Page 75 of The Rom-Commers

Sure enough, as I fell silent, we could hear her. She must have been talking to someone on the phone. “His car’s here,” she was saying, “but he’s not answering.”

Then she called again: “Charlie? Are you home?”

I looked at Charlie likeMaybe we should just turn ourselves in.

And he looked at me likeNever surrender.

I heard the ex-wife drop her keys on the kitchen counter and then wander off to another part of the house.

As her voice receded, I whispered, “Maybe we should make a break for it.”

“To where?” Charlie whispered back. “She’ll be back any second.”

“Text her! Tell her you’ve gone out.”

“Just randomly text her my whereabouts?” Charlie said. “Inevertext her.”

“Are you saying she’ll get a text from you and think,That’s funny. He never texts me. He must be hiding in the pantry?”

“I’m just saying it’s weird.”

“This whole thing is weird!”

Charlie capitulated and reached into his pocket for his phone. But after digging around a minute, he shook his head.

“What?”

“I don’t have it with me.”

That’s when we heard the ex coming back. “He’s definitely avoiding me,” she was saying. Then, a pause. “But it’s strange. The place is a disaster. There’s stuff all over the dining table—like maybe he’s writing again. And dishes in the sink. And—ugh—a box of Twinkies. How’s he supposed to stay healthy if he eats like a middle schooler?” Another pause. Then, “This doesn’t even look like his stuff, honestly. There’s abouquet of flowerson the kitchen table.”

Charlie and I held each other’s gazes, and our breath—united in the act of hiding—as we listened to the sound of her gathering her keys off the counter, and then her footsteps walking away.

The second we heard the front door slam behind her, we burst out of the pantry at the same time like bucking broncos out of the gate, moving too fast for anyone’s good, and I’m not exactly sure how it happened, but somehow I managed to get caught in an overturned grocery sack on the floor just outside the door—one foot entangled in it, I think, and the other steppingonit?—just as Charlie turned back to ask me some question that will now be forever lost to history.

That’s what I remember: Charlie turning around, just as I felt a sensation like someone had tied my shoelaces together—and I went jolting forward into his chest, knocking him backward.

And then we hit the ground.

Pretty hard, too.

I felt my knee knock the slate tiles like a hammer just as Charlie landed with a series ofoofsand smacks.

And then he was rolling onto his side and pressing his hand on his tailbone, growling in misery.

I’d landed with my face in his armpit, so I hoisted up and over to get a look at his face.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

Charlie’s face was red now, and his jugular was kind of pooching out, and all he could say was “Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuck that hurts.”

“Oh, god. I’m so sorry! Did you land on your tailbone? I did that once in Girl Scouts. This floor is not soft, either, by the way. No give there at all.” I smacked the floor for confirmation. “Do you think you broke it?”

“The floor?” Charlie croaked, like I was crazy.

“Your tailbone!” I said, like he was crazier. “Should I take you to the hospital? What do they even do for a broken tailbone—right? They can’t exactly put it in a cast.”

Charlie had gone back to growling.

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