Daniel had an arm draped over one bent knee. “My old man taught me.”
The way he said that made me pause. “Is your dad one of the things you needed to get away from when you moved here?”
Daniel was looking down at his hand, flexing his fingers. “Here’s the thing.” But then he didn’t say anything, like an entire minute passed and he was staring off at the back of the house across from us. When he suddenly turned and focused on me, I almost drew back.
“We don’t really know each other. Not really. I don’t want to tell you about my life back in Philly. There’s all this stuff I’m trying to forget, you know?”
He wasn’t asking me a question, but I nodded even though I had no idea what he was getting at.
“Like my dad. I don’t want to talk about him.” Daniel was tapping his foot, faster by the second, and he wouldn’t look at me. “He was—”
“Okay.” I cut him off with a hand on his forearm. “You don’t have to talk about him.” When he looked at me, I added, “Or anything that makes you think about him. I couldn’t care less about playing pool. Honestly.”
When Daniel dropped his eyes to where my fingers still rested against his skin, I pulled it back.
“You should have told me how old you were. I don’t mean that like you did something wrong,” he added when he saw my reaction. “It just would have been good to know.”
I could have said the same thing to him. I thought the age difference was pretty obvious, but really up until that moment at Sonic, I hadn’t thought it mattered. I could still fix his car, hang out with him occasionally. It wasn’t a big deal.
Until it was.
Sometime later when Daniel stood up to leave, he stopped at the edge of the roof. “You said almost seventeen. How much is almost?”
“October.”
His eyes were once again scanning the sky. “That’s not that far away.”
“Yeah?”
He was still looking up. “We’re just friends, right? And you seem pretty mature for sixteen.” I made a face and Daniel mirrored it. “That sounded creepier than I meant it to.”
I bit both my lips to hide my smile. “How creepy did you mean it to sound?”
He laughed and shook his head. “So you’re going to be around tomorrow night?”
The expression on his face made me think he wasn’t sure he should be asking me that. I kind of felt the same way even as I said, “Yes.”
CHAPTER 17
Ididn’t realize how much Hall & Oates had grown on me until Dad stopped playing them. Not right away, but after Mom called they were on less and less. There wasn’t anything to dance to and Dad grew different again, quiet and heavy like when she’d first left.
Sundays were the worst. Dad always got quieter after church, introspective. We’d get home and I’d catch his gaze lingering on things that reminded him of Mom. He stood for twenty minutes in the hall closet last Sunday when he’d found the pin from her college sorority caught on the corner of one of the coats. When I asked him about it, he’d given me the strangest look, as though I was the answer to a test he’d cheated on.
Beyond that we talked and worked, but he didn’t leave me any cartoons on the work board, and he didn’t comment when I put on the most obnoxious music I could think of. By week’s end, I couldn’t take it anymore. I went into Dad’s office, scanned the shelf over his desk until I found what I was looking for. I dusted it off on my way back to the garage and plunked it down in front of him as he was finishing his roast beef sandwich.
To the uninitiated, the Creeper Race Cup looked like a wrench nailed to an exhaust pipe and spray-painted gold. In reality, it was the most coveted wrench nailed to an exhaust pipe and spray-painted gold known to man.
Or to me and Dad at least.
We’d inaugurated the Creeper Races the day we moved to our house when I was eight. It was one of the best and worst days of my life.
Our old house had been a lot bigger. It had a little garden and the neighborhood was anything but cookie cutter. Claire lived around the corner too, so I didn’t want to move. I didn’t understand anything about money back then, but Dad explained we had to sell our old house, downsize, in order to buy the auto shop from the previous owner who wanted to retire. Dad had been working there most of my life and bringing me with him whenever possible, so I warmed up to the idea real fast.
Mom was harder to persuade.
She didn’t want to move. She didn’t want to buy the shop. She didn’t want to give up what little she had to acquire something she’d never wanted in the first place. She wouldn’t go look for new houses, refused to pack when our old home sold, and basically made everything harder. She stayed with her sister nearby the week we moved.
I remember sitting next to Dad in the moving van and him telling me all about our new little house. He kept calling it that,our little house, which made me feel like Laura Ingalls Wilder, impatient and excited to see everything. Dad said the little house was small and that it needed to be fixed just like the cars in the shop. He explained that Mom was having a hard time with the move but that we could help her by fixing it up before she saw it, as a surprise.
