I pulled my hand free, earning a puzzled look from Chase that I pretended not to notice.
“It’s nice to meet you too, Sandy. You, um, have great taste in music. Chase said the signed Aerosmith T-shirt we found was yours. That must have—”
“Where?” Her neck stretched to peer past me. “Where’s the box?”
“Mom, we didn’t throw it away. I promised you I wouldn’t get rid of anything important.”
She pushed past both of us, pulling open the first box she saw, scanning its contents, then moving to the next. I glanced at Chase for direction, but he was staring at her with an expression I felt guilty for seeing. His jaw was locked and his eyebrows were drawn together and lifted, not in embarrassment or anger, but something much more sorrowful. Without a word, he came alongside her and started opening boxes we’d already sealed.
“Dana? Can you?” He gestured to his mom’s other side. Wordlessly, I went. It took twenty minutes to find the T-shirt, but by then it was too late. She was pulling items out of the garbage bags, growing more dismayed by the moment.
“Chase, these are good. Why would you get rid of them?” She was holding up a pair of boys’ hockey skates from the bag marked Donate.
“They’re from when I was seven.”
She wrapped her arms around them. “I can picture you with your missing front teeth when I see them. These are staying.” She gasped as she drew another item from the bag, and another and another until the bags were empty. All of them.
“Mom. We can’t keep all this stuff. You said it yourself just last week.” He waded close to her. “We can barely walk through here, and the bedroom is worse. I can’t keep sleeping on the couch. When I moved home, you agreed.”
Her eyes squeezed shut.
“You needed me home—here I am. You want me to stay, you have to let some of this go.” She let him take the bike pump from her hands.
“We should keep that, though.”
From where I stood in the corner, I saw the tendon in Chase’s neck jump as he pulled his arm back from the donate pile and instead added the pump to the keep pile.
“And this,” she said, picking up a child-sized pup tent.
I watched him watch her, the neck tendon jumping each time she retrieved another item. He was so focused on her that he started when I slipped my hand back in his. “Want to get out of here for a little while?”
His hand tightened around mine.
CHAPTER 30
Chase pressed his keys into my hand without a word and sat just as silently beside me as I turned his truck toward Papago Park. Eventually, the neighborhoods gave way to flat desert, barren of all but the heartiest shrubs. Ahead, the normally reddish sandstone buttes glowed golden in the setting sun. I turned off at the first barely there dirt road once we left all trace of civilization behind us and killed the engine as soon as the main road vanished in my rearview mirror.
I glanced at Chase, at the small frown that had remained between his brows since we’d left his mom emptying boxes in front of his house. “Come on,” I said, brushing his arm when the sound of my opening door failed to turn his head. He followed me out of the truck and down the path I picked out. There wasn’t an actual trail, just rocks and dust separated by ground-hugging brush.
“What are we looking for?”
I slowed and stopped by a small cluster of flat rocks, barely wide enough for the two of us. I sat and took a deep breath, looking out over the empty miles of land stretching to the hills. “I don’t know, space? It’s open and not…”
“Open’s good right now.”
I felt his gaze as he lowered himself next to me, but I didn’t know how to meet it. We sat, side by side, the sunset painting our shadows long and dark behind us. “This is when I steal your line and say I didn’t think this out. There’s not really anything to break out here and I didn’t bring my bats.” When Chase’s quick smile at my quip faded, I turned back toward the truck and stood. “Actually, I’ve got a baseball in my bag. We could play catch or—”
“Dana.”
“Yeah?” I turned, my voice and expression light, trying to contrast the scene we’d left at his house.
“Sit with me?”
I returned to the rocks, not sure what Chase needed from me in that moment. When I’d offered him the chance to get away from his house, he’d taken it. I’d thought that’s what we were doing out in the desert too, getting away, forgetting. I should have known better with Chase.
He said my name, and when I met his eye, he slid his hand around the base of my skull, bringing me in for a kiss—the softest, sweetest kiss that somehow made me want to cry. When he pulled back, leaving our foreheads tilted together, my eyes felt watery.
“I don’t know what to do anymore,” he said, letting his hand fall away from me, but not his gaze. “I know she doesn’t want to be like this, and she was trying, she was. Letting me go through the garage was huge for her. I mean, a year ago she couldn’t have done it.”
