Page 26 of The Cadence
And I knew that he had always worried about people watching his behavior and noticing all the flaws. I didn’t care much what they thought about me, but he did, and he wasn’t the only one. When I’d started high school, my grandmother had warned me not to give anyone any grist for the mill. I hadn’t known what that meant so she’d gone on to explain.
“You don’t need to tell them how you grew up, nothing about your mother or father,” she’d cautioned. “Nobody needs to hear your business.” Nobody needed to know the whole truth, or even part of it.
“I’m sorry,” I told him now. If anyone was looking for grist about him, I’d provided it, and I shouldn’t have.
“You don’t need to apologize to me for anything, not ever. Let’s get the hell away from this trash.”
We went back to the party and I kept my conversation light and non-specific. I didn’t say another word about my personal problems regarding death or living rough, and I didn’t discuss anyone else’s punishments. The evening went well.
We hadn’t done much that day besides sitting in an air-conditioned stadium, but I was tired anyway and when Will finally asked if I was ready to leave the bar, I was. We went out to his car, slowly.
“Why are you limping?” he asked me.
“These are my good shoes and they give me blisters on my little toes. I only wear them for important occasions. I got them for the ninth-grade dance.”
He looked down at my feet, and I understood what was going through his mind. These sturdy shoes with their thick elastic straps and metal buckles were not what most girls had worn to the freshman dance.
But he said something different. “Those made you taller. When I first saw you, I thought you’d grown.” Then I knew he was thinking back to the day of my grandmother’s funeral, because he had noticed my height. He slowed down more and offered his arm, which I took, and it wasn’t that far to where he’d parked.
“You have some more money now,” he noted as the guard moved the barricade for the car and we exited the lot. “You don’t have a lot of expenses.”
“You mean, I can afford a new pair of shoes that don’t hurt? That’s true, but I’m also saving.”
“For what?”
“My grandma called it a rainy-day fund,” I said. “I want to have money put aside in case anything happens, so that I don’t need to worry. Maybe I’ll want to go back to beauty school, and I know I’ll want my own apartment.”
“What?” he asked me. “Why?”
“I can’t live with you forever,” I answered. “I wouldn’t do that! No matter what you said about not having guests, eventually youwill want to have people stay with you. Your friend DeSean, for example, or your mom.”
“I have five other bedrooms besides mine if I want to invite them.”
It was true that it was a very large house. “But you had privacy before and now you don’t,” I argued. “You have a stranger living in your back yard.”
“You’re not a stranger.”
“I’m someone you knew years ago, but we never saw each other during all the time since. We never even texted a ‘hello.’ We are strangers, pretty much,” I countered.
“Ok. Ok,” he repeated, and was quiet for a moment. Then, out of nowhere, he made an announcement: “I hate avocados.”
“Pardon me?”
“I hate avocados,” he repeated. “They make my mouth itch.”
“Are we talking about allergies again? I don’t think I have any to food, either.”
“When I get cold, my fingertips turn white,” Will continued. “That’s why I wear gloves for so much of the season. It doesn’t bother me, though.”
“Oh, you’re going over weird medical things? Ok,” I said. “Once, I got a splinter right through my hand that came out the other side. How’s that for disgusting?”
“I’m not trying to disgust you,” he responded. “I can’t stand opening the mailbox. It’s from when I was a kid, when mymom didn’t want to get the mail because there would always be notices about money we owed. She refused to look in there so I had to do it for her.”
“That’s too bad, and I know what you mean about the fear. Whenever I used to walk up the road to my mother’s mailbox, there was always a terrible surprise inside.” It had mostly been court documents, but there had been bills, too. “But why are you telling me this?”
“I don’t want us to be strangers,” he said. “I don’t want you to think that you don’t know me. I don’t want you to think that you have to move out, either. You don’t.”
“I wasn’t going to, not right away. I have to save a lot more.” The fact that I had already gotten another job to help me do it? It just didn’t seem like the right time to share that information.
