See You at Harry's(15)

“Didn’t what, Fern? What are you two hiding?” my mom asks.

“Just forget it!” Holden storms away and up to his room.

“Come back here!” my mom yells. But his door slams, and we all know he’s not coming back. She comes closer to me. “Are you going to fill me in on what’s going on?”

I shake my head, even though I want to tell her. I want to make her fix it. But I promised.

“Sara?” she asks.

“You need to ask him,” she says. But instead of going upstairs, my mom goes back to the kitchen.

“Ferny, you play with me,” Charlie says from the floor.

Sara bolts up before I can answer. “Have fun!” she says, sauntering into the kitchen after my mom.

Charlie pushes the trap that releases the checkers, laughing as they clank on top of each other into a heap. But I hardly pay attention. Am I the only one who cares that Holden is upset?

“Me first!” Charlie whines.

I guess so.





AT DINNER, Holden doesn’t look at me. At any of us. He probably wouldn’t have even come to dinner, but my dad’s home, and, unlike my mom, my dad would never let Holden get away with skipping a family meal.

I watch my dad take a bite of my mom’s sesame tofu and green-bean salad. He makes the strangest face as he chews, as if he’s trying to guess what he’s eating. I notice my mom watching him closely, almost challenging him to complain. Sometimes I think the reason he stays at the restaurant during dinner isn’t because it’s so busy but because it means he can have a tofu-free meal.

“So, how’s school going so far, you two?” he asks. He moves two tofu chunks to the side of the plate. It reminds me of something Charlie would do.

“Same ol’ same ol’,” Holden says quietly.

I look over at my mom to see if she’ll rat Holden out, but she pretends to concentrate on cutting Charlie’s food.

“What about you, Ferny?” my dad asks.

I shrug.

“Jeez. Why is everyone so gloomy?”

Charlie drops his spoon and smiles an amazingly sweet smile at my dad. His mouth opens wide, and a piece of tofu falls out.

“That’s disgusting,” I say.

Charlie frowns. His bottom lip starts to quiver the way it always does before he cries.

“Fern, honestly,” my mom says. “Do you have to be so mean to him?”

What?

I look over to Holden for help and remember he’s mad at me, too. I bite my own lip to keep it from quivering.

“OK, something’s going on here, and I want to know what,” my dad says.

We’re all quiet.

“I’m waiting.”

Finally Holden puts his fork down. “Apparently everyone thinks I have a problem.”

“Honey, of course we don’t,” my mom says in her usual calm way.

“It was just a misunderstanding,” Sara adds.

“It was!” I say.

Holden pushes back his chair.

“Where do you think you’re going?” my dad asks.

“Away from here.” He stands up.

“Holden,” I say. “It’s not what you think. We were just talking about —”

“Me. Behind my back.”

“No! Well, yes, but —”

He doesn’t wait to hear more. He stomps to the front door and slams it shut behind him.

“Does someone want to tell me what that was all about?” my dad asks.

No one does.

He looks at each of us, but we all pretend to get very interested in our food.

“We’ll talk later,” my mom says quietly.

After dinner, I call Ran. I want to tell him everything that happened, but for some reason I just don’t have the energy. Instead, we talk about our new math teacher, Mr. Hand. Ran says that Mr. Hand seems very smart and that we’re going to learn a lot this year. He tells me that geometry is very abstract. I don’t even know what that means, but it feels good to just listen to Ran’s calm voice. Ran never gets worried about anything. He has this thing he calls a mantra. “All will be well,” he’s always saying. I think a lot of other people would think this made Ran kind of a freak. But when he tells me all will be well, it calms me and makes me believe it. And now I realize how badly I need to hear those words.

“I had a really awful day today,” I tell him when he finally stops listing the benefits of geometry.

“Tell me.”

So I explain about the bus and Holden and the Things, and getting dropped off too far from the stop. When I finish, he’s quiet for a little while. I listen to him breathing, thinking.

“Fern,” he finally says, “you’ve had a hard day. But all will be well.”

I take a deep breath in and out, too. As if I am trying to breathe in his words.

“I really don’t want to ride the bus tomorrow,” I tell him.

“Then don’t.”

“But how will I get to school?”

“Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” he tells me, as if it’s that simple.

“Which is?”

“I’m not sure. But you’ll figure it out.” I can tell he’s ready to end our conversation, because he always changes his tone of voice. It gets slower and quieter. As if he’s reading me a bedtime story.