Page 18 of Finders Keepers
Quentin flashes that too-charming smile in my direction. It really gets under my skin, for some reason. And not in the way that Sabrina would tease me about. It legitimately irks me, and I can’t figure out why. Maybe because it doesn’t look fake, but it does look practiced. Like a trick he picked up somewhere. A third-party add-on to the genuine, original Quentin Bell experience. It reminds me of all the time I missed. All the things I no longer know about him. How hechosenot to let me keep knowing him.
“Would you like that?” he asks. “The fig leaf?”
“Absolutely not.”
It doesn’t come out very convincingly, though, and that vexing smile of his grows as he steps closer to the house, into the thin band of shadow on the patio so he can continue looking up at me without needing to use his hand as a visor.
I scramble for something else to say to change the topic to something safer and land on, “So, what’s all this, then?”
“You sound like the police in a Monty Python sketch. ‘Wot’s all this, then?’ ” he quotes. His next smile is smaller, but easier, more natural—morehim. This one I like a lot. I always have. “I’m replacing the floors on the main level.”
I didn’t spend nearly as much time at Quentin’s house when we were kids as he did at mine. My mom—who worked as a secretary in the high school’s front office—was home in the afternoon, while Quentin’s parents, a lawyer and a scientist, often worked long hours. So it made sense for him to come over after school most days, sometimes staying through dinner. And, to be quite honest, the vibes at Quentin’s were justbad. I didn’t understand it at the time but felt the tension nonetheless. Mr. and Dr. Bell’s marriage was like a Jenga tower of resentment and bitterness sitting right out on the coffee table. Even while it was still standing, everyone seemed aware that it would only take one small move to topple. It was all very uncomfortable. Not the kind of place kids wanted to hang out. (Also, my house always had baked goods. So it was really no contest.)
Still, I think back to the few hours I did spend inside 304 West Dill. I recall the pale green linoleum squeaking beneath my cheap Old Navy flip-flops as we crossed through the kitchen on the way to the backyard, and I imagine it replaced with the dark gray faux wood on the sawhorse. It feels a bit like a renovation of old memories, and I wonder if that’s what Quentin is out to do—both with his childhood home and with me. “I didn’t know you were handy,” I say.
He throws his arms out in an enormous, sloppy shrug as he flashes another one of those stupid smiles. “Probably lots you don’t know about me.”
“And whose fault is that?” I intend it as a joke but realize too late that it isn’t.
“Ah. Touché,” he says, bowing his head for a moment. A more neutral expression is in place when he raises it again. “I’ll be finished here in another hour or so. Want to grab lunch?”
“Lunch?”
“Yeah, you heard of it? Been all the rage for a couple centuries now.”
“Are you always this annoying?” I ask.
He wipes his forehead with the bottom of his shirt this time, obscuring his face but revealing a pale, strong stomach bisected by an auburn line of hair. My eyes instinctively follow it down to where it disappears behind the waistband of his shorts. “Depends who you ask,” he counters, reappearing as his shirt falls back into place. “I’ll get cleaned up and meet you at that new café by the toy store at twelve thirty. Unless you’re in the mood for something else?”
He almost definitely means in the mood for something else food-wise, but my brain takes the prompt and runs with it in the uncomfortable direction of the fig leaf again.
Okay. I really need to stop thinking about Quentin naked, because it’s only making things weird.
Or, rather, it’s makingmeweird. That’s really the only explanation I have for why it seems perfectly normal and reasonable to shout, “Sure. I desire a large salad!” before slamming the window shut.
9
The café whereQuentin and I are supposed to meet is located in one of the historic buildings on Main Street, about four blocks away from our houses. If I remember correctly, it used to be a RadioShack. While there are a few longtime businesses on this strip, including the toy store next door and the menswear shop across the street, most of the storefronts around here were either empty or occupied by some sort of unsexy retail chain back when I was growing up. But there’s been a downtown renaissance in Catoctin over the last decade or so, and now there are bubble tea places and hip vintage stores and microbreweries and bougie restaurants called, like, Fate/Happenstance. (How do you even pronounce that? Fate Slash Happenstance? Fate Divided by Happenstance?) Apparently they have vintage bicycles on the walls and give you an origami crane with your check.
This place is cute, cozy. There’s lots of exposed brick, and the sun streaming in through the large windows reflects the café’s name—Best That You Can Brew—backward in shadow on thehardwood floor. Yacht rock plays just loud enough to get my brain humming along with it. It’s the kind of place where I might come to grade research papers, if that was something I still did.
“Can you imagine Catoctin having a place like this when we were kids?” The combination of Quentin’s sudden appearance and the relevance of his question to my inner thoughts makes me turn around so fast that I nearly knock my drink off the table.
Once I’ve ensured the cup isn’t going to topple, I take in his hair, still a bit damp from showering, and his new outfit of mauve chino shorts, black T-shirt, and Converse high-tops. Those were the shoes he always wore when we were kids too. Has he been wearing them steadily over the last seventeen years, or are they another thing he left and came back to later?
“You’re late,” I point out. He’s only about five minutes past our agreed-upon time, but I’m feeling petulant.
“Blame your dad,” he says. “Ran into him on my way out the door and he wouldn’t stop chatting.”
“Mydad?Chatting?” If ever there was a man of few words, it would be Dave Hunnicutt. His best man speech at my uncle’s wedding famously clocked in at a cool ten seconds.
“Surprised me too. But I asked him a question and it turns out he has alotto say about electrical wiring fill capacity.” He nods toward my sweating glass of iced tea and the overflowing plate of greens in front of me. “I see you already got your desired large salad.”
Really,whydid I say that? I must’ve sounded like some sort of strange, prim, lettuce-loving monarch, issuing a formal declaration from my window. Of course Quentin wasn’t going to let that go unacknowledged. What I would give to be able to control my bodily response to his teasing so that he didn’t get the satisfaction of seeing this hot blush overtake my face.
“Want me to grab you anything else while I’m up there?” he asks, drumming his fingers on the table.
“I’m good, thanks.”
