Page 27 of The Last Thing You Said

Lucy and the dickhead who drives a Volvo.

It’s crazy, I know. Lucy working at the resort for the summer is driving me crazy. She’s so close, right there, but I can’t touch her, can’t talk to her. Emily talks to me, wants to play with me, but Lucy sort of hangs back. Like she never wants to talk to me again. And that’s nobody’s fault but my own.

I’m careful to stay three or four cars behind so they don’t notice. I’m trying to tell myself it’s because I want to make sure she’s safe, that this Simon guy isn’t some psycho killer abducting her in his jackass Volvo. They head out the county road past the Fire Tower toward Stone’s Throw Lake and turn in at Cloud 9.

That’s when I realize how stupid I am.

What am I going to do? Follow them into the park? Walk through the crowds alone, spy on them when they buy ice cream at the Snack Shack and watch cartoons at the amphitheater?

Pathetic.

She’s fine. She likes him.

She’s over it. Me.

I fucked it up and she’s moved on.

I whip the Firebird around toward home.

Dad’s left the liquor cabinet open again. I take a bottle of whiskey up to my room. I’m going to sit here and stack rocks and drink until I get the picture of Lucy and that shaggy-haired jackass out of my head.

I’m late for work the next morning. I find my dad in the pole barn working on a motor, and he is pissed.

“Well?” he says without looking up from the workbench. “Where have you been?”

Where have I been, he wants to know.

“Well?” Dad says again when I don’t answer him.

“I had something I needed to do.”

What I needed to do was wake up puking, which caused a pretty significant delay.

He lets out a long breath. “You could have let one of us know. John had to take your guests out. They were tired of waiting. Now he’s behind schedule.”

Dad turns to look at me when I don’t say anything. His hands and fingernails are dark with grease, the skin around his eyes grooved with deep wrinkles. We used to spend a lot of time together. We used to have a lot in common. You’d think that after Trixie died, we’d have grown closer, but lately I can’t stand to be around him. And it’s more than the drinking. He’s always in a shitty mood.

Maybe we do have something in common.

“Ben, how many times have I told you? You have responsibilities now. People are counting on you. With employment come certain responsibilities.”

He pauses, and it’s all I can do to stop myself from mimicking him as he says the inevitable next words: “With life come certain responsibilities.”

“You don’t say.” I can’t keep the bitterness out of my tone.

“Don’t get smart with me, Ben. I’m not in the mood for it.”

I’ve heard that one before, too. He’s a broken record. He teaches the same curriculum every year; he gives the same spiel out on the lake; he spews the same parental garbage.

It wasn’t like this when Trixie was alive. We used to have real conversations. We talked about a lot of things—school and fishing and the Firebird. Or sometimes, like it is with Guthrie and me, we didn’t talk. We sat out on the boat and fished and didn’t have to say anything at all, and that was okay, too.

“Those two guys staying in Wolf?” Dad says. “They brought in a nice stringer of sunnies and just finished gutting them. You should probably clean the fish house.”

I turn without a word and walk across the grass to the fish house. Shit. Nothing like cleaning up rotting fish guts in a shack on a hot morning when I could be out on the lake. Thank you, Lucy and the dickhead.

Later, after I’ve finished cleaning the fish house, I tell Tami that I feel like shit—not a lie—and am taking off the rest of the day. I need to walk, clear my head, so I hit the trail that winds along the edge of the lake from here to Sullivan Street Park. I’ll come back for my car later.

The trail is quiet today—usually it’s busy with joggers and bikers and families looking for a quiet place to fish with their kids, away from the crowded park.