I grimaced. ‘Mom, really – that’s the memory of my infancy you want to evoke?’

She poked me in the chest and slanted a brow. ‘Unless you want me to bring up how I fed you?’

I put her down. ‘Eww, no. Ugh.’

‘Do well at school and practise hard for that game this Sunday against those asshats from Annandale,’ Dad said. ‘I’ll be back Thursday.’ He ruffled my hair, which he knew I sorta hated – and that’s why he did it.

I twisted out from under his hand. ‘Good use of asshat, old man. Your vocab is improving.’

He smirked. ‘All right, big guy.’ He took my shoulders and looked me in the eye. ‘You’re the man of the house while I’m gone. Take care of your mother.’

‘Okay, Dad. Will do.’ I saluted and ran up the stairs, thinking about the game this weekend, and Yesenia, who I planned to ask out before the end of the day, if I could man up enough to do it.

LUCAS

The temperature at the beach was in the seventies, the average for this time of year. The Hellers dropped me off at Dad’s before heading to their vacation rental with a thawing turkey and a box full of yams, green beans, bread crumbs and cranberries. ‘We’ll see you tomorrow,’ Cindy told us. ‘We’ll eat around one o’clock. And if the turkey isn’t done yet, we’ll be drinking by one o’clock.’

Boyce: You here?

Me: Yeah. Give me a couple hours.

I dropped my duffle bag on the bed. The room had never seemed smaller. It was like a cocoon. I’d emerged from it and flown away over three years ago, and now it was just a tight, outgrown place, both familiar and odd.

The blank wall was full of thumbtack holes, and the shelves opposite were mostly empty. Dad hadn’t moved the light fixture back to the kitchen – it still hung near the ceiling, casting its indirect illumination over the space. A few old textbooks were stacked on one shelf, along with Grandpa’s Bible and a high-school directory. There was also an envelope that hadn’t been there when I visited last. It contained a dozen or so snapshots I’d never seen before.

One had been taken on my first day of eighth grade, after I got out of the car in my new uniform. I’d outgrown every item of clothing that fitted me three months before. I smirked at the camera – at my mom – as a guy on the sidewalk behind me photobombed, tongue sticking out the side of his mouth. Tyrell. Hated or loved by every teacher, he was one of the funniest guys I’d ever known. In the background, nearer the school building, a trio of girls stood talking. One of them faced the camera, dark hair in a ponytail, dark eyes on the back of my head. Yesenia. She was probably about to enter law school now, or begin an internship in accounting or apply for master’s degree programmes in film or sociology. I hadn’t known her well enough to know her interests or ambitions, beyond her interest in me. At thirteen, that was all that mattered.

I sifted through the other photos, pausing at one of Mom painting, and another of the two of us clowning in the backyard. I pressed the ache in the centre of my chest and put them all away to study later, musing that Dad must have left them in here for me. Maybe these images had been on a memory card in an old camera he’d finally checked before throwing it away.

In the kitchen, there was a bag of spinach in the fridge and a bowl of fruit on the kitchen table. I wasn’t sure if Dad had turned over a healthier leaf, or he was deferring to what I’d want to eat while I was home.

‘How’s school?’ he asked, pulling a beer from the fridge, his hair wet from a shower. He’d been out on the boat before we arrived today, of course. I assumed he would take tomorrow off completely, but was afraid to ask. It would hurt Cindy’s feelings if he didn’t.

‘Good. I netted a spot on a research team next semester. A project with one of my professors from last year. There’s a stipend.’

He sat at the small, ancient table – the varnish long since worn away, the wood scratched to hell. ‘Congratulations. So – engineering research? Race-car design?’

My mouth twisted. My interests had morphed beyond race cars since high school – not that he knew that. This exchange had to be the longest conversation about my academic goals we’d had since Mom died. ‘No – durable soft materials. Medical, sort of. Stuff to be used in tissue engineering.’

His eyebrows rose. ‘Ah. Interesting.’ He stared out the window over the table, which had the best view of the gulf, except for the view from Grandpa’s room – where no one lived. I was about to leave the room to shower and unpack the few things I’d brought when he asked, ‘Dinner plans?’

‘I’m, uh, going out with Boyce in a bit.’ I took a beer from the fridge and popped the cap off with the edge of my unopened pocketknife.

‘Got your key, still?’

‘Yeah.’

He nodded, eyes never leaving the window, and we lapsed into our customary silence.

Boyce and I chose a booth near a window. There was one halfway decent bar in this town, and we were in it. It was too loud and too smoky, and I missed the beach hangouts he said were overrun with high-school punks now. We had to laugh, because we were the high-school punks not that long ago.

‘Still got the Sportster?’ he asked. In the last few months before I left town, the two of us had rebuilt the badly maintained Harley his father had accepted as payment for repairs from one of his drinking buddies. When I needed to sell the truck to pay my first semester of college tuition, Boyce had somehow talked him into selling the bike to me cheap.

‘Yep. It’ll do a few more months, until I graduate.’ I thought about Jacqueline’s arms, locked round me, her hands clasped low over my abdomen. Her chest pressed to my back. Her thighs braced round my hips. ‘I’ll probably keep it, though, after I buy a car.’

The waitress brought our drinks and a basket of assorted fried stuff. Boyce picked out a beer-battered avocado slice and dipped it into the salsa. ‘Seen Pearl lately?’

I shook my head. ‘Not in a few months. She was doing well, I think – probably applying to med schools now. You’re more likely to run into her than I am, though. There’s, like, fourteen times as many students there as there are residents here, and I know she visits her parents often.’

‘True.’ He sipped his tequila.

‘So – you’ve seen her?’

His mouth kicked up on one side. ‘A few times.’