Page 70 of On His Mind

I nod.

“Percy.” She stands there with her keys, half turned. “Thank you. For this year.”

That thing I’m supposed to say doesn’t come up. I stand on the curb in front of my house with my hands at my sides and my throat closed around two words I cannot get out.

She waits and waits.

Then she smiles like it doesn’t matter.

“Okay,” she says.

She gets in. The engine turns over. She pulls away from the curb, and at the stop sign at the end of Hawthorne Street, her brake lights come on and hold, red, for four or five seconds. Then she lifts her hand out the window. And she turns the corner, and she’s gone.

I stand there a while after. The porch light’s on behind me and the street’s empty, and the whole thing goes on around me the way it did when Josh left. I’m on a curb again, watching somebody drive away, with a thank you still stuck in my chest where it’s been my entire life.

I go inside and close the door.

The summer is simple. I work. Marco puts me on the floor five and six days a week, doubles when somebody calls out, and I take every hour he has. I learn the wine list well enough that the bartender starts letting me run bottles. My feet stop hurting sometime in June, and I don’t know what day. I walk to work at ten in the morning, and I walk home at midnight through the same one. The house is dark and hot and empty, and I open the windows because there’s no air conditioning and lie on top of the covers listening to Hawthorne Street have a summer.

Nobody ever said anything about the lease. Benson texted in June to ask if I’d water Rowan’s plant, which is how I found out I’m staying. That’s how it happened. A text about a plant.

The money goes in the drawer. Eight hundred. Twelve. Two thousand and something by the end of July — more money than anyone in my family has ever had at one time — and I count it about once a week and put it back and don’t spend it on anything.

Penelope texts sometimes. It’s not often. A photograph of a courtyard in Lisbon with the light coming in exactly the way she said it would. A dumb question about hockey. Once, at three in the morning her time, a picture of a ceiling. I always answer. Inever text first. I read her book in nine days, and then I read it again, slower, and by August, I’ve read it four times. I don’t tell her that though.

In August, they put the ice back in, and I go down, stand at the boards, and look at it for a while.

Freshman year is over.

I’ve got a room in a house with my name on the mail. A stick another man handed me. A chair at a table that nobody sits in but me, and a French novel that four hockey players have decided is the funniest thing that ever happened to them. There’s a folded note in my drawer under a broken watch that I haven’t read yet. And there’s a girl coming back the last week of August.

Everything the man in the truck told me was waiting for me is here. All of it. He said they’d pay me to stand right there, and they did. He said this thing could change my whole life. It did.

I lie awake in an empty house in the middle of a warm night in May, and again in June, and again in July.

Don’t get used to it.

It’s the last week of July, and I’ve already checked the calendar twice.

Chapter 19

Percy

Akeygoesintothe front door, and I’m on my feet before I’ve decided to be.

It’s four in the afternoon on a Sunday in the middle of August, and I’m standing in the middle of the living room now on the balls of my feet. The lock turns. The door opens.

“Deveroux!” Benson’s got a duffel over one shoulder and a fan under his arm. His hair’s shorter than it was in May. Something goes through my chest that I’m not ready for, and I stand there.

“Reeve,” I say.

He looks around at a house that’s cleaner than he’s ever seen it.

“How was the summer?”

Fine. That’s the answer. It’s been the answer my whole life. It’s a good answer. It closes the door without slamming it.

“Marco let me run bottles,” I say.