Page 32 of Four Weekends and a Funeral

“No. Oh, god. Was it bad?”

“So bad.” My wince falls into a smile at the memory of my tenacious sister demanding occupations and vacation destinations from an unwilling audience. “They used to do events in town, like hardware store openings and stuff. My mom always made me go, even though I had horrible secondhand embarrassment. Emma wasn’t embarrassed, though. She’s nothing like me. She’s always been so confident.”

“You weren’t? Confident, I mean.” He glances between me and the other cars.

“Ha. No, I was a dreadfully boring kid and always looking for the manual on how I should be. I still am.”

“I don’t think you’re boring.” His sincerity does something to my stomach.

“Well, that’s just a blatant lie.”

“I don’t.”

“My whole ‘talking thing’?”

“It’s certainly not boring.” I catch the beginnings of a smile disobediently leaping up his face. The almost-smile raises the temperature in the truck better than the struggling heater.

His hand rubs along the icy steering wheel.

“Are you cold?” I open the glove compartment, hoping he keeps the obvious items in there. Instead, a plastic container of cookies pops out. “Snacks!” I blurt. “Thin Mints?”

The label credits a bakery in Duluth, but they look almost exactly like my favorite treat.

Pink erupts on Adam’s cheekbones before he huffs a hot breath into his cupped hands, the frozen wheel balanced by his knee. “I got them yesterday on the way home from work. This place makes dupes of gas station junk food like Ho Hos and Sno Balls, but they do a couple of Girl Scout cookies too. It’s dumb. They probably don’t even taste like the real thing.” He fusses with his rearview mirror, like he’s embarrassed to be caught with his own peace offering. My Starbucks gift from this morning looks pitiful by comparison.

I twist toward him in my seat. “This is amazing.” I grin at the box, unable to contain my delight. “Really, this is…nice.”

His mouth relaxes into a smile. “You sound shocked.”

“Did you keep them in the glove box so they’d freeze?”

“Happy accident.” He turns back toward the road, but his jaw works in thought. He opens his mouth as if to say something but then closes it. “I should probably apologize about last week.” He rubs his beard with agitated movements, waiting for my reply.

“Was that the apology or will it come later?” I make him work for it a bit, biting back my grin. I hate a bad apology, and Adam’s fun to tease.

“I shouldn’t have pretended to know anything about you and Sam.” His eyes meet mine when he pulls up to a stop sign, and guilt pinches at my side for giving him a hard time. He knows more about me and Sam than he realizes. “I’m so sorry, Alison. How can I make it right?”

Energy vibrates out of my hand on the bench seat between us, as if interlacing our fingers would be the most natural thing to do. Instead, I press my palm into my lap. “Don’t worry about it. It was a stressful day.”

He clicks on his blinker. “You don’t have to tell me it’s fine to make me feel better. I know I was wrong. It’s just…Sam and I had been growing apart for a while, and his last visit was…off. I’ve somehow been grandfathered into the ‘best friend’ title, and I put my guilt about that on you.”

“You weren’t wrong…about Sam or how he felt about me,” I say, flicking the plastic cookie container with my thumb. “But I want to help his family now, if I can. Sam knows who we all were to him. I think these posthumously awarded titles are more for the people who lost him.”

At least that’s what I’ve been telling myself.

He drums the steering wheel nervously. “Can we forget last week? Pretend it never happened?” He glances at me for a long moment and then returns his eyes to the road.

My heart sputters at his boyish earnestness, and I have to bite into a Thin Mint to contain my goofy grin. “I’d love that. But we have to start from right now. I need to wipe my memory clean of what we just watched.”

“Do you think Chelsea had to buy the rights to do that to ‘Wobble’?” he asks, blinking at me.

I burst into an embarrassing snort-laugh, earning rich, deep-throated laughter from him. My gloved hands mop up my leaky eyes, and I feel something more than awkward acquaintanceship bloom between us. Friendship, maybe? Something approaching friendship, at least.

Because despite all reason, I might like Adam Berg, and that’s a truth I’m still reeling from the whole way home.

9

Nips Out, Chilled and Perky

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