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  “Yeah. I remember her. Mary Ellen. Right?”

  “Right. Mary Ellen Paulston.”

  “Oh. I didn’t remember her last name. That sounds really familiar. Why does that sound so familiar?”

  It may seem like a strange thing to have said. Because it was his girlfriend’s last name, and I’d known her. I must’ve known her last name at one time. But that name was familiar in a whole different sense. I knew it from somewhere else, and the context felt strangely important.

  “Wanda Jean’s little sister.”

  “Oh crap,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Oh crap.”

  “Do you hate her? Is that why you didn’t take the ride?”

  “No. I don’t hate her. I just wanted to take the bus home with you. I wanted to see how you were doing after . . . you know.”

  But I didn’t want to talk about that yet. I wanted to talk about this Zoe Dinsmore connection.

  “Did Mary Ellen’s family hate her?”

  “No. They didn’t hate her. They avoided her because it brought up too many feelings and they didn’t know what to say to her. But they didn’t hate her. They knew she didn’t do it on purpose.”

  “So did you meet her back then? Or did you just know who she was?”

  “I met her once, but it was years after the thing happened. I think it was after she got clean for the first time and was going to meetings. I think she wanted to make amends to the family. You know. Like the ninth step of the program. You know which one that is?”

  Of course I knew. I’d been sitting in meetings. The twelve steps were read at the beginning of every meeting. I had them memorized. I heard them in my head as I was trying to fall asleep at night.

  Nine. We made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

  Roy kept talking.

  “But I guess you’re not supposed to do that if it would only hurt people more. Or maybe she was just respecting the family by staying away, I don’t know. Or maybe she was scared. I know I would’ve been. But she knew I was Mary Ellen’s boyfriend. Everybody in town knew that. So she saw me at a bus stop one day. She was in the market and she saw me waiting for a bus, and she stepped out and came over and told me who she was. But I already knew. And she asked me if I would give a message to the family for her.”

  He limped along in silence for a time. The bus stop had just come into view, and not a moment too soon.

  “And did you?” I asked, when I could tell he was not going to continue on his own.

  “I did.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  I figured I shouldn’t ask. It felt wrong to ask.

  We reached the bus bench at long last. He settled himself on the seat, even though he might not be there for long. I knew he was really tired.

  We sat staring off into the distance together, as though we could make the bus materialize by watching hard enough.

  “Was it private, do you think?”

  It surprised me that I asked. I hadn’t known I was about to ask.

  “Was what private?”

  “The message.”

  “Oh. We’re still talking about that. Well. I don’t know.” Then he veered in a slightly different conversational direction. “Do you know her? How do you know her?”

  “That’s a really long story. Longer than we’ve got.” I flipped my chin in the direction of the bus, which had just come into view. A little dot several blocks down. “But I will tell you, just . . . when we’ve got more time. But you can never, ever tell Mom about any of it.”

  “Okay,” he said. “I guess I can wait.”

  We stared at the bus, watching it grow larger in the distance.

  Then, just out of nowhere, he said it.

  “‘Tell them my heart is broken, too.’”

  “What?” I had no idea what he was trying to tell me.

  “That was the message. ‘Tell them my heart is broken, too.’”

  “Oh,” I said.

  I tried to imagine the scene as he passed those words along. He was likely around my age when he was given that task to perform. I wondered how it felt to say a thing like that to the family. I wondered if they said anything in reply. If they cried.

  But I never asked. To this very day I’ve never asked. So that was one part of the story that will stay with only the people involved. And maybe that’s okay, because maybe it’s theirs alone. Maybe nobody else has a right to one damned second of it. One damned feeling.

  “I let you down,” Roy said.

  “Is that another part of the message?”

  “No, I’m saying that to you right now.”

  “Well, don’t ever say it to me again.”

  And he never did.

  We’re not dead yet. And he might have some more apologies for me on his deathbed, but I hope not. He doesn’t owe me any. But up until now he’s done as I asked.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Worth

  “Why didn’t you tell me you knew my brother?”

  It was the following morning. I had just come back from running with the dogs and hadn’t seen her on the way out. It was astonishingly hot for not even eight o’clock in the morning. I could feel sweat running down every part of me. My chest, my back, my face and neck. Every limb.

  For a minute she didn’t answer. Just stood on her porch and petted her panting dogs. I thought maybe she hadn’t understood the question because I’d been breathing so hard when I asked it.

  She straightened up, and the dogs trotted around the side of the cabin to drink from their bucket.

  “Honestly?” she asked. “I didn’t remember his name after all this time. Even back then I mostly knew him by sight. I saw him around town with one of the families. I knew he was dating that girl. The sister. Until I saw him with you in the meeting last night, I never put two and two together.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  I had been mad, and now I felt silly because of it. I felt deflated, feeling all that anger drain away. She might’ve noticed; I’m not sure. She seemed to be watching my face as though it was an interesting process, whatever was happening there.

  “Don’t be too hard on your brother,” she said. “We’re all just doing our best, even if it doesn’t look so good from the outside. Try not to judge him.”

  “I’m not judging him,” I said.

  To the very best of my understanding, I think that was true. I wasn’t angry about what he’d done, and I didn’t blame him for it. The whole thing just made me incredibly sad.

  “What will you do when you’re eighteen?” she asked me. “And it’s time to sign up for the draft?”

  “Hope the war’ll be over by then.”

  “And if it’s not?”

  “Cross that bridge when I come to it.”

  I walked home. I did not run.

  I was still feeling pretty sad.

  I think it was two days later when my mom flipped out about Roy. About his suddenly being gone.

  I was up in my room, lying on the bed, because right in that moment there’d been nothing else I could find to do. And I guess without realizing it, I’d fallen asleep.

  See what I mean? You never know you’re falling asleep. You only realize it later, when something wakes you up.

  My mother came barging into my bedroom, pushing the door so hard it slammed back against the wall.

  “All right, where is he?”

  I sat up. Swung my legs over so my bare feet touched the rug. Sat on the side of the bed—but I swear I was still sleeping. The image of my mom in the doorway seemed to be an extension of whatever I’d been dreaming.

  “Wait. What?”

  “Where. Is. He. Don’t mess with me today, Lucas. I’m in no mood for it.”

  “He who?”

  “How many are there? How many people could I be talking about?”

  I shook my head hard, as though that might help put things in order up there. It didn’t.

  “Well. Da
d. And Roy.”

  “I know where your father is. He’s at work. Now where is Roy?”

  In a weird, sleepy moment, I wondered if she really knew my dad was at work. He’d become quite the missing person around our house. I heard him come in sometimes at night, but later and later. Sometimes I didn’t know if I’d slept through his coming home, or if he’d never come home. I actually wondered, I think for the second time, if he still actually lived here. I didn’t say any of that.

  “If he’s not in his room,” I said, “I have no idea.”

  She stormed over to the bed and grabbed my chin in her claws. She had these long nails, and they tended to dig in when she grabbed me. I was alarmed, but not awake enough to react much. At least, not on the outside.

  “You look me right in the eye,” she demanded.

  I did.

  I watched her face change. Soften.

  I think I was finally waking up by then.

  “Oh,” she said. “You really don’t know. Well, I’m going to get in the car and go look for him. You should get up and put on your running shoes and run all over town and see if you can find him.”

  “But I already ran today.”

  “Well do it again. You won’t die.”

  She was halfway out my bedroom doorway before I could pull together an answer.

  “Wait!” I said. And it came out loud. Too loud. Like I was yelling at her. I adjusted my tone and went on. “Why are we doing this? If he left the house on his own, won’t he come back on his own?”

  She narrowed her eyes at me.

  “That’s a very naïve statement,” she said. “He’s injured, and taking pain medication. So he’s off somewhere not using his best judgment. And with the problems he’s been having with . . .”

  But then she couldn’t seem to bring herself to say it.

  “I’m not too worried about that,” I said. “I think the meetings are actually going pretty well.”

  “Glad to hear it.” The words sounded quite sincere. Especially for my mom, who was not the sincerity queen. To put it mildly. “Now put on your running shoes and go see if you can find him.”

  I was running by the ice cream shop, the Place, when I saw her. I looked through the window of the store, but my view through the glass was partly obscured by reflections. But I saw the familiar face of Zoe Dinsmore, sitting at a table, one hand wrapped around a mug of coffee. Well. The coffee part was a guess. But it was definitely a mug of something.

  I stopped running.

  I looked in at her, and she looked out at me. And we locked eyes as best we could through all those reflections.

  It seemed strange to see her downtown, like any other resident of the little town of Ashby. I knew she came into town now and then—she had to, for supplies if nothing else—but it felt strange to see her sitting at a table in a public shop, enjoying a hot cup of something, like any other townsperson. Like she belonged anywhere she cared to go.

  It also felt nice, though.

  Then I shifted back a step, and that was when I recognized Roy’s crutches. He was sitting with his back to me, mostly obscured by the reflection of a light-colored brick building across the street.

  I turned back toward the door and walked inside.

  Roy looked around and watched me coming. Zoe must’ve told him. Or maybe he saw on her face that someone was there.

  I sat down at the table with them.

  My brother was drinking some kind of ice cream float, stabbing at it with the paper straw in between sips, as though breaking up ice floes.

  “Hey, buddy,” he said.

  “Mom’s flipping out.”

  “What is it this time?”

  “You.”

  “Right, I figured, but what did I do?”

  “You left.”

  “Don’t I get to leave?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’m nineteen.”

  “Right. I know. I tried to tell her that. Well. Something like that. But she worries about you now. I think she figures you’re somewhere . . . you know.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Up to no good.”

  “Right,” he said. “Got it.” He frowned into his glass for a few beats. “But I plan to go out a lot more, so she’s going to have to get used to it.”

  “Maybe leave a note?”

  “Yeah. I could do that, I guess. I guess I didn’t know it would bother her so much. I went out yesterday, and she didn’t care. Oh, but come to think of it, maybe she didn’t even know. She was away. I got it in my head that I had to have one of the root beer floats they make here. I swear I was thinking about them when I was overseas. Hardly a day went by I didn’t feel like I could taste these root beer floats. And I figured I need to get better on the crutches anyway, so I walked down here.”

  He stopped. Took a long pull through the straw.

  “Only I saw him going down Main Street,” Zoe said, seamlessly taking over where he’d left off, “and I stopped and asked him if he needed a ride, and the next thing we knew, we were having a soda together. And we had a good talk.”

  And now here they were, doing it again the next day. There was some kind of subtext in all this, but I swear I didn’t know what it was.

  I think she saw the confusion on my face, because she looked at Roy, a question in her eyes. He nodded, and she offered it up without my having to ask.

  “Your brother asked if I would be his NA sponsor. Which I think your average recovering person would consider a very dicey choice, if not absolute insanity. Partly because men usually get men sponsors and vice versa. But that’s just so there won’t be any weird emotional attachments, and with me being somewhere between old enough to be his mother and old enough to be his grandmother, I guarantee that’s not going to be an issue. More to the point, I don’t have any more clean time than he does.”

  “But you had a bunch of years before,” Roy said. “You know a lot more than I do.”

  “Other people know more,” she said.

  “That’s not the point, though,” Roy said. “Here’s the point. When she walked into that meeting the other night . . .”

  That’s when I realized he was talking to me. He wasn’t looking at me. But when he called Zoe “she” rather than “you,” I got it.

  “. . . it just changed something for me. Because I knew what she had in her past was so hard, you know? One of those things you never stop regretting, that never really leaves you alone. So I figured if she could pull it together and commit to getting clean again and keep going, so could I. It sort of gave me hope for my situation. That’s why she thinks I need to count my clean time from that night.”

  “Whatever,” Zoe said, shaking off his praise. “Bottom line, we’re looking to give that a go, no matter what anybody around us might think of the idea.” Zoe turned her attention directly onto me. “Would that be weird for you? If I was Roy’s sponsor?”

  “No!” I said. Shouted, almost, though I hadn’t meant to. “No, it would be great.” I felt as though a huge weight had been lifted off me. I didn’t realize how much the weight of saving my brother had been crushing me until Zoe lifted it away. “If you helped him half as much as you helped Connor . . .”

  “I didn’t do anything special with Connor,” she said. But I knew that wasn’t true. “Don’t invest too much in me, kid, like I’m magic. That boy just had some stuff he needed to get off his chest. That’s all that was.”

  I heard the distinctive sucking sound of a straw running dry. Hitting the bottom of its drink. I looked over to see that Roy had rushed through the bottom half of his soda and was pushing to his feet.

  “I’ll go home and tell Mom I’m alive,” he said.

  “She might be driving around looking for you,” I said. “Don’t be too surprised if you run into her accidentally.”

  He didn’t answer. Only shook his head. Because . . . you know. That was our mom. What could you do but shake your head about her?

  “You need a ride, so
n?” Zoe asked him.

  “No, ma’am. Finish your coffee. I need to practice walking anyway. You two sit. I’ll go sort it out with Mom.”

  I watched him swing along on his crutches, headed for the door. Watched a local man with two little kids hold the door open for him. The man nodded at my brother proudly, as though Roy were some kind of war hero.

  I wondered if Roy would get to keep that. Or if, in a town this size, the truth would find its way out.

  I looked back at Zoe, and she looked at me. We’d been doing that a lot lately, I’d noticed. Looking each other head on, both at the same time. Like we weren’t afraid. Like we had nothing to hide and nothing to lose.

  At least, not from each other.

  “What did you do that helped Connor so much?” I asked her. “I’d really like to know.”

  “I just told you.”

  “But there had to be more to it than that. You couldn’t have just sat there and said nothing while he talked.”

  “Now and then I might’ve said something in reply.”

  “Like what?”

  She sighed. Rolled her eyes at me, like I was still the little pest I’d always been. But not really in a bad way, if such a thing were possible. Then she surprised me by offering up a serious answer.

  “Like when he talked about his mom, and how much she smothers him, and depends on him too hard. I just told him he wasn’t wrong for minding. Kids get to feeling like they ought to be everything a parent needs, and they feel guilty if they fall short. But I told him anybody in his position would feel the same way, and it’s normal to feel it. And his dad leaving the way he did. I just told him it was between the man and his wife, something that’d been going on years before he was born, and it didn’t have nearly as much to do with him as he might’ve thought. People need help with perspective sometimes. If they’re all alone in their own head, they can lose perspective. Sometimes you need to use somebody else like a mirror. Let them reflect back to you the way the world really is.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Not a problem.”

  “Did he tell you about his kitten?”

  “Oh yeah. At great length. It’s not hard getting Connor to tell you about his kitten. The problem would be getting him to stop telling you about her.”