What Happens to Goodbye(103)

As for me, I was packed up as well, my stuff folded away into my same boxes, ready to m the trip back to Tyler. It wasn’t easy leaving, especially with so little left of the year to go. Everyone was talking about final plans: the end of the model, graduation, the Austin road trip, even though Ellis, Riley, and Heather were less excited than they had been since Dave was staying behind. As for Dave, he’d been pulling back as well, mostly because he had to. He went to work, school, his U classes, and home. His car was off-limits, parked in the driveway under the basketball goal, so any free time he was allowed was spent working on the model. Now though, for his own reasons, he preferred to do that alone, coming for an hour here and there when the rest of us were already gone.
He might have been absent, but his work was evident, as over the last week people had slowly begun to appear on the model, here and there. He didn’t put them on using the sector system, or pinwheel, or anything else. Instead, their numbers just seemed to grow, day by day, as if they were populating all by themselves. Each figure—men, women, children, people walking dogs, cyclists, policemen—was added meticulously, and clearly with great care. More than once, I’d stood at my front window, looking at the back windows of Luna Blu, and wondered if he was up there, bent over the little world, adding to it, one person at a time. I’d often thought about going to join him, but it was like something sacred he was doing, that he had to do alone. And so I let him.
“Five minutes!” Deb called out, moving quickly behind me, the STOW checklist in her hand. I looked across the model at Riley, who was adjusting an intersection, her brow furrowed, then at Heather, who was sitting back on her heels, admiring her trees. Ellis, off to my left, was clicking a stop sign into place.
“One minute!” I heard Deb say, and I pushed myself back, taking a breath as I looked over the entire model and the faces of my friends gathered around it. As the time ticked away, we all sat there, silent, and then we heard the staff counting down below us. A chorus of voices, marking the end of one thing, the beginning of another.
“Five!” I looked at the last bush I’d put on, touching my finger to it.
“Four!” I looked at Riley, who smiled at me.
“Three!” Deb came and stood beside me, biting her lip.
“Two!” Already, downstairs, someone was applauding.
And in that second, right before the very end, I looked around the model again, wanting to see one final thing. When I spotted it, I noticed something else. But by then, everyone was already cheering, in motion. One.
“Where are you going?” my dad called after me as I turned the corner. “You’ll miss the party.”
“I’ll be back in a second,” I told him.
He nodded, then turned back to the bar, where all the employees and some devout regulars of Luna Blu, as well as Deb, Riley, Heather, and Ellis were gathered, eating up all the leftover stock of fried pickles. Opal was there as well, serving up beers, her face flushed and happy.
As I climbed up the steps to the attic, I could still hear everyone talking and laughing, their voices rising up behind me. Once on the landing, though, it was quiet, almost peaceful, the model stretched out before me. In all the excitement earlier, I hadn’t been able to look as closely as I wanted to. I wanted to be alone, like now, when I had all the time in the world.
I bent down over my neighborhood, taking in the people there. At first, they’d just seemed arranged the same way they were everywhere else: in random formations, some in groups, some alone. Then, though, I saw the single figure at the back of my house, walking away from the back door. And another person, a girl, running through the side yard, where the hedge would have been, while someone else, with a badge and flashlight, followed. There were three people under the basketball goal, one lying prone on the ground.
I took a breath, then moved in closer. Two people were seated on the curb between Dave’s and my houses: a few inches away, two more walked up the narrow alley to Luna Blu’s back door. A couple stood in the driveway, facing each other. And in that empty building, the old hotel, a tiny set of cellar doors had been added, flung open, a figure standing before them. Whether they were about to go down, or just coming up, was unclear, and the cellar itself was a dark square. But I knew what was down below.
He’d put me everywhere. Every single place I’d been, with him or without, from the first time we’d met to the last conversation. It was all there, laid out as carefully, as real as the buildings and streets around it. I swallowed, hard, then reached forward, touching the girl running through the hedge. Not Liz Sweet. Not anyone, at that moment, not yet. But on her way to someone. To me.

I stood up, then turned and went back down the stairs, into the bar area. Everyone was talking, the noise deafening, the smell of fried pickles hanging in the air as I cut through toward the back door. I heard Riley call my name, but I didn’t turn around. Outside, I pulled my sweater more tightly around me and started to jog down the alley to my street.
The lights were on in Dave’s house as I came up the driveway, his Volvo parked where it had been for the full week, right under the basketball goal. I stood looking at it for a moment, remembering my dad and me pulling into the adjacent spot that first day. I looked up at the basket, its shadow an elongated circle, stretched across the windshield and driver’s seat. A Frazier Bakery cup, empty, sat in the holder, a couple of CD cases stacked on the seat. And on the center console, there was a Gert.
What? Impossible, I thought, moving closer and peering into the window. Same weird braiding, same dangling shells. Just to be sure, though, I opened the door, reaching in to grab it, and turned it over. A tiny GS, in Sharpie marker, was on the back.