“I didn’t say she was. I’m just trying to be ready, that’s all.”
“Whatever. It’s like this. If her eyes are blue and you like brown eyes but otherwise she’s the perfect woman for you, do you reject her?” He stops at the red light and turns onto the side street like he’s not sure this is the right way to go. “No way. No girl is ever going to be perfect, but some things are more important than others. Only you get to say which.”
The Subaru crawls along. Joe’s leaning sideways to see something in the side mirror.
“What?” I ask. “What is it?”
He doesn’t answer, just puts his tongue over his upper lip, concentrating like he does when he’s trying to figure how not to lose his queen in chess.
“Joe? What the hell is it?”
“I think there are two young ladies behind us you might know.”
I whip around and look out the rear window. Sure enough, it’s the twins in their sweats, jogging. Meredith is waving madly.
“Stop.”
He guns it.
“Joe, for God’s sake, quit fooling around and stop the effing car.”
He brakes hard, then puts it in reverse right there on Water Lane and starts to back up. Man, my brother is…a real cowboy.
“Enough. You’ll hit something.”
The rear wheel squeals on the curb and he cuts the motor. “You coming?” He leaves the driver’s door wide open.
And he’s right. The chances of another car coming down this last stretch of Water Lane before Jeanette Drive are a zillion to one. Everyone turns at the post office road.
After the introductions, Joe lets me do the talking. He’s angled his foot on the fire hydrant and he’s looking out across Hoskins Creek like he’s just biding time, humoring me. You can see Juliann is fascinated. Speechless, in fact. That Jane Austen look is in her eye again. Girls are so weird.
Meredith’s T-shirt is pale green like apple tree leaves in the spring. Next to that shirt, her tan looks like you could eat it. When a girl looks that good, it’s hard to concentrate.
She smells great, too. “Daniel, you still planning to go to Leonard’s on Saturday for the Halloween party?”
With the girls turned toward me, Joe’s out of their line of vision. He pushes his lips together in a know-it-all smirk and nods. If I react and the girls turn around, they’ll know he’s cutting up, so I have to keep a straight face. I look into Meredith’s eyes.
“Yeah, sure. Did Mack talk to you about getting there?”
“Mom said she’d drive us, but now she’s supposed to meet friends of hers, from work, and they want to eat at some restaurant out past Warsaw. Good Eats?”
Joe is bobbing his head up and down like an old lady at a tea party. My lip’s going to start bleeding if I have to keep this up.
The driving thing I can solve. “It’s not that far to Leonard’s. Just beyond the Catholic Church, right off 17. Maybe Mack could drive us all.”
Joe is smiling and tipping his head from side to side, Mr. Happy from the kids’ book. It’s almost impossible not to laugh.
“Okay,” Juliann says, like that would be acceptable, but without her usual enthusiasm when Mack’s name comes up.
“I’ll check with him again and call you,” I say to Meredith. “I’m sure it’ll be fine.”
When Joe starts walking back to the car, I wonder if I should say something more, about school. Or Halloween. Or that I’ll call her sometime just to talk. It’s not as easy to talk to her face-to-face as it is on the telephone. Why is that?
Juliann raises her arms to the sky and starts jogging in place. Meredith’s shaking her head in that can you believe this way.
Juliann looks daggers at her, then turns to me. “Is your brother at the University?”
When I look from Meredith to Juliann, she blushes. It’s all over her face that she’s just fallen for Joe big-time. Man, oh man, I’m in trouble now. Mack’ll have my head. There’s no good way to tell a sixteen-year-old girl that a twenty-one-year-old college guy is too old for her. She ought to have enough sense to know. Meredith sees it too, I can tell.
“I’ll have Mack call Juliann directly, don’t you think?” I whisper to Meredith.
She nods. “That’d be good. Yeah, do that.”
And louder, to both girls. “I’ll talk to y’all tomorrow. Or later tonight…”
When Joe honks, I sprint for the car because it’s already rolling.
“Man.” Joe starts to punch my arm, but draws back at the last minute. “Those are two cute chicks. You and Mack did good.”
I can’t exactly tell him the whole truth. Because I sure haven’t done anything special to impress them. I fell off a bridge. How random is that? Twin girls just happen to move next door to my best friend who just happens to introduce me and we just happen to take them fishing and they just happen to end up liking us. Until Joe College comes home. All I can think is I’m lucky Joe lives somewhere else most of the time.
“So,” Joe starts, “what did you want to ask me about? Need condoms?”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Mom and Dad are all jokey and funny at dinner. Joe tells one story after the next about the kids in his dorm, his professors. One old guy who shuffles in and stands in front of the board, greets the class, opens his notes, and asks a few questions. No one answers. The students look around, confused. The professor repeats the question. He scans the rows. No one speaks. He excuses himself. When he comes back in, he has a different notebook. “Wrong class,” he says.
Dad repeats the punch line about six times and we’re all laughing, way too hard for the joke, but I can just see the fuddy-duddy professor wondering what’s going on when no one knows the answer. They haven’t even read the book.
Nick volunteers for cleanup duty. Amazing. Joe lugs his back pack into the main cabin, turns on all the lights, and settles himself at one end of the couch with a book propped on a pillow in his lap.
“Can I use the cell phone to call Mack?” I ask Dad.
When I come back inside, the whole deal with the Halloween party and the twins is figured out. Mom is pacing back and forth and Joe has closed his book.
His forehead wrinkles exactly like Dad’s, which I never noticed before. He’s intent on the conversation and doesn’t acknowledge me. He drills his words at Mom. “I don’t understand why the lawyer can’t stop them.”
Mom’s answer is like raining bullets. “Apparently it’s a special law. To protect children. As parents, we have no rights. They’ve already found us guilty. Neglect and abuse. It’s been in all the papers. They filed this special petition that says Daniel is a child in need of services, CHINS. They asked the court to order the treatment over our objection.”
Joe looks at me with a question on his face.
“Don’t ask me. They won’t even let me go to the hearings.”
“But do you want the treatment, the chemo, radiation, whatever?” Joe asks.
There’s kind of a swollen silence like the sound right before a balloon pops when you know you’ve hit something sharp or hot and it’s likely to explode any second.
Mom claps her hands and puts them to her lips as if she’s shocked that the question would even be asked. “Of course he doesn’t want the chemo. Misty’s been treating him with herbs and vitamins and he hasn’t been sick to his stomach in days. He’s getting better. His color’s better too.”
To tell you the truth, I can’t think what part of me has any color at all, much less what’s changed. I sleep two hours out of every six. My knees and elbows ache like I’m one hundred years old. My face doesn’t have a pimple all of a sudden as if even the oil and dirt have fled for fear of the skulking cancer cells. If you ask me…but even as Joe is saying the words that no one else has said, it hits me that from the very beginning of this entire mess no one has asked me what I want. And with the court and the county and my parents at war, they’re all too busy building their own moat and fortifications.