The Title With Her Name First
“Because when I was your age,” I said, “I didn’t have one thing in the world that was mine. Not a bed. Not a car. My dad sold my four-wheeler to pay a light bill and didn’t tell me till it was gone. I didn’t want you to ever wonder if something was yours.”
She was quiet a long time. Then she said, “Do you remember when I asked you about Christmas?”
My throat closed up. “I remember.”
“I was so scared,” she said. “Every year. I thought if I didn’t ask, you’d leave without telling me. Like him.”
She meant Travis. She never calls him Dad. “And then one year I just stopped being scared. I didn’t even notice when.”
“You were ten,” I said. “I noticed.”
She wiped her face with a Sonic napkin and laughed at herself. “This is so embarrassing. I’m crying at Sonic on my birthday.”
“Best place for it,” I said. “I’ve done it.”
“You have not.”
“Day your mom said yes to dinner. Right in that stall.” I pointed. “Number fourteen.”
She laughed so hard she snorted cherry limeade.
And for a little while it was just the two of us in a parking lot with the bugs ticking against the menu lights, the way it used to be when she was small.
We drove home slower than we came, if that’s possible. It was a little after ten fifteen.
She remembered her blinker every single time. At the end of our street, before she turned in, she pulled to the curb and stopped.
“She’s going to be mad,” Kaylee said.
“Maybe,” I said. “Or maybe she’s just scared. Sometimes those look the same from the outside.”
“How do you tell?”
“You wait,” I said. “And you’re kind while you wait. Mostly you wait.”
Kaylee turned into the driveway at one mile an hour. Most of the party had gone home.
A few of her friends were still in the yard picking up cups and stuffing them in a trash bag, and Madison and Jacob were sitting on the tailgate of my truck.
The string lights were still on. The balloons had started to sag. And Crystal was still on the porch. I don’t think she’d moved from that post the whole hour or more we’d been gone.
Kaylee turned the car off. Neither of us got out right away.
Then Crystal came down the porch steps and across the grass, past the bow I’d left lying there, and she stopped at Kaylee’s window.
Kaylee rolled it down. I could see in the porch light that Crystal had been crying.
Her mascara had run and she hadn’t fixed it, and Crystal fixes her face if she’s going to the mailbox.
“How did she do?” Crystal asked me. Not Kaylee. Me.
“Perfect,” I said. “Speed limit the whole way. Signaled on an empty bypass.”