On Monday, 56 found her between classes and asked her out for ice cream at Friendly’s. The anxiousness then transferred itself to what to wear, how to do her makeup, how many pimples would appear between now and then. She lied to her parents about who she was meeting and how she would get home, and her mom dropped her off (“Guess Stacey and them all aren’t here yet. It’s okay, I’ll just get a booth.”). Then she went around the corner to stand beneath the awning of a dentist’s office (William Ashcraft, DDS) and waited until she saw his huge black truck pull in.
They sat across from each other with dueling glasses of ice cream sundae.
“Want my cherry?” he offered. “I don’t like ’em.”
“How can you not like cherries?” she exclaimed, taking it from his red-stained fingers. “That’s the best part. That’s why they say ‘the cherry on top.’ ”
He was grinning, admiring her. “I like some cherries, just not these cherries.”
“Oh, so you like the ones with pits still in?”
He laughed hard at this, but she didn’t understand why. “That’s right. The ones with pits.”
He took a large bite of his ice cream, his tongue volleying it into liquid.
“My friend didn’t think you’d actually ask me out.”
“What?” He swallowed a huge gulp of vanilla and fudge. “Why not?”
“She said you could have any girl you wanted.” She amended Stacey’s comment. “So why a freshman?”
“Your friend sounds jealous.”
Yes, Stacey was jealous. That was so obvious to her now, sitting across from him with his letter jacket, black and patched with his football letter on the breast. His hair gelled into tiny, neat spikes over a heavy, severe brow. His smile that curled half of a thick, lovely lip. Who wouldn’t be jealous of her?
“This is going to sound stupid,” he said. “Promise you won’t think I’m a creepy dork.”
As if there was any way she could think this.
“Last year I stayed over at Matt Moore’s house and the next morning I went with him and his family to church. Which was your church.”
“Really? I never saw you there.” Oh, but she had. Now that they were older, she cursed Mrs. Moore’s new rule forbidding anything resembling a coed sleepover.
“Naw, we were in the back, but I had this view of you the whole time, and man.” He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. “I was just like, ‘That’s the most beautiful girl I ever seen in this town.’ ”
He was blushing, which made a similar heat rush to her face. She looked down at the melting suds of her ice cream and tried not to smile like a mental patient.
“Alls I knew was I had to be single when you finally got to high school.”
He laughed loudly at himself, his face grew a shade pinker, and she finally looked up to admire the jagged horizon of his top row of teeth.
She noticed the gas gauge dwindling. She had enough to make it to New Canaan and could get gas on her way back but… so many uncertainties lay on the other side of that. Like if she’d even be coming back. Better to do this menial task now, have the full tank, and be prepared for whatever happened between her and 56. She pulled off the highway into a Pilot station, reached for her debit card (mindful there was only $73 attached until the end of the month), and thought better of it. She had $14 in her wallet, enough for about four gallons. She rummaged in the change drawer and put together another $2.84. She put every last cent into the pump, giving the gas nozzle tense, spurting squeezes to land on $16.84 exactly. She tucked one of Cole’s ball caps onto her head, went inside, landed the money on the counter, said, “Got it exact,” and breezed back out. Perhaps it had been a bad idea to stop. She now regretted it, but love would keep her going. Love shoved aside second thoughts, regrets, fear. She had to do this. She had to see. No matter what it meant for her parents or poor, wonderful Cole.
It had been difficult to learn to love him. In the weeks after he came to church with her family, they’d meet for lunch in the break room. Their conversation would be stop-and-go as they cast about for suitable topics. It was hard to look at his elongated, alien-shaped skull, the thin brown fuzz above his upper lip with one hairless vertical line, a scar from a cleft palet surgery he’d had as an infant.
“Do you like carrots?” he asked, holding a baggie of slimy baby carrots.
“Not really. They have no taste.”
He nodded and pretended to pay enormous attention to snapping a Ziploc bag closed, folding it up, and putting it back in the plastic Walmart bag he always brought his lunch in.
He aroused nothing in her, and she often found her mind wandering to any of the other men she’d been with. (Though it had been almost a decade, one in particular cast his ever-present ghost over her desire.) He asked her out several times, but she made excuses.
“He’s awkward,” she explained to Beauty. “And it looks like God put the teeth in his mouth drunk.”
Beauty’s head whipped back in laughter, and then she slipped quickly into a pout.
“Not nice, Teen. He’s sweet. He just hasn’t had a lot of girlfriends, and the one he had—Sarah Wiloxi?—she wasn’t nearly as pretty as you. He’s just intimidated.”
They were hidden in the bedding aisle, taking their time restocking. The store was as empty as it ever got, and Gary had the day off, which meant everyone was moving at an unafraid half speed.
“He just doesn’t do much for me, you know? It ain’t like I need him to be Luke Bryan, but he’s just—argh, he reminds me of a big, tall bird. And he’s got that gross scar on his lip.” She shook her head. “I dunno. I was thinking of going out to the bars this weekend. Just seeing what’s out there with the fish in the sea situation.”
Indeed, that weekend she found herself a sturdy boy in a camo Budweiser hat who might not have been Luke Bryan, but at least when she got around his beer gut there were strong arms and a broad back she could cling to, really wrap herself around. For a few months, she went on to see Darren of the camo hat (he never went without it, she realized, because he was covering a rather oddly clean bald spot on the top of his head). Maybe everything would have turned out differently with her and Cole if her dad hadn’t taken a fall on the ice following a winter storm in early 2010.
He was coming out of F & S Flooring late, and someone must have missed a spot with the salt in the parking lot because her dad caught a slick piece and took a fall, shattering his hip. He was technically part-time at F & S, so no insurance, no workman’s comp, and the surgery alone pretty much wiped out her parents’ savings. Credit cards took a bite, and their lives became defined by interest payments and medical debt. Then there was the issue of caring for him once he got out of the hospital. Her mom had to cut back her hours at the YWCA to be home—and Tina had to be there whenever her mother wasn’t.
Her dad, always fiercely independent, hated this, and it made him a difficult patient. Every four hours or so he’d have to go to the bathroom (though she suspected he held his bladder out of stubbornness sometimes). He also needed to be fed, helped to the shower seat, and his pill regimen enforced. She did physical therapy with him, extending his leg in different directions, yet even these slight movements made him grit his teeth, sweat, and mutter rare cusses. He’d never looked so old to her, shuffling along with his walker, jowels looser, the last of his hair vanishing from the top of his head to reveal dark, pulpy liver spots. One time when both she and her mom had no choice but to be at work he wet the bed, and when Tina found him, he was furious, not at her but for some reason at the doctors, who he was convinced had botched his surgery, which was the reason he still couldn’t walk.
“Those incompetents butchered my leg,” he raved, slapping his water off his nightstand, scattering plastic mug, lid, and liquid across the floor. He’d calmed down only because this unusual rage had brought her to tears while she stooped to clean up the ice.