“Yep. We used to be tight. Kind of partners in crime,” he said, shifting in the seat. “Has he ever mentioned Brinker Hadley or Mike Pearson?”
The names sounded vaguely familiar.
“Brinker Hadley? A Separate Peace, right?”
His eyes changed, softened the tiniest bit. “You’ve read that?”
There was an edge of disbelief in his voice, which bugged me.
“Yes, last year. It’s one of my favorite books.”
He ran a hand through his hair, pushing it back from his face. “Interesting.”
“What’s interesting?” Ava stood above us in the aisle.
“There she is,” Luke said.
“So now you’re wearing a bell?” she asked, gesturing toward his chest.
Luke picked it up and shook it. “Wren asked me nicely.”
I took Ava’s arrival as my cue to get another seat. She mouthed, Thanks, as I walked up the aisle. There was something about the gesture that reminded me of St. Vincent de Paul Ava. Maybe it wouldn’t be impossible to be friends again. I thumped down into the first available seat, next to a girl who pressed against the window when she saw me. Freshman. The morning was going to crawl by. A text to Grayson was in order.
No sooner had I typed in the message than Mrs. Fiore ripped my iPhone from my hands. I gasped, reaching for it as she shoved it into her shoulder bag.
“I was only going to use it on the bus.”
“You won’t miss it for two hours. These seniors look forward to this visit all season. We need to give them our full attention,” she continued, now loud enough for all to hear. “Does anyone want to join Ms. Caswell in relinquishing their phone?”
“Oh, snap,” someone sounding suspiciously like Luke said from the back. I slunk down in my seat. Ten minutes later we arrived at St. Lucy’s.
The rec room was decked out and ready for our arrival. Multicolored Christmas lights hung around the perimeter, and the focal point was a six-foot artificial tree that had so much tinsel on it, it almost looked like it was made of silver. The room was dry and hot, with a faint medicinal odor. We dumped our coats in a walk-in closet off the kitchen and went out to mingle, offering coffee and tea to the residents while Michael Bublé crooned on a Christmas CD in the background.
I chatted up residents with holiday small talk—the recent snow, favorite Christmas songs, whether or not their grandchildren were going to visit, which at times melted my heart. So many of them seemed forgotten. I noticed one woman in a wheelchair, sort of off by herself at the end of the long table where Ava was teaching some of the residents how to make pom-pom wreaths, and walked over to see if I could get her anything.
“Tea,” she said softly. Her hair was the color of straw, all drawn up in a messy bun, and her face was plump, cheeks drooping into soft jowls that shook when she spoke.
I returned with a Styrofoam cup of tea, steam swirling above it as I set it down on the table in front of her. “Here you go,” I said, smiling.
She glared at me and swiped the cup sideways off the table. I hopped out of the way just in time, barely missing the scalding fountain of tea that would have sprayed across my jeans.
“Don’t want no tea,” she sputtered, frightening the residents closest to her. “Who the hell are you?”
Sweat trickled down the back of my neck as the woman stared at me with curious gray eyes that appeared slightly unfocused, like it wasn’t really me she was seeing. I touched my necklace, holding the love charm between my thumb and forefinger, a habit that had become instinctive in the last few days. A hand on my shoulder brought me back to the present.
“Everything all right?” Luke asked.
I moved the charms across the chain a few times before letting them drop. His eyes danced across my chest, taking in the necklace, then back to my face.
“Yeah, thanks,” I said. Mrs. Fiore and a heavyset female attendant dealt with the situation. I cleaned up the mess. The attendant spoke to the woman in the wheelchair in a less comforting tone than I would have imagined to be appropriate.
“Rosie, that wasn’t very nice. This young lady is here to help us,” she said, motioning at me.
Rosie cried, bringing both hands up to hide her face. I felt terrible. Mrs. Fiore patted Rosie’s back, then came over to me. The attendant whisked her out of the room.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“It’s okay, it happens sometimes,” Mrs. Fiore said. “Why don’t you join the party?”
I hung around Ava’s craft table, but it only further depressed me. At one time these adorable old people, as Ava called them, were our age, with their futures ahead of them. I thought of my own grandpa, how he’d fought in the Korean War, all those old black-and-white photos of him and Grandma, how dramatic everything looked, how dressed up they got for something as simple as a picnic at the lake. I couldn’t imagine them here, making pom-pom Christmas wreaths and never getting any visitors. Wasn’t there something more we could do?
One of the St. Gabe’s guys played “Jingle Bell Rock” on the piano, which got the residents clapping along. Across the room Luke chatted with a red-haired woman in a reindeer sweater. He tossed back his head and grinned, enthralling the woman. If I couldn’t see she was in her nineties, I might have imagined he was hitting on her. For that matter, he still might have been. He took the bell from around his neck and placed it around hers. She beamed up at him from her seat. Maybe he did have some hidden depths. He certainly dealt with people better than I did.
“It’s cake time,” Ava announced, striding up to me while wielding her clipboard and crossing off something else on her to-do list.
“I’ll cut,” I answered, jumping at the chance to feel useful.
The kitchen was cooler than the rec room, and quiet. My Camelot skills came in handy, and I attacked the cake like a surgeon, cutting thin slices while another girl scooped vanilla ice cream onto them. The volunteers lined up to carry out cake to the residents. There was a small slab of cake left that I pushed to the side, waiting for Mrs. Fiore’s orders on whether to save it or trash it. I picked up the metal server and ran it under warm water, working the icing off with my fingers.
Luke sidled up to me and placed the extra cake he was holding on the counter.
“Hiding out?” he asked, facing me.
“That obvious? I sort of suck at volunteer work, don’t I?”
“Nah, I think it takes substantial talent to make an old lady toss her tea across the table. Frankly I was impressed.”
“Funny,” I said, genuinely cracking a smile. “And you looked like you were about to get lucky with that redhead.”
His eyes lit up as he smiled, completely transforming his face. He was unnervingly scorching when he wasn’t pouty and brooding. “You should have heard what she said to me.”
“Giving her that bell was sweet. You made her day,” I said, scraping some stubborn icing off the other side of the cake server and shaking off the flustered feeling that sprung up when he looked at me that way.
“It has to suck, you know? I mean, if I’m ever stuck in a place where the highlight of my day is a sing-along and some red-velvet cake, well, fuck, just put a pillow over my head and put me out of my misery.”
I laughed, a loud pop of a laugh that surprised me. “You’re awful.”
“Although this cake,” he said, pinching off a piece from the leftover cake and popping it into his mouth, “is pretty damn good.”
“Looks yummy,” I said.
“Here,” he said, grabbing another bit and holding it against my mouth. “Try it.”
The icing touched my upper lip. My hands were still under running water, and I had no choice but to open my mouth or the piece would have tumbled down the front of my sweater. Luke’s thumb grazed my bottom lip. The air in the room became dense, hot, as his eyes held mine.