Page 27 of What August Heard
She saved people.
While I was responsible for getting one buried.
I set the glass down on the desk, and turned the chair toward the window.
She could not be near me.
Not because I didn’t want her near me. Because I wanted her near me more than I had wanted anything in five years. Good things were not for people who had done what I had done. You did not deserve to sit next to someone who drove to a children’shospital every morning. You did not get to hold her hand or watch her cry at her own shop opening.
You deserved to sit in the dark.
You paid the foundation.
You drove to nowhere after midnight.
And you kept your hands to yourself.
***
Chapter 9
August
“Soulmates!” I said.
Fletcher looked up from his drawing and smiled, as if he had been waiting for this exact moment and was trying not to show it.
He dropped the marker on the coffee table and leaned back on his hands. We had just won. Again. Our team for Pictionary was me, him, and Poppy. Because we were an odd number of people (with Margaux there this year), we had pulled out names from a hat. The hat decided to put me with Fletcher. It also decided that Douglas would spend the next forty-five minutes partnered with Margaux, which he was handling with the patience of a very, very confused man.
Poppy jumped up.
“We won,” she announced, to the room, to the ceiling, to whoever was listening. “We won because August can read Fletcher’s terrible drawings and that is a skill no one else has.”
“My drawings are not terrible,” Fletcher said.
Callie held up the paper. The soulmates drawing looked like two potatoes holding hands next to what might have been a moon or possibly a wheel of cheese.
“The soul,” Poppy said, pointing, “looks like a kidney. How did you figure out that word, August?”
“I guess I do have a skill.” I said.
Then I looked again at the potatoes Fletcher drew and I started laughing. I couldn’t stop. Every time I looked at the two potatoes I started again and Poppy’s face every time she looked at me laughing made it worse. Fletcher was watching me laugh and trying to keep a straight face and not managing it at all.
Poppy grabbed both of our arms and pulled us into a hug, her small arms not quite reaching all the way around. I felt Fletcher go stiff for a second — just a second — the way he sometimes did when something got too close without warning. Then he let out a breath and the stiffness went away.
Over Poppy’s head, across the coffee table, Margaux was looking at me.
She looked at me the way you look at a stain on your shirt that you can’t do anything about until you get home.
“Fun game,” she said. “Should we play something else?” She looked around the circle. “Never Have I Ever. I’ll go first. You drink a shot of Vodka if you’ve never done the thing I say.”
She looked at Poppy.
“For children,” she said, very sweetly, “it’s lemonade.”
“I would prefer lemonade anyway, even if I was a hundred years old.” Poppy announced.
Jennifer and Douglas were already standing. They had a cocktail thing with the Hendersons — family friends who summered one street over — and they’d been trying to extract themselves from Pictionary for the last three rounds without being rude about it.Jennifer kissed the top of Poppy’s head. Douglas collected his jacket from the armchair. He told us not to stay up too late and looked at the vodka bottle on the table and then looked at Callie.
