How to Tell a Lie (7 page)

Seth emailed her every day after that, but only once a day. With questions about her day, questions about her emotional state, hidden among the talk about psychology, cleverly worked in between comments about the game. She replied, even though she knew it was encouraging him. He called her office once, on Wednesday, asking if she wanted to eat lunch. As it happened, she really couldn’t—she had a department meeting. She didn’t want him to feel rejected, so she shared her cell and home numbers and made it a point to express regret over having to turn him down. He didn’t press about the weekend after she mentioned she was going out of town. She almost hoped he would, because she wanted an excuse not to go home to catch the football game Tess had been talking about.

The temperature was dropping every day, down to what was normal for September. The dog days were past. Any day now, Allison knew, would come the heady scent of wood smoke on the air, the sound and feel of leaves underfoot. She didn’t know why, but this year she couldn’t stand to see the summer go, the strange late summer with the oppressive heat they had all complained about.

Going home, sitting on the ridged metal bleacher seat. Watching her cousin
Mikey
run up and down the field where she had played clarinet in the marching band every fall weekend of her own high-school career. Psyching up for the team rivalry against some other small town, chanting the same cheers she had chanted in high school, and remembering how Pete
Nielsson
from the drum line had once tried to feel her up under her uniform jacket while they were sitting in the stands during a game. She had elbowed him hard, and the band director had scolded them both. Doing all those things, remembering all those things, would make the autumn real.

The real passage of time, currently suspended by some magic of weather and mood, would resume.

* * * * *

Tess drove, as ever, quickly and borderline recklessly. She handled her little garnet-red roadster like a motorcycle, weaving in and out of the Friday afternoon traffic effortlessly as she carried on a rant about the necessity for the trip in the first place.

“You know, we drive all this way and it’s supposed to be for
Mikey
, but I’d bet cash money he’s not even going to stay around after the game. You know he’ll be gone once he’s changed out of his uniform, then we’ll all be standing around like dorks, trying to figure out what to do. Then we’ll end up at Benny’s again and drink too much and then dance to those same dozen songs on the jukebox and it will just be sad, sad, sad.” She flicked a glance back over her right shoulder and slid over a lane, bypassing a black Suburban and speeding up to take advantage of the gap she had reached by doing so.

“Benny’s has a karaoke machine now,” Allison volunteered, trying not to flinch as they swung past the larger vehicle. It seemed as though they missed it only by inches, but she knew her anxiety was probably making objects appear closer than they really were.

“Karaoke. Great. So now instead of just dancing to the same dozen dumbass songs, we’ll be singing the same dozen dumbass songs.”

“Yeah, well. Our dads will be happy we’re home though. Is Lindy driving down by herself then?”

“No. She’s actually not coming. First regular season home game, and
Mikey
is starting quarterback this year. I have no idea how she’s justifying missing it. But she apparently had some business thing she couldn’t get out of. Because there are so many blazing business emergencies in the high-paced world of knitting.”

Allison eyed Tess warily, sensing her cousin was in a mood over more than just an obligatory trip home. She had wondered several times recently if Lindy, Tess’ shy, younger sister who normally formed the other part of their usual threesome, was actually seeing somebody. But Allison wouldn’t dream of suggesting that Lindy’s “business thing” might have a strong personal element. Not to Tess, particularly not when she was on a tear like the one she was on today.

Allison wished, as she had nearly every day since she was sixteen, that she still had a mother to discuss these things with. Sometimes a friend, even a cousin as close as a sister, just wasn’t enough. And she knew that Tess and Lindy, who had lost their mother when they were even younger—about thirteen and ten, respectively—must feel the same way.

“When you’re just starting out with a business like hers,” she finally said neutrally, “you probably have to do a lot of stuff on other people’s schedules.”

“Yeah, whatever.”

The maple trees, always the first to show the season, were starting to turn. Flame-red leaves among the green, scattering over the road and swirling up in joyful abandon in the car’s wake. The girls turned off the highway and onto the road that led to home and a tiny whirlwind of leaves marked their passage, like a handful of fall-themed confetti.

“Pretty,” Allison commented.

“Mm-hmm.”

“Smells like somebody’s barbecuing.”

“Probably your dad. When is he ever not barbecuing?”

Tess was just being contrary. They were still half a mile out of town, and several more blocks than that away from Allison’s childhood home where her father was, no doubt, firing up the barbecue. Still well out of smelling range.

“Tess, what is the matter? You’re being so…”

Tess raised an eyebrow and spared a look at Allison. It wasn’t a friendly look.

“So bitchy? I told you, I didn’t really want to make this trip. I have to do the dumb high-school football autumn color piece because my editor knew I was heading here, and it’s a crap assignment and I hate it. I hated high-school football when I was in high school, I’m not a sports writer and I don’t see why I should have to write about it now. God, I can’t wait for my next book to come out. I’m hoping the royalties will let me quit the paper and just write full time.”

Allison didn’t ask why Tess was making the trip in the first place. She knew Tess’ reasons were the same as her own. Both of them felt responsible for their fathers, bound to check up on them frequently, using any ceremonial occasion as an excuse. Both felt that way for the same reason—because they had become the lady of the house at far too early an age.

“Tess, how could you have hated football in high school? You were a cheerleader.”

“I hated that too,” Tess said with a smirk.

“Must be nice.” Allison knew girls in high school who would have killed to be cheerleaders, to be down on the sidelines at every football game. To be Tess.

“You do what you have to do.”

“Somebody in particular you wanted to keep tabs on at all those games?” She couldn’t resist the dig, since Tess was obviously going to be in a bad mood no matter what Allison said.

“Yes. Danny Fields. If I hadn’t kept an eye on him all weekend long he would have screwed his way through the entire cheer squad and half the drill team. He got pretty damn far down that roster even when I did try to watch him like a hawk.”

It was true. Tess had dated Danny throughout her junior and senior years, but she had never been under any illusions about his long-term viability or his short-term fidelity. She saw him as convenient, as the type of person she should be dating. And she was the type he should date. He was a tight end, and he went on to some small amount of college fame as a player until a back injury knocked him out of the game for good. Now he was living in Indianapolis and selling insurance. He had married another girl he knew from high school, and Allison had been invited to the wedding. She skipped it. She knew, because she had been unfortunate enough to drive past and see them, that Danny had screwed one of the bridesmaids in the parking lot behind Duke’s Steakhouse during the rehearsal dinner. She doubted it was Danny’s last bachelor fling. Going to the wedding would have felt dishonest.

But the incident, though depressing, did serve to confirm Tess’ fundamental ability to size people up. It also confirmed that Tess had issues of her own, because she had voluntarily aligned herself with Danny for her own cold-hearted ends for the two most important years of her high-school career. Thereby avoiding, not coincidentally, other more potentially meaningful entanglements. She had never been one to make close friends easily, despite her vast number of good acquaintances. She tended to collect people and hold them in orbit around her, keeping them at a distance of her choosing. She tended to date men she sort of disliked, men with whom she had little in common.

Allison decided to drop the whole subject, although she knew it was never Danny who had held Tess’ gaze at all those football games. She wasn’t watching the tight end with the big shoulders and the shaggy blond hair, who drank a six pack of beer every Friday and Saturday night and—it had startled Allison to realize Tess knew this—had probably still managed to sleep with at least half the cheerleaders and a good quarter of the drill team girls.

No, Tess’ interest had always been elsewhere. Tess had only ever had eyes for the quarterback, even though she refused to admit it. Jake Hogan. He had returned to Cranston a few years ago and since that time Allison noticed that, although she complained about it every time, Tess seemed to find any number of excuses to go home every few weeks. This local color story was just the latest in the series.

“Yep, it was your dad cooking,” Tess said with a laugh. They pulled up to the curb in front of Allison’s house and waved as they got out of the two-seater. Their fathers, not twins but still looking too much alike to be anything but brothers, were standing in the side yard next to the big charcoal grill. Smoke was already pouring generously from the coals, and the two men were staring earnestly at the embers and making final adjustments; another flake of mesquite here, a high point in the coals knocked down over there, and then Allison’s uncle Stuart produced a heaping plate of steaks and started placing them carefully over the heat.

“Ally, just in time. Put your bag inside and then get me the marinade from the counter in the kitchen, please. With the brush.” Her father had barely looked up from his serious task, and he spoke gruffly, but when Allison stopped to hug him he smiled almost shyly and kissed her on the forehead. Her uncle, greeting Tess, gave her a half-hug in passing as she headed for the short set of steps that led to the kitchen door.

Allison was almost knocked over by her cousin
Mikey
, all six foot two of him, barreling through the screen door and vaulting down all three steps. Hard on his heels was a Golden Retriever, tongue lolling out to the side, entire body wagging in anticipation as the boy turned mid-flight and flipped a flying disk across the wide lawn behind the house. The disk made it almost to the end of the yard, where it sloped down toward the creek, before the dog snapped it from the air and returned with the toy and his tail held high.

“Who is that?” Tess demanded.

“Wabash,”
Mikey
said with a grin that probably felled high-school girls at twenty paces. “He’s our new mascot.”

“He’s your brother’s folly, Teresa,” said Uncle Stuart.

“You never let me and Lindy have a dog. We begged you, and you never let us have one. And now he gets one? So unfair!”

“Tess, you sound like a twelve-year-old,” Allison pointed out. “Here, boy!”

The animal galumphed over to Allison, his fur flopping with each step, and sat politely while she knelt to pet him.

“He’s gorgeous,
Mikey
. And he’s so well behaved. Where did you get him?”

“Golden Retriever rescue group in Indianapolis. He only stays with me because the coach’s little girl is allergic. He’ll be coming to all the games this year.” He ran a hand fondly through the dog’s thick ruff and Wabash looked up at him with obvious devotion.

“Totally unfair,” Tess insisted, but stooped down and let the dog lick her face.

Allison continued inside to fetch the marinade, dumping her backpack on a chair. The familiar smells of the kitchen greeted her, along with a flash of a memory of her mother standing at the kitchen sink, smiling out the window as her father passed by with the lawnmower. The kitchen always took her right back to the year she was sixteen, as though time had stopped in this one room. Even now, thirteen years later, Allison always expected to walk in and see her mother in the kitchen, as she had every day after school while her mother still lived. Sometimes it still made Allison cry, that horrible moment of memory and realization. After her mother’s death, she had started entering the house by the front door after school. She didn’t realize why until years later.

Coming to herself and shaking off the moment of melancholy that the kitchen time warp so often caused, Allison left the room quickly. Saucepan and brush in hand, she returned to the yard.

The tradition was that the family would eat outside at the picnic table then proceed in as many cars as necessary to the first home game. Most of the town would be there. Allison tried to get herself into the mood as she devoured her steak, but was still feeling a little detached. When she heard her cell phone bleep, telling her she had received a text, she jumped at the harsh electronic noise that seemed so out of keeping with the picket-fence surroundings.

It was a short text, and she wasn’t surprised to see it was from Seth.

Seth Brantley: Hey princess, did you bring your laptop?

She smiled and looked around. Nobody was paying any attention; they were all still eating and chatting. With an eagerness she found a little disconcerting, she thumbed the buttons and composed a reply.

Me: Yep. It’s shackled to my wrist, you didn’t notice?

Seth Brantley: Your dad have a decent connection?

Me: Yes, why?

Seth Brantley:
Marielle
bailed on us again. For a hot date.

Me: The nerve!

Seth Brantley: I know, right? Can you come raiding again?

She tapped her fingers thoughtfully over the keys, debating. She had her laptop, she even had her headphones and microphone in her computer bag, and she could easily devise a good reason for needing to return to her father’s house before ten. But was it a good idea to let herself be tempted into a repeat of the post-raid activities they had enjoyed last Friday?