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  I stopped. Breathed.

  The air around the four of us seemed to throb with all those words.

  “Whew,” she said. “It really is a tough place inside that brain of yours, isn’t it?”

  I didn’t answer, because I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to ask if it was too weird in there. If she thought there was something abnormal about me. But if I’d asked, she might’ve answered.

  “Okay,” she said. “Here’s what you do. You get yourself a nice big basket.”

  That was definitely not the direction I’d expected the conversation to go.

  “Basket? What kind of basket?”

  “Just some nice big basket with a handle, like maybe a gardening basket. I’ve probably got something if you don’t.”

  “My mom has a basket she used to use when we’d go out and get produce from the farm stands. Back when we used to take Sunday drives. You know. The whole family.”

  Back when my brother wasn’t off fighting a war and my parents could stand to be in the same car together, but I didn’t say that. I still had no idea what a basket had to do with taking a girl out for a meal.

  “That’s perfect. So you take the basket. Make sure it’s nice and clean. Wash it under the hose and then dry it out in the sun if you have to. Then you go into the fridge and make some sandwiches. You know how to make sandwiches, right?”

  “Yeah. Sure.”

  “Now, I don’t know what kind of food and stuff your mom tends to keep around the house. Maybe you’ll find everything you need right in the fridge, and it’ll be free. Or maybe you’ll have to get a few things at the store. Either way, it’ll be cheaper than the Burger Barn. You’ll need a couple of sandwiches for each of you. Don’t want to run out of food in case she’s hungry. Maybe some fresh fruit. Bananas or apples. Or both. And a couple sodas. If your mom has cloth napkins, bring two of those. They’re nicer. If not, paper napkins’ll have to do. Maybe something sweet for dessert. You pack all this stuff up in the basket. And then you get a nice tablecloth. I’m sure your mom will have something around. Don’t use a white one—it’ll get dirty and she’ll shoot you if all the stains don’t come out. Iron it if you have to. Fold it up all nice and neat and put it on top of the food in the basket. Like a cover. Then you take it over to this girl’s house and you say, ‘I decided a picnic would be more romantic.’ Take her to some nice quiet spot out in these woods with a pretty view. Looking back down over the town, or overlooking the river. Most people think the river is a nice view. I don’t, but she probably will.”

  I sat a minute, letting the sheer brilliance of her plan sink in.

  “A picnic,” I said when I could find my words again. “Ooh. That’s good.”

  “Wait. There’s one more thing. You got any kind of flowers growing in your yard at home?”

  “My mom has rosebushes all along the back fence.”

  “That’ll do it. Go out and pick the nicest, most perfect rose you’ve got. Just one. Make sure you cut the stem real nice and long. And break the thorns off it so she doesn’t stick herself on them when you hand it to her. Put it on top of the food, right under the tablecloth. And when you uncover everything, take the rose out and hand it to her and tell her, ‘Here. This is for you.’ Then go about setting up your picnic just so. She’ll like that.”

  We sat for another silent moment.

  Then I got up off the porch and fell to my knees in front of her. Literally. Fell to my knees. And there had been no forethought about it.

  “Please don’t go,” I said. “You help me so much. Nobody else tells me these things. Please?”

  She sighed and turned her face away.

  “We’ve been through this before,” she said.

  “No we haven’t. I told you I thought you should stay. Thought it. Just words in my head. Now I’m telling you how I really feel about it. You know things I don’t know, that no other grown-up I know seems to know. Or at least that they’re willing to tell me. What would I do if I couldn’t come ask you these things?”

  I was hoping I’d broken through to a new place between us. But when she answered, I knew I had only hit a wall that would prevent me from getting there.

  “You’d figure it out on your own, trial and error, like everybody else. Now get up off your knees, boy.”

  I did as I’d been told.

  “Okay,” I said. “Sorry. I’m going to go running with the dogs now. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  “Whatever,” she said. “Yeah. Go run.”

  But before I could get a step away, she stopped me with a kinder thought.

  “You let me know how that picnic idea turns out.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said. “I will.”

  It was always a give-and-take with Zoe Dinsmore. But then I couldn’t let myself get too confused about it, or think too hard. Because the dogs and I were running. And I didn’t want to smack into a tree.

  I had been avoiding going over to Connor’s house for a few days, and not really talking to myself about why. But I knew I couldn’t go on that way much longer.

  I jogged by his house on the way home. Didn’t even bother to go home and clean up and change out of my running clothes first. I thought if I waited too long, I might talk myself out of going.

  To my surprise, Connor was outside.

  He was in the backyard, in just a pair of long khaki shorts, sunning himself on one of those cheap folding lawn-chair-type lounges. The kind with the plastic webbing. I could see the vague shape of him through the fence when I was still halfway down the block.

  I walked up his driveway and sat down in the grass beside him. The skin of his chest was pasty white, and I worried about Connor getting a vicious sunburn. I could see every one of his ribs, but without any appearance of sinewy muscle stretched over them. Just skin and ribs. He looked like a guy who’d been sick for a long time.

  First he said nothing at all.

  Then he made a face and said, “Phew! Mind sitting downwind of me?”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  I moved to the other side of his lounge.

  Under different circumstances I might have gotten a little ticky about a comment like that. But he was mad at me for not coming by, and I knew it. And he was going to lash out at me, and I should’ve seen it coming. And I deserved it.

  “I guess it’s bound to happen,” he said. Then a long pause. Then, “Running in all this heat.”

  “What’re you doing outside in the sun? Seems unlike you.”

  “It was my mom’s idea. She thinks I’m getting too pale.”

  “Oh,” I said. What else could I say?

  I sat there with him in silence for a minute, cross-legged on the grass. Then I noticed the garage door was open. And there was only one car in it. His mother’s car. And it was Saturday.

  “Where’s your dad’s car?” I asked, not realizing it was a big question. Mistakenly thinking it was harmless small talk.

  “With my dad, I guess.”

  “Where’s your dad?”

  “No idea.”

  “You didn’t ask your mom?”

  “I asked. She has no idea.”

  I just sat a minute. Wondering if I should say more or not. I was beginning to get a sense of the weight of that whole thing.

  “How long’s he been gone?” I asked after a time.

  “Three days.”

  He didn’t go on to say, “If you’d come by to see me, you’d’ve known that already.” Then again, he didn’t need to. It went without saying.

  My mind was spinning around in circles, wondering what that meant. Wondering whether I should ask.

  But Connor stopped my mind in its tracks.

  “When were you planning on telling me?” he asked. His voice sounded stiff. Rehearsed, almost. And like we didn’t really know each other very well. Like the voice you use with a stranger you sit next to on a bus bench.

  “Tell you what?”

  “That you’re dating Libby Weller now.”


  “Oh. That. It’s pretty new. How did you even know about it?”

  “I watched the two of you walk by my house holding hands yesterday. You must know I have nothing better to do than sit up in my room and stare out the window.”

  I was stunned. Not so much by the fact that he’d seen it. And said it. More by the fact that it had never crossed my mind. I’d been so busy holding Libby’s hand that it never occurred to me that the walk to the bus stop took us right by Connor’s house. How could I not have thought of that? How did a girl’s hand have that kind of power over me? When you stepped out of the thing and looked at it from a distance, it didn’t make much sense at all.

  “It was our first date,” I said. “I was going to tell you.”

  “Well, I figured. When I saw you were here just now, I waited. I waited for a few minutes. You know. For you to say something like, ‘Hey. Big news!’ I mean, it is big news. It’s sort of huge. And I’m your best friend.”

  “You are,” I said. I couldn’t think what else to say.

  “Did you figure I was so miserable and my life was such a mess that it would break me into a million pieces to hear that something good happened to you for a change?”

  Now, I like to tell the truth. More and more as I’ve gotten older. But I was pretty attached to the truth even back then, if only because it stressed me out to have to juggle chunks of fiction and keep track of what I’d said. So much easier to stick with the facts. But this was one of those situations where the truth simply would not do. Because the truth was, yeah, that’s exactly what I’d figured. And that would’ve been a pretty cruel thing to go and say.

  “No,” I said. “It’s not that at all. I just . . . I just wanted to wait and see if we even liked each other. If there was even going to be a second date. I think I just didn’t want to tell anybody I was getting my hopes all up. Because then if it came to nothing, I’d have to tell them. And they’d see how disappointed I was. And then they’d be all disappointed for me. And that’s worse than anything.”

  I paused, in case he had thoughts he wanted to voice. While I waited, it bothered me just a little that it was so easy for me to make up such an intricate lie. But then I thought back over what I’d just said, and there might have been a grain of truth to it.

  He wasn’t saying anything. So I added, “You know what I mean about that, don’t you?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Sure.”

  He didn’t sound all that sure.

  We sat in silence for a weird length of time. Quite a few minutes. I was getting tired of baking in the sun. I wanted to go home and take a shower. Make plans for a romantic picnic.

  I looked over at Connor, and saw that his chest was broken out in beads of sweat.

  “Don’t stay out too long,” I said. “You’ll burn to a crisp.”

  “Oh,” he said. A little surprised, as if I’d wakened him. “You going?”

  “I think so, yeah.”

  “Okay.”

  “But I’ll come by again. Sooner. I mean, I won’t let so much time go by this time. That’s what I mean.”

  “Okay.”

  I pulled to my feet. Stared down at him for a minute. His eyes were squeezed closed.

  “Think your dad’s coming back?”

  I hated to ask. The last thing I wanted to do was upset him. But how weird would it be to act like it wasn’t a big deal, or like I didn’t even care?

  “No idea,” he said. “And don’t say ask my mom, because she has no idea either.”

  “Oh. Sorry. I hope he does. I mean, I hope he does if you hope he does. Do you hope he does?”

  I was making a mess of things and I knew it.

  “Yeah. I hope he does. I don’t know what my mom’s going to do without him. She’s pretty broken up about it.”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “Not your fault.”

  “Still sorry.”

  Then I didn’t know what else to say. So I just said goodbye and jogged home, thinking. Well, actually, I was trying not to think. But that didn’t go my way at all.

  My mom was in the kitchen when I got home. And I wanted her not to be. I wanted to look around and see what we had in the way of picnic ingredients. But you don’t just ask your own mother to leave her own kitchen.

  She was leaning her back against the fridge, reading some kind of women’s magazine. Holding it with one hand, its pages folded back. In her other hand was a half-eaten apple that she seemed to be ignoring.

  She looked up and blinked at me. As though she’d expected to look up and see some entirely different scene.

  “Lucas,” she said.

  I wondered where my father was. It was Saturday, and the house was quiet, so he must’ve been far, far away. Golfing, maybe. Or now, in retrospect, I think he might even have been having an affair. I was getting used to his unexplained absences, which had been accelerating.

  “Who else would it be?” But it wasn’t really as grumpy as I make it sound. Just a tossed-off comment, meant to be halfway funny.

  “I didn’t see you last night. Your father was out late, and I think I might’ve fallen asleep on the couch before you got in. How was your date?”

  “It was good. Actually.”

  “Don’t sound so surprised. I always thought she seemed nice, that Weller girl. Are you going to see her again?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Looks that way.” Then I took a big, deep breath and faced a new path through the world: I decided to take a chance on letting my mother know my plans. Not the easiest thing for a fourteen-year-old guy to do. “I was thinking I’d invite her out on a picnic. So I was wondering if we have stuff around. For a picnic. Like sandwich stuff and fruit and some kind of dessert. Drinks. Because I spent my whole allowance last night, so if we don’t have what I need, I won’t be able to ask her out again until after I get my allowance Friday. Which seems like a really long wait.”

  She smiled in a way that struck me as a bit sarcastic. Looking back, anyway. At the time I probably just felt like she was making fun of me.

  “Ah, to be fourteen again. Where a week feels like a lifetime.”

  She set her magazine down on the drainboard of the sink, which I could see was wet. I wondered why she hadn’t noticed that. She threw her half-eaten apple into the trash bin under the sink.

  She opened the fridge and began to root around in there.

  “A picnic,” she said. Like it was just such an amazing word that she had to say it out loud. Savor it. “What a nice idea. You really are growing up to be a thoughtful young man. You know that?”

  “Thank you,” I said. But I felt bad. Because I never would have thought of such an idea. Not if you’d given me a hundred years to think.

  “Where are you going to go for your picnic?”

  See? This is why I tended not to share stuff with my mother, who would be horrified to hear I had ever stepped foot into those dark, dangerous woods.

  “The park, I guess.”

  No answer for a time. Just the sound of her rooting in the fridge. I was thinking that was a lot of cold escaping.

  “Well, I think we’re in good shape,” she said, pulling her head out and swinging the door closed. “We have sliced turkey. Ham. Then in the cupboard we have some canned things—tuna fish and deviled ham. Bananas and oranges. You know I don’t like you to have sodas, but if you insist in this case, you can buy your own. But we have bottled apple juice and orange juice if that’ll do. And those cookies you like.”

  “Do we have cloth napkins?”

  Then I had to look away because of the expression that came over her face.

  “Cloth napkins? My, my! Aren’t we the fancy guy? This girl must be very special.”

  “Jeez, Mom. Can you just answer a question the normal way for a change?”

  “Yes, you can use two of the good napkins. But bring them back! And we have a couple of print tablecloths I wouldn’t mind you using on the grass. I can always bleach them.”

  “So I’m set,” I s
aid, eyeing her rosebushes through the kitchen window.

  “Looks that way. Is it time for us to have the talk?”

  For a minute, I didn’t know what talk she meant. Then I looked away from the roses and into her face, and then I did. Horrifyingly did.

  “Oh my God, Mom! Please. No! We’re just going to eat sandwiches. How could you even bring a thing like that up?”

  “You’re growing up,” she said. “Much as I hate to admit it.”

  “I’m going up to my room.”

  Before I could even get out of the kitchen, I could feel my face going beet red. I remember thinking, Right. That’s why I never talk to my mom about real stuff. How could I have forgotten?

  I was lying on my back, reading a comic book. Or so it would have seemed to anybody who walked into my room. In reality I had been staring at the same page for probably half an hour.

  I was obsessed with the details of making food for a picnic. Obsessed. I couldn’t stop thinking about whether she would like sweet-pickle relish in the tuna, along with the mayonnaise. And how much mustard to put on the turkey. And whether to bring some kind of trash bag for the orange and banana peels, so they wouldn’t just sit around on the tablecloth and look nasty.

  I knew it was stupid, and a waste of my time. But the details wouldn’t let me go. So I just lay there, wishing I could think about something else.

  Then, a minute later, I got my wish.

  Be careful what you wish for.

  My mom rapped on the door to my room.

  “Someone here to see you, Lucas,” she said through the door.

  I flew off the bed. I swear I don’t even know how I made that move, and I never could’ve made it again. It was something like levitating.

  I threw the door open. It seemed to startle her.

  “Is it Libby?” I asked, my voice sounding out of breath.

  “No, it’s Mrs. Barnes.”