The Last Forever (13 page)

Henry’s got a satchel over his shoulder, and it’s bulging like a fat man in a tank top. “New books?” I ask.

Henry shrugs. “I’m an addict.”

“Are you interested in
everything
?”

“Hmm. Not football. Not . . .” He thinks. “Eighteenth-century porcelain?”

“Basically everything.”

“Okay, yeah,” he admits. “Hey, do you mind if we stop at my house? I forgot my . . .” He pats his back pocket where his wallet would be.

“No problem. I’ve got my bike, though. Should I leave it here?”

“Nah. Kenny Travis will steal it. Kenny Travis will steal anything. He once stole the Jarvises’ Saint Bernard when it was tied up outside the bank. Anything goes missing, you head over to Kenny Travis’s house and his mother will give it back.”

“His mother?”

“Kenny’s eight.”

I am in Henry’s car, and I am having a hard time believing I am in Henry’s car. It is an old Mercedes, but don’t get the wrong idea. The car is about a thousand years old, and it’s
yellow and boxy, and every now and then it backfires and I think we’ve just been shot.

“Car mechanics,” Henry says. “I’m not interested in car mechanics.” We’ve wedged Jenny’s bike into the backseat, and the front wheel is spinning near our heads. I watch Henry’s profile. I’m engrossed, because this is Henry driving a car. His elegant hands shift into third. I am on a fact-finding expedition in a new country that is Henry. There is a string of wooden beads hanging from his rearview mirror. There is an orange water bottle by my feet. A notebook with a worn leather cover is shoved partway into the fold of the front seat.

“Journal?” I gesture to it.

“Nah.” Henry blushes, though. Even the tips of his ears are red. This is what happens to Henry when he lies, although I don’t know that yet. “Just stuff. To do. Thoughts, whatever. Here we are.”

It isn’t where I pictured Henry living. He has turned into a neighborhood with a sign marking its entrance:
WHISTLING FIRS
. It’s a regular suburban-type street, with regular houses that all basically look the same. It’s the sort of place where someone’s bound to have one of those outdoor banners that remind you what holiday it is. And, yep, there it is. Decorated with a beach bucket and sunglasses, so we’ll all know it’s summer.

But wait. What’s this? There’s a guy washing a car while wearing a kilt. Maybe I’ve been out in the sun too long.

“Is he wearing a kilt, or am I seeing some sort of Scottish mirage?”

“He’s wearing a kilt. That’s Jackson. He went for a hike once on Mount Conviction a few years ago and got lost. Like, about-to-die lost. But then he heard the sound of bagpipes and followed it to safety. Now he wears a kilt.”

I make that
heh
sound in the back of my throat that means
Are you kidding me?
But Henry’s serious. He beeps his horn and Jackson waves and Henry waves back as we turn in to a driveway. I’ve learned my lesson: Don’t let a suburban ranch house fool you.
Nothing
is regular on Parrish Island.

Inside, Henry drops his bag by the door. I snoop around on my Henry fact-finding mission. There’s a grandfather clock and a bench to sit on while you take off your shoes. Past the hallway, there’s a staircase and a living room with a plaid couch and a rocking chair and a table with lots of magazines.

“Hell-o!” he calls out, but no one replies. “I live here with my mom. My dad lives on Velveeta.”

Well, this is what I hear him say, anyway. I am thinking this sounds like a very limited diet when Henry notices my puzzled expression.

“It’s a boat.
La Bella Vita
? ‘The Good Life’? He usually docks it down by Hotel Delgado, but he’s taken it to Tortola for a while.”

“Oh, wow. Cool.”

He takes the stairs two at a time, and I’m not sure what to do, so I follow. And then there I am in Henry’s room. I am hoping his mom doesn’t come home right now. It’ll look bad if we’re in there alone. In the film version, my shirt is buttoned
wrong and Henry is tucking his in as fast as he can, but it’s only the wish-fear of my imagination, because Henry is focused on the task at hand. He is searching around his desk for his wallet and feeling in the pockets of jeans, which gives me a minute to take in his room.

Books. Books are stacked and tumbling. Books are packed into bookshelves. Books are lying open on his unmade bed and are piled up to create a nightstand. There is also an old, sepia-toned map of the world on one wall, and on another, an elaborate boat in a rambunctious sea. I recognize that boat.

“Hey, the
Dawn Treader
,” I say. I am so happy to see the
Dawn Treader
, I can’t even tell you. I loved that book. The Chronicles of Narnia are my very favorite books ever. “Those are my very favorite books ever,” I say.

“I knew I liked you for some reason,” Henry says. He is kicking a pair of boxers under the bed so I don’t see. He is feeling around in his sheets. “Aha,” he says. He holds up the wallet and gives it a look that says that sneaky bastard has nothing on him.

“Great job, Encyclopedia Brown,” I say. Why his wallet is in his sheets, I’ll never know.

“We’re outta here,” he says.

And we are. But not before I see it. On his desk, there’s a picture frame. It is not odd that he has a picture frame on his desk, of course. The odd part is that it is facedown. At the sight of it—well, I know right then that there is more to be found out about Henry Lark than I first thought. More than favorite
books, or fathers on boats, or boxers. A photo too special to get rid of but too painful to look at means one thing and one thing only—Henry Lark has had his heart broken.

*  *  *

On the way out of Whistling Firs, Henry waves to an old lady whose house has a
FOR SALE
sign out front.

“Mrs. Martinelli,” Henry explains. “They’re moving. She and her husband bought a cocoa plantation on the Ivory Coast. I’ve known them since I was, like, seven.”

“Does anyone around here just do anything . . .” I was going to say
normal
, but that sounds bad. “Usual?”

Henry looks at me with a baffled expression. He has no clue what I mean. The car deodorizer hanging from his rearview mirror is shaped like a Twinkie and smells like vanilla, and nothing in this place strikes him as odd.

“Everyone has a story, I guess,” he says. “And every person’s story is either a little crazy, or a lot crazy.”

“I guess that’s true.”

“You too? I mean, what are you doing on Parrish? You’ve never exactly stayed with Jenny before, at least for any length of time.”

“Does everyone know everything about everyone else here?”

“Pretty much,” Henry says. He is a careful driver. Or else, his car just can’t make it over thirty. Every time he turns a corner, the bike wheel starts spinning by my head as if it’s in the lead and rounding the last bend in the Tour de France.

“I didn’t
know
I was coming here.”

“Surprise trip?”

“You could say that.”

“Got it. It’s private.”

“No, it’s fine. I don’t mean to be mysterious, but we’re having a happy evening, and in this particular story there’s a dead mother and an AWOL father.”

“Oh.”

“See what I mean?”

“Jesus.”

“So let’s talk onion rings for now. First thing I should know about you. Onion rings or fries?”

“Both,” he says.

“I knew I liked
you
for some reason.”

*  *  *

The Hotel Delgado overlooks the sound. It’s a stately, old white building with a huge porch and green shutters. It’s something you’d see in Key West, and I know this because we went there once, Mom and Dad and me. Dad wanted to go because he read that the town celebrated the setting of the sun every night. He thought we shouldn’t miss a place like that. The celebration turned out to be touristy, with people selling conch shells and T-shirts and handing out pamphlets for discount marlin-fishing trips, but this did not dampen my father’s enthusiasm one bit.

The Hotel Delgado, though, is surrounded not by lush palm trees and humid air, but by tall, shadow-casting evergreens
and shaggy pines. There are several docks in front of it, packed with sailboats and cruisers, and it all seems like a big surprise because you drive and wind your way down a forested road and then there it is, this place so beautiful and strange at the same time.

We order our burgers and have the polite, first-date argument over who will pay.
No really. But I asked you. But that’s not fair. Okay, but next time . . .
When we get our food, the bags are stuffed and hot to the touch. We sit down on this bench in front of the hotel and spread out our food. I’m feeling the happiest I’ve felt in a long time. Henry asks me about San Bernardino, and I ask him who the biggest jerk in his class is. (Zachary Riley, who’s a bully.) I ask him what he wants to do after graduation next year, and he asks me who in
my
class I’d take to a deserted island. (Xavier Chung, who is still in the Boy Scouts.) We are joking and talking about our mutual dislike of foreign films, and he is telling me how much he hates movie theater butter squirted on popcorn, and I am about to tell him my popcorn story (don’t ask), when my phone buzzes. I decide to ignore it, but then it buzzes again, and I start to imagine that Jenny has fallen on her kitchen floor. She is writhing in pain and has scooted inch by inch over to the phone, where she has just barely managed to kick it off the hook with her one unbroken leg.

“Sorry,” I say to Henry.

“No problem.”

I fish my phone out of my purse. It’s not Jenny at all. It’s
another text from Dad, a photograph of a pregnant woman sitting on a bench, maybe at a bus stop. There are four children with her. One boy has a toddler on his lap, one kid is under the bench itself, and another is hitting his own head with a drumstick.

Shawntel Believed That One in Five Children Is a Musical Prodigy.

I turn off my phone. “My father.”

“Do you need to talk to him?”

“Not
now
. Anyway, he’s in Portland. With the creepy-cat-lady version of the baroness in
The Sound of Music
.”

“Mine’s in the Caribbean. With the ditsy twenty-two-year-old version of the baroness in
The Sound of Music
.”

“Hmm. I guess we’ve got something in common.”

We both say it at the same time. “I knew I liked you for some rea—”

We’re laughing again. We’ve been having so much fun that I almost forget how attracted to him I am. I’ve forgotten all about those sweet eyes, and that swoosh of hair, and that ever, ever so slightly imperfect smile. I’m comfortable with him. That’s the shocking thing. It is turning out that Henry is not only gorgeous, but that he could be a great friend. You always hear people say that about the person they’re with—
he’s my best friend.
But I never felt that way about Dillon. There were basic best-friend requirements he didn’t fulfill. He didn’t really get me. We didn’t make each other laugh. He refused to say
I’d feel the exact same way
if he didn’t feel the exact same way.

“Doesn’t your friend Elijah work here?” I ask Henry.

“He’s a waiter. I was trying to see if I could see him.” He looks over his shoulder. The restaurant is inside the hotel, but it also spills out onto the hotel porch. There are a few couples having dinner at tables with white tablecloths and candles that have not yet been lit. “In an hour, this place’ll be packed.”

“I could never work in a restaurant. The whole balancing-dishes-on-your-arm thing. Have you always worked at the library?”

“There and the bookstore.” He gives me that apologetic look again. But there’s no need to apologize for loving books. It’s one of my favorite things about him.

“I worked at our Parks and Recreation department. I was a helper in this horse class for kids.”

“So you like horses,” Henry says. “Okay, horses are cool. Did you know they’ve been around for fifty million years? The first one was as tall as a fox.”

“I don’t know much about horses at all. I’m not sure I
do
like them. They kind of scare me. All I had to do was walk one around a ring with a kid on its back and, you know, clean stalls.”

“Crappy job.”

“Ha-ha. Hilarious. Hey, do you always laugh at your own jokes, Mister?”

“I think so. I think I do.”

“Wait. I do know something about horses. The whole measuring thing. Each hand stands for four inches. If a horse is
sixteen-point-two hands, the point two stands for—”

“Two fingers,” Henry says.

I smile. It’s possible that Henry and I understand each other. He seems to realize this too. We are both quiet. The sun is beginning to turn to that bittersweet orangey yellow of twilight, and the water is shimmering gold, and the boats are bobbing and sloshing, and it makes this bench a perfect bench for a kiss. At least Henry is looking at me and I am looking at him, and though we barely know each other, there’s the sense it’s about to happen. I shut my eyes for a moment, ready for him to lean in. But I open them again and find Henry looking out toward the evening sky.

He takes my hand, gives it a little shake. “You’re funny,” he says. “I like you.”

“I like
you
,” I say.

And, there, yes, it is happening again. His eyes are on mine, and I am feeling this connection between us. It feels old. Like it’s already been, or will be, for a long time. This bench no doubt has seen many kisses; it is likely just all in a day for this bench. But what happens next is not what I expect. Henry leans in and kisses my forehead. It is so tender; it is so
kind
that I almost want to cry.

“Wait,” I say. “I almost forgot.”

I go reaching for that stupid bag of stupid caramels. And that’s when I knock my purse off the bench, spilling everything from travel-sized deodorant to travel-sized shaving cream. At our feet is a Rite Aid for gnomes. Thank God no
tampons come rolling out. The perfect kiss moment is ruined as I grasp for the tiny Crest box and the bitty bottle of Scope, the folding-out toothbrush, and the SPF 35 lip balm.