Dark Water - Laura McNeal [29]
“Oh,” I said. “He moved.”
“Moved?”
“Out,” I said. I was surprised no one in town had told him. Usually, I heard about affairs and divorces and drug problems that way: from adults talking to each other.
“Then how are you?” Mr. Eckert said.
“Oh, fine,” I said, grateful to have Robby’s life to discuss instead. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Sure.”
“It’s about your waitress,” I whispered. Mary Beth was talking to customers on the other side of the room, but the café wasn’t very big.
Mr. Eckert bent forward and looked amiable but concerned.
“You know my cousin, Robby, right? He has a crush. On her, actually. We’re doing reconnaissance.” I paused for a second because I didn’t know how to ask if Mr. Eckert had, by chance, seen Mary Beth with Robby’s father. “Is she single?” I asked.
“Far as I know.”
“What else can you tell us? He needs, you know, a flirting angle.”
“Kind of mature for you, isn’t she?” Mr. Eckert said to Robby, not entirely disapproving, maybe even impressed. “You’re still at the high school, right? Well, let’s see. She’s studying gerontology. Sophomore year, I think. She lives with her parents, very nice also. Her father’s an eye doctor. She had a tennis scholarship to UCLA but pulled something.”
I was stuck on the gerontology part. She was training to take care of old people and dating a fifty-year-old man?
Mr. Eckert stopped talking because Mary Beth was coming toward us with our sandwiches. “Mary Beth?” Mr. Eckert said. “Have you met Pearl DeWitt before?” Mary Beth shook her head politely and set my plate in front of me. I could tell she wanted to remain strictly anonymous.
“This is her cousin …” Mr. Eckert started to say, waiting for me to fill in the blank, but Robby beat me to it.
“Robby Wallace,” he said. “I think you were at my house last night.”
Mary Beth gave him his plate with the air of someone who has been lit by a motion detector.
“My overblown birthday party,” he added.
“Oh, that’s where I’ve seen you,” she said, as if she’d just that second figured it out. “Happy sixteenth!” Her hands were free, so she tucked a piece of hair behind her ear. It didn’t stay.
“Seventeenth,” he said.
I really didn’t know the script at this point. Mr. Eckert winked at me, mistaking Mary Beth’s flustered look for a romantic interest in Robby, and went off to seat a group of people I was glad I didn’t recognize.
“So you play college tennis?” he asked Mary Beth.
“I’m not playing right now. I did,” she said. Her face was red from what I guessed was a little internal voice repeating Oh my God Oh my God. I felt a little sorry for her, though she didn’t really deserve it.
“You don’t give lessons or anything, do you?” Robby asked. “I thought my dad was saying that you did.”
“Also past tense,” she said. “I pulled a hamstring.” She looked nervously around the room. “I’d better go take their order,” she said, pointing to another table and starting to walk away.
“Hey,” Robby said. “Is your dad Dr. Farlow?”
She nodded.
“The ophthalmologist?”
More nodding.
“My dad keeps saying he’s going to get his eyes checked. He has this weird mass in the right eye, this—what’s it called—occlusion.”
She blinked.
“I’ll tell him I saw you.”
“Okay,” she said.
“Occlusion?” I said to Robby in his car on the way home.
“It just came to me,” he said.
“Do you have a plan, here?”
“A plan?” he said. “Sort of. Not really. As much as anyone, I guess.”
Eighteen
We beat my mother to the house by five minutes. By the time she arrived, I was cleaning Lavar’s junky old bathroom. After that, she read a book, and I put away wrinkly clothes that hadn’t seen a drawer in weeks. I sat down with my science book opened to the periodic table and looked with a kind of hopelessness at the abbreviations of the noble gases. It was when my mind wandered from He to Uuo that I began to hatch my own Robby-style half-baked plan. If I could sneak out of the house once, why not twice?
My mother had been to the farmers’ market, but she’d brought nothing home, not even strawberries, so at about six