Little Miss Red (23 page)

“I’m not sure. We stopped keeping score a while ago.”

“But…”

“But what?”

“How are you going to know who gets to date me?” I asked.

“You said you didn’t want to date either of us anyway,” he said.

True, but it had been the point of the whole putt-putt game!

“We’ll figure that part out later,” he said as he continued walking.

Maybe my life wasn’t like a romance novel after all. Because in a romance novel, the two guys who were fighting for the girl would actually
fight
for the girl rather than trust it would all just figure itself out.

After what seemed like an eternity (even though it was only ten minutes), the guys finished the last hole and it was finally time to leave. With Carmen gone, Jack and I were stuck having to drive Michael back. Not that I minded. Having Michael there made me feel safer. Plus, the idea of being alone with Jack and having to listen to him talk about himself some more wasn’t very appealing. Of course, now that he and Jack were best friends, it wasn’t like Michael was any better. Not to mention the fact that if worse came to worst, Michael would have no clue what to do in case of an emergency.

Like, for instance, if we got a flat tire on the highway.

“Don’t you just want to call Triple A and wait for them?” Michael said nervously after we had pulled over to the shoulder.

Jack shook his head. “Triple A’s for amateurs,” he scoffed.

As he opened the driver’s side door, the loud rumble of eighteen-wheeler trucks filled the air. It was already eleven at night, and the highway was deserted except for them. It was definitely creepy—like something out of a horror movie about killer trucks.

“You know, when I was in the car with my dad recently, there was a story on the radio about how truck drivers take uppers so they can drive all night and that it’s almost as bad as if they were drunk driving,” Michael said.

“Yeah?” Jack said.

“So what if we’re changing the tire and one of them crashes into us!”

Jack’s eyes narrowed. “You’ve never changed a tire before, have you?” Even I knew how to do that, thanks to that Driver’s Ed/defensive driving course I took last fall.

“I have so,” Michael said defensively.

From the backseat, I stopped trying to call Grandma Roz and looked up. “What, on your Big Wheel when you were five?”

He turned and gave me a dirty look. “It wasn’t my Big Wheel. It was my Tiny Trike.”

Jack reached across Michael and opened the passenger door as well. “It’s about time you became a man. Believe me, you’ll thank me for this one day.”

“Why will I thank you after ending up with grease on my shirt?” Michael asked.

After they got out of the car, I locked the doors and
went back to calling my grandmother so I could let her know about the flat. Oddly, the phone just rang and rang. Even if she was sleeping, she should have heard it, because she always slept with the phone right next to her ear in case someone called in the middle of the night with news that someone had died.

I heard the guys rummaging around in the trunk, then a loud thump followed by Jack screaming, “My foot! My foot!”

“It’s not like I did it on
purpose
,” I heard Michael say.

There was more thumping, and when I looked up I saw Jack hopping back to the car while Michael trailed behind. “Who has a bowling ball in their trunk but no jack?” I heard him say.

“You need to elevate that,” I said, pinching my nose as I examined Jack’s foot. A foot that had been in a motorcycle boot all day smelled really gross, especially when it was in a car with the windows closed.

“I do?”

“Yeah. Or else it’ll swell.”

“Wow, Red—you
are
really smart.”

I shrugged. “Girl Scouts.”

We went with Michael’s original plan of calling AAA (“Too bad no one bothered to listen to me in the first place,” he grumbled), then settled in and waited for them to arrive. When they wouldn’t stop fighting about what radio station to listen to, I made Michael switch seats with me and
I took control—landing on a talk show where a guy talked about how he had been abducted by aliens a few months before and how, ever since then, he could see people’s inner thoughts in a cartoon bubble above their heads.

Unfortunately, none of us remembered that listening to the radio when you have the engine off drains the battery. Which meant that even after Luther, the AAA guy, changed the tire, we couldn’t go anywhere because the battery was dead. And the Buick was so old, it wouldn’t take a jump start. Which meant that the three of us had to pile into the front seat of Luther’s truck and have the Buick towed.

Smooshed in between my two ex–soul mates—one with a smelly foot and another with a rumbling stomach thanks to all the junk food he ate—I thought about fate. What if I had gone to Mexico with Jordan? Would I have met a
different
soul mate? Someone whose eyes I would have been staring into this very minute as the tropical breezes gave my hair a cool windblown look and we ate guacamole? Or was my fate that my Spring Break was
supposed
to have been exactly like this—in humid Florida, with frizzy hair, learning the painful lesson that there
wasn’t
such a thing as a soul mate. That no matter how good someone’s butt looked in faded jeans, or how good their fashion sense, they were just human, with smelly feet and gassy stomachs, and all that other icky stuff that wasn’t romantic but was part of real life.

Was my fate that I was supposed to learn that guys like Dante didn’t exist in real life? That he was just a character who had been made up so that people could escape reality every once in a while? And that the hot guys who rode motorcycles were overrated and not much better than the ones who used hand sanitizer all the time?

I turned to Jack, who had fallen asleep with his head against the back of the seat and was snoring quietly. Then I turned to Michael, who was also sleeping, with his head against the window, and also snoring quietly.

Then I turned to Luther, who was softly singing along to some cheesy love song about how some guy was going to love this girl until the end of time, before he took his index finger and started rooting around in his right nostril.

Yup. At the end of the day, humans were all just really…
human
.

“Luther?” I whispered.

He quickly took his finger out of his nose and turned to me. “Yeah?”

“Are you married?”

He nodded and held up his left hand where I could see a big gold ring. “Thirty-nine years,” he sighed.

“Is it hard?”

“Hard?! Sometimes I wake up and turn to her and I think, ‘Man,
you
again?’”

“So she annoys you sometimes?”

“Sometimes?! Try most of the time.”

I could feel my stomach start to clench. Love wasn’t supposed to be a jail sentence, was it?

“But I wouldn’t trade a minute of it,” he went on. “I love her just as much as the day we met.”

My stomach unclenched. “You do?”

He nodded. “Yup. I’m not sayin’ I believe in soul mates or any of that junk, but if I’m gonna spend my life bein’ with just one person, I’m sure glad it’s her.”

Maybe
that’s
why I was supposed to come to Florida— to hear Luther say that.

Or maybe I was supposed to come to Florida to find out that nothing was what it seemed—not supposedly hot bad boys who may or may not have been criminals, not perfect boyfriends, and
especially
not arthritic old men who jingled their pocket change.

We pulled up to Grandma Roz’s condo, and I saw three police cars with flashing lights out front. My heart started to race. All these years I had joked that Grandma Roz was a hypochondriac—but what if something had finally happened to her? As we got closer to the condo, however, I saw her standing outside wiggling her finger in front of a policeman’s face, and I breathed a sigh of relief. She was fine.

As the three of us got out of the truck, I realized this might be my last time with Jack where we weren’t separated by a bulletproof partition of glass. I put my hand on
his arm and turned to Michael. “Do you think Jack and I can have a moment?”

He yawned and nodded, shuffling off to sit on the curb and eat his taco from Taco Bell. I guess whatever jealousy he had been feeling had officially sizzled out after he had convinced Luther to go through the drive-through on the way back.

“What’s up, Red?” Jack asked, also yawning. Obviously, he hadn’t seen the cops and had no idea that life as he had known it was officially over. I wondered if they had Pizza Fridays in jail like they did in middle school.

I tipped my hat up so I could get one last look at his face and, like Devon had done with Dante, “memorize every last curve and crevice of his rugged countenance” (and, in Jack’s case, the big red zit on his forehead that had popped up during the drive back from Pablo’s). Maybe he was a super-self-involved human, with oil glands and everything, but he’d always hold the space in my heart marked “First Big Dramatic Adventure.” My hat was so big, it kept flopping down and ruining the moment, so I finally just took it off. “I just wanted to say,” I began, “no matter what happens when we walk in that door…” I grabbed his hand and tried not to cringe at how sticky it was from all the junk food he had eaten. “I don’t regret a single moment we’ve had together.”

“So you really are breaking up with me, huh?” he asked.

I nodded. Even if I had wanted to be with Jack, I didn’t think I could do the long-distance/convict thing.

“Wow. No one’s ever broken up with me. Either
I
break up with
them
, or I just end up splitting without an explanation.”

Suddenly, Grandma Roz came barreling toward us. “Ach! Thank God you’re here!” she bellowed, pulling Jack and I into a bear hug and smothering us between her boobs. I didn’t know what was freaking me out more: that she was hugging a criminal, or that she was wearing a fuchsia silk nightgown with black lace that was so low-cut her boobs were almost falling out.

“You have no idea what I’ve been through these last few hours. I’m surprised I haven’t dropped dead from a heart attack,” she said once she let us go.

Just then two cops walked out, one on either side of Art, who was in handcuffs.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“That…
animal
,” she replied, pointing at him, “was the one who broke into the condo.”

“No he’s not,” I blurted out. I pointed at Jack. “
He’s
the one who broke into the condo.”

“Huh?” Jack said, confused.

I reached for his wallet and opened it, yanking out the hundred-dollar bill. “See? This is the only thing he managed to get before we walked in and caught him.”

“That’s not mine,” Grandma Roz said. “I keep all my
cash underneath my mattress, and when I went to check this afternoon, all 75,562 dollars and 33 cents was there.”

Jack looked so upset, you’d think I had accused him of murder. “That’s the hundred-dollar in-case-of-emergency bill my grandmother gave me,” he said.

“I told you!” Michael said from the curb.

“But…but…but the whole trip you made me pay for everything. You said you didn’t have any money!” I exclaimed.

Jack shrugged. “Well, lunch at Denny’s doesn’t exactly qualify as an emergency.”

Jack wasn’t a criminal—he was just cheap. I should have known.

“It’s a good thing you broke up with me, Red,” he sighed dramatically. “’Cause I don’t think I could be with someone who would think I could ever do something as horrible as steal from a senior citizen.” He flashed Grandma Roz his trademark grin. “Especially someone as wonderful as your grandma.”

I rolled my eyes. Not only was he cheap; he was a suck-up to boot.

“You can’t put a man in jail without his hearing aid!” Art was screaming as the cops dragged him toward the squad car. When they got to Grandma Roz, he stopped.

“This doesn’t mean you’re going to stop loving me now,
bubelah
, does it?” he asked anxiously.

She paused and thought about it for a second. “I don’t
know, Art. I’m going to have to really search my soul about that one.”

He shrugged. “Okay. Just let me know when you decide,” he said as the police pulled him along to the car.

After Grandma Roz changed into a more respectably grandmotherly velour tracksuit, the four of us hitched a ride in one of the cop cars to the precinct. After an hour, a detective came out of the interrogation room and filled us in. It turned out that over the last few years, not only had Art stolen thousands of dollars in bonds from Grandma Roz, but when he wasn’t shuttling her around to early bird special dinners or senior citizen–priced matinees, he was with his
other
lady friends—stealing from them!

“
Oy gevalt!
” Grandma Roz cried. “The money I may have been able to forgive—but he had other lady friends?! What—I wasn’t enough for him?”

“Huh. So
that’s
why he kept asking if I knew where he could get a fake ID,” Jack said. “And that explains why I found him online on Craigslist checking apartment listings in Buenos Aires.”

“He was?” I asked. Jack and I had hardly spent a moment apart for days, but I hadn’t seen any of that. Here I was, upset that Jack and Michael were all about themselves and their dramas, and I was so wrapped up in my own world that I had totally missed
this
drama. Which was pretty juicy.

While the detective helped Grandma Roz fill out a mountain of paperwork, Jack went to go flirt with the cleaning lady and Michael and I started up a game of Go Fish. I was winning when Jack ambled up to me.

“Hey, Red, can I talk to you a sec?”

“Okay,” I shrugged.

We walked over to the corner. “I’ve been thinking about it, and I think us breaking up is the right way to go.”

Um, great. Hadn’t I already said that?

“The truth is you deserve a lot better than me.” He sighed and shook his head. “I don’t know—it must be that stray dog thing. Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever be able to settle down.”

He looked so vulnerable just then. Some of those old feelings almost came flooding back, but I willed myself to stay strong.