He glances at me. “What?”
I frown. “Huh? What, what?”
“You’re staring at me.”
I sigh. “Oh. Sorry.” I look away, out the window; we’re passing the quarry on the left, thumping over the train tracks and then the highway is dark and quiet once more.
“Just wondering what you’re thinking, is all.” Jamie lowers his window a bit more and hangs his hand out; the early fall air is cool and pleasant.
I can’t help a laugh. “I’m trying to figure that out myself.”
“Same.”
Silence for miles, nothing but trees and guard rails and blacktop.
A small, quiet, tightly controlled sob escapes me. “I’m scared, Jamie.” I breathe through it, and tamp the sobs down. “Scared and confused.”
He doesn’t answer for a while. “Elyse, I…” He shakes his head. “I have so much in my head right now, and I just…I don’t know how to—”
“Can you just…just turn up the radio? I’m not sure I can handle conversation, yet.”
“Shit, me neither,” he says, relieved, and turns up the volume on “Would You Go With Me” by Josh Turner.
Country music serves to cover our nerves and the raw, anxious, thick silence between us. The trees give way to farmland, and farmland to large rural home plots, and then those get smaller and closer together, and there’s the occasional neighborhood, and then the prefab and single-wides. The front yards get smaller and smaller, and then we’re slowing to enter the traffic circle at the center of town—home.
Jamie glances at me as he trundles slowly around the circle. “I…um. Am I taking you home? Or are we getting Aiden from your folks? What do you want to do?”
I can’t think. I can only shrug and try to hold back the tears. “I don’t know,” I whisper. “I don’t know.”
He angles away from the traffic circle and pulls to a stop in a parking spot outside the general store. “Can I see your phone?”
I dig it out of my purse and hand it to him without thinking.
“Passcode?”
“One-zero-two-one-one-zero,” I say. “Aiden’s birthday.”
“October twenty-first, twenty-ten, huh?” he muses. “Mine’s the thirtieth.”
I glance at him, a faint hint of amusement whizzing through me. “Devil’s Night?”
He laughs. “Yup.”
“That must’ve kept your childhood interesting.”
He chuckles. “Nope. Totally boring. Never got into any trouble on my birthday. I was a boring, innocent child completely devoid of any mischievousness whatsoever.”
I laugh. “I bet.”
“I definitely did noteverget arrested for vagrancy and trespassing. Nor for climbing the water tower, or stealing Old Man McClary’s tractor.”
“I thought you grew up in Nashua?”
“On a farm outside it, actually. We only moved into the city itself after my dad passed when I was fourteen. Mom couldn’t handle the farm by herself, so we sold it and moved into the city. Just me, her, and our Schnauzer Border Collie mix, Hurley.”
I smirk. “And you got into all that trouble before you were fourteen?”
He laughs. “And then some. Most kids who lose a parent get into trouble afterward as a way of lashing out at life. I actually stopped getting into trouble. Mom needed me, so I put my focus into being there for her. Which kept me out of trouble. Otherwise, I’d probably be fixing cars in a highway-side auto body garage in the middle of nowhere in the New Hampshire countryside. I’d have long greasy hair, a scraggly goatee, and prison tattoos.”
