I stop when I get close, hitching my hip against the wheel well. “Hi.”
A stiff nod.
I point my chin at the truck. “Whose car?”
His lips ripple. “My father’s. He liked . . .” He trails away, apparently unable to tell me what his father liked. He adjusts the side mirror instead, his hands gentle, almost reverent. “I cleaned it up. Hasn’t been driven much since . . .”
I consider waiting him out, letting the silence stretch him like a man on one of those medieval racks, but I find a small measure of mercy in my soul, or maybe I’m just tired. “What exactly is happening right now?”
Arthur exhales, abandoning the mirror. “What’s happening is that I’m asking you not to walk home.”
“It’s not my ho—” I catch the word between my teeth, bite it in half. “So are you offering to drive me?”
His eyes meet mine for the first time, flashing with an emotion I decline to identify. “No.” He holds out a stiff arm and something clinks in his fingers. It’s another key, except this one isn’t old and mysterious. It’s cheap metal, with the Chevy symbol engraved on the head and a little plastic flashlight on the key chain. “I’m offering you a car.”
My hand, half-outstretched for the key, freezes in midair.
This is not a candlestick or a coat, something a rich boy would never miss. This is a temptation I don’t want, a debt I can’t pay. Mom’s entire life was a house of cards built from favors and charity, bad checks and pills. She never closed a tab or paid a parking ticket; she ripped the tags off in dressing rooms and owed everybody she ever met at least twenty bucks. When she died her house of cards collapsed around us: the junkyard took the Corvette, her boyfriend took the pills, and the state did its damnedest to take Jasper. All we had left was room 12.
But I’m trying to build something real for us, a house of stone and timber rather than wishes and dreams. I work for what I can and steal the rest; I don’t owe anybody shit.
I slip my hand back into my coat pocket without taking the keys. The stolen letter gives a recriminatory rustle. “I’m good, thanks.”
Arthur’s eyes narrow at me, arm still stiff between us. “I didn’t mean forever. Just until your work here is through.” Another flash across his eyes, bitter black. “I don’t like people asking questions about this place.”
“Oh.”
“And take this, too.” He says it carelessly, as if it’s an afterthought, but the piece of notepaper he pulls from his jacket is folded in a crisp square. He tips it into my hand along with the Chevy keys, fingers carefully not touching mine.
“I don’t—is this a phone number?” The sevens are crossed with old-fashioned lines, the area code bracketed in parentheses. Hardly anybody in Eden bothers with the area code because it’s 270 all the way to the Mississippi, and who would visit from farther than that? “Since when do you have a phone number? Or a phone?”
It’s difficult to pull off a really convincing sneer after giving a girl your number, but Arthur makes an admirable effort. “Just because I didn’t give you my number doesn’t mean I don’t have one.” He slides a matte black square out of his pocket as proof, pinching it awkwardly between thumb and forefinger. There’s a filmy look to the screen. He hasn’t even peeled the plastic cover off yet. “If those people bother you again . . .” He shrugs at the paper in my hand.
“Okay.” I blink down at the keys and the phone number, feeling disoriented, suspicious, as if Bev just asked to adopt me or Jasper brought home a B+. “Okay. But who are they? And why do they want—oh, come on.”
But his shoes are crunching past me up the drive, his shoulders pinched tight. He disappears back into Starling House without looking back.
I slide into the driver’s seat of the truck, hands strangely clammy. I never got my license—a fact I will withhold to share with Arthur later, whenever it seems funniest—but I know how to drive. Mom taught me. You’d think, the way she loved that Corvette, that she wouldn’t have put a preteen behind the wheel, but she was the kind of person who didn’t like to eat dessert unless you had some too. The last time I had my hands on a steering wheel she was in the passenger seat, head tilted back, eyes closed, smiling like nothing had ever gone wrong or ever would.
I look up as I turn the key in the ignition. There’s a single light flickering from the highest window of the house, soft gold in the near night. A lonely figure stands silhouetted behind the glass, his back turned to the world.