Danny put the car into park and took his foot off the brake. “How long are you staying?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. She let her head sag against the seat. “I haven’t thought much about it. My mom needs my help, and my dad’s got the election coming up, so—”
“Bullshit,” Danny said.
Colleen lifted her head and looked over at Danny. She waited for him to say something else, but he didn’t. “It’s not bullshit,” she finally said.
“It’s bullshit if you think your mom needs your help,” he said. “Your mom needs your help as much as your dad does, and I don’t think your dad has ever needed anybody’s help.”
“He’s probably going to lose this election, Danny.”
“And you hanging campaign posters with your mom is going to change that? Please.”
“What are you trying to tell me?”
“I’m not trying to tell you anything,” he said. “But they don’t need your help, Colleen. And you don’t need their help either.”
“I didn’t say I needed their help.”
He put his hand over hers. It felt warm and familiar. Colleen looked down at their hands. She turned hers over, palm up, and their fingers interlocked. “Look, honey,” he said, “I’m about the worst and last person to be giving advice on relationships, but I think the only person who can help you and the only person who needs your help is back in Texas.”
She let go of his hand and brought hers back into her lap. Out of nervous habit, she reached for her wedding ring to spin it on her finger, and again she remembered that she wasn’t wearing it. She looked out at her parents’ house. “Remember when we were in high school,” she said, “and you’d drop me off late and wait for me to get to the front door, and then you’d lay on the horn?”
Danny laughed. “I do,” he said. “I do remember that.”
“Please don’t do that tonight,” Colleen said.
Danny put both palms on the center of the steering wheel as if preparing to honk the horn. He smiled.
“You bastard,” Colleen whispered, trying not to smile herself. “Don’t you dare.”
“You’d better get back to Texas before my hands get heavy.”
She gave him a playful slap. “I needed this tonight,” she said.
“I know,” Danny said. “Me too.”
“I should’ve married you,” she whispered. She smiled.
“Oh, honey,” he said. He cocked his head and looked at her with mock sympathy. “There would’ve been a lot less screwing and a lot more drinking.”
“There hasn’t been that much screwing,” she said, “but there’s been plenty of drinking.”
“Go home,” he said. “To Texas.”
She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek, and then she opened the door and climbed out. She leaned in the open door and put her fingers to her lips. “Keep your damn hands off that horn,” she said, and then she shut the door and walked up the short driveway toward the front porch, her Keds crunching over the gravel and oyster shells that covered the walk.
She’d made it to the porch steps when she heard Danny drop the car into reverse and roll backward down the short incline of her parents’ driveway. She stepped into the soft curve of yellow light where it cast a halo on the porch, and she felt as if someone’s eyes were on her. She looked up at the second story, expecting to see her mother peeking through the aluminum blinds in the office’s window. No one was there.
By the time she bent to retrieve the front door key from beneath her mother’s planter—the one in the shape of a toad with red geraniums growing from its open back—the motor of Danny’s Camaro was already too far down Yacht Drive to be heard. Colleen found the key and, as quietly as she could, lowered the corner of the planter back to the porch.
When she stood, she caught the scent of cigarette smoke, so overpowering that she could not believe that the near-empty bar in which they’d spent the evening had left such a strong smell clinging to her clothes and hair. It overwhelmed the damp odor of moss, the soggy wood on the porch, and the humid pungency of the dripping oak trees.
She inserted the key into the lock, and that was when she heard a man’s voice lift from the dark at the far end of the porch. “Don’t let me scare you,” the voice said.
In what felt like one motion, Colleen turned the key in the already unlocked door, pushed it open, and nearly fell into the small foyer at the bottom of the stairs. She caught herself by holding on to the doorknob, and she gathered her breath before turning to look back outside. When she did, she saw that a man stood smoking at the other end of the porch, his presence so clear as to seem impossible to have overlooked. She was shocked to recognize him as the man she had seen on the pay phone just a few minutes before.
“I didn’t want to scare you,” the man said.
“I’m not scared,” Colleen said. She slid the key out of the lock and slipped it into her back pocket. “You didn’t scare me.”
“Good,” the man said. He took another drag on his cigarette, and then he tapped the ash over the railing and onto the pine straw bed below. “I’m Tom Groom,” he said. “The pilot.”
“Okay,” Colleen said, mostly because her heart was still racing and she did not know what else to say.
“Your dad picked me up today,” he said. He stubbed out his cigarette on the railing and took a step toward her. The halo of light coming from the fixture above the front door fell on him from only the chest down, but Colleen could still see his face. He was older than she had assumed after hearing his voice, perhaps in his early forties. He wore a dark polo shirt and what appeared to be slacks. The light shone on an old pair of well-cared-for leather boots.
“I think I saw you earlier,” Groom said. He put his left hand on the railing and slipped his right hand, which held the cigarette lighter, into his pocket. Over the sounds of the night, Colleen could just barely make out the noise of him grinding the striker with his thumb from inside his pocket.
“Yeah,” Colleen said. “I think so. At the motel. I saw my mother’s car.”
“Yeah,” he said. “She asked me to get some things from the store, and I thought I’d make a call while I was out. I didn’t want your parents getting charged the long-distance.”
“They wouldn’t mind,” she said.
“Well, it’s not even worth mentioning to them,” he said. “Not worth worrying about.”
Colleen nodded.
“Your mother said you’re visiting from Texas?”
She nodded again.
He stopped speaking and turned to look out at the quiet, empty street. He looked back at Colleen.
“Was that your boyfriend?”
“What?”
He asked her again, but before he could finish the question a second time, she stopped him.
“No,” she said, “no, that was a friend.” Suddenly, she felt more exposed than when she’d first discovered that his eyes had been on her without her knowing it, and she stepped inside the doorway and began to close the front door.