“I NEED A HUGE FAVOR,” he says. It sounds like he’s in the car, on speakerphone, his voice slightly distant.
“Bigger than faking an engagement?” I ask, instinctually glancing down at my finger, even though the ring’s not there right now. It’s in the NO BUTTS ABOUT IT mug on my dresser, because I’m afraid that if I sleep in it, I’ll break it.
“Well, smaller than that,” he says. “Are you busy today? Can you take Rusty? Something exploded at the brewery and I’ve got to go make sure we can still sell beer to people next month.”
I’m still leaning against my kitchen counter, drinking my second cup of coffee, but the word exploded sure wakes me up.
“What exploded?” I ask, alarmed.
“Beer,” he says. “I don’t know what happened yet, Seth called in high dudgeon and said that there was something wrong with the release valve, but I’m worried that it’s infected…”
He goes on about the problem, clearly stressed. I’d been planning on using today to finish up the antique table so it’s ready to go back to the mansion next week, then maybe hit up a few junk shops along the rural roads and see if they had anything worth fixing up and selling.
Sounds like my plans have changed. I’ll have to finish the table tomorrow, hopefully.
“Yeah, no problem,” I say. “Want me to come pick her up?”
“Meet me at the brewery,” he says.
IT’S obvious that something’s wrong the second I open the side door, since there’s a big SORRY, CLOSED TODAY sign across the front: it smells like beer.
I mean, it always smells like beer — it’s a brewery — but this is a warm, wet, punch-you-in-the-face beer smell. I think I can taste it in my mouth.
Also, the floor is sticky. There are still a few puddles here and there, and as I look for Daniel, there are several people diligently mopping.
The beer smell doesn’t fade like smells usually do. When I find Daniel a few minutes later, it’s as beer-y as ever, and he’s standing in front of one of the giant metal tanks, surrounded by puddles, talking to one of his workers and gesturing madly.
“Hold on,” he tells the guy when I come up, and walks up to me.
“Thanks,” he says, tugging one hand through his hair. It’s obvious that he’s been doing that nonstop today, because it’s completely insane, sticking up in every direction like it’s trying to escape his head.
“The tank in the corner exploded,” he says, jerking his thumb over his shoulder. “I still don’t know whether something got into the beer and made it produce way too much carbon dioxide, or whether someone fucked up the gas release valve, or whether the tank lid itself is just defective, and Seth is pissed as hell about the whole thing—”
“Don’t worry about it,” I say, reaching up and combing my fingers through his hair, trying to get it to lay flat. I’m medium successful. “Stay as long as you need, I’ve got Rusty. If you’re here late, I’ll put her to bed.”
Daniel shakes his head, his hand in his hair again, messing it right back up.
“I’ll come back and do bedtime,” he says.
“I don’t mind,” I say, trying to keep it light. “I’m pretty sure I can get it right.”
His face is tight, his eyes serious. Someone behind him shouts his name, and he holds up one finger, the gesture quick, jerky, stressed.
Of course he’s stressed. His brewery just exploded. Rusty’s final custody hearing is on Tuesday, and his sea-hag of a babymomma claims she’s got something on us.
And then there’s last night, when I didn’t think a single thing through, I just did, and it could have fucked us both over. What if he’d pulled out half a second later? What if it hadn’t been Officer Sherman? What if the landowner had come down there with a shotgun?
Actually, I think Daniel would have preferred the shotgun over getting arrested, at least with the hearing on Tuesday.
Suffice it to say, I feel guilty about the whole thing, and will never be more than an arm’s length from a condom again.
Also, I won’t trespass.
Finally, Daniel nods, a smile twitching at his lips.
“Right, of course you can,” he says. “Just don’t forget Astrid.”
“I would never.”
“Rusty’s in my office,” he says, then digs in his pocket, comes out with his keys. “Just take my car, it’s already got the booster seat.”
We swap keys. I head to his office and grab Rusty, who hops off the chair, shoves her coloring books into her rainbow backpack, and practically bounces out the door.
“Can we go to the waterpark?” she asks as we wind between massive tanks, something bubbling in all of them.
“I don’t think so,” I say.
“Can we go to the beach?”
The beach is four hours away.
“Probably not,” I tell her.
She huffs. We turn a corner, and there’s Daniel again.
“Can we go to the sliding rocks?” Rusty asks me. “Please?”
“No,” Daniel says, frowning.
“I asked Charlie,” Rusty points out.
“He’s the authority here,” I say. “Sorry, kiddo.”
She sighs dramatically and rolls her eyes. Daniel and I exchange a look.
“I never get to do anything,” she mutters, kicking at the ground.
“Well, have a fun day with Charlie,” Daniel says, leaning down and kissing the top of her head despite the sulking. “If I’m not back, she’s gonna put you to bed, okay?”
“Fine,” she mutters, still not looking up.
“C’mon,” I say. “We’ll find something fun to do. Bye,” I say to Daniel, lean in for a quick kiss.
It’s a second longer than quick. It’s perfectly chaste and appropriate, but we linger. When we pull back, I look down.
Rusty’s making a half-grumpy, half-grossed-out face at me, and it takes everything I’ve got not to laugh.
“Bye,” he echoes as Rusty precedes me to the parking lot.
“COME ON,” she says from the backseat, where her small, still-slightly-grumpy face is in the rear-view mirror. “The sliding rocks are no big deal. Everyone goes there. Valerie goes there all the time and she can’t even do a cartwheel.”
I reach below the driver’s seat of Daniel’s car and slide it about a foot forward, then flip the lever on the steering wheel and adjust that, too.
“Your dad said no,” I say, even though I secretly agree with her.
The sliding rocks are exactly that: a bunch of big, flattish rocks in one of the mountain creeks that form a natural slide. As long as you wear sturdy shorts over your bathing suit, it’s pretty harmless, and it’s really fun.
“Dad thinks I’m a baby,” she huffs. “He won’t even let me cut my own sandwiches. With a butter knife.”
“Want to go to the park?” I ask.
“I guess,” she mutters.
“How about the one in Flintburg that’s shaped like a castle?” I offer, even though that one’s an hour away.
Rusty just sighs.
“The one near my house is fine,” she says. “Even babies go to the sliding rocks. I know first graders who go.”
“Nope,” I say.
“We don’t have to tell my dad,” she says, leaning forward. “Charlie, I promise not to tell him if we go to the sliding rocks. He’ll never ever know. Cross my heart and hope to die. Uncle Eli brings me wedding cake from his job all the time and my dad has never found out.”
I glance in the rear-view mirror at her small, earnest face.
Daniel knows about the wedding cake. He’s known for ages. I don’t have the heart to tell Rusty.
“I never told about the rides at the state fair,” she cajoles.
“Rusty, knock it off,” I say, sighing.
I’m bummed, because I’d also like to go to the sliding rocks instead of the park. It’s hot out. They’re fun. The park is kind of lame, and besides, Rusty won’t get hurt.
She’s silent for about five minutes, just looking out the window, thinking to herself.
Then, at last, she speaks up again.
“Are you and my dad sleeping together?”
To my credit, I don’t react. I don’t jerk the wheel to one side, I don’t shout what? I don’t even suck in a breath, despite being unprepared for that question.
Instead I pause. I remain steady. I look in the rear-view mirror at her incredibly serious face, and I decide that Rusty is a young woman deserving of respect and straight answers.
“Yes,” I say.
“Huh,” she says thoughtfully, then looks out the window again.
I wait.
“What’s the point?” she finally says.
“Of sleeping together?” I ask, still maintaining perfect calmness.
“Yeah,” she says. “Sleeping is boring. Why don’t you go out or something?”
Right then, I make a choice.
I choose not to explain euphemisms. I decide not to tell her that sleeping together actually means having sex, because I don’t think she knows what that is yet, and I’m unprepared to tell her right here, right now, on this car ride.
“Adults are weird, I guess,” is all the explanation I give.
“When you sleep together are you naked?” she asks, making a face. “Valerie says adults sleep together naked.”
I look at the double yellow line on the road in front of me and consider my options for a long moment. Then I take a deep breath and look into the rear-view mirror again.
“If I take you to the sliding rocks, do you promise not to tell your dad?”
IT WORKS.
Rusty doesn’t ask another question about sex for the entire car ride, even though we have to go to my apartment for my bathing suit and then her house for her bathing suit, and the whole thing takes forever.
The rocks are a half-mile hike into the woods, and I think Rusty skips the whole way there, practically floating on a cloud that she finally gets to go. She jumps. She leaps. She uses her towel to pretend that she’s a woodland-themed superhero named The Fearsome Fawn.
There are a few other people there when we show up, and I recognize most of them, but not too much. I’m pretty sure that none of them know Daniel well enough to rat me out, so we’re good.
We spread out our towels on the rocks. We jump into the pool at the bottom to get wet, Rusty shrieking with the cold, and I don’t think about Daniel throwing me into the creek last night even once.
In fact, I don’t think about a single thing that happened last night at all. Not about watching him float, naked, in nothing but moonlight. Not about him tossing me over his shoulder and throwing me in.
And I most certainly don’t think about fucking outside on the rocks, the air cool and his body pure fire.
Once she’s in, I show her the best way to the top of the rock slide, because it can be tricky if you don’t know how to go.
“All right,” I tell her, sitting at the top, watching another kid slip and slide down the rocks, shrieking with delight as he tumbles into the pool at the bottom, “Do you want to go first or do you want me to go?”
She bites her lip, nervous, kicking her water-shoe-clad feet on the rocks.
“You go,” she says.
I clamber over her to the trough where the water escapes the top pool and put my butt in.
“See you at the bottom!” I say, pushing off.
Holy shit is it fun. It’s over in five seconds and then I’m splashing into the pool at the bottom, breathless with the thrill, water up my nose. I surface and wave at Rusty, who waves back, then gets into position.
For a second, my heart squeezes. Just because everyone in Sprucevale takes their kids here doesn’t mean it’s safe. Sliding down a bunch of rocks into a creek isn’t necessarily safe, and for a minute I wonder if taking her here on an impulse was dumb as fuck, and then she pushes off.
And screams with delight the whole way down.
I catch her when she splashes down at the bottom, laughing like a maniac.
“Again!” she shrieks, slithers out of my arms, and is already clambering up the rocks.
She must go down the slide twenty, maybe twenty-five times. The second she hits the water at the bottom she’s already racing back to the top, impatient when she gets stuck behind someone slower on the climb, tapping her foot dramatically if someone else is on the slide when she gets to the top.
I go down plenty more times, but I can’t keep up with her. I swear Rusty’s rocket-powered or something, and after a while, I head to the towel we spread out in the sun and sit down.
Sitting feels great. I lean back on my hands, let the sun warm me up, bright behind my eyelids, and try to wash everything else but this blissful, perfect moment away.
The table will get finished in time. The brewery lost some beer, but they’ll be fine. Crystal will never get custody.
I’m going to be more responsible, quit being impulsive, start remembering shit like I’m supposed to. For once, I’ll get Elizabeth a birthday present next month instead of just texting her at 9 p.m. like I usually do.
A scream jerks me out of my sun-drenched reverie, and before I even know what I’m doing I’m already on my feet, every nerve in my body alive and tense, heart hammering.
It’s Rusty, and she’s wailing, the sound agonizing and pain-filled and it strikes terror deeper into me than I knew terror could go and oh fuck where is she, is she drowning is she stuck did she hit her head and get a concussion—
I spot her. On the rocks, halfway down, and half a second later I’m scrambling up to her, more terrified than I’ve ever been in my life, more terrified than the time Daniel impaled himself on a branch and even more terrified than the night I woke up to the garage on fire.
“Rusty!” I shout, even as my foot slips and my knee slams into a rock, sliding along a sharp edge, but I get up and keep moving toward her.
She’s sitting, legs akimbo, one half in the rushing water, her face bright red and her mouth open, her cheeks already soaked as she screams and sobs and then screams again.
Her left arm is out, held stiffly away from her body, and it’s wrong. I don’t even know how it’s wrong — not bent backwards, not snapped in half — but there’s something wrong about it and it’s swelling up like a pufferfish.
“What happened?” I ask, uselessly, when I reach her.
She just sobs and holds out her arm, still swelling.
Strangely, I’m relieved. Even as I scoop her up in my arms, crying, even as I make my way carefully down the rocks and people gather around us and someone hands me our towels and my bag, I’m relieved that she’s not bleeding to death, that she didn’t hit her head, that it’s just an arm.
I’ve never hiked faster than I hike back to Daniel’s car, half-running even with a sobbing seven-year-old over one shoulder, breathlessly telling her that she’ll be okay. I get her into her booster seat, I wrap her arm in a towel, I kiss her and tell her we’re going to the hospital and it’ll be over soon, and then I drive like hell to Sprucevale General.
It’s not until she’s in a room, a nurse and a doctor hovering over her, looking so small in that hospital bed, that I realize my hands are shaking.
