“Look after him for me. Wil you do that?”
“You won’t need me to look after him, Susannah, you’l be here to do it,” I said, and I tried not to sound desperate, but it didn’t matter.
Susannah smiled and said, “You’re my girl, Bel y.”
After lunch, Susannah took a nap. She didn’t wake up until late afternoon, and when she did, she was irritable and disoriented. She snapped at my mother once, which terrified me. Susannah never snapped at anybody. Nona tried to put her to bed, and at first Susannah refused, but then she gave in.
On the way to her bedroom, she gave me a little halfhearted wink.
Jeremiah came home around dinnertime. I was relieved to see him. He made everything lighter, easier. Just seeing his face took away some of the strain of being there.
He walked into the kitchen and said, “What’s that burning smel ? Oh, Laurel’s cooking. Hey, Laure!”
My mother swatted at him with a kitchen towel. He dodged her and started looking under pan covers playful y.
“Hey, Jere,” I said to him. I was sitting on a stool, shel ing beans.
He looked over at me and said, “Oh, hey. How are you?” Then he walked over to me and gave me a quick half hug. I tried to search his eyes for some clue as to how he was doing, but he didn’t let me. He kept moving around, joking with Nona and my mother.
In some ways, he was the same Jeremiah, but in other ways, I could see how this had changed him. Had aged him. Everything took more effort, his jokes, his smiles. Nothing was easy anymore.
chapter eleven
It felt like forever before Jeremiah spoke again. I was pretending to be asleep, and he was drumming his fingers along the steering wheel.
Suddenly he said, “This was my prom’s theme song.”
Right away I opened my eyes and asked, “How many proms have you been to?”“Total? Five.”
“What? Yeah, right. I don’t believe you,” I said, even though I did. Of course Jeremiah had been to five proms. He was exactly that guy, the one everyone wanted to go with. He would know how to make a girl feel like the prom queen even if she was nobody.
Jeremiah starting ticking off with his fingers. “Junior year, I went to two, mine and Flora Martinez’s at Sacred Heart. This year, I went to my prom and two others. Sophia Franklin at—”
“Okay, okay. I get it. You’re in demand.” I leaned forward and fiddled with the air conditioner control.
“I had to buy a tux because it was cheaper than renting over and over again,”
he said. Jeremiah looked straight ahead, and then he said the last thing I was expecting him to say. “You looked good at yours. I liked your dress.”
I stared at him. Did Conrad show him our pictures? Had he told him anything? “How do you know?”
“My mom got one of the pictures framed.”
I hadn’t expected him to bring up Susannah. I’d thought prom would be a safe subject. I said, “I heard you were prom king at your prom.”
“Yeah.”
“I bet that was fun.”
“Yeah, it was pretty fun.”
