We had to find out sometime....

I got through the evening somehow, but it wasn’t easy. My parents and sisters had to be told everything about Jake’s injury and more than once. But I didn’t spill anything about what had happened to me. The longer I could keep that a secret, the better, for my part.

I wasn’t really hungry at dinner, and that triggered a little maternal worry. I might not be as big of an eater as Jake and some of our teammates, but normally, I did put it away. Just for Mom’s sake, I took a second helping of buttered squash. It was from her own garden and tasted like pumpkin, one of my favorite things, actually.

Mollified that I wouldn’t starve to death in front of her eyes, she turned her attention to my sisters’ squabbling. Molly was teasing Jordan about some boy who had been sniffing around, and Jordan offered to stuff Molly into the hollow in the roast chicken. “You’ve always liked stuffing better than dressing,” she cooed.

Which was pretty funny, but I didn’t want to encourage them. Also, I vaguely wondered if I was going to have to talk with this Kyle Penworth. (Molly was calling him Kylie Penisworth and not getting caught out on it by the parents—yet. I felt my face turning red and didn’t call anyone’s attention to it, either. I needed to talk with her, too. Where did she learn the word? Were they teaching that in sixth grade now?)

The girls were sentenced to kitchen duty for their sins while Mom harangued them about their behavior at the table. So Dad and I escaped outside to look at Jake’s big truck, which I had parked under the garage floodlights. Dad sold probably more F-150s than anyone in our corner of the state, and he knew everything about them.

“It’s got excellent reliability and safety ratings and will out-pull anything in its class,” he bragged. Well, anything that could out-pull a fully-loaded F-150 would almost by definition be in a different class. And I noticed he didn’t say anything about gas mileage.

“Sell me one,” I teased.

“What color you want?” he came back.

“Blue,” I said. “That neon blue the Mustangs come in.”

He snorted. It was a sore spot with him that Ford did not offer that blue for pickup trucks without a special order. “Too much truck for a high school punk like you,” he scoffed.

“What about Jake?” I asked.

“Too much truck for his candyass, too,” Dad agreed.

I heard myself giggle at that, and he gave me a funny look, then grinned. “Jake uses it as a chick magnet, doesn’t he?”

I sighed and nodded. And I was stuck driving a mom-mobile.

“Funny thing is, he probably doesn’t need it,” Dad observed. “Big guy like that, handsome, athlete, rich family.” He paused then added, ‘Course, he ain’t the biggest wrench on the wall, comes to brains. Breaking his hand on a towel dispenser.” He grinned at me.

I didn’t say the hand wasn’t broken. I’d mentioned that twice already. I just shrugged and showed a weak grin.

Dad looked thoughtful, staring off in the direction of the Mogollon Rim for a moment, a view that was high on the list of the ten best reasons for living in Friendly. The stars were hard bright diamonds on black velvet, and neither of us said anything for a while.

He shrugged, finally and turned to me before saying, “It is kind of embarrassing, you driving that piece of crap GM station wagon your grandad gave your mother. Maybe I can find something on the used car lot that would suit you better?” He’d apparently been thinking about this very thing.

“Wow! Really?” I couldn’t believe it. I’d been pestering him since I got my license the previous year to let me pick something off the lot, even if it was a beater headed for the salvage yard. I blinked as we both turned back to the bright lights around the driveway.

He nodded. “Tell you what, you win Friday night, with or without Jake, and I’ll find you something.” He looked at me and grinned. “It might even be blue.”

“You’ve got a deal,” I said. “Wow, what an incentive!”

“I didn’t say it would be free. That nickels-worth Chevelle will be your down payment, and I’ll cover monthly payments till graduation. And insurance, I can get it cheaper than you can. But your summers are spoken for till it’s paid off. Okay?”

“Yeah, Dad! Thanks!” I wanted to kiss him, and when I thought that, I almost tripped over my own feet.

“Careful,” Dad said, “there’s a garden hose lying here on the ground, somewhere.”

I settled for grabbing Dad’s right hand with mine and giving him a one-arm hug with my left. He grunted, but he sounded pleased.

“Don’t tell your mother about this deal,” he warned. “She might try to nix the car I’ve got picked out for you.”

“That sounds like it might be a Mustang,” I guessed, feeling hopeful.

“Maybe not, but maybe the next best thing,” he said, cooling my hopes a bit.

We were talking about a used car, so it could be any nameplate at all. The next best thing to a Mustang would have to be something like a Camaro or a Barracuda? I couldn’t guess.

*

We probably watched some television later, but I excused myself with a headache and went to bed early. Our house had three bedrooms and a den, all on the same level as the kitchen, dining and living rooms. Ranchstyle they call it, and the whole thing was shaped like a lopsided capital H.

The big space in the middle of the house was the living room/dining room, with the kitchen off to one side in the front, the girls’ room on the other side.

In the back, the big leg was the master suite for my parents, and the stubby leg held my room and the afterthought of the den. A loft above this branch was used entirely for storage because the two rooms up there were too small for anything else. I guess originally they had been servant quarters when this had been a real ranch house.

Mom and Dad had a full bathroom in their bedroom, and the girls used the one off the front hall. I had to go through the den to get to my 3/4 bath, but at least I had one to myself. I intended to take a long hot shower while everyone else watched some Halloween-themed movie in the front room.

The fake holiday itself would be around at the end of the month, but even Molly was getting too old for trick-or-treat. I got out clean underwear and a pair of pajama bottoms and laid them across my bed. Most of my bath stuff was already in the bathroom since I didn’t have to share unless we had guests who would be sleeping over.

I added a pair of socks to the pile on the bed before realizing I had been dithering, delaying going down the hall to take my bath. Megan and I had had tentative plans for Saturday night, but somehow they had gotten laid aside in the confusion of Jake’s injury.

My relationship with my girlfriend had fundamentally changed, I realized. A week ago, nothing short of fire, flood or famine would have kept us from getting together. Well, famine probably wouldn’t have worked. We’d just go out for burgers.

I saw myself in the mirror over the dresser, and I wasn’t smiling.

I sat on the bed, ignoring the clothes I had laid out, and picked up my phone. It was an extension of the house phone. I didn’t have a line of my own. The girls had one in their room because otherwise, they would monopolize the family line.

But I didn’t need to think about Megan’s number to dial it. She answered in the middle of the second ring. (She had her own line, too.) “Pete, Pete, Petey,” she said after we traded hellos.

“You up for a drive?”

“Better bet the barn on it,” she said.

“See you in twenty,” I promised.

I hadn’t gotten undressed yet, so I just grabbed my jacket and boots and stuck my head into the living room to tell the folks I was leaving. “Going to take Megan over to Wilcox for some Steak’n’Suds,” I called out. The S’n’S was a well-known roadhouse, often threatened with being closed down for underage drinking. It was also more than seventy miles away, across some rugged mountains, so my parents would know I was kidding.

“I thought you were already in bed,” Mom protested but got distracted by a scream from the movie they were all watching.

I slipped out the door between their wing of the house and mine onto the back patio. Wugger, the Old English Sheepdog who had replaced Piffle, the border terrier, made his characteristic, “Wug uff!” noise from deeper in the backyard. Wug took his job as a guard dog seriously and worried about coyotes and squirrels killing all of us in our sleep. He stayed outside all night and kept us safe, and we appreciated that.

“Just me, Wug,” I said. I sat on the wooden bench by the door to put on my boots. The dog came up for a head scratch as I finished, then went back on his patrol. It wasn’t nine p.m. yet, but at almost 5000 feet elevation, the temperature had already dropped below 50F. Wug in his fur coat and I in my leather and wool jacket were warm enough, though, and in fact, the cold seemed to improve my mood.

I had trouble figuring out just what, in particular, had gotten me so agitated that I felt the need to get out of the house. As I went around the garage to Pete’s truck, I remembered. Oh yeah. The need to get naked to take a shower.

It was the sort of existential dread they talked about in senior English literature classes. It being October, we had been reading Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The monster in the book was almost nothing like the one in the films. You not only felt sorry for him, you ended up kind of rooting for him.

Dr. Frankenstein was certainly not the hero of the story. “I guess I’m the monster,” I muttered.

I paused beside the truck for a moment, watching my breath fog out. Then I had to step up on the abbreviated running board to reach the keyhole to unlock the door. Then back down to open the door before clambering inside. Jake did not have any such troubles.

Why was I taking Jake’s truck? Well, it was parked at my house, and I had the keys. Megan would enjoy the wide bench seat, and I already admitted that I was the monster in this story.

* * *

I pulled into the Star Valley Mobile Home Park and put on my parking lights to cruise the lanes. Then I revved the engine outside of Megan’s place instead of honking. Some people might be trying to sleep, but I needn’t have bothered. She was waiting under the awning and came right out to the truck.

I put the shifter in neutral, set the brake and scooted across the big bench seat to open the door for her and give her a hand in. She immediately kissed me. I don’t know why that surprised me, but I figured out I should kiss back.

We just sat there a bit, doing a lip dance and rubbing against each other. I pulled back first. “We shouldn’t just neck here where someone can, well, interrupt or get annoyed or something.”

She rolled her eyes but grinned at the same time. I put the truck in gear and rolled back out to the street before putting the headlights on again.

“Petey, Pete, Pete,” she murmured. “What am I going to do with you?”

I continued thru the roundabout to take the west leg of the highway, going toward Camp Verde. Since I’d told my folks I was heading east to Wilcox, they’d never be able to follow me. Not that they would anyway, it was just a driving game I sometimes played, pretending I was trying to throw off pursuit.

“Huh?” I said belatedly to Megan’s question. “What do you mean?”

She didn’t say anything for a moment. The full moon was behind us and the night was so bright I almost didn’t need headlights. I felt an odd peace after the craziness. Megan had scooted over close to me and dropped a hand onto my thigh. I trusted her not to do anything crazy there….

And then I remembered. The cold seemed to penetrate the cab, and I reached out to turn the heat up a notch.

“There’s a motel in Pine Creek and another in Strawberry Hill if the first one is full on a Saturday night,” Megan said, as matter-of-fact as if she were discussing where to find a 7-Eleven. The two small towns were both before the road began threading through the mountains toward Sedona.

“You sure?” I asked. It hadn’t been my reason for this late-night drive. I’d just wanted some company that might not ask awkward questions.

We cruised in the moonlight for another mile, saying nothing. I dropped a hand on top of Megan’s and glanced over at her.

She was looking at me with that solemn expression she got. The one where you figure she’s ready to laugh if someone gave her a reason. She sighed. “Pete, Petey, Pete,” she said with a catch in her voice. “We’re going to have to find out if either or both of us are lesbians sometime. Why not tonight?”