He smiled at Karen again and handed over a white box of treats. “Lavender vanilla cupcakes. For little Bronwyn.”
Karen smiled at Cal, which was kind of a minor miracle in and of itself, since she was generally even crankier than he was, but I couldn’t bring myself to care.
I gritted my teeth impatiently. “Whywill it be tricky? Where is he?”
“Hard to say,” Cal said. He glanced at the ceiling and then out the window at the sky. “What with the time change and all.”
My heart sank, and I put out a hand to brace myself against the display case. “The what?” I whispered.
Cal’s eyes narrowed on my face. “We drove him to the airport earlier so he could catch a flight to Arizona.”
“No,” I whispered. This could not possibly be happening again. Notagain.
“’Fraid so,” Cal said. “He should’ve just had us drive him the first time. Would’ve made a lot of things easier, huh?”
I was too stunned to move at first, too stunned to reply. I wasn’t sure how I was remembering to breathe. Then his words finally penetrated.
“No,” I told him. “It wouldn’t have been easier. That was our do-over. It was supposed to be, anyway.” I ran a hand through my hair. “He didn’t even take his stuff. His car’s out there, and I have his plants. His memory box. Half his clothes.”
“I don’t know what to tell you.” Cal shrugged. “He was pretty upset.”
“Well, and he was in kind of a hurry too,” Ash added. “His mom…”
Cal cut him off with an elbow to the side, and Ash looked down at him curiously. They exchanged some kind of telepathic conversation that had Ash saying, “What?Ohhhh!”
Ash turned back to me. “Yep. Yeah, what Cal said. Parks was just… super upset.Soupset. Ran off. Couldn’t stop him. He’s gone.Sogone.” He made a whistling noise and waved his hand in the general direction of Arizona.
I buried both hands in my hair and groaned. “I need to talk to him. I need to see him. I have to explain… He doesn’t have all the facts.”
“Oh, really. What facts?” Cal demanded.
I dropped my hands. “That I love him. That I want him to stay in O’Leary. That I’m tired of being scared. That we are meant to be together.”
“That’s so beautiful,” Marci sniffled, and I remembered suddenly that I had an audience.
“You bring him back here, Jameson!” Hen Lattimer said.
“Oops,” Cal said, like he could read my mind. But his grin suggested he’d gotten exactly what he wanted out of our conversation.
I rolled my eyes. “I’m going after him.”
“Thank God,” Ash said. He held out a set of car keys and nodded at Parker’s car. “It’s got a full tank. And I happen to know there’s a flight leaving at six.”
Chapter Thirteen
Parker
“I told you golf was dangerous!”The only thing higher than the pitch of my mother’s voice was the decibel level she insisted on using, despite the fact that no one in the car was arguing… or even speaking at all.
My head was aching violently, reminding me that I was too old to drink whiskey before noon, I hadn’t eaten anything all day except some exceptional chana masala, and I’d been an idiot to ever think I could stay with my parents in Arizona for even aweeklet alone some indefinite span of time. I’d literally hemorrhage my brains from my ears if I had to listen to my mother for much longer.
I pulled my parents’ Acura into the driveway of their house and sighed tiredly. The sun had set while we were on our way home from the hospital, but it was still light out enough for me to make out the lines of their new place which, as my mother had reminded me no less than twelve times in four hours, I had never bothered to come see before.
It looked like a very tiny, very exclusive prison. A tall black gate topped with spikes guarded the entrance to the community and bright lights shone on nearly every public space, from the little pool—which was behind a second gate—to the long, winding road that led to my parents’ house. And the house itself? It looked like a long, grayish-brown cinderblock sitting on top of a grayish-brown driveway, set in an entire landscape of grayish-brown. There was a single spindly tree poised next to the house and a few succulents lining the driveway, but they did almost nothing to lessen the severity of the lines and angles. I felt like I’d landed on an alien planet, and I missed the lush landscape of O’Leary, with all its hairpin-curved roads and muddy imperfections and the promise that even under its winter-brown covering, things were waiting to bloom.
But more than that,somuch more than that, I missed Jamie. I missed the awareness that buzzed and crackled between us when we were together, the ever-present air ofchallengethat made everything interesting andfunwhen he was around. I missed the way he could make terrible things better. I missed his arms around me, and even though it had only been half a day since we’d been together… it was half a day too long.
I put the car in park and stepped out, taking a minute to stretch my back. The night air was cool and fresh and blessedly silent… for the two seconds before my mother got out of the back seat.
