“I’ll find someone,” Luke said. “I need to hit the restroom anyway.”
With that, he was up and gone, and I wished more than anything I could go with him. Benji was still talking.
“—a shrimp burger, but Dad said I had to get chicken satay.” My father looked at him, now clearly annoyed. “What? Oh, Emaline and her boyfriend. Luke.”
“Benji.”
“He’s really cool. He—”
“Benji.”
This time, Benji stopped talking. “What?”
“We don’t use the phone in the restaurant. Take it outside. Or at least up front.”
Benji looked at me, as if needing confirmation of this. When I didn’t give it, though—not my place, not even really my family—he got up anyway.
My father watched him, his mouth a thin line, as he wove through the tables towards the hostess stand. “That phone. It drives me crazy.”
“I didn’t realize kids his age even had them these days.”
“It’s relatively recent. Since we decided to separate. We figured it would make it easier for Leah and me to stay close to him.”
Separate?
“Can I get you something to drink?” the waitress, finally appearing, asked from the end of the table.
“Water for me,” I blurted out, too quickly. My father, after consulting the beer list, asked for some microbrew I’d never heard of. As she went to the bar, we were both quiet for a moment. Then I swallowed and said, “I didn’t realize you and Leah had . . .”
He looked up from the beer menu, meeting my eyes. Suddenly the more tired expression, how he seemed older somehow, made sense. “We only decided a few months ago. Benji doesn’t know yet.”
I nodded, all the while doing the math in my head. A few months ago had been just after my acceptance to Columbia. This, then, was the Unforeseen Circumstance that had forced his own We regret to inform you.
“I’m sorry.”
“Well.” He cleared his throat. “Yes. Thanks.”
Our waitress, now working at warp speed, came back with our drinks. Once they were distributed, she said, “Are we waiting for two more?”
“They’re here,” I told her. “Just—”
“Give us five more minutes,” my father said. She nodded, retreating again, and I watched him glance at Benji, who was now sitting on a bench by the front entrance, picking at his shoe as he talked to Leah.
“How’s Benji doing?” I asked, nodding in his direction.
“He’s been aware of the tension, for sure.” He took a sip of his beer, which had a label like an abstract painting, all swirly reds and blues. “We’ll see how he does on this trip, though. With the distance, and the time away from his mom, as well.”
I wasn’t clear what he meant, and even less sure I wanted to ask. But I did. “So . . . you’re here for more than a visit?”
He took another sip. “For the summer, probably. In the fall, I’ll be finding an apartment and moving to the city, and just have him weekends. He doesn’t know that yet, though.”
I looked at Benji again, thinking of his face when he couldn’t order what he wanted. And that was just a shrimp burger.
“What’d I miss?” Luke asked, sliding back into his seat. He spotted the drinks. “Other than the waitress.”
Instead of answering right away, I turned my head and looked out at the parking lot. In the distance, you could just make out the bridge to the mainland, arcing across the blue of the sky. Cars were coming, cars were going. A bridge was just a bridge, indeed. All that mattered was that somehow, it carries precious cargo from one piece of solid ground to another, safely over everything and anything that might lay below.
* * *
“Man,” Morris said. “That is just crackers.”
We were sitting at the Tip, a strip of beach on the west end of Colby that was slowly being eaten away by the ocean. There wasn’t much there except the end of an access road, bonfire remnants, and, on weekend and summer nights, just about everyone from my high school.
This evening was no exception. A pile of driftwood was just catching about a hundred feet from us, a keg sitting lopsided on the sand adjacent. People were milling around, but Morris and I had a small stretch of sand all to ourselves.
“Crackers?” I repeated. “What the hell does that mean?”
He tipped up his red plastic cup, finishing it off. “Crackers. You know, like, crazy. Bizarre. Weird.”
“You just made that up.”
“Nope.”
I just looked at him, not fully convinced. Morris was always coming up with his own expressions, then swearing they were part of the general lexicon, as if just by appearing in his own head they indeed existed for the rest of us. Crackers, indeed.
I didn’t want to be thinking about the contents of Morris’s head, though. I didn’t want to think at all, which was why I was here in the first place, a heavy cup of cheap draft beer parked between my feet. It was my second one, but I still couldn’t get the bad taste of my dinner at the Reef Room out of my mouth. And it wasn’t just the chicken satay.
It was just so weird, from the very start. Seeing Theo in the parking lot, Benji’s sudden attachment to me, and then, the capper: my father dropping the bomb that his marriage was over. Suddenly, it all made sense: his weird response to my acceptance, the sudden rescinding of all he’d promised. But why hadn’t he just told me? Plus there was the fact that when he left my half-brother to move to New York, Benji would be not that much older than I was when my father first decided to come back into my life. There was a symbolism in that, but I was trying not to think about it. I picked up my beer and took another big gulp instead.