“It made sense at the time.” This is a lie, but also Simon’s not totally clear on how car insurance works. “Finally he sits me down in a Panera and gives me this whole speech about how we can’t get back together. Like, it was aspeech. He’d definitely practiced. He probably had a PowerPoint presentation that he was going to use if he had to. I could hear the bullet points. One was sexualincompatibility. And I had to explain that, actually, I had no interest in getting back together, I was just lonely and missed him.”
“Thatisembarrassing.” Charlie’s emerged from the pillow. “In aPanera.”
“Yes, thank you, happy to serve. Do you want to call someone? Alex?”
Charlie tosses the pillow aside. “She doesn’t know about this shit.”
When Charlie said he wasn’t texting people because he couldn’t fake being okay, Simon gathered that Dave going missing—or at least Charlie’s reaction to it—wasn’t common knowledge. But he didn’t think that included Alex. “Why not?”
“She needs things to be fun, or at least fine, otherwise she starts making flow charts and action plans, and the next thing you know there’s an Alex-shaped hole in the drywall and she’s gone.”
Simon is surprised to realize he knows Alex well enough to see how this would be true. “Is there someone else you can talk to?”
“No, Simon, I try to keep my unnecessary feelings about my not-dad to myself, actually.”
“It wasn’t a criticism. I just thought you might want to talk to someone who could, like—I don’t know—remind you that your worth doesn’t depend on what some shithead in an undershirt thinks about you.” Charlie doesn’t say anything, so Simon just rambles on. “I mean, obviously it isn’t as easy as that. If people could stop internalizing what their parents thought about them—no, shut up, Charlie. You obviously thought of him as a parent when you were a kid, so he counts. How old were you when you lived with him?”
“Eight.”
Forget the cliff. Simon wants to feed Dave to sharks. “Right, so some part of your brain was like, ‘oh, good, a dad,’ and it stuck. That’sfine, Charlie. It isn’t your fault.”
The awkward pats can’t possibly be doing any good, so Simon just lets his hand rest on Charlie’s ankle.
The motel doesn’t have a gym, so Charlie puts on his sneakers and announces that he’s going for a run.
“Do you mind if I borrow your car?” Simon asks. “I want to see what our dinner options are.”
“Sure,” Charlie says, handing him the key fob. He looks skeptical, which is fair since Simon’s absolutely lying, but Charlie doesn’t ask any questions.
As soon as Charlie leaves, Simon drives back to Mike’s house. He still has the address in his phone, and he’s still angry enough to make some questionable choices.
Usually, Simon is good at boundaries. He treats them like an electrified fence. He stays inside the lines, far from where any normal boundaries are located, not because he’s just that respectful of other people’s autonomy, but because he’s anxious about overstepping and leery of anyone thinking he cares too much.
Right now, there’s a good chance he’s getting things wrong. He shouldn’t do this without Charlie’s permission. Butnotdoing something is also wrong. Somebody needs to stand up for Charlie, and Simon’s the only person around to do it.
“Yes, yes,” he tells the dogs when they trot over to greet him. “I’m not mad atyou.”
Mike answers the door, and either he isn’t surprised to see Simon or he’s a very calm person, because he just opens the door and points to the rear of the house. “He’s out back.”
Simon thanks him and crosses through the house and back outside to a deck, where Dave is smoking, two empty bottles of beer on the rail in front of him and a full one in his hand.
“Oh, Christ. This again,” he says when he sees Simon.
“As far as I can tell, you’ve done nothing to deserve Charlie caring whether you live or die—worse than nothing—and he still cares about you. He isn’t going to stop, so you can either make sure he has whatever minimum information he needs not to spend an entire week of his life panicking about you, or you need to know that you’re hurting him. Own it.”
Dave doesn’t answer. He isn’t even looking at Simon, his gaze turned toward the empty hills that surround them.
A curl of anxiety wraps around Simon’s stomach, but he reminds himself that he’s doing a job. Playing a part. He has lines. The sense of doom recedes, the way it always does when he’s acting.
He sits in an Adirondack chair and waits Dave out.
“He’s done enough worrying,” Dave says. “By the time he was ten, he’d done enough worrying about the fuckup adults in his life to last him a lifetime. I’ve told him that. I thought I finally got through that thick skull of his.”
“Well, you didn’t. And you won’t. Charlie doesn’t know how to not care about people, even when they don’t deserve it.” Simon thinks about Charlie hugging everyone at the wrap party. He thinks about Charlie explaining how he had to kiss that waiter so he didn’t seem like a jerk. He thinks about Charlie driving Simon home whilehe complained in the passenger seat. “If you want to throw that away, that’s up to you, but you can treat him like a person.”
Dave swears under his breath and takes a swig from his bottle. “What are you, his boyfriend?”
“If you want to know about his life, you could pick up your phone.” Simon doesn’t know whether Charlie’s out to Dave, but he does know that answering with an easy, honestnowould be giving this man more information than he deserves.
