Lock and Key(86)

“What?” he said now, as I realized I was still looking strangely at him.

“Nothing,” I replied, and turned back.

Nate reached for the radio, cranking it up, and then we were turning out into traffic. Everything actually felt okay, wholly unchanged, and I realized maybe I’d overreacted, thinking they would have. The bottom line was, I knew something I hadn’t the week before, and we were friends— at least for another six months or so. I didn’t have to get all wrought up about what was going on with his dad; I’d never wanted anyone to get involved with me and my domestic drama. Maybe what we had now, in the end, was best—to be close but not too close, the perfect middle ground.

Half a block from school, Nate pulled into the Quik Zip for gas. As he got out to pump it, I sat back in my seat, opening the calc book in my lap. About half a page in, though, I heard a noise from behind me.

By this point, I was well acquainted with Gervais’s various percussions, but this wasn’t one I was used to. It was more like an intake, a sudden drawing in of breath. The first one I ignored; the second, barely noted. By the third, though, I was starting to think he might be having an attack of some sort, so I turned around.

“What are you doing?” I asked him.

“Nothing,” he said, instantly defensive. But then, he did it again. “The thing is—”

He was interrupted by Nate opening his door and sliding back behind the wheel. “Why is it,” he said to me, “that whenever I’m in a hurry I always get the slowest gas pump in the world?”

I glanced at Gervais, who had hurriedly gone back to his book, his head ducked down. “Probably the same reason you hit every red light when you’re late.”

“And lose your keys,” he added, cranking the engine.

“Maybe it’s the universe conspiring against you.”

“I have had a run of bad luck lately,” he agreed.

“Yeah? ”

He glanced over at me. “Well, maybe not all bad.”

Hearing this, I had a flash of us in the kitchen that day, his hand brushing against mine as he reached for the key lying in my palm. As Nate turned back to the road, I suddenly did feel awkward, in just the way I’d thought I would. Talk about bad luck. Maybe this wouldn’t be so easy after all.

For me, December was all about work. Working for Harriet, working on my applications, working on calculus. And when I wasn’t doing any of these things, I was tagging along with Nate on his job.

Logically, I knew the only way to stay in that middle ground with Nate was to let space build up between us. But it wasn’t so easy to stop something once it had started, or so I was learning. One day you were all about protecting yourself and keeping things simple. The next thing you know, you’re buying macaroons.

“Belgian macaroons,” Nate corrected me, pulling two boxes off the shelf. “That’s key.”

“Why? ”

“Because a macaroon you can buy anywhere,” he replied. “But these, you can only find here at Spice and Thyme, which means they are gourmet and expensive, and therefore suitable for corporate gift-giving.”

I looked down at the box in my hand. “Twelve bucks is a lot for ten macaroons,” I said. Nate raised his eyebrows. “Belgian macaroons, I mean.”

“Not to Scotch Design Inc.,” he said, continuing to add boxes to the cart between us. “In fact, this is the very low end of their holiday buying. Just wait until we get to the nut-and-cheese-straw towers. That’s impressive.”

I glanced at my watch. “I might not make it there. My break is only a half hour. If I’m even a minute late, Harriet starts to have palpitations.”

“Maybe,” he said, adding a final box, “you should buy her some Belgian macaroons. For ten bucks, they might cure her of that entirely.”

“I somehow doubt the solution is that easy. Or inexpensive. ”

Nate moved back to the head of the cart, nudging it forward past the chocolates into the jelly-bean section. Spice and Thyme was one of those huge gourmet food stores designed to feel small and cozy, with narrow aisles, dim lighting, and stuff stacked up everywhere you turned. Personally, it made me feel claustrophobic, especially during Christmas, when it was twice as crowded as usual. Nate, however, hardly seemed bothered, deftly maneuvering his cart around a group of senior citizens studying the jelly beans before taking the corner to boxed shortbreads.

“I don’t know,” he said, glancing at the list in his hand before beginning to pull down tins decorated with the face of a brawny Scotsman playing a bagpipe. “I think that what Harriet needs might be simpler than she thinks.”

“Total organization of her house, courtesy of Rest Assured?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “Reggie.”

“Ah,” I said as the senior citizens passed us again, squeezing by the cart. “So you noticed, too.”

“Please.” He rolled his eyes. “It’s kind of flagrant. What does she think all that ginkgo’s about?”

“That’s what I said,” I told him. “But when I suggested it to her, she was shocked by the idea. Shocked.”

“Really,” he said, pulling the cart forward again. “Then she must be more distracted than we even realize. Which, honestly, I’m not quite sure is possible.”