Page 105 of Wayfarers

“No. Because I think we both have reasons for keeping that stuff to ourselves. Or we would’ve talked about it already.”

“Okay,” he says. “What’s option three?”

“One for one.”

“I need more than that.”

“I tell you something,” I say, “something I feel comfortable telling you, something about—Cal, or whatever, and you give me something in return. But here’s the deal. If I don’t think the thing you’ve given me is significant enough, that you’re trying to winkle out juicy stuff—”

“Winkle?”

“—winkle out stuff without giving me equal stuff in return, the game stops. And the same goes for me.”

“These are our only three options.”

“Yep,” I say, squinting at the blue amenities sign ahead of us. Then I turn on my blinker. “Tell me I’m wrong.”

Knox sighs. It’s the sound of someone gently dropping something they didn’t want to carry anymore. “You’re not wrong. Is it weird that this kind of reminds me of strip poker?”

“You played a lot of strip poker?”

“Do we need gas? Is that why we’re pulling off the highway?”

“Because I’ve never played strip poker.”

“. . . we’re passing the gas station.”

“We’re getting Starbucks,” I tell him. “Do you want a coffee drink with caramel on the top and caramel on the bottom?”

“Oh,” he says. “Hell yes.”

A LITTLE LATER

“Did you just pay for that with your phone?”

“Triple Star Day,” I tell him, pulling out of the drive-thru. “I just got a boatload of points for those iced macchiatos. And the muffins.”

His eyebrows go up, then fall. “Triple Star Day,” he says. “Got it. I thought we were kind of low on cash.”

“I charged it to like a hundred dollars’ worth of Starbucks credit that my mom has loaded into her account.” I start to play it off, make it clear I think it’s frivolous and stupid, but also I’m aware that this silly coffee drink is making me genuinely happy. “You like it?”

He takes an experimental sip. “So much caramel.”

“Yeah,” I say. “I special order the extra layer. It must taste insanely sweet.”

“It kinda does.” He sips again. “I like it? I like it. I think I just need to drink it slowly.”

We’re quiet until we get back on the highway, following the route that skirts us around Chicago.

“My mom woke me up in the middle of the night,” he says, finally. “When I was a kid. She put me in the back seat, and we left. We didn’t tell my dad we were going.” Knox frowns. “Could’ve been she left a note. I guess I never asked her. My dad died a couple years after my mom left him and took me. We found out just outside of Salt Lake City, Utah. We were going to a rave festival thing in the desert. My mom checked her email, which she did maybe once a week, and got the message from my mamaw. And, yeah, I really miss him. We left behind my dog Bilbo and I miss him too. I guess he’s probably also gone. I never heard.”

“Oh.”

He looks at me. “You see,” he says, gently, “why I didn’t really want to tell you a lot of this.”

“If it’s painful—”

“I’ve had a long time to grieve. But I can tell that you don’t know what to say now.” He takes another cautious sip of his drink.