Running on Empty (16 page)

“You’re home early.” Raye stood in the doorway of the family room, which Jillian hadn’t had a hand in decorating, so its oak floors and sand-coloured walls made it a warm, inviting space for the comfortable leather furniture Ethan sprawled on now.

“Mm.”

“I thought you were working this afternoon.”

“I was.” Ethan didn’t feel like talking. He’d called Allie’s cell several times, but it kept going straight to voice mail. Maybe her battery was dead. He’d stopped by her house, but no one was home. From there he’d gone to the library and then her dance studio, but another group—which looked to be for beginners and chronic klutzes—was being taught, so he’d left there, too. After that, he’d had no idea where Allie might be. Shopping with Bethany or her mom? She hadn’t shown up at school and he’d meant to phone her earlier to find out why, but his head had been preoccupied with getting to The Chow Down and, hopefully, seeing Link Hornsby. Now that he needed to tell her what had happened, he couldn’t find her.

Frustrated, he’d come home and turned on the seventy-inch LED in the family room just to have noise in the house. Two women on the Home Shopping Channel now
oohed
and
ahhed
over a skin cream that, from the sounds of things, did everything but cure cancer. Maybe even that, too.

“Thinking of ordering some?” teased Raye, nodding at the screen.

He didn’t reply. Instead, he began clicking the remote, ratcheting his way up through the hundreds of channels their satellite dish brought into the house.

Raye frowned, then plopped herself down on the loveseat that formed the short side of a leather L in front of the flat screen. “What’s up, Ethan?”

“Price of gas, according to C-SPAN.”

“Funny.”

“I’m here all week, two shows a night.”

Both of them silently watched the images change rapidly in front of them, logos of various networks flashing past.

Finally, “Ethan, is something wrong?”

“Life,” he muttered, his eyes still on the flickering screen.

“Anything I can do?”

He was about to say no when he suddenly turned to her. “That offer to loan me some cash still good?”

She nodded. “How much do you want?”

“How much do you have?”

“Four eighty, four eighty-five, something like that.”

Ethan tried to look nonchalant. “Say, three hundred? Just for a few days?”

Raye’s left eyebrow lifted, but her voice was even as she replied, “No problem. When do you need it?”

“When can you give it to me?”

“It’s upstairs.”

He grinned at her. “You didn’t get the memo about interest?” Their father was forever lecturing them about the importance of making deposits into their accounts rather than leaving their money lying around earning nothing.

Raye grinned in return. “He shouldn’t have given me Juanita,” she said, referring to the huge blue piggy bank that sat on her dresser. “I’ll be right back.”

And in a minute she was. “Here,” she said, passing him a roll
of bills. She hadn’t asked him what the money was for, but the unspoken question hovered over them like a glowing neon sign.

Ignoring it, Ethan took the money and stuffed it into the pocket of his jeans. “Thanks, Raye,” he said. “I’ll get it back to you in a couple days. Three at the most.”

“No worries,” she said. “I know where you live.”

Standing up, Ethan grabbed the jacket he’d left lying on the ottoman and headed toward the patio door.

“Ethan?”

Both arms in the jacket’s sleeves, he turned. “Yeah?”

“Is everything okay?”

He flashed her a grin. “Never better.”

She looked down, and he could see a new splash of ink on the back of her hand where Jazz had been at work again. From across the room, he couldn’t tell what it was. Not a dragon this time. A unicorn, maybe?

“You don’t seem …” Her voice trailed off.

“What?” he asked, failing to keep the impatience out of his own voice. He had less than half an hour to make it to the bank before it closed. “I don’t seem what?”

She shrugged. “Nothing.”

He nodded. “Thanks again, okay?” And he left.

Afterwards, he realized he should have gone to find Hornsby and offered him Raye’s cash as a stake at the waterfront casino.

But he’d remembered Hornsby’s comment in the Echo, how their fifty-fifty split that night had been “a one-time low introductory offer,” and he knew the guy would want an even bigger chunk this time. And besides, Hornsby had been such an asshole in the alley
—You think I’m your friend. I’m not
—that he was the last person Ethan wanted to see that afternoon.

Instead, Ethan had made it to the bank just in time to deposit Raye’s three hundred bucks into his account, after which he’d gone home, logged onto MyDigitalVegas.com, and tried to transfer the money to the site. It took him a dozen attempts that afternoon for the money to go through—apparently, the bank’s site wasn’t as efficient as the online casino’s—but after almost an hour he was good to go.

And in less than fifteen minutes, he’d lost it all.

“—so if you two could keep the noise down this evening, I’d appreciate it.” Jack Palmer looked from Raye to Ethan, who absently moved something resembling angel-hair pasta—minus most of the calories and all of the taste, since Jillian had cooked it—around on his plate with his fork. “Is that doable?” he asked.

Ethan continued to play with his food until he felt a foot kick his shin under the table. “What?” he demanded, looking across at Raye, who was nodding toward their father. “Yeah, yeah,” he muttered.

“Thanks,” said Jack. “The crew should be in and out in a couple hours, and a lot of that is set-up time. The interview itself shouldn’t take more than half an hour.”

If he’d cared at all, Ethan might have wondered how the tech person in charge of lighting would handle the glare off those Brilliant Cream walls, since the media consultant for his father’s party had decided the interview should be conducted in their living room. He’d granted CBC’s Connie Althorpe an exclusive “At Home with Jack Palmer,” and she was scheduled to arrive within the hour.

Ethan, however, didn’t give a damn. The only thing occupying his mind at the moment was the money he’d let slip through his fingers in the last two days. First the thousand remaining after
he’d paid Filthy his five hundred, and now the three hundred he’d borrowed from Raye. And that wasn’t even counting the three hundred he’d paid for that damn driver’s licence. On top of that, he’d thrown away his job at The Chow Down this afternoon, and he’d be lucky if his next—and last—paycheque from there came to more than a hundred bucks. That wouldn’t even cover the Christmas gift he’d wanted to get Allie let alone the money he now owed Raye.

He had tried the Martingale system again, but he knew now where he’d gone wrong. The Martingale required more than balls and a bankroll to work. It also required brains. Ethan had been in a hurry, and instead of starting out with his regular five-dollar wagers, he’d begun placing ten-dollar bets, which meant he’d gone in the hole much faster. He’d been up sixty bucks when the law of averages kicked in and his initial winning streak ended. Five losing hands later, he had only fifty left, far less than the three hundred twenty his next bet should have been. What else could he do? He bet the fifty.

And lost it.

Idiot! If only he hadn’t gotten greedy. Next time, he’d know what to do. Next time, he’d stick to five-buck bets, wouldn’t get carried away by a few early wins.

Next time.

Ethan unlocked the back door and slipped inside, feeling like a thief in his own home as he keyed the entry code into the alarm system. He’d left school after first period—Beaker had given his forged note only a passing glance before waving him off—and didn’t think he’d be missed since so many others in his class were absent, one of them Allie. Pete and Seth were among the missing, too, and he wondered what the two of them might be up to. Whatever it was, it couldn’t be worse than what Ethan was planning to do.

He passed through the kitchen and down the main hall, glancing into the living room where his old man’s interview had taken place. He wondered if it had gone as well as his father had hoped. As he’d promised, Ethan had stayed in his room the whole evening—he hadn’t felt like doing much else anyway—then he’d lain awake most of the night weighing his options. As a result, he’d overslept and missed breakfast, so there’d been no one to ask how the “At Home with Jack Palmer” thing had gone. Not that he was really interested, but at one point he could hear his father’s raised voice floating up from the living room. He was probably making some point like he did in court—dramatically. Ethan had heard nothing else after that, except for the camera crew’s van pulling out of the driveway a few minutes later.

Fighting the urge to tiptoe, Ethan now climbed the staircase and went through the first door on the left. As usual, he shook his head at the sign above his sister’s bed:
Raye’s World
. Even
on this sunny day, it was like a tomb in there. The walls and ceiling were a deep purple, a tribute to her favourite band painted by Raye herself, the week before they moved into the house, and the window and bed were draped completely in black, a holdover from Raye’s brief goth flirtation. But Raye’s World was anything but grim. Pinned up on every available wall surface were hundreds of cartoons, some clipped from newspapers and magazines, some downloaded from the Internet, and others drawn by Raye herself. They were nothing like the cartoons in those dumb decorating magazines that Jillian sometimes brought over and left lying in the family room. Raye’s taste ran to
The Far Side
and
Doonesbury
and even weirder offerings she’d clipped from magazines like
The New Yorker
and
Harper’s
. She’d shown Ethan her latest find a couple of days ago, a drawing of dozens of cattle entering a tiny corral with dialogue balloons saying things like “Excuse me” and “Pardon me.” Raye had laughed like crazy when she’d shown it to him, and he’d laughed as much at her reaction to it as anything else. Although he’d never said so, his sister’s weird sense of humour was just one more thing that he loved about her.

Which made what he was about to do now even harder.

Moving to her dresser, he picked up the blue ceramic pig she’d named Juanita P. Orker and heard inside it the clink of coins and the rustle of something more substantial. He turned it over and unscrewed the plastic plug in the pig’s belly, then shook the contents onto the black bedspread. Just as he expected, he counted nearly two hundred bucks, more than half of it in toonies, loonies, and quarters. It was so like Raye to have given him only bills the night before while she kept the more unwieldy coins for herself.

Replacing Juanita’s plug, Ethan scooped up the money and shoved it into his pockets, then repositioned the pig on Raye’s dresser. With the law of averages on his side—and what he knew
about balls, bankrolls, and brains—he’d be able to repay all the money he’d borrowed from her by the end of the day. He was sure of it.

“You don’t have school today?” asked the teller at the bank, a young man who was carrying about fifty pounds more than he should.

Looking over the counter, Ethan saw that the guy’s ass hung over both sides of the stool he was sitting on. “In-service,” he lied.

“Gotta love those, huh?” the man grinned. “Now what can I do for you today?”

Ethan began pulling the coins out of his pockets, placing them on the counter between him and the teller. “I have a hundred ninety-six bucks that I—”

“Sorry,” interrupted the teller, “I can’t take all those loose coins.”

“Why not?”

“Bank policy. That many coins have to be rolled.” The teller reached into a drawer and pulled out several paper tubes. “These here are for your two-dollar coins, these are for loonies, and these ones are for quarters. Doesn’t look like you’ve got enough of anything else there to roll.”

Ethan tried to hide his impatience. “Can I do that here or do I need to come back?”

“There’s a table in the reception area you can use if you don’t mind doing it out in the open but, if I were you, I’d use the one over there.” He pointed to a table behind a large pillar that held a display of banking pamphlets and brochures.

And if I were you
, thought Ethan,
I’d cutback on the Cinnabons
. “Thanks. I’ll just be a minute.”

The teller had grinned at this and, fifteen minutes later, Ethan understood why. Getting coins into those paper tubes wasn’t as easy as it looked. More than once he’d dropped a handful of toonies on the floor, and they’d rolled in all directions. He had just dived again after a bunch of quarters when he heard a voice he recognized.

“I need to see the bank manager, please.”

“Certainly, Ms. Fontaine. He’s with another client at the moment, but he shouldn’t be too long. Would you care to take a seat?”

Ethan looked up from beneath his table and saw Allie’s mother standing at the end of a counter separating this part of the bank from two offices with signs on their doors:
Manager
and
Assistant Manager
and names below them. An attractive woman in a grey suit stood on the other side of the counter.

Christ
, thought Ethan.
Of all the times—

“Do you know how long he’ll be?” asked Allie’s mother.

“I can check for you,” the woman said.

Ethan glanced around the space and saw that the only empty chair was directly across from where he was working. Shit!

Allie’s mother put her hand to her throat, her fingers toying with the necklace Ethan recognized as the one Allie and Bethany had given her for her birthday. He knew that gesture well. He’d seen it when he’d been at the Fontaines’ house the day Bethany had strep throat and she and Allie’s dad had debated taking her to the doctor again. He’d seen it when she was attending one of Allie’s dance recitals just before Allie and her partner executed a particularly challenging move. He’d seen it the night he’d dropped Allie off after a movie, the streets slick with freezing rain that hadn’t been forecasted. The woman was nervous or upset. Or both.

“No, that’s okay,” she said. “It’s probably better if I make an appointment.”

“I know he’s free at one o’clock,” said the woman behind the counter. “Would you like to come back then?”

Ethan watched Allie’s mom tug at her necklace again. “I think it’d be better if I called him.”

The woman nodded. “By all means. Would you like his card?”

But Mrs. Fontaine was already moving past Ethan’s table on her way toward the exit.

Relieved, Ethan crawled out from under the table and slid the last errant coins into the sleeve for quarters. Standing up, he collected the filled tubes and remaining loose change and headed back to the lineup.

The Martingale system served him well after he returned from the bank … for the first hour.

At one point, Ethan had won back all the money he’d borrowed from Raye the previous night and was up a hundred eighty-five bucks—and that didn’t include the cash he’d taken from Juanita that morning, which he still had. He’d lost some along the way, of course—five bucks here, ten there, and a string of bad hands had cost him forty bucks on one bet and eighty on another—but he’d kept his head and stayed the course, waiting for the law of averages to kick in when he needed it. And it had.

Until the second hour.

At one point, he considered stopping, almost clicked the End Game button, but then he slid the cursor over to Hit Me. Again and again, like his brain had separated itself from everything but the job of creating the electrical impulse that travelled down his arm into his index finger.

Ten minutes into the second hour, it was all over.

Sitting on his bed now, Ethan looked at the screen in disbelief, staring at the zero in his Your Total Winnings window.

He flung his laptop across the room.

“Hey, buddy,” said Ethan.

Standing in the open doorway of his parents’ kitchen, Pete looked first at his feet and then at Ethan on his back step. “Hey,” he said.

“Can I come in?”

Pete glanced behind him and Ethan could see Pete’s mother making a pie at the counter. Ethan nodded to her—”Hi, Mrs. Hennessey”—and she waved back, her hand covered with flour.

“Maybe I’d better come out,” Pete said. He stepped inside for a moment and then reappeared, slipping on his jacket as he closed the door behind him.

Ethan moved down the steps into the driveway. Behind him, Pete grabbed the railing with one hand and nimbly swung his legs over the wrought iron and landed on the concrete beside his friend.

“You weren’t in school today,” said Ethan. He wanted to ask,
So, you and Seth hanging out now?
but that would’ve just complicated things.

“I drove Ma to Bridgewater. Doctor’s appointment.”

Ethan blinked, embarrassed. “She okay?”

Pete nodded. “Eye checkup. They put drops in and she couldn’t drive herself home. No big deal.”

“Good to hear.”

The two stood looking at each other, an awkwardness settling around them like wet sand.

“I bet you’re surprised to see me,” offered Ethan finally.

Pete looked at his feet. “Not really. No.”

Another moment passed. Then both began speaking at the same time: “Look, I’m sorry—”

They stopped, then chorused, “Jinx!” Like they were nine years old again. Ethan laughed self-consciously, and Pete joined him. Their laughter lasted longer than it needed to, as if they were delaying an uncomfortable inevitability.

“You first,” said Pete, finally.

Ethan nodded, ran a hand through his hair, cleared his throat. “I’m sorry for what I said on the phone about options. I didn’t mean it. You’ve got plenty.”

Pete shrugged. “I don’t know about plenty,” he said, “but thanks, man.”

“I was a jerk,” continued Ethan. “I was pissed over what you said about Allie, but that was no excuse to take it out on you.”

Pete looked away. “Yeah. About that.”

Ethan glanced at his watch. The day was disappearing. “Look, Pete, I gotta ask a favour.”

“Favour?” Pete’s voice seemed to come from farther away than where he stood in the driveway.

Ethan didn’t know how to ask what he’d come for so it wouldn’t sound like the only reason he was there. But he asked anyway. “Can I borrow some cash? Fifty, a hundred, whatever.” He paused, then added, “Two hundred, if you got it.”

Pete turned to him. “You came here for money?”

Ethan flushed. “Yeah, look, I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important.”

Pete stared at him for a moment, a series of expressions flickering across his face. Finally, “I got maybe twenty bucks.”

“Twenty’s good.” Ethan hated the eagerness in his voice, but he plunged on. “I’ll pay you back soon as I can. It’s just—”

“Don’t worry about it,” said Pete. He reached into his back pocket, took out his wallet, then hesitated. “Ethan?”

“Yeah?”

“That’s really why you came here? To borrow money?”

“Not
just
that,” Ethan replied. “To apologize, too, right? But I’m in kind of a rush. Do you think you can—”

Pete held up his hand. “There’s something I gotta say.” He took a deep breath, released it. “I’m sorry.”

Ethan felt a wave of impatience surge through him. “Look, it’s not for long. I’ll get the twenty back to you tomorrow. Or the next day for sure.”

Pete shook his head. “It’s not about the money.” A car came down the street, and he followed it with his eyes until it passed. “I didn’t mean for it to happen.”

“What?”

“You’re my buddy. My best friend. Friends don’t do something like that. They don’t
plan
to, anyway.”

Ethan frowned. “What are you talking about?”

Pete looked toward the street again. “It wasn’t Allie’s fault.”

Ethan could feel his impatience become annoyance. “What’s Allie got to do with it?”

Pete turned to him. “She really didn’t tell you?”

“Tell me what? She wasn’t in school this morning.”

Pete shrugged. “Yeah. I was up half the night myself.” Now it was his turn to run his hands through his hair, and he kicked at a piece of concrete crumbling from the driveway’s edge. “I like Allie, Ethan.”

“I know you do. Who doesn’t?”

“No.” He took another deep breath. “I mean I
really
like her.”

Ethan’s eyes narrowed. “What are you saying?”

Pete looked at his feet. “You know what I’m saying.”

Ethan tried to make sense of what he was hearing. “But how
could
you?”

Pete looked up, his face lined with misery. “I didn’t want to. Honest. It just—”

“But you’re gay!”

Pete gaped at him. “What? I’m not gay. Where’d you get
that
idea?”

Ethan ran over everything in his head, trying to sort it all out. “You’ve never been serious with a girl. And you haven’t dated anyone for
months
. You don’t even
look
at girls. I saw you at—” He thought back to their lunch at Perk Up Your Day, how Pete had ignored the server’s big breasts, looked through her as she’d leaned over him, collecting their dishes while he—

While he chatted with Allie.

And when had Pete stopped dating?

After Allie arrived at John C. Miles.

And the questions:
What’s Allie doing tonight? Does Allie know? How do you think Allie’ll feel?

He even knew about Ragged Ending, Allie’s favourite band.

“I’m not gay,” Pete said simply.

Ethan looked at the crumbling concrete that Pete was poking with his toe, began to feel the driveway vibrate under his feet. A tractor-trailer churned up the street, the sound growing as it approached then washing away as it passed. It left a smell of something heavy in the air. Oil? Rubber? Transmission fluid just before the gears seize? Everything connected in some way. Allie and Ethan, Ethan and Pete.