“Ok.” He nodded at me before returning his attention to the two guys arguing about football on the big screen, and I wandered out into the garage where I really did have a lot more to do with my boxes of stuff that we’d moved from the old apartment. It wasn’t very nice of me to keep a smelly pile like this, although he hadn’t complained about it. I twisted my hair into a knot and tried to focus on the smokey stink rather than the kissing that had gone on in this house not too long before. And the stink was still overwhelming, bad enough that when I started to clean and organize, I also started to cough and had to open the garage door even though it was chilly outside this morning. It reminded me that winter was coming soon enough.
I got hot in spite of the temperature because I was working pretty hard—definitely harder than what I’d done with the weights. As I wiped my arm over my forehead, Everett joined me in the garage. He had just showered and put on nice stuff for the trip (as far as I could tell, the Woodsmen liked to dress up for their flights).
“Are you ready to go?” I asked. I picked up one of the boxes, and it was a heavy one. “No, you’ll get dirty,” I objected, but he took it from me anyway.
“I’ll leave in a minute. Where do you want this, on the shelf?”
I nodded and looked at the pile of crap, which I had reduced a little. “I’m wondering whether I need to keep any of it,” I admitted. “I texted my sister and told her to come get what she wanted, but I’m not sure about my dad’s things. My grandparents saved so much. I have every one of his report cards, baseballs from when he played Little League, even a few empty jars of baby food he must have eaten.”
“You could probably get rid of those,” he said. “Willow isn’t interested in it?”
“No. She’s not as sentimental, but it’s also because they just weren’t as close. She didn’t grow up with him,” I explained.
He looked over at me, confused. “Who’d she grow up with, then? What am I missing?”
“We don’t usually talk about it very much,” I said. “My sister and I have the same dad but different mothers. She lived with her mom and I lived alone with mine, up until my parents got married when I was six or so and we moved into my grandparents’ house. Dad had been with my mother for a few years but they split up for a while, right before she found out that she was pregnant with me. They were apart when Willow was conceived. That’s why she and I are so close in age, but he didn’t know about her for a long time, like…” I thought. “At least a decade, because I found out that I had a sister when I was around eleven. I was so excited.” I had thought that we’d be instant friends—best friends. It hadn’t worked out that way at first, but we had fixed it.
“How did your dad find out about her?”
“It was because her mom died,” I said. “When she was sick, she wrote letters to everyone, including to him. He saved it and it’s in that box.” I pointed to one of the plastic bins. “She blamed him for ruining her life and Willow’s, too, and he felt very guilty and very, very sad. And my mom felt really mad.” I remembered that, because it had been explosive. “My sister came to live with us and my dad took us on vacation. I guess he was trying to make everything ok for her and for my mother, like, to make it up to them.” The car ride to the Alabama shore from northern Michigan had been about twenty hours, one way—forty total hours of my angry mother, my confused and sad sister, and my guilty and depressed father, with me trying to placate everyone. It had been a disaster.
“Willow’s mom saved almost all her baby stuff,” I said, patting the top of another box. “My mother didn’t do that, though. I’m glad she kept my birth certificate but there’s really nothing else.”
“That’s too bad.” Everett carried that box to the shelf and then walked back to me. He pulled me into his arms. “That’s a shitty story.”
“It’s—”
“Don’t say ‘it’s ok,’” he ordered. “It’s sad.” He bent and twisted a little to look at my face. “Are you sad about it?”
“No, it’s…” I stopped and didn’t say that it was ok, because he was right. It wasn’t. “My dad never got over it. He blamed himself for the accident, too, and he drank so much. He took off in my mom’s car and wrecked it, and he spent a ton of moneythat we couldn’t afford to waste. When he finally came home, he tried to quit cold turkey. That can be dangerous, but I didn’t know at the time. He passed away in his sleep.” If my mom had been angry at Willow before, it was nothing compared to her rage after all that happened. My dad had blamed himself for the problems, but my mom blamed my sister.
“Jesus. Damn.” He snuggled me more tightly, and he kissed me gently. That was our fifth. “What a bunch of bullshit to put on the two of you.”
I held up my face and lifted on my toes, so he kissed me again as I put my arms around his waist. And again, and again, and I stopped counting and just enjoyed it.
The abrupt noise of a car’s honk made us separate. We turned our heads and saw Boyd and Willow staring through his windshield into the garage, amusement on his face and shock on hers. Her hand was on the steering wheel, too, so she had been the one to lay on the horn. I started to pull away but then thought, no. I stayed where I was.
She got out and I was worried when I saw how stiffly she moved, until I realized that it was due to anger. “Hey,” Everett called to her, and she gave him a stare of death which didn’t seem to bother him. “I need to get going,” he told me. “I’ll call you from Omaha.”
“Ok.” I smiled up at him and he smiled back, then kissed me again. I heard my sister hiss, like a snake. Boyd had to move his car, since he’d parked it in the middle of the driveway, sothat Everett could reverse out. He waved as he pulled down the street and I waved too, smiling even more.
Willow had already joined me in the garage, and she was not smiling. “What are you doing?” she asked, the words sibilant. “What are you doing, Zoey?”
“I was cleaning up some of the stuff from our old apartment and Everett had to leave for the game. They fly in an orange plane together,” I explained. She wasn’t as up on Woodsmen stuff as I now was, but that hadn’t been the information that she was after, anyway.
“I knew you were sleeping with him,” she said. “I knew it.”
“I’m not,” I answered, before I remembered that I didn’t have to share that information. “It’s none of your business,” I added, too late.
“Zoey! This is terrible!” She looked toward her boyfriend’s car and waved at him until he got out. “Let’s get a guy’s perspective. Boyd, if you were Everett Ford and you were sleeping with my sister—”
“I don’t want to play this game,” he interrupted, and neither did I.
“What are you two doing here?” I asked.
“You weren’t answering me and I got worried,” she said, and I touched the pocket where I usually kept my phone. I hadn’t thought of carrying it with me because I hadn’t been worried about her. For the first time in years, she hadn’t been on my mind.
“I’m ok,” I said. “I really am, not just pretend ok. I’m glad you’re here, because you can take some of this back to your apartment.” I pointed to the bins.
