What We Saw Read online

  “Let us help you with that, Mrs. Cody.”

  Adele claps her palms together, holding back the tips of her bejeweled manicure. “Oh, bless your heart, Katie.” She jerks her chin at Ben. “This one just thinks I’m crazy.”

  I wrinkle my nose. “Well, this one needs all the free deodorant you can bring home.”

  Adele giggles as I slide a flat of Powerade out of her Explorer and plop it into Ben’s arms, then tell him to wait while I give him another one. The combined weight of forty-eight twenty-ounce bottles makes every muscle in his arms and shoulders pop while he lugs them over to the growing stack at the edge of the drive.

  “Benny, do you think you can get these into the garage for me? I have to hurry.”

  “Mom, we don’t have room for all this crap.”

  “I cleared some space this morning,” Adele says, digging through an accordion file. It is filled with stacks of coupons thick as paperbacks clamped with binder clips. “The shelf under the ramen and over the Tapatío.”

  Ben frowns. “But this is Powerade. P comes before R.”

  Adele waves a hand as she finds the stack for her next conquest, then runs back to the driver’s seat. “S for ‘sports drink,’” she calls out. “If we land some Gatorade next week I don’t want it all on different shelves.”

  We stand aside as she screeches out of the driveway, blowing kisses and honking. In the silence that follows, Ben contemplates the stack of Powerade. It’s the size of a small mastodon.

  He groans. “Guess I’ll get the dolly.”

  I stop him as he turns toward the garage. “Might as well take a couple with you.”

  He frowns as I drop one flat into his arms and bend down to grab another. “Why do I have to take two?”

  “Part of the Powerade workout,” I say with a smile.

  “What are you gonna do while I haul these around?”

  I want out of the friend zone and decide to go for broke. “Enjoy the view.”

  I think he starts to blush. I’m not sure because he turns around pretty fast and lugs those drinks up to the garage in record time.

  five

  BEN OFFERS TO drive me back to my place.

  “What if your mom needs help with the Right Guard?” I’m only sort of joking.

  “Can’t handle the shame. Have to get out of here.” He says this with a grim finality. I understand what he’s talking about. He doesn’t mean get out of here today, right now, this afternoon.

  He means get out of here.

  Forever.

  We’ve talked about this more than once since we started hanging out again.

  It was an accident that I saw his garage last fall. I’d come over to study for a geology test and arrived a few minutes before he came home from practice. Adele greeted me at the door and asked if I wanted a Diet Coke or a Coke Zero. In her excitement to serve me the Coke Zero I requested, she pulled me down the stairs to the garage entrance off the rec room of their raised ranch. While I was standing in that doorway Ben arrived and discovered me, slack-jawed, watching his mother slide a twelve-pack off the shelf just beneath CHARMIN and right above DRĀNO.

  The first time I saw those perfectly packed shelves, I was seized by the urge to grab a canvas bag and do a supermarket sweep. From ballpoint pens and batteries to Post-its and Sticky Tack, Adele gave me the grand tour, tallying the money she’d saved and pointing out which products were the best deals. Most of the time, with double coupons and deals that “stack,” she actually got money back. She’d haul out a colossal pile of product for free, and because of her coupons and the way the deals worked, the store would also pay her. I stared up in wonder that first afternoon, laughing in amazement as she explained her system.

  I’ve only seen her in action for a few months, but I now know it’s no laughing matter. Adele has a coupon compulsion, no doubt about it. She can’t not do it. The urge to get the next deal overwhelms her to the point that she’s missed several of Ben’s games this year—not to mention moments like this one, when it might be nice to sit on the deck out back, have some iced tea, and hang out.

  Instead, she’s running for the Right Guard special. It has nothing to do with deodorant. It has to do with the fix she gets from the deal, the short-lived euphoria of the score. As we watch her screech around the corner onto Oaklawn, I wonder what it was that actually caused this malfunction in Ben’s mom. Had it always lurked beneath the surface? Did the divorce just uncover it, buried beneath thick layers of “normal”?

  As we climb into Ben’s truck, he says, “Thanks for being cool about . . . all this.”

  I know that “all this” means his mom and her stockpile. I know that “being cool” means taking it in stride and not telling anyone at school. I also know how hard it is for him to talk about it.

  Ben puts the truck in reverse but pauses, foot on the break, hands on the wheel. He glances over at me. “You really have to get home?”

  “Eventually. No rush. Did you have a pressing errand with which you require my immediate assistance?”

  He smirks at me and shakes his head.

  “What?” I ask, blinking with wide eyes of false innocence.

  “You,” he says, “and your attempts to pepper all conversation with iambic pentameter.”

  “From the boy who just used iambic pentameter in a sentence, modified by the verb pepper.”

  “Touché.”

  “Conversational French. Further proving my point.”

  “It was my point,” he says with a laugh.

  I cross my arms. “Which was to mock me?” I love giving him a hard time.

  “No! Just—it’s nice not to have to dumb things down. It’s one of the reasons I like talking with you: Your communication skills are both scintillating and exquisite.”

  “Wow!” I snort-laugh, which cracks him up. “Okay, now you need to cool your jets.”

  “Mmmm. Ice cream sounds perfect,” he says. “I’d suggest Dairy Queen, but I think I’m too smart to be served there.”

  “Drive, Einstein. Your secret is safe.”

  six

  WE CARRY DIP cones and French fries across the street to the park and plop down in the grass against a big tree near the jungle gym. A group of kids shriek from a spinning tire swing. Two little boys chase each other, scooping fistfuls of wood chips off the ground and chucking them at each other. Their dad shouts from a grill near the picnic tables that they should stop it. They ignore him.

  Ben has nearly finished off the hard chocolate shell on his vanilla soft-serve and starts dipping French fries into the ice cream. We sit in silence, letting the afternoon sun make us lazy. The quiet between us is different from the tongue-tied awkwardness I first felt just a half hour ago. Most of the time, I’m not frantic to invent conversation around Ben or worried about forcing words out if they won’t come. I know he’s cool just hanging out with our thoughts. Somehow, this makes me feel closer to him, not farther away.

  I’m crunching the last bite of my ice cream cone when a group of guys start a pickup basketball game on the court by the parking lot, and I wonder aloud if Ben’s heard from any scouts lately.

  “Iowa and Indiana have been watching my clips online,” he says. “Told Coach they’re both sending people to see the tournament.”

  “Are you kidding? That’s huge. You’re only a junior.”

  He shrugs. “Don’t know whether to feel relieved or guilty.”

  “Guilty?”

  “About leaving her.”

  He’s talking about Adele, and I proceed with caution, letting his remark sink in before I pursue it. “Is she collecting all that crap in case you don’t get a scholarship? Stocking up now so she can spend all her money on tuition later?”

  “Who knows? She’s constantly afraid of not having enough cash, or enough . . . anything, ever since Dad took off.”

  I can feel the curtain fall in his voice. We never talk about his dad. Ever. It’s as if Brian Cody never existed. “Ben, she wants you to go to college
. She’ll be so excited if you get a full ride.”

  “Just afraid I’ll come home to shelves in every room. Whole damn place will be packed full of crap from Ajax to Zyrtec.”

  I squirt some ketchup across my fries, and wait. If he wants to tell me what that means he will. A guy on the basketball court yelps and goes down. The players gather around him as he rolls onto his back and grabs at his ankle.

  “She’s been hiding stuff in the house again.”

  I glance over at Ben, who keeps his eyes on the injured player. After a minute or two the guy’s friends get him up off the ground, and he starts limping toward a bench between two buddies.

  “I thought you said she agreed to keep all her bargains on the shelves in the garage.”

  “Oh, she did. Then the other day I walked by the guest room and the closet door was open a little. Whole thing was stacked with Rubbermaid bins packed full of tube socks and boxer briefs.”

  “For you?”

  He sighs. “I can buy my own goddamn underwear.”

  A woman with a booming voice calls her kids to the picnic table. Ben chews his cheek, watching as they obey in double time. “I know I’m a total tool for feeling this way. It’s just, Mom’s obsessed. There’s enough crap in the guest room to fill every sock drawer I own from now until I’m seventy.”

  “Maybe she’s just trying to show you how much she cares about you.”

  “Maybe. But wouldn’t it be better to show me she cares by sticking to our agreement? Those Rubbermaid bins aren’t for me. They’re for her.”

  “If you can nail down a scholarship do you think she’ll chill out?”

  He looks at me with a sad smile. “I don’t think it works that way. Pretty sure I have zero power where this whole coupon-hoarding thing is concerned. It’s like some bad reality show.”

  “I understand,” I say. “Sort of. I mean, my parents have their own crazy. Dad makes bad bets in his fantasy football league with the guys on his construction crew, but he’s always on my case about saving more money. Mom is always complaining about how she needs to lose ten pounds, but she’d rather try crazy diets than just eat more fruit and come running with me.”

  Ben smiles. “Remember when she did that grapefruit diet when we were in elementary school? Your dad told her if she didn’t watch it she was gonna squirt herself in the eye every time she peed.”

  “She got so mad at him,” I say. “And then at us because we couldn’t stop laughing about it.”

  We both giggle at the memory. A breeze rustles the new buds on the elm branches above us and blows a strand of hair over my face. I reach up to brush it away.

  “I like my mom and dad,” I tell him, “but sometimes, I wish they’d admit they don’t know everything.”

  “All parents have that thing they don’t know about themselves,” says Ben. “It’s like a room they aren’t aware exists. They don’t know it’s there, so they can’t even look for the light switch.”

  Before I can agree, Ben tosses aside the DQ bag full of empty fry boxes and ketchup packets. He stretches full length on the grass under the tree, lays his head on my leg, and closes his eyes.

  The words on my tongue disappear. My first instinct is to run my fingers through his hair, but I stop my hand midair. It floats over his head for a second, before I press it against my lips, and slowly drop it back into the grass. I relax against the tree, attempting to breathe normally.

  After a few minutes, my heart stops pounding. I can feel the weight of Ben’s head pressed against my thigh, keeping me from floating away. The basketball game has resumed, minus one, and as I watch I realize how lucky I am that my parents and their crazy isn’t so bad in comparison to Adele’s. Losing fifty bucks or ten pounds isn’t going to land you in a psychiatrist’s office or take over your life. Still, it might be easier to relate if we could all just turn on the lights.

  Of course, to them, we’re just kids.

  One day, they say, we’ll understand.

  But I wonder if maybe I’m the one who does understand.

  Sometimes I get the feeling they’ve asked me to hold this big invisible secret for them, like a backpack full of rocks—all these things they don’t want to know about themselves. I’m supposed to wear it as I hike up this trail toward my adulthood. They’re already at the summit of Full Grown Mountain. They’re waiting for me to get there and cheering me on, telling me I can do it, and sometimes scolding and asking why I’m not hiking any faster or why I’m not having more fun along the way. I know I’m not supposed to talk about this backpack full of their crazy, but sometimes I really wish we could all stop for a second. Maybe they could walk down the trail from the top and meet me. We could unzip that backpack, pull out all of those rocks, and leave the ones we no longer need by the side of the trail. It’d make the walk a lot easier. Maybe then my shoulders wouldn’t get so tense when Dad lectures me about money or Mom starts a new diet she saw on the cover of a magazine at the grocery store.

  The sun is hanging a little lower in the sky, and the guys on the basketball court haul their friend with the sprained ankle into a car as the mother at the picnic table packs up the leftovers. My leg is all pins and needles from the weight of Ben’s head, and before I can talk myself out of it again, I run my fingers lightly through his hair. He stirs and opens his eyes.

  “Did I go to sleep?” He rubs his eyes and yawns.

  “Yeah. So did my leg.”

  He smiles and helps me up, grabbing our trash and tossing it in a barrel on the way back to his truck.

  seven

  AS WE DRIVE away from the park, Ben’s phone rattles in the cup holder. The music from the playlist pauses as John Doone’s picture pops up on the screen under the name “Dooney.” Ben glances down and frowns.

  “Want me to answer it for you?” I reach toward the phone, but Ben grabs it in a hurry and taps ignore. The music swells to full volume automatically.

  “Nah—I’ll call him back. Probably just woke up.”

  “How is he going to put his house back together before his parents come home?”

  Ben smiles. “Deacon told him just to burn it down.”

  “Wish I could’ve stayed longer,” I groan. “Was it fun after you dropped me off?”

  Ben glances over at me, but I can’t read what’s behind his eyes. “Nothing’s ever as fun without you there.”

  My stomach drops and I try to stop myself from staring at him. Too late. There is no oxygen in the cab of this truck anymore. Ben takes a big breath, then opens his mouth to speak. Only he doesn’t speak. He bellows a song like one of those opera guys on PBS:

  “Yooooooooou, light up my liiiiiiiiiife. Yooooooooooou give me hooooooope to carry oooooooooooooooon—”

  I punch him in the shoulder. “Asshole.”

  He laughs. “No! Don’t be pissed.” I feel his hand on my knee and look back at him. He’s smiling his Irresistible Grin. The one that made my mom sneak him an extra juice box back at age six when we had snacks after the game. Some things never change.

  “Seriously,” he says, turning onto Oaklawn. “Would’ve stayed at the party later if you’d been with me. Since you weren’t, I walked back to get my truck and left.”

  “Oh. Rachel said she saw you coming in when she was headed out.”

  “Told Dooney bye. He and Deacon were wrecked by that point.”

  “Yeah, Rach sent me a picture, and—”

  “Of what?”

  There’s an awkward pause. “Um . . . of me?”

  “Oh, cool.” He drums his thumbs on the steering wheel.

  “It was not cool. I was blotto. Don’t worry, I deleted it. Made Rachel delete it, too. I was doing shots with Stacey.”

  Ben turns up the volume and a male voice raps about girls in their bras and thongs falling at his feet like trees, “Timber.” Ben taps along on the steering wheel as we pull down my street.

  “Didn’t remember Stacey even being there,” I confess. “Until I saw the picture.”

&n
bsp; Ben shrugs and nods his head with the lyrics, She say she won’t, but I bet she will, timber.

  “I didn’t know she hung out with Dooney much.”

  He glances over at me with a grin, turns down the music a little. “Sorry, what’d you say?”

  Why am I talking about Stacey at a moment like this?

  “Nothing.”

  Will is in our driveway shooting baskets, missing more than he’s making. As we climb out of Ben’s truck, I hear more rim than net—more donk than thwfft.

  Ben’s immediately in action, running into the drive, hands up. “Dude. I’m open.”

  Will tosses him the ball. Ben takes it down for a couple of through-the-leg dribbles, pivoting low as if he’s being double-teamed in a tight imaginary defense. He drives to the basket and alley-oops, like he’s going for a layup, but expertly hooks a pass to Will, who is caught completely off guard. My brother bobbles the ball and chases it into the grass.

  “Awwww, man! Gotta be ready.” Ben shakes his head. “Eyes on the ball, not on my face. I can make you think I’m headed one way with my eyes, but my hands and feet are busy doing something else.”

  There’s a big brother friendliness about this chiding that makes Will nod and smile, and beg Ben to show him how he did that. Before long, Ben’s shirt is off again, and the two of them are locked in a lopsided one-on-one—Will, losing, but triumphant. Court time with a starting junior is a rare commodity for a benchwarmer on the JV team.

  Mom sits down next to me on the front porch steps. She offers me an open bag of gummy worms bearing a large green seal across the front that proclaims them to be FAT FREE!

  I smile and try to look away, but she catches me and pokes me in the ribs. I jump and we both laugh. “Are you making fun of me?” she asks.

  “Mom, all gummy worms are fat free. They always have been. Because they’re made of corn syrup.”

  Her laugh is warm and breezy. She slides an arm around my shoulders. “Well, I’m certainly no scientist like you are, but at least they’re not full of sugar and fat.” She holds the bag toward me once more with a sly smile. “Every little bit helps, I always say.”