Ford’s mind played a drum flourish. Sadie thought she looked pretty, and there was no denying that she had boobs.
“You look—” Ford began, searching for words. “Better than dinner.”
“Must not be much of a place you’ve picked out then.” Cali smiled at him.
“Oh, it is. It is.” Their fingers twined together, and Sadie felt his heartbeat pick up.
Cali said goodbye to her dad, and they stepped out onto the porch into the warm night. Ford bent to grab the picnic basket, and Cali tugged her hand from his. “No,” she said emphatically. “No, no, no.”
What was going on? Sadie wondered as Ford’s mind filled with even lines of dark circles hovering in protective formation. “Cali?” he asked.
She shook her head, her cheeks flushed, arms crossed over her chest. “Not again,” she told him. “You said we were going somewhere new. Somewhere special.”
“We are,” Ford assured her.
You totally are, Sadie agreed.
“Then what is that?” She pointed a long, harlequin-painted nail at the picnic basket.
“Dinner?” Ford said.
“I am not spending another one of those nights climbing over people’s discarded crap to one of your ‘special’ places in some old building with no working bathroom.”
Sadie hadn’t thought about the bathroom part.
“Look at me,” Cali said, running her hand down herself like a TV presenter. “I’m the kind of woman who should be taken out and shown off. Not the kind who should be sitting on the floor eating off paper plates in some moldy house no one else wants to be in either.”
Sadie was shocked. She’d expected Cali to be so excited, thrilled. Because Ford had expected her to be excited, she realized.
And because I would be.
Now Ford’s mind hummed with anxiety. He set the basket down. “I thought you liked that. You said you liked it when I found secret spots to take you. They’re way more special than that place we went for dinner on Friday.”
“Really?” Cali said, raising an eyebrow. “Because I think toilets are special.”
Sadie started to feel annoyed with Cali. If she’s going to be that way, she doesn’t deserve to see the tree house, she told Ford.
But he didn’t agree. Fix this, fix this, fix this, his mind chanted. “Please, Cali? Please will you come? I think you’ll really like it.”
Cali teetered back on her heels. “No. I can’t. If I go you’ll be funny and we’ll have sex and nothing will ever change.” She let out a long ragged breath. “I think it’s time for this to be over.”
Her words caught Ford completely off guard. For a moment his mind froze, every sound gone, every dot stuck, suspended in place. “Over?” he repeated, and Sadie felt how tight his vocal cords were. “You and me? Because of a picnic?” He kicked the basket. “Forget the picnic. Fine, let’s go to a restaurant.”
“It’s not the picnic. It’s everything.”
Points of color flared agonizingly and Ford’s head filled with noise, as if Cali saying “it’s time for this to be over” were a magnet for other voices—“piece of crap,” “puppy,” “I miss him,” “drop it,” “let go,” “get out of here”—lashing him, causing real, physical pain.
Sadie felt the stickiness of humiliation, the heat of his anger, scented the bleach of betrayal, the raw hurt of having worked so hard and been rejected. He did the only thing he knew how to do, the thing he always did. In a harsh, cold voice he said, “Are you sleeping with your boss already?”
“You asshole.” Cali turned to go back into the house.
“Cali, wait, I’m sorry.” He reached for her arm. Sadie was impressed with him, impressed with his accepting responsibility and being willing to admit he was wrong. “That was a terrible thing to say. I didn’t mean it. It’s just—you said everything was wrong. But I thought we were fine. We went out with your friends the other night, and it was great. I loved George and Cotton.” Ford’s vision dimmed, and Sadie felt him recoil from the lie but sensed his hopelessness, his desperation. “I always just assumed it was you and me together forever. That’s what we said. And now we have some little disagreement and you say everything is over.”
Cali looked at his hand on her arm. “It’s Georgia and Clinton. And you didn’t like them. You hated them. You pretended to, but you were bluffing.”
Ford blinked, and Sadie felt a rising sense of vertigo, as though he had no idea where he was or which way was up. “That’s not—”
Cali stopped his protest. “You were so busy this weekend, I had a lot of time to think. And the more I did, the more it became clear.”
Something in her tone made Ford let go of her arm. The feeling of vertigo stayed with him. “What?”
“You—you’re all about the past. Old houses, old friends. City Center. Things staying how they are. But I’m not. I want to move forward. I’m tired of picnics, and crawling through rafters to see some great view of the city, which is just the same dirty city no matter how you look at it. I like eating off plates with silverware at a table with chairs. I adore restaurants and new homes in new developments with new furniture and new carpets. I want to live somewhere with a bathtub no one has ever used and a refrigerator that makes ice. Like Georgia and Clinton’s town house.”
Sadie watched Ford rooting around his mind, hunting for patches, anything he could use to fix this like he fixed the tree house, only the materials were much more sparse. He considered a memory of an old porch swing they’d sat in on an abandoned porch and watched the sunset, but settled instead on “We agreed that place was hideous. All that fake plastic molding and wallpaper that looked like tile.”
Wrong choice, Sadie thought.
Cali shook her head. “You said it was hideous. I—I liked it.” She looked down, knitting her fingers together. “Actually, I loved it.”
“But the windows were aluminum. They’ll be freezing all winter. And the front door wasn’t even real wood. Everything was fake. A lie.” Stop! Sadie called out to him. You’re completely missing the point.
Cali sighed. “That’s not what I saw. I saw something clean and pretty. For happy people with a bank account and plans for the future.”
Sadie watched miserably as Ford flailed around, finding all the wrong handholds. “It’s not going to look pretty for long. That stucco was already starting to—”
“Stop it!” Cali said. “This isn’t about the damn house. It’s about us. About us being over.”
Ford’s mind heaved and rolled from anger to desperation and back again. “Why now?” he said. “What changed?”
“Nothing’s changed, Ford. That’s the problem.” Cali’s expression was almost pitying. “I’ve been waiting for you to change for months. You say you want to grow up, have a construction company of your own. You talk about all those old buildings, restoring them to the status they deserve, like they are members of your family. But it’s all talk. In the end, you’re still a scrapper.”
Ford’s mind continued to rise and fall in stormy confusion. “That’s not true. I salvage.”
“That’s just a fancy name. Like when alcoholics call themselves wine connoisseurs. You go into old buildings and take stuff no one else wants. All you do is get distracted by one thing or another. I waited for you. I was patient. I believed you—believed in you. But you never meant it, did you?”
Sadie felt Ford looking for a horizon line, for anything stable. “Of course I did.”