Page 46 of The Summer of ’98

Cass stared at her handful of products. “You might need to write all of that down for me.”

I laughed. “Sure.”

“Also, are you qualified to be giving out this sort of advice?”

“I’m not giving you medical advice. None of these products are prescription only, so it’s safe. And I know what I’m talking about, I promise. I live and breathe this sort of stuff. The worst that’ll happen is some inflammation. In that case, you stop using the product and the inflammation will stop. It should be fine, though. Do a patch test on your neck first.”

“Okay then,” she said, going to the counter. I followed her with a few of my own products. “New skin here I come.”

We paid for our items and went back outside with a paper bag each.

“Let’s go and get an ice cream,” she linked her arm through mine. “It’s a furnace out here.”

“You sure about that?” I asked. “Ice cream.”

“I’m not letting my intolerance tell me how to live. You know, I didn’t eat ice cream, cheese, milk, nothing like that until I was eleven. Eleven! Mom cut me off as soon as she found out that I was intolerant. She hated dealing with the aftermath. I was deprived, and then James left, and I ran away when it was dark outside, went to the nearest convenience store, and ate an entire tub while I walked home. So worth it.”

I laughed as we passed a clothing store. There were racks of scarves on the sidewalk, a stand of hats, and shoes on a table. The little tags with permanent marker prices stapled to the clothes tipped me off to the fact that it was a thrift store.

“We should go in here,” I said, stopping to browse the shoes.

“You wanna know why my first instinct was to eat ice cream?”

“Tell me.”

“Have you ever seen Kramer vs. Kramer ?”

“I don’t think so,” I said as we slipped inside the store and the aroma of musty clothes invaded me. It was so familiar. A little slice of home right here in Colorado.

“I’d watched it with my parents a few months earlier,” she explained as we weaved in and out of racks. “Which was totally awkward during a sex scene; I mean, I was eleven. So, anyway, there’s this scene with a little kid and his dad, and the dad is telling the kid to eat dinner, but the kid is totally acting out because his mom just left and whatever. So, the kid goes into the freezer, grabs a tub of ice cream, and the whole time his dad is like ‘Billy, you better not eat that.’ But the kid does eat it and the dad gets mad and sends him to his room, and anyway, at the time I saw ice cream as this prop that’d piss Mom off if she knew. A way to act out, I guess. Now that I look back, I think maybe I was hoping my dad would come back and tell me off for eating ice cream when I knew I wasn’t allowed to.”

Cass still had her shades on while she flipped through hangers of coats. My heart was aching for her. She’d known her dad and had had a relationship with him—she had someone to miss. I couldn’t relate to that because I’d never known mine. Even without him, I had a mom who was there and who, while a bit overbearing, was around when I needed her.

“You wash the clothes before you wear them, right?” Her voice snapped me out of sorrowful thoughts, and I looked to see that she was holding up a cute plaid skirt.

“Of course.”

“Great, because this is tight and it’s only two dollars.”

“It’s cute.”

She grinned, wide and convincing before she slipped around me toward the counter. Her moments of vulnerability were overwhelming to witness. There was so much I wished that I could do to help her feel more whole.

When Leroy met us outside of Rocky Ryan’s an hour later, his brow was damp, all of the car windows were down, and he had a bottle of water between his legs as he held the gear stick. Cass slipped into the backseat, I took the front, and Leroy peeled away from the curb.

“You do some shopping?” he asked.

“There was a skincare sale at the pharmacy,” I explained. “I couldn’t help myself.”

He smiled. “Where to?” He peered in the rearview mirror at Cass, who was going through her bag of clothes, the wind whipping at the paper and her larger-than-life hair.

“Drop me off at Tony’s,” she said.

Leroy pursed his lips, indicating some sort of internal conflict.

“Who’s Tony?” I asked.

“A friend of Noah’s,” he answered.

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