Pete’s burger tasted like ashes. He’d gotten himself one to go, only because Shayla asked him when he’d eaten last, and he couldn’t remember. Dinner, last night? Maybe.
And as much as he didn’t want to take the time, he knew he needed to refuel. He’d only get stupider without it.
“How worried should I be?” he asked his incredibly patient neighbor as she pulled out of the parking lot. “Assuming Maddie really is hanging out with Dingo and Dumber…?”
As she drove, Shayla made the face—lips pressed temporarily together, slightly furrowed brow—that told him she was giving careful thought to her coming word choice. “If Maddie’s…involved with one of them—and my guess would be that it’s Dingo—she certainly wouldn’t be the first fifteen-year-old girl in the history of the world to be sexually active. She also wouldn’t be the first girl to tell her twenty-year-old boyfriend that she’s eighteen even though she’s not. Or, you know, maybe it just didn’t come up. When you were his age, did you ask the hot girls who wanted to sleep with you fortheirID, with their proof of age?”
“So. DefCon One,” he said around his bite of burger.
Shayla’s eyes danced as she laughed. “DefCon Four,” she corrected him. “Back it down, Lieutenant. You shook the jailbait tree. Let’s give Dingo time to have theAre you freaking kidding meconversation with Maddie. Although if it’s okay with you, I’d like to swing past the mall again. Go back into the parking garage, see if the car’s still there. I keep thinking we missed something.”
He wiped his mouth and chin with the ridiculously small napkin that had been thrown into his bag. “Personally, I wouldn’t mind another conversation withgood old Dingo.” He went into a fake Aussie accent as he crumpled his trash. “Maybe with my hand around his throat this time.”
“Yeah, becausethatalways works,” she said, giving him that now-familiar hard look that he’d quickly IDed as massive attitude-filled judgment.
Pete smiled at it—at her—despite the bad mix of burger, uneasiness, and ire that was churning in his gut. “Yeah, I know, I was just…being a jerk. Frankly, I’m trying really hard not to freak out.”
“You’re doing great,” she told him. She had a switch that she could flip in a heartbeat—from disapproval to 200 percent reassurance. It was fun to watch her do it, because she was also 200 percent sincere.
And smart. Man, the way her brain clicked along at a million miles an hour was a thing of beauty to behold.
And then there were her eyes….
Pete cleared his throat. “Betsy—the counselor—told me that kids who are grieving sometimes use sex for comfort,” he told her. “As a way to cope, kind of like drugs or alcohol or Jesus, I don’t know. I’m not saying it right, it’s more complicated than that. Problem is, I stopped listening because Maddie dresses like she’s twelve, in baggy clothes, like her body embarrasses her, so I didn’t think I had to worry about her having a fucking twenty-something-year-old lover named fucking Dingo.” He heard those f-bombs coming out of his mouth, but he couldn’t stop himself so he shook his head. “Sorry.”
“It’s okay,” she said.
“In my head, she’s still only a year old,” he found himself telling her. “Lisa got the good stuff—the toddler and the six-year-old, you know? I get the teen pregnancy years. Gee, maybe if I’m lucky, we’ll have us a good ol’ shotgun marriage and Dingo’ll move into my house.”
Shayla laughed, but her eyes held sympathy. “You can go there, but I’m gonna live inthisworld, where women still have choices, and smart girls—and their inappropriately older boyfriends—knowallabout contraception. Yay!” She laughed again, and then made ashhhsound. It was something that she did now and then, almost as if she were shushing her own overactive imagination.
“So…what exactly happened to set this off?” she asked. “Did you and Maddie have a fight, or…? If you don’t mind my asking.”
“No,” Pete said. “It’s okay. And no fight. No blow-up, nothing big, nothing…I mean, yeah, I’ve had to lay down some rules. Set a curfew. Without it, she just wandered home whenever she felt like it—sometimes past midnight. And I know she wasn’t happy when I finally put my foot down. But…we’ve barely had any conversations at all. Getting her to talk is like pulling freaking teeth.” He sighed again. “The counselor says to give her space, so that’s what I’ve been trying to do. Me, I’ve been taking a crash course in Living with a Teenager 101, talking to teammates who have kids, trying to figure out WTF. But most of the men I know have toddlers, so they’re clueless, too. You should see the pile of books on my bedside table.”
“Shh,” she said again, but it was so soft, maybe he’d imagined it.
“How to Talk to Your Teen,”Pete continued, and it was weird, like now that he’d finally started talking about this, he couldn’t shut the fuck up, “and it’s well written, but there’s an assumption that you and your kid aren’t total strangers. I need a way more basic care-and-feeding manual.”
“Don’t we all,” Shayla murmured.
“I have this one friend,” he continued, completely unable to stop himself from babbling on and on. “A teammate. Zanella. Good man. His wife’s little brother lives with them. So I thought, damn, good resource, right? But it turns out the kid—Ben—he’s the most well-adjusted teenager in the universe. Apparently, he talks to them. Like full sentences. Nouns, verbs, even the occasional adjective.”
She laughed at that. “I think it just looks like that from the outside. Ben’s probably had his bad days, with plenty more to come. It’s pretty universal—the silent phases. My boys go through them, too. You really just have to be patient. Don’t give up.”
Pete nodded. “The longest talk I had with Maddie is when she tried to convince me to demand a paternity test, but then send in someone else’s DNA so it would come back negative.”
“Whaaaat?” Shayla looked at him.
“Yeah. She said, that way I’d be off the hook. She said, that way I could get my life back.”
“But then where wouldshebe?” Shayla glanced at him again. “Lieutenant, where did Maddie live before she moved out here, to be with you?”
“Palm Springs,” Pete said. “Not that Lisa had bothered to tell me, but about a year ago, they moved back to California to be near Lisa’s grandmother, Kiyo. Lisa’s mother died years ago, but her grandmother’s still, well…Kiyo’s in a nursing home, she’s not…any kind of option for Maddie.” He shook his head. “I actually drove out there this morning, but no one at the facility had seen Maddie since our last visit.” He’d tried to call, but they kept putting him on hold, so he’d finally just got into his truck and gone there—wasted six solid hours on the road.
Shayla nodded. “Okay, but is it possible that there’s someone else in Palm Springs, not necessarily a blood relative—maybe a good friend of Lisa’s—that Maddie might prefer to live with?”
“If that’s the case,” Pete asked, “then why wouldn’t she say something?” But then he laughed and answered his own question. “Maybe because she’s not saying much of anything.”
