Page 9 of The Wrong Track

He nodded, kind of glumly. “I am. I am lucky. A lucky guy.”

Then we just sat there until Mrs. Baghdatis came back with tea for me. “It’s not caffeinated,” she assured me and I stared at her, wondering why she’d felt the need to inform me of that fact. “You have that look about your face,” she explained. “When are you due?”

My fingers closed into fists. “Due?” My winter coat was huge and bulky and I hadn’t removed it yet, because it didn’t feel warm inside this restaurant, either. There was no way she could have seen my stomach. The issue showed on my face? Did I have it written on my forehead?

“I meant the baby,” she explained. “I’m sorry, am I wrong?”

There was a very awkward moment of silence until I said, “April.” And then there was more silence.

“I’ll be right back with your food,” she said, and hurried away.

I bobbed the tea bags in the little silver pot. She could see it in my face? Could everyone?

“I don’t think you look any different,” Tobin told me. “If you were worried about that.”

He hadn’t known me before, though. Everything about me was different now. “I’m not worried. Not about anything.” I bobbed the tea bags faster. “Have you ever been to the Southwest?”

“I went to the Grand Canyon on a road trip with my parents. That was maybe the longest week of my life, but it had more to do with me being fourteen and not wanting to be in a car with them. And the day after we returned, I got attacked by a dog in my driveway. Not a great spring vacation.”

“A dog?”

He nodded. “One of our neighbors had adopted a big, ugly mix, and she let it wander. It came up on me and knocked me down, and it went right for my throat.” He took off his coat and pulled at the top of his uniform, exposing a bright-white undershirt but also some scars around his neck.

“Shit.” It had tried to kill him. “How’d you get away?”

“Hazel,” he answered. “Haze saved me. Now, she says that she didn’t, that it was nothing, but she literally jumped on the dog.” He stared at the little tea pot. “She’s fearless.”

Then she was lucky, too. It was very fortunate not to feel fear all the time, in everything you did. I nodded and kept dunking the paper bags into the water.

“Are you actually thinking of moving to Arizona or something? The desert?”

“We’ll see,” I answered.

“What about going home? Where are you from, Virginia? Do you have any family living there?”

“Is your family all local? What is this place called again, the middle finger area?”

Tobin laughed. “We’re in the little finger of the mitten of Michigan,” he said, and displayed his hand and pointed at it as I’d seen other people here do to describe their geography. “A lot of my family members are local, but some live downstate, some in California, other places. On our way to the Grand Canyon, that trip I told you about? We stayed with relatives the whole way across the country. That was why it took us so long to get there, all the damn reminiscing with all the family. After years of wishing for a sibling, it was enough to make me glad that I was an only child.”

He looked so mournful that I felt my lips tug again. “You don’t have brothers and sisters?”

“No, my parents thought they couldn’t top me.” He paused. “Another joke.”

I acknowledged that with a nod. “Funny.”

“I think my mom wanted more kids, but it didn’t work out.”

Funny, I repeated in my mind. Funny how some people wanted them and didn’t get them, and some people…I poured the tea into a cup and put my hands around the white china to warm them.

“How about you?” he asked. “I think Haze told me you have a sister.”

“Did she?” He waited, and I added, “Yes, I have a sister.”

“Where does she live?”

“I haven’t seen her in years,” I answered. Four years.

Tobin looked at me very steadily, his face totally serious now. “Did you leave your family to be with Kilian?”

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