Dark Water - Laura McNeal [50]
“Want me to make you Breakfast in a Barrel?” I asked. Breakfast in a Barrel was the egg-and-potato burrito we’d eaten every morning on a family vacation in Hawaii and then adopted as a dinner dish.
“I already ate,” she said. She didn’t sit, and she didn’t go to the computer to check e-mail. The only people she heard from anymore were attorneys, so who could blame her? “Thanks,” she added.
“I’m going for a walk,” I said. I waited a little too long before I asked, “Wanna come with me?”
I’m sorry to say that I was glad when she shook her head, glad when she said she was going to take a nap and then maybe check out some more job listings. “Okay,” I said, relief insulating me from her. It was the same stuff that deafened and padded me when I stood there and watched her scream insults at my father in the dark avocado grove. She needed saving, but I didn’t move. It was as if my mother, the expert swimmer, were drowning, but I had never learned to swim.
“Okay,” I said again, and watched her go to her bedroom, take off my homecoming dance heels, and lie down fully clothed on her unmade bed.
Thirty-one
I waited until she was asleep before I slipped the money back out from under the cushion and made for my bicycle, taking a roundabout way to see if there were still loquats on the tree.
Loquats taste like tiny peaches dipped in lemonade. They’re kind of like the manna God dropped every day for the Israelites: delicious if you eat them right away, but if you try to put them in a bowl for the next day, they go brown and wrinkly. It’s best to eat them outside so you can peel the skin off with your teeth, then bite the globe in two so you can examine and remove the cluster of two or three slippery brown seeds. These you also have to throw out, but it’s fun to look at them first, all puzzled up together and wet like something from a tide pool. I once ate twenty-two loquats without being sick. On this occasion, I ate three or four, then snapped off a whole branch and tucked it carefully into my backpack for a picnic at the river.
I found Amiel where tall, skinny oaks and sycamores bend toward each other like a cathedral over Agua Prieta Creek. The path curved sharply to the north ahead of me, deep inside the arched bower of trees, and I saw him when he was just fifty yards away, a dark-haired boy wearing a red plaid shirt, his head down as he scanned the ground for something.
Because he was so busy looking down, I had three or four seconds to think of what to do, and sometimes when you have time to think of what to do, you see what a ninny you are. I stopped walking. I sat down on a fallen log. I faced away from the trail and pretended, like a ninny, that I was completely unaware of him. I thought my act of obliviousness would be more realistic if I had some reason to be sitting down, so I opened my backpack and brought out—presto, chango—the branch of loquats. I snapped off one, peeled it, bit it in half, and pretended to examine the glossy brown seeds. I could hear footsteps, so I knew Amiel saw me, but I didn’t turn my head. I ate the other half of the loquat, and then I dropped the interlocking seeds.
The footsteps stopped. I could feel that he was near me, and I still couldn’t speak. I reached into my backpack, felt for the envelope all thick with money, and pulled it out. I held it out to him and then, only then, did I have the courage to look at his face.
There are emotions your face can’t hide, and he was intensely relieved. His bandaged hand, worn leather work boots, and black eyebrows—all the heavy parts of him—appeared to become weightless, the way your arms do when you’ve pressed them hard against a doorway and then stepped away to let them float all by themselves. Greenie and I used to make our arms float all the time, going from doorway to doorway in her house.
Amiel looked at the envelope for a few seconds, and I waited for him to speak. He smiled instead, showing the white