Even though he had grown taller and gotten broader through the shoulders, she still saw him as being fourteen. There was a little-boy look and sound to him that she thought he might never entirely escape.
“Are we?” he pressed.
She gave him a considering look. “Yes, Robert, we are. We always will be, I hope. But we’re just friends, okay? Don’t try to make it into anything else. If you do, you’re just going to make me mad all over again.”
He looked doubtful, but nodded anyway. “Okay.” He glanced down again at the real estate papers. Are you going to sell the house?”
“Robert!
“Well, that’s what it looks like.”
“I don’t care what it looks like, it’s none of your business!” Irritated at herself for being so abrupt, she added, “Look, I haven’t decided anything yet.”
He put his coffee cup in the exact center of the papers, making a ring. “I don’t think you should sell.”
She snatched the cup away. “Robert . ..”
“Well, I don’t. I think you should let some time pass before you do anything.” He held up his hands in a placating gesture. “Wait, let me finish. My dad says you should never make any big changes right after someone you love dies. You should wait at least a year. You should give yourself time to grieve, to let everything settle so you know what you really want. I don’t thinly he’s right about much, but I think he might be right about this.”
She pictured Robert’s father in her mind, a spectacled, gentle man who was employed as a chemical engineer but spent all his free time engaged in gardening and lawn care. Robert used to call him Mr. Green Jeans and swore that his father would have been happier if his son had been born a plant.
“Robert,” she said gently, “that’s very good advice.”
He stared at her in surprise.
“I mean it. I’ll give it some thought.”
She put the coffee cups aside. Robert was annoying, but she liked him anyway. He was funny and smart and fearless. Maybe more to the point, she could depend on him. He had stood up for her five years earlier when her father had come back into her life. If not for Robert, her grandfather would never have found her trussed up in the caves below the Sinnissippi Park cliffs. It was Robert who had come after her on the night she had confronted her father, when it seemed she was all alone. She had knocked the pins out from under him for his trouble, leaving him senseless on the ground while she went on alone. But he had cared enough to follow.
She felt a momentary pang at the memory. Robert was the only real friend she had left from those days.
“I have to go back to school tonight,” she said. “How long do you have?”
He shrugged. “Day after tomorrow.”
“You came all the way home from California for the weekend?”
He looked uncomfortable. “Well…”
“To visit your parents?”
“Nest…”
“You can’t say it, can you?”
He shook his head and blushed. “No.”
She nodded. “Just so you don’t think I can’t see through you like glass. You just watch yourself, buster.”
He looked down at his feet, embarrassed. She liked him like this-sweet and vulnerable. “You want to walk over to Gran and Grandpa’s graves with me, put some flowers in their urns?”
He brightened at once. “Sure.”
She was already heading for the hall closet. “Let me get my coat, Mr. Smooth.”
“Jeez.” he said.
CHAPTER 2
They went out the porch door, down the steps, across the yard, and through the hedgerow that marked the back end of the Freemark property, then struck out into Sinissippi Park. Nest carried a large bundle of flowers she had purchased the night before and left sitting overnight in a bucket of water on the porch. It was not yet nine, and the air was still cool and the grass slick with damp in the pale morning light. The park stretched away before them, broad expanses of lush, new-mown grass fading into distant, shadowy woods and ragged curtains of mist that rose off the Rock River. The bare earth of the base paths, pitcher’s mounds, and batting boxes of the ball diamonds cornering the central open space were dark and hard with moisture and the night’s chill. The big shade trees had shed most of their leaves, the fall colors carpeting the areas beneath them in a patchwork mix of red, gold, orange, and brown. Park toys dotted the landscape like weird sculpture, and the wooden trestle and chute for the toboggan slide glimmered with a thin coating of frost. The crossbar at the entrance was lowered, the fall hours in effect so that there was no vehicle access to the park until after ten. In the distance, a solitary walker was towed in the wake of a hard-charging Irish setter that bounded through the haze of soft light and mist in a brilliant flash of rust.