Lock and Key (29 page)

“I wasn’t,” I said.

“Then where were you?”

“Everywhere,” I said, yawning. She looked up at me, quizzical, and I wondered why I didn’t just tell her the truth. But there was something about that day that I wanted to keep to myself, if just for a little while longer. “Do you need help with dinner?”

“Nah, I’m good. We’ll be eating in about a half hour, though, okay?”

I nodded, then headed up to my room. After dropping my bag onto the floor, I went out onto my balcony, looking across the yard and the pond to Nate’s house. Sure enough, a minute later I saw him carrying some things into the pool house, still working.

Back inside, I kicked off my shoes and climbed onto the bed, stretching out and closing my eyes. I was just about to drift off when I heard a jingle of tags and looked over to see Roscoe in the doorway to my room.
Cora must have turned on the oven,
I thought, waiting for him to move past me to my closet, where he normally huddled until the danger had passed. Instead, he came to the side of the bed, then sat down, peering up at me.

I looked at him for a second, then sighed. “All right,” I said, patting the bed. “Come on.”

He didn’t hesitate, instantly leaping up, then doing a couple of quick spins before settling down beside me, his head resting on my stomach. As I began to pet him, I looked down at the scratches Lyle had given me, smoothing my fingers across them and feeling the slight rises there as I remembered Nate doing the same. I kept doing this, in fact, for the rest of the night—during dinner, before bed—tracing them the way I once had the key around my neck, as if I needed to memorize them. And maybe I did, because Nate was right: By the next morning, they were gone.

Chapter Eleven

“All I’m saying,” Olivia said, picking up her smoothie and taking a sip, “is that to the casual observer, it looks like something is going on.”

“Well, the casual observer is mistaken,” I said. “And even if there was, it wouldn’t be anyone’s business, anyway.”

“Oh, right. Because
so
many people are interested. All one of me.”

“You’re asking, aren’t you?”

She made a face at me, then picked up her phone, opening it and hitting a few buttons. The truth was, Olivia and I had never officially become friends. But clearly, somewhere between that ride and the day in the box office, it had happened. There was no other explanation for why she now felt so completely comfortable getting into my personal life.

“Nothing is going on with me and Nate,” I said to her, for the second time since we’d sat down for lunch. This was something else I never would have expected, us eating together—much less being so used to it that I barely noticed as she reached over, pinching a chip out of my bag. “We’re just friends.”

“A little while ago,” she said, popping the chip into her mouth, “you weren’t even willing to admit to that.”

“So? ”

“So,” she said as the phone suddenly rang, “who knows what you’ll be copping to a week or two from now? You might be engaged before you’re willing to admit it.”

“We are not,” I said firmly, “going to be engaged. Jesus.”

“Never say never,” she said with a shrug. Her phone rang again. “Anything’s possible.”

“Do you even see him here?”

“No,” she said. “But I do see him over at the sculpture,
looking
over here.”

I turned my head. Sure enough, Nate was behind us, talking to Jake Bristol. When he saw us watching him, he waved. I did the same, then turned back to Olivia, who was regarding me expressionlessly, her phone still ringing.

“Are you going to answer that?” I asked.

“Am I allowed to?”

“Are you saying I make the rules now?”

“No,” she said flatly. “But I certainly don’t want to be rude and inconsiderate, carrying on two conversations at once.” This was, in fact, exactly what I’d said, when I got sick of her constantly interrupting me to take calls. Which, now that I thought of it, was very friend-like as well, in its own way. “Unless, of course, you feel differently now?”

“Just make it stop ringing, please,” I said.

She sighed, as if it was just such a hardship, then flipped open her phone, putting it to her ear. “Hey. No, just eating lunch with Ruby. What? Yes, she did say that,” she said, eyeing me. “I don’t know, she’s fickle. I’m not even trying to understand.”

I rolled my eyes, then looked over my shoulder at Nate again. He was still talking to Jake and didn’t see me this time, but as I scanned the rest of the courtyard, I did spot someone staring right at me. Gervais.

He was alone, sitting at the base of a tree, his backpack beside him, a milk carton in one hand. He was also chewing slowly, while keeping his eyes steady on me. Which was kind of creepy, I had to admit. Then again, Gervais had been acting sort of strange lately. Or stranger.

By this point, I’d gotten so used to his annoying car behavior that I hardly even noticed it anymore. In fact, as Nate and I had gotten closer, Gervais had almost become an afterthought. Which was probably why, at least at first, I didn’t realize when he suddenly began to change. But Nate did.

“How can you not have noticed he’s combing his hair now?” he’d asked me a couple of mornings earlier, after Gervais had already taken off and we were walking across the parking lot. “
And
he’s lost the headgear?”

“Because unlike some people,” I said, “I don’t spend a lot of time looking at Gervais?”

“Still, it’s kind of hard to miss,” he replied. “He looks like a totally different person.”

“
Looks
being the operative word.”

“He smells better, too,” Nate added. “He’s cut down considerably on the toxic emissions.”

“Why are we talking about this again?” I asked him.

“I don’t know,” he said, shrugging. “When someone starts to change, and it’s obvious, it’s sort of natural to wonder why. Right?”

I wasn’t wondering about Gervais, though. In fact, even if he got a total makeover and suddenly smelled like petunias, I couldn’t have cared less. Now, though, as I looked across the green at him, I had to admit that Nate was right—he did look different. The hair was combed, not to mention less greasy, and without the headgear his face looked completely changed. When he saw me looking at him, he flinched, then immediately ducked his head, sucking down the rest of his carton of milk.
So weird
, I thought.

“. . . no, I don’t,” Olivia was saying now as she took another sip of her smoothie. “Because shoes are not going to make you run faster, Laney. That’s all hype. What? Well, of course they’re going to tell you that. They get paid on commission!”

“Who does?” Nate said, sliding onto the bench beside me. Olivia, listening to Laney, raised her eyebrows at me.

“No idea,” I told him. “As you’ll notice, she’s not talking to me. She’s on the phone.”

“Ah, right,” he said. “You know, that’s really kind of rude.”

“Isn’t it?”

Olivia ignored us, picking up my chip bag and helping herself again. Then she offered it to Nate, who took a handful out, popping them into his mouth. “Those are mine,” I pointed out.

“Yeah?” Nate said. “They’re good.”

He smiled, then bumped me with his knee. Across the table, Olivia was still talking to Laney about shoes, her voice shifting in and out of lecture mode. Sitting there with them, it was almost hard to remember when I first came to Perkins, so determined to be a one-woman operation to the end. But that was the thing about taking help and giving it, or so I was learning: there was no such thing as really getting even. Instead, this connection, once opened, remained ongoing over time.

At noon on Thanksgiving Day I was positioned in the foyer, ready to perform my assigned duty as door-opener and coat-taker. Just as the first car slowed and began to park in front of the house, though, I realized there was a hole in my sweater.

I took the stairs two at a time to my room, heading into the bathroom to my closet. When I pulled the door open, I jumped, startled. Cora was inside, sitting on the floor with Roscoe in her lap.

“Don’t say it,” she said, putting a hand up. “I know this looks crazy.”

“What are you doing?”

She sighed. “I just needed to take a time-out. A few deep breaths. A moment for myself.”

“In my closet,” I said, clarifying.

“I came to get Roscoe. You know how he gets when the oven is on.” She shot me a look. “But then, once I was in here, I began to understand why he likes it so much. It’s very soothing, actually.”

For the first time, Cora and Jamie were hosting Thanksgiving dinner, which meant that within moments, we’d be invaded by no less than fifteen Hunters. Personally, I was kind of curious to meet this extended tribe, but Cora, like Roscoe, was a nervous wreck.

“You were the one who suggested it,” Jamie had said to her the week before as she sat at the kitchen table in full stress mode, surrounded by cookbooks and copies of
Cooking Light.
“I never would have asked you to do this.”

“I was just being polite!” she said. “I didn’t think your mother would actually take me up on it.”

“They want to see the house.”

“Then they should come for drinks. Or appetizers. Or dessert. Something simple. Not on a major holiday, when I’m expected to provide a full meal!”

“All you have to do is the turkey and the desserts,” Jamie told her. “They’re bringing everything else.”

Cora glared at him. “The turkey,” she said, her voice flat, “is the center of the whole thing. If I screw it up, the entire holiday is ruined.”

“Oh, that’s not true,” Jamie said. Then he looked at me, but I stayed quiet, knowing better than to get involved in this. “It’s a turkey. How hard can it be?”

This question had been answered the night before, when Cora went to pick up the bird she’d ordered, which weighed twenty-two pounds. It took all three of us just to get it inside, and then it wouldn’t even fit in the fridge.

“Disaster,” Cora announced once we’d wrestled it onto the island. “Complete and total disaster.”

“It’s going to be fine,” Jamie told her, confident as always. “Just relax.”

Eventually, he had managed to get it into the fridge, although it meant removing just about everything else. As a result, the countertops were lined not only with all the stuff Cora had bought for the meal, but also all the condiments, breads, and cans of soda and bottled water— everything that didn’t absolutely have to be refrigerated. Luckily, we’d been able to arrange to use Nate’s oven for overflow—he and his dad were going to be gone all day, getting double time from clients who needed things done for their own dinners—as nothing else could fit in ours while the turkey was cooking. Still, all of this had only made Cora more crabby, to the point that I’d finally taken a loaf of bread, some peanut butter, and jelly into the enormous dining room, where I could fix myself sandwiches and eat in peace.

“You know,” Jamie had said the night before, as Cora rattled around the kitchen beyond the doorway, “I think this is actually going to be a really good thing for us.”

I looked at my sister, who was standing by the stove, examining a slotted spoon as if not exactly sure what to do with it. “Yeah?”

He nodded. “This is just what this house needs—a real holiday. It gives a place a sense of fullness, of family, you know?” He sighed, almost wistful. “And anyway, I’ve always loved Thanksgiving. Even before it was our anniversary.”

“Wait,” I said. “You guys got married on Thanksgiving?”

He shook his head. “June tenth. But we got together on Turkey Day. It was our first anniversary, you know, before the wedding one. It was, like, our first real date.”

“Who dates on a major holiday?”

“Well, it wasn’t exactly planned,” he said, pulling the bread toward him and taking out a few slices. “I was supposed to go home for Thanksgiving that year. I was pumped for it, because, you know, I’m all about an eating holiday.”

“Right,” I said, taking a bite of my own sandwich.

“But then,” he continued, “the night before, I ate some weird squid at this sushi place and got food poisoning. Seriously bad news. I was up sick all night, and the next day I was completely incapacitated. So I had to stay in the dorm, alone, for Thanksgiving. Isn’t that the saddest thing you ever heard?”

“No?” I said.

“Of course it is!” He sighed. “So there I am, dehydrated, miserable. I went to take a shower and felt so weak I had to stop and rest on the way back in the hallway. I’m sitting there, fading in and out of consciousness, and then the door across from me opens up, and there’s the girl that yelled at me the first week of classes. Alone for the holiday, too, fixing English-muffin pizzas in a contraband toaster oven.”

I looked in at my sister, who was now consulting a cookbook, her finger marking the page, and suddenly remembered those same pizzas—English muffin, some cheap spaghetti sauce, cheese—that she’d made for me, hundreds of times.

He picked up the knife out of the jelly jar. “At first, she looked alarmed—I was kind of green, apparently. So she asked me if I was okay, and when I said I wasn’t sure, she came out and felt my forehead, and she told me to come in and lie down in her room. Then she walked over to the only open convenience store—which was, like, miles away—bought me a six-pack of Gatorade, and came back and shared her pizzas with me.”

“Wow,” I said.

“I know.” He shook his head, flipping a piece of bread over. “We spent the whole weekend together in her room, watching movies and eating toasted things. She took care of me. It was the best Thanksgiving of my life.”

I glanced back at Cora again, remembering what Denise had said about her that night at the party. Funny how it was so hard to picture my sister as a caretaker, considering that had been what she was to me, once. And now again.

“Which is not to say,” Jamie added, “that other Thanksgivings can’t be equally good, or even better in their own way. That’s why I’m excited about this year. I mean, I love this house, but it’s never totally felt like home to me. But tomorrow, when everyone’s here, gathered around the table, and reading their thankful lists, it will.”