“Okay,” she says dubiously, and leans her head against the side window. “I just hate it when everybody’s too quiet or too loud.”
“Yeah, me too.” I turn the wipers on high as we truck along, and turn the radio up so we can hear it against the beat and squeak of the wipers and the roar of the defroster. I peer out through the windshield, trying to ignore the vision. “Dang, it’s nasty out here.”
“Maybe we’ll get a snow day tomorrow,” Rowan says, excitement in her voice. “Oh, wait.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Saturday. That’s the breaks.”
“Work is going to suck.”
“It always does on Valentine’s Day,” I say. And I have to angle my head away from her because tears pop to my eyes. “It’s really going to suck this year.”
“Because of Sawyer? You like him, don’t you? That’s what everybody’s mad about. Right?”
I think about that as I turn into the alley and park the truck, and we sit and wait for Trey to get here so we can enter as a force as usual. “I guess you could say that. But he doesn’t like me, so it’s not a problem.”
“I think he does.”
“What do you know?”
“He follows you around, he watches you. I see him.”
I turn to look at her. “He does not.”
She shrugs. “Hey, I’m not blind. But like you said, it’s better if he doesn’t like you.”
I frown. Rowan is sneakier than she looks. But this news just makes everything worse. The aching crevasse in my chest opens up a little more. “Hurry up, Trey,” I mutter.
Finally he comes and we all go inside. It’s 4:04. I have exactly twenty-seven hours to figure out what I’m supposed to do.
• • •
“I wonder what kind of crowd we’ll get tonight,” Mom says cheerily. “Look at it coming down.”
Mom and the three of us kids stand at the front entrance as it nears five o’clock, ready and waiting for the early birds, but not sure if they’ll come out tonight or if they’re all at the grocery store stocking up on toilet paper. I feel like we could make a public service announcement letting Chicagoland know that if they need anything, anything at all, we probably have it upstairs.
“We’re going to be slammed with deliveries, I bet,” Rowan says. She’s the queen of gauging delivery orders.
We all agree, mesmerized by the heavy flakes. I shake my head and turn away, going into the dining room to make sure everything’s ready for the brave souls who venture out, and it is, of course. I plop down in a booth and stare out the window, wondering what Sawyer’s doing right now. If he’s remembering our awkward conversation, or trying to forget it. Wondering what’ll happen, and how. My stomach churns as now, in all of our windows, the vision plays out over and over, and I can’t get away from it. It plays out on the front of the menus, too, and the paper place mats on the tables, and the computer screen up at the cash wrap. The urgency of the vision is coming through loud and clear. “Okay, okay,” I mutter. “I know already.”
I twist the heels of my hands into my eyes, trying to rid them of the vision, feeling myself slipping back into that place of hopelessness. Nothing’s right. Nothing is what I expected. Nothing is as it seems. I think that if I were a comic book character, I’d have the most desolate story of a wasted life—a wannabe hero who doesn’t come through for the victims. The end.
When I feel a hand on my shoulder, I look up. My mom squeezes my arm and then slides into the booth across from me. She’s always been pretty, but she looks older than she is. She has dark circles under her eyes, like me.
She puts her elbows on the table and rests her chin in her hands, gazing at me. “Where’d you go last night?” she asks.
I hesitate, suspicious. “To the library. I told Dad—”
“No, I mean in the middle of the night.”
I lean back in the booth, trying to keep a poker face, but I wasn’t expecting this. “Oh.”
She nods, waiting.
And really, what does it matter now? On Monday we’re going to have another talk. And I’m going to end up in the hospital with scary people. So I tell her the truth. Sort of. “I went to see Sawyer Angotti, to say good-bye.”
She is silent. And then she takes my hands and holds them and says, “I’m very sorry about that, Julia.”
I tilt my head, perplexed, and really look at her. She is sorry. I can see it. Wow. “Thanks,” I say. “That was . . . unexpected.”
She smiles grimly, collapsing her arms onto the table, and sits back in the booth. “You’re not the first person who’s had to say good-bye to an Angotti. I imagine it’s hard. Some of them are actually decent people, even if they make mistakes.”
I stare. “What . . . you?”
The bell over the door tinkles with the first dinner customer, and she gets up to take the hostess stand tonight. “No, not me.”
“You mean Dad?”
But she doesn’t answer me. Instead, she says, “Why don’t you take tonight off? You could use a break.”
Thirty-One
Upstairs, I can’t do anything. The windows are plastered with the scenes. So are the mirrors. The scenes dance around the pile of Christmas tins, play out on every board game cover, every magazine, every newspaper. Every schoolbook I open screams explosions at me. There are no words, only the crash. The crash is my life.