I nod. “You should come back in the daytime. I’ll show you around.”
“Let’s get you down the hill.” He picks up the cat carrier. “Anything else you need?”
“No.”
In his mud-splattered white truck, which I imagine hauling soil and wheelbarrows and such things, he doesn’t chatter, and it’s not awkward, just kind. “We went to school together, didn’t we?” I ask.
“We did. You were a year ahead of me, so our circles didn’t cross much.”
“You hung out at the hippie house, though, right? That summer?”
“Yeah,” he says quietly. “I still think about that place sometimes.”
“Me too.” It was the end of a lot of things for me, but people mostly don’t know about much of it, except that my hair was shorn when I came back to school. Even now, the memory gives me a sad, dull ache in my chest.
Again, I think of the lie I must confess to Phoebe, the lie rooted in that summer. “Funny how things stick.”
“I remember the church burning down,” he says as we pass the lot where it stood, still empty after all these years.
“Yeah,” I say. A knot of dark memory ties itself in my gut, a knot made up of so many threads—my father’s rage and Joel’s act of revenge and the loss of everything. Ripples of things I’ve never worked out, couldn’t bear to. “Only pity is that my dad wasn’t in it when it burned.”
He glances at me. “He had a reputation as a miserable bastard.”
“Understatement.”
He nods. I’m grateful that he doesn’t pursue it, and we don’t say anything more until we pull into Phoebe’s driveway. Lamplight glows in the living room and one other upstairs window, the room that was mine, after I survived all that happened. Phoebe is going to let me stay in my old room.
All the heat and loss and weight of time drop out of my body. If home is a person, mine has always been Phoebe. That lamplight gives me hope that we might resolve the still-simmering anger between us.
“Thanks, Ben.”
“Anytime.”
Chapter Seven
Phoebe
It was actually Ben’s idea to pick up Suze. I’d been texting with him, as we often did in the middle of the night, talking about movies or books or politics or the world, whatever, and I mentioned that I was worried about Suze because all the lights were on. He suggested he could bring her down to me, and the way that landed in my gut, I knew he was right.
That’s a big favor, I said.
Not really. Will you make me some of that rose petal tea?
Rose?
It smells like roses. You made it with honey.
I remember, and smiling, type, Rose tulsi. You got it. I’ll call her right now.
They arrive less than a half hour after the phone call. The cat, in his enormous, padded, beautiful carrier, is a big Himalayan Ragdoll who seems perfectly calm. “He’s gorgeous.”
“He’s a great cat,” Suze says.
Ordinarily I would have met him by now, but her last cat, Melvin, died not long after Beryl did. It occurs to me for the first time that she lost her partner, Beryl, and Melvin within a couple of years.
And me, I realize. A river of mingled anger and guilt—It’s not my job to take care of her! But who else does she have?—travels through my body.
Yul Brynner winds around my ankles. His fur is as soft as a breeze, thick and long. “Wow, he’s so pretty!”
“Ragdolls always are,” she says, stroking Yul Brynner’s tail. “They’re good travelers, too.”
She’s woven her long hair into a braid, and her face is devoid of makeup, revealing the circles below her eyes and the paleness of her lips. Ben comes in, carrying a bag. He’s a little unkempt himself, his dark hair mussed, his shirt untucked. “Come in, both of you. Let’s keep our voices down. Jasmine is sleeping.”
Maui rounds us into the kitchen, and Yul Brynner crouches near the sink, wary. “Maui, give him some space,” I say.
“You sit,” Ben says. “I’ll make the tea.”
I smile. “You’re the master now, are you?”
He winks at me. “Best teacher around.”
I pat his back, taking comfort in his solidness, his reliability. It’s been so long since there was anyone around for me to depend on. For all that Suze needs me, she’s not the most consistently available presence. I know it’s not her fault, but sometimes you want more than a voice on the phone. “Thank you.”
A deck of cards sits on the counter, left over from the rummy I was playing with Jasmine. “Poker, anyone?”