The Scorpio Races - Maggie Stiefvater [85]
Back in the house, Gabe and Peg Gratton are talking easily while Tommy Falk peers under the lid of a pot on the stove. I don’t see Finn.
The kitchen itself reminds me of the butcher shop, if the butcher shop was made into a house. Despite the dark outside, the kitchen is all bright whitewashed walls and pots and knives hung up on them. The image of clean whiteness isn’t at all diminished by the fact that the floor is filthy with footprints. There are knickknacks on a half-dozen shelves, but they’re entirely different from our sort of knickknacks: crude wooden statues that could be either horses or deer, a broom of grass with a red ribbon tied around it, a piece of limestone with the name PEG written on it. None of the painted glass figurines or charming landscapes dotted with sheep and cheerful women that Mum liked. Stuff but not clutter. The room smells piercingly and wonderfully of whatever is cooking on the stove.
“They’ll have your room,” Peg says to Beech as soon as he comes in. In the light, I can see that Beech has grown into a great, ruddy creature who clearly takes after his father. He looks a little like he’s made of wood, and because wood is fairly inflexible, it takes him awhile to change his expression. When he does, it’s not pleased.
“They never will,” Beech replies.
“And where, then, would you like them to stay?” Peg Gratton asks. It’s strange to see her in this context, not in the butcher’s as someone who will cut your heart out, not in our yard telling me not to race, not in a headdress cutting my finger with a knife. She is smaller, somehow, neater, though her ginger curls are still unruly as ever. I’m bewildered at how easily she and Beech and Gabe go around and around about where we will sleep, and I realize that some of the time that Gabe was gone must have been spent here. Maybe a lot of it. It makes me realize we’ve come here because this is where Gabe feels safe. It makes me feel strange and sad, like we’ve been replaced with another family.
“Where’s Finn?” I break in.
“Washing his hands, of course,” Gabe says. “It may be decades.”
I feel weird about that, too, the rather free admittance of Finn’s foibles, though I’ve always thought it was something private, something only Connollys knew about. Gabe didn’t say it like he was making fun of Finn, but it feels like it.
“Where is the toilet?”
Tommy, not Peg or Beech, gestures toward the stairs on the other side of the kitchen. It’s like it’s everyone’s house, not just the Grattons’. Feeling sulky, I head out of the room. There’s a tiny, dark hallway with three doors off it up at the top of the stairs, but only one of them has light coming from underneath it. I knock. There’s no response until I say Finn’s name and then, after a pause, the door opens. It’s a tiny room, just big enough for a tub and a toilet and a washbasin if they’re very good friends and don’t mind rubbing shoulders, and Finn sits on the toilet with the lid down. There are big manly footprints on the small tiles of the floor.
I shut the door behind me and check to make certain that the tub is dry before stepping into it and sitting down.
“He comes here all the time,” Finn says to me.
“I know,” I reply. “I can tell.”
“This is where he’s been.”
The betrayal sits thick between us. I want to say something to make this better for Finn, who idolizes Gabe, who would do anything for him, but