Until Anne rose on the toes of her fancy shoes, balancing herself with one hand against his chest, and pressed her lips to his.
13
Anne
“Where are you going?” Momasked after we’d finished dinner and the dishes were drying on the rack beside the sink.
“To get Dad’s workbench.”
“And how are you going to do that? You can’t carry it home.”
I hadn’t thought. “I guess I’ll…”Ask Joe.“Figure it out,” I said. He hauled it away, I reasoned. He could haul it back.
Mom sat on the couch and reached for the remote. “You might as well take that casserole dish to Nicole, then. Since you’re going over anyway.”
“Is Joe still living with his mom?”
“He moved home,” Mom said, without glancing away fromLove Is Blind. “After the divorce.”
Weird to think of Joe married. And divorced. And sleeping again, apparently, in the room he’d grown up in. As if I weren’t the only one whose life wasn’t proceeding exactly according to plan.
I trooped down the street to knock on the Millers’ front door like a nine-year-old asking Joe’s mother if he could come out and play.Blergh.
The sun had slipped behind the trees. The sky ran withcolor like a paint box, the purple clouds edged with pink and gold. I walked along the grassy verge past tidy yards and small, square houses, their windows glowing in the dark.
The Millers lived in a bungalow on a long, narrow lot with a chain-link fence and an addition built on in the back. The big golden, Honey, woofed at my approach.
“Hey, girl, hi,” I crooned, reaching over to ruffle her fur. “How are you?”
She wagged in reply and licked my wrist.
A tall figure moved behind her, dark-haired, big-framed, and lean, casting a long shadow in the yard. My heart bumped. In alarm, I told myself.
He sauntered forward into the floodlights.Joe.
“Anne,” he said. Not nearly as welcoming as his dog. On the other hand, he didn’t stick his nose in my crotch. “If you want Hailey, she’s in the house.”
“Oh, I, um….” I held up the Pyrex dish like a flag.I come in peace, maybe. Or,Surrender. “I came to return this.”
“Bit late,” he observed, unlatching the gate.
“I know. Dad’s been dead for two months. But we didn’t eat the casserole until tonight. After I burned dinner,” I confessed.
Beneath his beard, his lips quirked. “I meant, it’s after nine o’clock.”
I realized I was staring at his mouth and jerked my gaze up. “Right. But Mom was at the shop until after seven, and, like I said, I burned the chicken. Also, well, I was cleaning up Dad’s workshop”—Remember why you’re here, get to the point—“because as long as I’m going to be home, I need a quiet place to work. And a desk.”
He nodded. “Rob said you were writing a book.”
Which made me feel warm all over and also like the worst kind of imposter. “I’vestarteda book.” Several books, all of which went nowhere. “I haven’t published anything. Or finished anything. I don’t even have a blog. So I’m not a real writer. Not yet. Not like Nora Roberts or Lucy Maud Montgomery or Madeleine L’Engle.”
“I read that in school.A Wrinkle in Time.” He rubbed his jaw. “Don’t know the others.”
Look at us, politely discussing books like grown-ups having a normal conversation. I felt a lurch of hope that we could be…friends, maybe, or at least friendlier. “Nora Roberts is, like, the original queen of romance novels. And Montgomery wroteAnne of Green Gables.” Nothing. I tried again. “The book I gave to Hailey?”
“I saw it. Thanks.” There was a pause, as though he was thinking through exactly what to say, a talent I, obviously, did not possess. “I read to her. When she was younger. Now she spends all her time on her phone.”
The image of Joe reading bedtime stories to his little sister, looking out for her the way he’d once looked out for me…It stirred memories I didn’t want to think about.
