The Dark Light of Day (12 page)

“That sucks.”

“It’s better if we don’t see each other, anyway. Things didn’t end
well when I first left town. Shouldn’t take me long to sort out the
mess of a business he’s been ignoring. Then, I’m gone again.” He stared off into the sky, his mind obviously on things that places like Coral Pines could not provide.

Back in the apartment, Jake made us both sandwiches while I sat
at the counter. I didn’t realize how long it had been since I’d last
eaten. I could hear my stomach growl when he set my turkey and cheese in front of me on a paper plate. He politely ignored it, although it was loud enough for the neighbors to hear.

“What do you do?” I asked. “Are you a mechanic when you
aren’t here?”

“Not exactly.”

“How can you not exactly be a mechanic?”

“I have mechanic skills, but I only work as a mechanic when I am here.” Then, he asked, “Where are you from?” He took a big bite of his sandwich so his mouth was full. Both the question and the face stuffing were avoidance tactics I’d used myself. Maybe, he was embarrassed about his regular job. I didn’t push.

“Atlanta area, I think,” I answered. I was pretty sure that was
almost correct, because my parents had been in and out of the
Georgia
State Prison system. When anyone asked, I usually said
Atlanta
because it’s the only city I remember in Georgia off the top of my
head.

“You
thin
k?”

“I was young when we left, and we moved around a lot.”

“And why did you come to Coral Pines?” This was a slippery slope he was heading down.

“To live with my Nan.” My ability to give only vague answers impressed me.

“And why was that?”

“Pass.”

“Pass?” Jake asked.

“Yes. Whenever you don’t want to answer a question, you get to pass. I’m choosing to pass on that one.”

“Who came up with these rules?”

“My Nan.”

“So you’re just gonna take a pass because your Nan invented a game to let you slide on having to tell anyone anything?” He was a perceptive one.

“Pretty much.” I took a big bite of my sandwich. The recognition of what I was doing danced in Jake’s eyes. He flashed me a smirk.

Once I’d choked my way through more turkey than I should
have shoved down my throat in the first place, I laid out a few
questions of my own. “So you’re from here?”

“Yes.”

“But you left?”

“Yes.” That single-word motherfucker.

“Why did you leave?”

“My mother and brother died.” I thought I had heard that
Frank’s wife and son had died, but I didn’t put two and two together that it would have been Jake’s mother and brother. I avoided apologizing
for it. I wasn’t sorry. I didn’t do anything. I never understood that
practice anyway.

“How?” I asked, curious.

My brother drowned in a boating accident, and shortly after my mom couldn’t process his death, so she opted out.”

“Opted out?” I asked.

“Took matters into her own hands,” he said.

“No—I know what it means. I actually use that phrase myself. I’ve just never heard someone else say it before, is all.” I sipped my Coke. “I can see why you left, then.”

“Yeah, well... that’s not the whole reason.”

“Then, what is?” I’ve never felt the desire to know anything
more
about anyone before, but Jake intrigued me on a level I was very
unfamiliar with. If he had a diary, I would have
unapologetically stolen it and read it.

“Pass,” he said smiling, using my own game against me.

“You can’t pass,” I scolded. “It’s not your game!”

“It is now.” He came around the counter to sit on the barstool next to me. He lifted his sandwich and in one bite had finished off half, laughing with his mouth full.

“You’re going to choke,” I said. Jake laughed harder and tried to swallow the food in his mouth. His eyes were watering by the time
he got it all down. When he pushed away his empty plate, his
forearm brushed mine. I jumped. It wasn’t just a flinch, either. I jumped high enough to knock over the stool I was sitting on and fall against the computer desk.

“Whoa, there. Are you okay?”

It took me a second to do an inventory. I was okay. It was just a
brush of the arm. Nothing inappropriate. No harm done. It didn’t
even burn all that much. I nodded at him and tried to catch my breath. Jake reached down and righted my stool. He patted the cushion, inviting me to take my seat again. Reluctantly, I did. I naively hoped that he would overlook what had just happened. Of course he didn’t.

“What was that about?”

“It’s nothing,” I answered.

“That didn’t seem like nothing. Was it because I touched you?”

“Pass.” I didn’t want to spend any more time on this subject, and making an excuse for my behavior meant lingering. The pass seemed like my best option.

“This little get-to-know-you lunch is really working out well.” Jake laughed. I actually laughed too. “How about this instead: since we’re going to be living together for a bit, and we are just so damned forthcoming about our personal lives, what if every day we answer
one question and reveal one significant thing about ourselves? We
can pass on as many questions as we would like, but at some point we
have to answer. And no question can be asked twice in one day.” Jake seemed proud of these rules. I was terrified. “Any follow-up
questions are allowed.”

“Like, I can ask you what is your favorite color?” I asked.

“We can ask those types of little things too, but by the end of the day you have to answer something significant.”

“Like, what you do for a living?” I offered. I raised my eyebrow at him.

“Now, you’re getting it, Bee,” Jake said. “And I’m gonna pass on that one. How did your Nan die?”

“Meth lab explosion.” It sounded downright silly saying it
aloud, like it was a TV crime show instead of my life. I didn’t like talking about it, but it was public record, and in the vault of my secrets it was a relatively minor one.

“Bullshit! You’re making that up.”

“Look it up,” I told him. “Made the news and everything. Nan
didn’t do drugs... well, not after the sixties, anyway. And yet
somehow
she wound up in a meth lab trailer in the middle of the Preserve
during the bright light of day when she should have been on her way to my graduation.”

Jake threw away our plates and moved to sit on the couch.
Instead of taking the seat next to him, I just swiveled to face him from my place at the counter. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“Okay, let’s get one thing out of the way: let’s not say I’m sorry
to one another. I hate that expression. What are you sorry for? You didn’t do anything. I’m not sorry because you lost your mother and
brother. I didn’t do it.” The words came out a little rougher than I intended.

“Okay,” Jake agreed. “No more I’m sorrys. How about we just tell it like it is?”

“Now we’re talking.”

“Bee, I am not sorry your Nan died because I didn’t do anything to contribute to her untimely demise, but it still sucks.”

“Better.” I laughed.

“What’s your mom like?” Jake asked.

I stopped laughing immediately. “Definite pass on that one.” I pointed to his arm. “The tattoo on your forearm: whose initials?” He glanced down at the intricate gray and black design on his left forearm that started somewhere inside his short sleeved shirt and ran down to the top of his hand, creating an interlocking SL.

“Pass,” he answered. “How long did you live with your grand-mother?”

“A little under four years. How old are you?”

“Twenty-two,” he replied.

Jake may have had the hard look of someone who had been through a lot, and people who couldn’t recognize what that looks like might have guessed he was a few years older than twenty-two. I
knew what that life experience looked like. Twenty-two would have been my guess.

Jake leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. He looked like he
was deep in thought until he shook his head and smiled up at me. “Who is your…best friend?” I could tell he was trying to come up with a simple question to lighten some of the heaviness of our
previous questions.

“Right now?”

“Yes, who is your best friend right now?” He probably thought that this question would be one I could answer easily and possibly even rant a bit about. Most girls my age had tons of friends. He probably expected an answer about my friend, and her car, and her boyfriend, and the movies we’d seen, and all that shit.

“Pass.” I didn’t want to have to tell him that right at that very moment, my very best friend, my only friend in the entire world was him.

***

Jake took me next door to the attached garage area and
introduced me to Reggie, the head mechanic. Reggie was tall and skeleton-thin,
with huge ears and a crooked front tooth. He happily showed me around the building. There were two offices in the front. Jake was using his dad’s office since he wasn’t around much, and the other was the main office, which is where I was going to be working. It
was small—just enough room for two filing cabinets and a little wooden desk with a yellow phone. It had a big window with plastic horizontal blinds that looked over into the three big garage bays that made up Dunns’ Auto Repair.

Cars and motorcycles were in all sorts of stages of repair within
the bays. Some were in parts on the garage floor with screws, bolts, tires and rims lined up next to them, while other vehicles were on lifts with men in coveralls under them, reaching up into their
mechanical guts.

Reggie showed me how to answer the phone and schedule appointments. It seemed easy enough. I thought I was going to work
there in exchange for Jake letting me stay with him, but he insisted on paying me exactly what the last receptionist was making before she’d up and quit on them.

After the tour, Jake and I went back to the apartment. He made some room in his closet for my few articles of clothing. It was pretty easy, since neither of us had much. Basically, he just slid some of his stuff down the clothing rod and I hung up my few things on red plastic hangers. He told me I could use any of the drawers in the dresser, since they were all empty anyway.

“Why are you doing all this for me?” I asked. “You don’t even know me.” Jake stood in the doorway of his room and watched me fold a few t-shirts into one of the drawers.

“I don’t know,” he answered. I was surprised he didn’t take a pass on that one. I didn’t know whether to appreciate his honesty or be fearful that as soon as he figured out why, he’d just change his mind, and I would be left with nowhere to go. Again.

My plan was now simple. I would save money in the next
several months by working at the shop, so by the time I turned eighteen—or
by the time Jake skipped town, whichever came first—I would be
able to afford my own place.

“I really can sleep on the couch,” I said. “You don’t need to give me your bed. Anything is better than the bench seat of a dusty truck. I’ll be perfectly comfortable on the couch, I swear,”

“No,” he said, without saying anything more. It was one of the things I was beginning to like about him. He didn’t feel the need to explain everything all the time. He didn’t just talk to fill the silence between us with useless words.

Jake made a grocery store run while I finished unpacking. I offered to make dinner for us as a thank you, even though my skills were more of the heating up variety, but he had told me he loved to cook and never really had a chance or a place to do it while he was on the
road.

I sat at the counter and watched him slice and chop vegetables. He finally took pity on my uselessness and let me peel potatoes but not without a thorough tutorial first. He had marinated chicken thighs in different spices and set them under the broiler. “You really know what you’re doing, don’t you?” I was amazed by his skills in the kitchen. “Who taught you how to cook?”

“My mom. She went to culinary school, but came back here after she graduated. She wanted to open her own restaurant, but then she married my dad and had Mason and me, so she kept putting it off.” He dropped some chopped onions into a pan. They sizzled and popped when they hit the oil. “Your mom never taught you how to cook?” he asked.

“I’m not a good cook,” I said.

“That didn’t answer the question,” He answered.

“Why do you want to know about my mother?”

“I just want to know
you
,” he said. I know he was serious about getting to know me, but my frustration was growing like it did every time I allowed that woman into my thoughts for more than a minute without dismissing her.

“What do you want me to tell you? Because I honestly can’t
think of a single thing my mother actually taught me. Oh, wait. She did teach me how to tie off those yellow rubber tubes really good and tight around her arm so she could find part of a vein she hadn’t treated like a dart board. That was, of course, until she’d exhausted all those veins and they died in her arms like I wished she would have every time she picked up the goddamned needle or snorted some shit up her fucking nose.”

I got up and walked into the bathroom, slamming the door
behind me. I was mad, but not at Jake. I was mad I had let myself get that
upset. The woman who gave birth to me wasn’t even worth my
anger.
I’d had a handle on it since the very last day I’d ever seen her,
though I don’t know if I could really call
avoidance
having a handle on it.

After a several minutes, there was a knock at the door. “Bee?”

“Yeah?” I kind of liked his nickname for me. I’d never had one before.

“I’m sorry I pushed. I said I wasn’t going to, but I was curious,
and
I let it get the better of me. I won’t do it again.” He was apologizing
to me when I was the one who acted like a giant ass-hat.