Save the Date(68)
I hadn’t realized Bill read the strip—or that he’d known who we were. But if you read the strip, it was pretty obvious. “I guess you’re a fan?”
Bill started walking again. “Oh yeah. I didn’t get it at first—I mean, that you guys were those Grants. But I kept feeling like I’d been in your kitchen before. It was the weirdest feeling, and then I finally put it together.”
“Well, he’s not really our dog,” I said, then explained Waffles’s temporary nature. “I don’t suppose handling temporary canines is anything you’ve dealt with before?”
Bill laughed. “It’s a first.”
We rounded the curve in the road and reached the house—and as soon as it was visible, Waffles pulled me forward, straining against the leash to go in. And it hit me that this dog hadn’t even been in our house a full day but already knew it and wanted to get back inside. That even if it was just temporary, he wanted to go home again.
*
“All set?” I asked as I came into the family room. I’d arranged one couch with blankets and pillows for myself and another for Bill. When we’d come in, I had told Bill I could get him set up in the family room before it hit me that I would also be sleeping in there. Somehow, this hadn’t occurred to me until that moment, that inviting him to stay meant we’d be sleeping in the same room. Normally, there would be other options, but we were, for the first time in my memory, totally out of rooms.
Since I didn’t want to interrupt whatever might be happening in J.J.’s bedroom, I had just decided I could sleep in the sweatpants and T-shirt I’d played capture the flag in—my sweatshirt was muddy and grass stained, but the T-shirt had been protected and was fine. I’d taken out my contacts and found a pair of glasses floating around in the kitchen, so I could at least see.
The couches in the family room, thanks to the GMA crew, had ended up at right angles to each other, and looking at them now, they suddenly seemed very close. But I really didn’t think I could move them apart at all without being totally obvious.
“Yeah,” Bill said, looking up from where he was lying on the couch, the blankets pulled halfway over him.
He gave me a smile, and I realized there was nothing to do except turn off the lights and start what was certainly going to be the weirdest sleepover of my life. “Um,” I said, reaching for the lamp but then pulling my hand back. “Okay if I turn off the lights?”
“Fine by me,” Bill said.
I snapped off the light, and the room was thrown into total darkness for a second, and then a moment later, moonlight started filtering in. I blinked, letting my eyes adjust as I looked around.
I’d always loved the family room. There was a big stone fireplace at one end, surrounded by built-in bookcases filled with books and board games, most of which were missing at least one crucial piece. Unlike the kitchen, where we all hung out by chance, while eating or passing through, the family room was where we chose to hang out. This room was the best of us. It was where we watched movies, passing bowls of popcorn back and forth. It was where my parents had faculty parties, where the Christmas tree was always set up, and where we all found ourselves after Thanksgiving dinner, fighting off our food comas. It was having movie marathons with my siblings on rainy afternoons, all of us wrapped up in blankets. It was playing high-stakes games of Pictionary and kids-only games of Cards Against Humanity. It was where most of my favorite memories in the house had happened.
As I looked around now in the moonlight, I felt a wave of loss hit me, even as I was still sitting right here. But ever since my parents had sold the house, a countdown clock had started ticking in my brain—how many more times would I sit in this room? How many more times would we gather here? How many times would I push through the door, hang my keys on the hook, an unthinking motion I’d performed a thousand times?
And it made me furious that I’d ever dared to complain about the fact that the family room floors were always cold and the hot water in my bathroom took too long to heat up. What did I have to complain about when this was my house, before I’d had any inkling that wouldn’t always be the case?
“Charlie?”
I glanced over at Bill, who was looking at me like he was waiting for an answer. “Oh—sorry. What?”
“Nothing,” he said with a shrug. “I just said that I appreciated the help today. Sorry if things were a little disorganized.”
“Yeah,” I said, shaking my head, thinking about Clementine, the decorations, Waffles, Mike. “It definitely was kind of crazy.”
“We got that all out of the way today,” Bill said confidently. “Tomorrow’s going to go perfectly.”
He settled onto his pillow and then adjusted his blankets, and I realized that it was strange for me to still be sitting upright on my couch. I took a breath, then lay down, staring straight up at the ceiling, trying not to think about how close our heads suddenly were. I found myself aware of every movement he was making and how loud my breathing suddenly was. Why had I never thought about how intimate it was, just sleeping in the same room with someone? Because it really was—it was how I knew that Siobhan talked in her sleep, and occasionally sang, and that Linnie stole every blanket she saw and then denied it with a straight face in the morning. When you were asleep, you were who you were, not who you were pretending to be, and now I was going to be doing that with Bill, with someone I’d just met that morning.