Part 2 (2/2)
She smiled. He sounded better again. Relaxed. He was funny, which was a surprise.
She liked him.
Of course, she'd already liked him, but in a faraway, movie-star-idolizing sort of way. When she'd imagined talking to him in her head, he hadn't ever been funny.
Actually, did he even talk, in her head? Or did he just sort of ... attractively smolder while chopping wood, or smas.h.i.+ng things with a sledgehammer, s.h.i.+rtless?
Her imagination-so rich in some ways, so impoverished in others.
”Do you deserve to be defended?” she asked. ”I thought you were trouble.”
”Who said I was trouble?”
The teasing had drained from his tone. Oops. ”The same person who told me your name was Patrick.”
”You were asking about me.”
”It's possible.”
”Well, if you did ask about me, and you found somebody who knew my family well enough to tell me and Patrick apart, they'd probably tell you I was all right. Not bad news like Patrick, but not as smart as Joe or as ambitious as Peter. They'd probably also tell you none of us boys has a lick of sense compared to Andrea and Cathy.”
”That's a lot of nots. You're not the bad one, the smart one, the ambitious one, or one of the girls. Which one does that make you?”
”The one who's never going to amount to anything.”
He was trying to sound light and breezy again, but it wasn't quite working. She heard the discomfort behind his words, and it surprised her.
Tony ran a big construction company, or at least part of it. Directed trucks. Told workers what to do. He walked around pointing at girders and directing electricians as though he had an encyclopedia of construction inside his head. Surely he'd already amounted to something?
”Why would anybody say that about you?”
A few seconds' pause. ”Actually, I take it back. It's been awhile since anybody said that. I'm trying to be the responsible one these days.”
”Trying?”
Three or four mornings out of five, his blue truck was waiting in the parking lot when she drove up, and he kept her late after work. He seemed about as responsible as they came.
”Yeah, well, it doesn't come real natural. My brother, Patrick? He and I ...” Tony paused, then exhaled explosively. ”Let's just say he did something he couldn't undo, and I had a part in it. It changed the way I think about ... pretty much everything. And then my dad died a few years ago, and my mom took over the company, but she doesn't know jack s.h.i.+t about building things. I've been helping her keep it afloat.”
”You don't sound like trouble at all.”
”I used to be.”
An uncomfortable pause. They'd strayed too far from where they started. In an attempt to steer them back, she said, ”That's a relief. If you were a saint, who would teach me how to misbehave?”
Silence.
She'd walked off a conversational cliff.
In the dark, silence had a completely different quality. She felt exposed, her heart beating over a loudspeaker, her words echoing in the s.p.a.ce between them.
She smelled concrete and pool chlorine and damp. She s.h.i.+fted away from the hard plastic of the chair digging into her upper back, and she heard it all coming. Everything he was about to say.
”Amber, look.”
She crossed her arms.
”You're a nice girl.”
That. Exactly that. Now he would tell her he hadn't meant what he'd said earlier.
”I didn't mean to give you the wrong impression. The thing is ...”
”I get it,” she said. Anything to stop him before he could tell her she was too nice for him, or too young, or too something else that she didn't know the words for.
”I'm pus.h.i.+ng thirty,” he said. ”And you're, what, twenty-one? Twenty-two?”
”Twenty-four.”
Metal sc.r.a.ped over concrete as he s.h.i.+fted in his chair. ”You're a pretty girl.”
He said it like an apology.
”Thank you.”
Silence again. Pitch-black silence, into which no machines rumbled and no lights intruded, no shapes emerged to make the darkness feel familiar. She could hear the rain, a faraway white noise that only seemed to deepen the quiet of the bas.e.m.e.nt.
She could hear her watch, too, ticking off the seconds. She'd had no idea it was making so much noise down there on her wrist.
And beneath that, inaudible but present, she could hear the anger and frustration she'd been finding increasingly difficult to ignore over the past few years.
This was what came of trying so hard for so long to be good. Twenty-four years old, and her inexperience was written all over her face, so obvious that it meant a man like Tony didn't even find her attractive.
When she was little, she'd believed that G.o.d was watching her, and she'd wanted to please Him, just as she'd wanted to please her mother. In those first years after they moved to Ohio from Michigan, away from her aunts and uncles and her grandparents, her mother had become so bitter and unhappy she was almost unrecognizable.
Amber did what she could to make it better. She played with her younger brother, Caleb, and helped take care of baby Katie. She never made a peep at school, helped clean the house, brought home exemplary report cards.
After a while, Mom got used to Camelot, Ohio, and Amber got used to being good. For years and years, she was as good as she could possibly be, thinking it was going to get her somewhere. Win her a blue ribbon, or true love, or fulfillment.
It didn't.
Even before college, her faith in G.o.d and goodness had started to fray, and the summer break she spent in the slums outside Cape Town doing charity work with a group of Nazarene students left it in tatters.
G.o.d wasn't watching. There might be a G.o.d, or there might not-she hadn't made up her mind about that. But she'd seen enough dire poverty and need in South Africa to shake her out of her complacence.
Life could be short, and it could be brutal. She was lucky enough to have been born in a good place to good people in the midst of plenty. Yes, she needed to use the advantages she had to try to make the world better, but she also had to live.
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