The Moon and More (11 page)

“How’s Benji doing?” I asked, nodding in his direction.

“He’s been aware of the tension, for sure.” He took a sip of his beer, which had a label like an abstract painting, all swirly reds and blues. “We’ll see how he does on this trip, though. With the distance, and the time away from his mom, as well.”

I wasn’t clear what he meant, and even less sure I wanted to ask. But I did. “So … you’re here for more than a visit?”

He took another sip. “For the summer, probably. In the fall, I’ll be finding an apartment and moving to the city, and just have him weekends. He doesn’t know that yet, though.”

I looked at Benji again, thinking of his face when he couldn’t order what he wanted. And that was just a shrimp burger.

“What’d I miss?” Luke asked, sliding back into his seat. He spotted the drinks. “Other than the waitress.”

Instead of answering right away, I turned my head and looked out at the parking lot. In the distance, you could just make out the bridge to the mainland, arcing across the blue of the sky. Cars were coming, cars were going. A bridge was just a bridge, indeed. All that mattered was that somehow,
it carries precious cargo from one piece of solid ground to another, safely over everything and anything that might lay below.

“Man,” Morris said. “That is just crackers.”

We were sitting at the Tip, a strip of beach on the west end of Colby that was slowly being eaten away by the ocean. There wasn’t much there except the end of an access road, bonfire remnants, and, on weekend and summer nights, just about everyone from my high school.

This evening was no exception. A pile of driftwood was just catching about a hundred feet from us, a keg sitting lopsided on the sand adjacent. People were milling around, but Morris and I had a small stretch of sand all to ourselves.

“Crackers?” I repeated. “What the hell does that mean?”

He tipped up his red plastic cup, finishing it off. “Crackers. You know, like, crazy. Bizarre. Weird.”

“You just made that up.”

“Nope.”

I just looked at him, not fully convinced. Morris was always coming up with his own expressions, then swearing they were part of the general lexicon, as if just by appearing in his own head they indeed existed for the rest of us. Crackers, indeed.

I didn’t want to be thinking about the contents of Morris’s head, though. I didn’t want to think at all, which was why I was here in the first place, a heavy cup of cheap draft
beer parked between my feet. It was my second one, but I still couldn’t get the bad taste of my dinner at the Reef Room out of my mouth. And it wasn’t just the chicken satay.

It was just so weird, from the very start. Seeing Theo in the parking lot, Benji’s sudden attachment to me, and then, the capper: my father dropping the bomb that his marriage was over. Suddenly, it all made sense: his weird response to my acceptance, the sudden rescinding of all he’d promised. But why hadn’t he just told me? Plus there was the fact that when he left my half-brother to move to New York, Benji would be not that much older than I was when my father first decided to come back into my life. There was a symbolism in that, but I was trying not to think about it. I picked up my beer and took another big gulp instead.

Earlier, after the bombshell, my father had moved on to inquiring politely about how my family was doing. I, in turn, asked him about his plans for the summer. Safe and easy topics for all of us as we ate our food, with the booths, bar, and tables filling up all around us. When we got the check, the restaurant was packed and noisy, with a crowd of people waiting to be seated.

“Wow,” my father said as we wound through the mob to the front door. “This is a popular place.”

“High season,” I replied. “Everything’s crowded.”

I was right behind him, with Benji holding my hand, Luke bringing up the rear. I’d been so worried about how dinner would go and whether it would be awkward, but once my father told me about the separation I couldn’t think about anything else. Why did I have to know something about Benji’s life
that he didn’t? Not the position I wanted to be in, even before he’d attached himself to my side. Maybe it was my father’s way of apologizing to me about everything that had happened, without actually doing it: he could dodge that obligation, as well. I wished, yet again, that things with him could just be clear cut. But none of this was my choice anyway.

Once in the parking lot, he pulled out his keys. “Well, I suppose we should be on our way to North Reddemane. We’ve paid to have the house cleaned since the renters left, but there’s no telling what kind of state we’ll actually find it in.”

“Renters are hell on houses,” Luke said, as Benji skipped beside me in that awkward, bouncy, little-kid way.

“Is that so,” my father said.

“According to Emaline’s grandmother, anyway.” Luke pulled out his keys and started jingling them as his truck came into sight. Seriously, it was like a reflex with him. “Most likely it’s nothing you can’t fix up yourself, though.”

“I don’t know about that,” my father said. “I’m not exactly handy.”

I saw Luke give him a look, slightly pitying. It’s one I never would have expected a couple of hours earlier, when this evening began. Then, he and Theo were the experts, and Luke stuck out. But here, now, it was reversed, and I suddenly saw my father the way I realized my boyfriend had from the beginning, like he was the one who should be embarrassed. Which, in turn, embarrassed me. Apparently, I was responsible for everyone now.

“Nice to meet you,” Luke told him, extending a hand. My father shook it. “And thanks for dinner.”

“Of course.”

“Are you coming back to the house with us?” Benji asked me.

“Um,” I said, glancing at Luke, “I don’t think so. Not tonight, anyway.”

“Emaline’s got her own life,” my father said. “She was very kind to meet us on such short notice.”

Benji looked at me, his eyes squinty in the setting sun. He was more my sibling than Amber or Margo, at least if you went by genetics. But I didn’t know him at all.

“I’ll see you soon,” I told him. “We’ll go play minigolf, or something.”

“Yeah?” he said, excited. “That would be so cool!”

“Watch this one with a golf club,” Luke told him, cocking a finger at me. “She’s lethal.”

“That was just one time,” I said.

Benji’s eyes widened. “What happened?”

I looked at Luke. “I kind of nailed him on the forehead on the windmill hole.”

“Hit one of the spokes and shot right back at me,” he added, ever cheerfully. He stuck a finger in the center of his tanned forehead. “Had a circle mark here for
weeks.
”

Benji laughed, because of course this was just the kind of thing ten-year-olds loved to hear about. My father forced a smile. “All right, buddy,” he said. “Let’s get going.”

“Okay.” Benji crossed over to where my father was standing, leaving us in two separate camps. The natural order, resumed. “See you guys later.”

“Count on it,” Luke said.

“Drive safe,” I added. And then, finally, it was over. It had only been an hour and a half, but I was exhausted. I could feel it in my bones.

Even so, after a few steps, I turned back and looked at them again. Benji had run out ahead to the Subaru, my father walking behind him slowly, almost heavily. As I watched, he reached up and rubbed the back of his neck.

“Check the doorknobs,” I called out.

He turned around. “What?”

I cleared my throat. “The doorknobs. They get the most wear and tear in a rental. Especially any onto the beach side. You don’t want them falling off and locking you out.”

He just looked at me for a moment, and I wondered why I was even telling him this. In the distance, Benji was lifting his arms to the breeze coming off the causeway, his hair blowing back from his face.

“Okay,” my father said. “Thanks.”

I nodded, then started back towards my car, where Luke was waiting for me.
Doorknobs?
I was thinking.
Really?
And yet it wasn’t like I was proficient in his language, had any idea how to speak to him. You stick with what you know.

Now, back at the Tip, Morris picked up his beer again. “It’s not your problem,” he told me.

I looked at him. “What isn’t?”

“His marriage. Or his relationship with his kid.” He took a sip, then swallowed. “Any of it.”

Morris might have been dense. Okay, Morris
was
dense, most of the time. But just about when I was totally ready to
give up on him, he’d say something out of nowhere that surprised me. And, even more surprisingly, helped.

“So why do I feel like it is?” I asked.

“Because he dumped all that shit on you. Totally uncool.” Another gulp. God only knew how many he’d had. Morris never seemed to get drunk, just talked even more slowly. When he was really wasted, he was flat out silent. That’s how you knew. “He wasn’t around for you when you needed him, you don’t have to be there for him. Bottom line.”

I was quiet, aware as I always was when we crept close to the issue of his own father. All I knew of him was the lowered Monte Carlo he’d always driven to see Morris back when we were neighbors, years ago. It was red, supershiny, with a stereo that had bass rumbling loud enough to set your teeth chattering. You could tell the car was its owner’s baby, absolutely loved and cared for. This was in stark contrast to how he treated his actual child, who, more often than not, sat waiting on the front steps for weekend visits for hours before finally disappearing back inside, dragging his overnight bag behind him. After Morris and his mom moved, his dad relocated somewhere up north and hadn’t been in touch since. It was not something we talked about much. What I did know was that in the weeks leading up to graduation, when I found myself haunting my mailbox for responses to my invites, it was Morris who said to cut it out, that it wasn’t worth the time. He might have been ignorant on some fronts, but the boy knew about the futility of waiting around.

Unlike Luke, who was now suddenly behind me, his hands sliding down over my shoulders. “What are you guys doing
over here, looking so serious?” he asked. “Contemplating the universe?”

I glanced at Morris, who was downing the last of his beer. “Sort of.”

“Screw the universe,” he said. “I’m just checking out the ocean.”

Luke guffawed, then plopped down next to me and pulled me into his arms. I knew he was buzzed and just being sweet, but like too often lately, it grated; he’d come at the wrong moment. I tried to shake this off as Morris got to his feet.

“Getting a refill,” he announced. He looked at me. “You need one?”

I shook my head. “Talk later?”

“Talk later,” he repeated.

It was what we had always said, our version of goodbye, going all the way back to the days when he lived next door. Back then, when we were kids and time was long, we spent just about every day together—riding the bus to school, coming home, then playing by the causeway behind our houses. More often than not, he’d then end up at our house for dinner and TV afterwards, leaving only when it was time for me to go to bed. But as he finally went out the door, walking the short distance across the grass to his rental house, it was never a full stop. More like a pause, until we started up the next day. Talk later. We always did.

Now he nodded, then was gone, loping across the sand. As I watched him go, Luke pulled me in even closer and kissed the back of my head. “You did look pretty serious over here. Everything okay?”

“I guess.” I picked at a piece of driftwood by my foot. “Just kind of freaked about my dad and everything, still.”

“Right.” He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “I know it’s weird. But the fact that he did tell you … it’s kind of cool. Like he’s, you know, letting you in.”

I felt myself blink, processing this. “Into what?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. His life, his marriage. I mean, that’s progress in some way, don’t you think? That after pulling away like he did, he wants to include you now?”

No,
I thought. Out loud I said, “Maybe.”

It was so different from what Morris had said, the complete opposite in fact, that I wanted him to explain himself. But then he was sliding his hands around my waist, over the small of my back, kissing my neck again. “My parents are out tonight,” he said into my collarbone. “Want to see if we can get busted at my place this time?”

It was a fair offer, one I most likely would have jumped at any other day. But now, it just felt off. Sometimes I thought Luke knew me better than anyone. This wasn’t one of them.

“Maybe,” I said again, leaving all of my doubt to hover in this one word between us. I didn’t know if he heard me or not, as the wind was picking up, carrying voices from behind us with it. There were so many sounds near the ocean. Water, air, even sand blowing. As you got farther inland, nature subsided, muted by concrete and the landscape. Here on the Tip, though, you could always count on it to drown just about anything out.

Of course, Luke’s parents didn’t catch us. He had always been the lucky one.

I was heading home just after midnight when my gas light came on. Now I’d be late for curfew for sure, I thought, as I turned into the Gas/Gro. I’d just started filling up when a dusty, dented pickup pulled up to the other side of the pump. The door creaked open and an older guy with graying hair, wearing a worn baseball cap that simply said
FISH
, climbed out.

It was one of those hot summer nights, with a breeze that didn’t even come close to cooling you off, even when it hit you right in the face. Inside the Gas/Gro, the attendant had his cell phone tucked between his ear and shoulder as he stocked cigarettes, sliding in one box at a time.

When my pump read twenty bucks, I slowed it down, watching the numbers carefully so I wouldn’t go over what I had in my pocket. In my peripheral vision, I saw the guy slide his credit card, then twist off his gas cap. He started filling up as well, and for a moment we just stood there, the only sound the ticking of gallons and dollars going in.

“Hey, Clyde,” I finally said.

He glanced up. “Emaline. How’s it going?”