I sit up straighter. “Of course.”
“Okay. When I was fifteen, my mom died.”
I manage not to make a noise. My birth mom died when I was little, and I always felt awkward when people gushed over how sad that was. Sure enough, Bobby shoots me a grateful smile. “It was an accident. She was heading home and a drunk driver T-boned her.”
This time it’s harder not to make a shocked noise. Poor Mrs. Bassilotta. Poor Bobby. I put my free hand over our joined ones. “I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, it sucked. But my dad got a life insurance payout Enough to send me to Pembroke Prep.”
“That’s where my brothers went.”
“It’s where Eli and I went. I applied for a scholarship in middle school, but it wasn’t enough to cover the fees. I felt guilty as hell about profiting off my mom’s death, but I knew it was my shot at being able to get into a good college.”
“Bobby! I’m sure your mom would’ve wanted something good to come out of her accident.”
He gives me a wry smile. “You didn’t know my mom. Anyway, I had a rough time in New York at first. I wasn’t rich like the other kids. My dad was a farmer, and I didn’t have a fancy phone or a car… it was hard.”
He says it lightly, but looking at his face, I can see the sweet, lonely teenager he must have been, and my heart aches. “That sounds awful.”
“It was okay. In my second semester, I made the baseball team and I sat next to Eli in bio. Everything got better.”
I picture the two of them, Bobby all shy in his blue sweaters and Eli in some fitted T-shirt and designer jeans. “What was Eli like?”
“Exactly the same. Everyone liked him. All the girls. All the guys. He seemed older than us in a lot of ways. He knew things about wine and clothes and he’d lived in Europe…” Bobby shoves a hand through his short hair. “I’m dancing around what you need to know, but it’s hard to talk about this stuff.”
“That’s okay.”
His face softens. “Do you like baseball?”
“I don’t know a lot about it.”
“It was my dad’s thing. He was first generation Italian, and he wanted to prove he was a good immigrant.”
I smile. “Zia Teresa was the kind of immigrant who makes everyone feel bad fornotbeing Italian, but I get what you mean.”
Bobby laughs. “My dad and I went to baseball games together, threw the ball whenever he had time. I missed him a lot when I went away to school but watching games on TV gave us something to talk about on the phone.”
“That’s really nice.”
We hold hands in silence as more pretty country scenery rushes past. It’s peaceful. The most peaceful I’ve felt in… I’m not sure how long. Bobby lets go of my hand and I feel a flash of nerves. I know him well enough to know he doesn’t want to be touching me while he says whatever’s coming next. That he’s ashamed.
“At the end of our senior year, Eli looped me into this deal he had going,” Bobby says. “Some local guy and his muscle invented a pill that was selling like crazy.”
“Doc and Adriano,” I say. “And Orchard.”
“Yup.” Bobby pulls in a deep breath. “Eli was putting up cash for them to expand and he asked me to make a secure website so they could set up drops. I wanted money, so I helped out.”
He glances across at me. “This might be hard to understand, but I never saw it as a long-term thing. I had a full ride to play ball at UCLA. I was gonna help Eli out, send most of the cash home to my dad, and head to California.”
“So… what happened?”
“At first everything was great. I liked the guys, Doc and Adriano. We got along well. Like we’d known each other our whole lives.”
All these years later, he still sounds surprised.
“…Soon we had big plans. We were making street money, but Eli was setting up meetings with Provalite and Osember, these huge drug companies. He kept saying we had the female Viagra and if we could take Orchard mainstream, we could make millions, maybe billions. I didn’t know about that, but I figured I didn’t need to know. I was getting ready for UCLA and Adriano was talking about the Marines and Doc was thinking about going back to school and getting his GED and everything looked good…”
I so badly want to believe everything worked out. That Doc went back to school and Adriano joined the military and Bobby played baseball in California.
