“All set, sir?” she says, and holds the scanning wand to his purchases. “Some cool stuff here.” Luke’s palms start to sweat. He pulls the credit card slowly from his pathetic-looking wallet with the worn leather. He wishes he had cash. Cash is so definitive.
“Twenty-four fifty,” the cashier says.
He hands her the credit card, and she swipes it. He doesn’t breathe until he hears the paper printing. She tears off the first receipt and hands him an oversized purple pen. “Sign here.”
Thank God. Thank. God. He holds the shopping bag. Ginger waits for him by the door. “I guess I should go find that crown,” she says, and shrugs. She reaches out and touches the side of his arm, such a familiar gesture, and he wants to freeze time, feeling her hand there in just that right way she always had with him.
He knows his mother thinks he ruined things with Ginger. And he probably did. Of course he did. He had nothing going on when she graduated pre-vet from Fairfield. He could have told her he’d go anywhere with her when she was deciding which program she should attend—Cornell or Penn or Michigan State. She was accepted everywhere.
But his dad was sick, and things with Jimmy and Murph and Chucky were going great. Their band had a monopoly on all the local haunts—two gigs a weekend sometimes, and he was happy doing that. His hands on the guitar, the encouraging audience, the way he and Jimmy would lean in to each other on the songs they’d cowritten and belt out the words. He loved being onstage and in the moment, forgetting all the bad stuff: his dad’s eyes when he would sit feebly on the back patio and stare at the trees, his mother’s insistence he find “something stable.” Looking back now, he wonders what he thought he wanted then. Did he just want to go on that way forever because nothing bad had happened yet, or did he have future plans—maybe a record deal, marriage? A home with Ginger where she could run her vet practice right out of a downstairs office? Had he ever gotten that far in his mind?
Yes, he remembers hoping all that would eventually happen. He remembers thinking they’d have a nice Connecticut home where he wrote lyrics or banged away on his drums in the basement, her coming downstairs with some injured animal in her arms. “I couldn’t leave him in the cage for the night,” she’d say. But he was so damn afraid of the future then. How could he wish their relationship were further along when he knew it meant his dad would be gone and Luke himself would be older with fewer and fewer chances of having made it （didn’t you need to make it when you were young?）， and, God, his mother’s impatient prodding. Ginger’s future was so bright, it was guaranteed to be bright because that’s who she was, so where did that leave him? Her definite future made his feel scrawny. At times he was jealous, wondering what it felt like for everyone to know you’d end up well. For him, it was only if he stayed with Ginger that he’d be successful, and that slowly ate away at him.
Ginger stopped coming to their concerts, and one night he kissed that girl with the eyebrow ring behind the stage, and he drank more than he should have, slept more than he should have, started messing with pills Chucky gave him. “Are you okay?” Ginger kept asking. “Fine and dandy,” he’d reply.
When Ginger said University of Georgia offered her a great scholarship package, he said, “Hey, go for it. Take the midnight train, right?”
He wanted to trick her with that pathetic statement. He wanted her to say she might go far away but he was worth waiting for. He wanted to feel good enough for her. He needed convincing, didn’t he? He wanted her to ask him to visit whenever the band wasn’t playing. Maybe he wanted more fight: them to fight for their love the way his father was fighting for his life. And he felt betrayed. Why in the world would she choose a school thirteen hours away?
He didn’t know about the uncertainty of right then, but he had no doubt they would be together down the road. He wanted Ginger to say no place would be right without him.
She didn’t. The girl with the eyebrow ring was the proof he needed. Their kiss was too dry, too foreign, and he bolted from her immediately afterward, saying, “Sorry. I’m sorry.” He only loved Ginger. He wanted to know she loved him as fully and as achingly as he loved her. It was a childish want, but he needed to be sure. If she had said she needed him, he would have quit the band then, wouldn’t he have? He likes to think yes. But her eyes looked so hurt after he said she should just go without him that he still tries to forget her expression. They were sitting in his car in her parents’ driveway. She had just moved out of her apartment. Her eyes were red, and he saw the late-day sun hit the small diamond on her necklace. “Be good to yourself.” She closed the car door gently, and he watched her walk inside the way he always did when he dropped her off.