by Amber Smith
As I approached, I waved with my free hand and said “Hi.” I told him I was Isobel’s nephew. Nephew. The word sat heavy on my tongue. I told him I was there to see Maia. I had something of hers.
He regarded the bag I was holding with suspicion, as if it contained something dangerous that might detonate at any moment, so I volunteered, “Some stuff to fix her bike.”
“What’s wrong with her bike?” he asked, turning to look at it, perched against the railing of the porch.
“The tires are flat,” I told him.
He set down the insulated lunch bag he’d been holding and walked over to her bike. He leaned in and examined each tire, running his hands along the rubber.
Another car pulled up the driveway and parked next to the truck. And as the woman stepped out and started walking toward us, I could see a little bit of Maia in her. The same dark hair, dark eyes, the same walk. As she came up the pathway, she looked me right in the eye.
“Hi,” I offered first.
Her smile was tired, but pretty. The way my mom would smile after a long day. “You must be Chris,” she said, and just when I felt a little flutter of excitement—the idea that Maia had been talking about me to her mother—she added, “Isobel told me you were staying with her for the summer.”
“Yes,” I said, and then, as an afterthought, “Ma’am.”
She did one of Maia’s ha laughs. “I’ll let Maia know you’re here. Nice to finally meet you.”
“You too,” I called after her.
It was not lost on me that her father and mother did not exchange so much as a nod.
“Here, why don’t you help me turn this over,” her father said.
I set the bag down on the ground and grabbed one end of the bike, following his lead. With only a small amount of awkwardness, we set it on the ground upside down—so the wheels were in the air and the bike was balanced on the handlebars and the seat.
“You’ve done this before?” he asked as I stood there staring at the tires as they spun gently with the air. “You know how to do this?” he clarified.
I nodded, but then added, “Well, sort of.” I was thankful I’d decided to watch another video online last night before bed, but the truth was that even if I had a modicum of knowledge, I had no practice. He nodded back, but I wondered if he could tell by looking at my smooth hands that I’d never done this sort of thing before.
“Here, hold this steady for a minute,” he said, with his hand firmly on the rear tire. I placed my hands where his were. And then he unclamped a lever, slid the chain aside, and smoothly popped the entire wheel off the bike just like I had seen in the videos.
“You have some tire irons in there?” he asked, hitching his chin in the direction of the bag.
I rifled through until I found the package of the little tools that the person in the video had called bike levers. “You mean these?” I asked, just to be sure.
“Yep,” he said, nodding again.
As he waited for me to remove the paper backing and pop them out of the plastic case, I was positive he thought I was the biggest wuss on the planet. But then I thought about Coleton: He’s a boy, no debate about that, and he wouldn’t have a clue how to do any of this either. It didn’t make him less of a man, just a different kind, and I was actually okay with the idea of being a different kind of man too.
“You take this end”—he held up the flat side of the instrument—“and pry it in under the tire casing like this.”
“Okay,” I said, leaning in. I wanted him to know I was paying attention.
“Then you take another, do the same thing. Then you can just take it right off with your hands.” I watched as he moved around the whole circumference of the tire, gently prying it right off the rim.
He proceeded to change that bike tire, exactly as I had seen it done in the video. Only, he didn’t need to watch any video to know how to do it. It was like he had this innate, institutional knowledge. I wondered if I’d ever be at the point where I had that, or if I even wanted that—if it even mattered.
“Hey.”
We both looked up at the same time to see Maia standing there.
As she got closer, there was this scent coming off her. I didn’t know if it was her hair or her skin, but it was a clean, citrus fragrance that made me think of oranges. For once in my life, I was actually thankful for what was not in my pants, because right at that moment, the way my insides were stirring, I was pretty sure I’d have to hide a really embarrassing boner.
“What are y’all doing?” she asked.
“Your tires need fixing, don’t they?” her dad said.
“Yeah,” she responded.
“Well,” was all he said.
He detached the front tire, and then murmured, “You wanna try this one?”
I took the tool that he was handing to me. I pried the tire off the rim, the way he had showed me.
“So, how’d they get flat anyway?” he asked. When I looked up at Maia, she shook her head in this discreet, almost microscopic way; I knew it meant I was not to say anything.
“I don’t know,” she answered, extremely convincingly. “I just came out of work and found ’em like that.”
“What’s happening to this damn town?” he said to no one in particular.
As he walked past Maia, he put his hand on her shoulder.
“Hey, thanks, Dad,” she told him.
He didn’t say anything back, but he did nod—he seemed to be big on the nonverbal communication, like a lot of dads are, I suppose.
“Yeah, thanks for showing me how to do all this,” I said, and he waved in acknowledgment.
Maia crouched down next to me and made a face. “I hope that wasn’t too weird.”
I shook my head. “It was okay, really.”
The crack of their front door closing was followed quickly by a series of clicking sounds and a scuffle. There was a dog headed straight for us. As it approached, already barking, I asked Maia, in the bravest way possible, “It doesn’t bite, does it?”
She looked at the dog advancing on us and said, “Maybe if she had more teeth left.”
“That doesn’t make me feel better!” I said, scrambling to stand before the dog got to me.
“I’m kidding!” she wailed, grabbing my hand to pull me back down to the ground—and now I was scared for an entirely different reason. Her hand was touching mine, and I liked it. “Sit.”
“Me or the dog?”
“Both of you, sit.”
The dog maneuvered next to Maia and stopped barking.
“Roxie,” Maia began, as if she was speaking to a human child. “This is Chris. Don’t bite him.” Then she turned to me and said, in the exact same tone, “Chris, this is Roxie. She will not bite you.”
Roxie stood up and sniffed all over my arms and legs, then sat in front of me and stared, her face right in my face, her dog breath hot as she panted.
“If you just pet her, she’ll leave you alone.” Maia reached out and started stroking behind the dog’s ears and down its back. “She can’t see very well. I don’t think she quite understands personal space anymore.”
I let the dog sniff my hand and then followed what Maia was doing.
“See?” Maia said softly. “He’s not so bad.”
“Yeah, this is a lot less scary now,” I told her.
“I was actually talking to Roxie.”
I laughed. “Thanks.”
Maia stopped petting the dog, and said, “Okay, Roxie. Go lie down.” The dog moved about three inches to the right, and then plopped down.
We took way longer to finish the second tire than her dad took to do the first, but it meant Maia was close to me longer, so I wasn’t in much of a hurry. We stood the bike upright, both tires fixed and reinflated, and admired our work.
“Thanks, Chris.”
“No problem.”
I was preparing to leave when she sat back down and started petting the dog again. The dog woke up and looked at me like I should
be sitting down too. So I did.
“Really,” Maia continued. “I was thinking I’d be without my bike for the whole summer.”
I nodded, only because I didn’t really understand what she meant by that. Her dad was there the whole time; he could’ve fixed everything days ago, in five minutes flat. Instead of saying that, I tried to work around it by asking, “So, you didn’t want your parents knowing about the stuff with Neil, I take it?”
“No way.” She cringed, adding, “There are certain things I would rather keep completely separate from them. For their own good.”
I didn’t know what she meant by that either, but I could understand the sentiment—hadn’t I kept huge secrets from my parents too? For their own good.
She glanced back toward the house and sighed, saying, “Parents are so . . .” She trailed off, never finishing. She didn’t have to, though.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “If it means anything, they were pretty nice to me.”
“Oh sure, they are nice,” she agreed. “They’re just not nice to each other.”
“Right,” I said.
“Then again, it’s probably not the best idea to live with someone after you divorce them.”
“Seriously?” I looked toward the house too. “They’re—wow, that is—”
“Fucked up?” she finished for me. “Yeah. I don’t ever wanna end up like that.”
I thought about all the tension and the fighting between my parents this past year, how I was driving a wedge between them, how I was scared they were going to end up like that too—just two strangers who share the same house but can barely stand to look at each other.
“Me neither.” The guilt twisted into my stomach like a knife.
“What about your parents?” she asked. “They still together?”
“For now, anyway.” I debated saying what was on my mind. But the silence seemed to open up just the right space for it. “Part of the reason I’m here wasn’t just to get a break from them. It was to give them a break from me too.”
“Why?”
“They don’t really agree on much when it comes to me. If they ended up getting a divorce over it, I guess it really wouldn’t be a surprise.”
Sitting on the ground, with the day’s heat beginning to fade around us, Maia looked at me in this thoughtful way.
“If they do,” she started, “it wouldn’t be because of you. You know that, right?”
“I don’t know.” I shrugged. “Maybe.”
It was quiet, and I didn’t want her to think I was feeling sorry for myself, so I started talking again, trying to be a little more upbeat. “Have you ever heard of binary star systems?” I asked her. “It’s where there are two stars that orbit each other?”
She shook her head.
“Well, like four-fifths of all stars are binaries. But the two are so close together, they look like one point of light. Most of the stars in our galaxy that are like our Sun are in these binary star systems.”
I was boring her, I was sure.
I cleared my throat. Rein it in, Chris. “Binary stars orbit each other, and they’re so close sometimes that they can transfer mass, one to the other. Like one starts feeding off the other, and sometimes it just keeps gaining more and more mass until it basically consumes the companion star altogether.”
She was tilting her head slightly as she listened, her brows knitted together like I was telling a joke and she couldn’t decide what the punch line was.
I shrugged and added, “It’s just something I’ve thought about before, when it comes to my parents. Although, maybe it’s all parents. Or all couples, anyway. I don’t know.”
Her expression flickered like a light blinking in and out, bright one second, dark the next. Before I could interpret what it all meant, she let her head drop down, her chin to her chest, and I watched as she brought her hands up to cover her face. She didn’t make a sound, but her shoulders were shaking. I thought she was crying, but then she tossed her head back and her laughter became audible. Not her ha laugh, but real, loud, hard laughter.
The dog jumped up and waddled toward the house.
“What?” I finally asked. “Why are you laughing?”
She drew in a sharp breath and held her hand to her side as she struggled to get the words out. “Sorry,” she wheezed, breathless. “You just—I—”
“What?”
“That was—”
“What?”
“It’s just—that was very cheerful, Chris,” she finally said, still giggling. “Thank you for that. Really, I feel so much better.”
Now I dropped my head. “Okay, point taken. I guess maybe that sounded a little dark.”
She brought her thumb and pointer finger together in front of her face so they were almost touching, and said, “Just a little.”
I could feel my face getting hot, turning all shades of red. “It was supposed to be a comforting idea,” I tried to explain.
Her nose scrunched up in this way, her features contorted in an expression that hovered between amusement and horror. “How?” she shouted.
“Like what if it’s only natural that things don’t last? So then maybe it doesn’t have to be such a terrible thing. Right?”
She laughed silently again, clamping her lips together as she shook her head.
“No?”
“No.”
After another bout of laughing, she looked at me, her eyes lit with this inner glow, and said, definitively, “You’re weird.” Except, the way she said it, I had never felt more normal.
MAIA
I WATCHED CHRIS WALK BACK across the field, and I pressed my hands against my cheeks, opening and closing my mouth, all the muscles in my face strained from laughing so much.
Dad was in the kitchen washing his hands at the sink, his microwave dinner box sitting open on the counter. Glancing over his shoulder at me, he said, “Everything work out?”
“Yeah,” I told him.
He turned around and grabbed the dish towel that was hanging off the handle of the stove. “Good.”
“Daddy?” I couldn’t help thinking back to our last interaction in the kitchen the night before, the look on his face when he walked away. “Thanks again for helping.”
“You’re welcome.” He dried his hands, looking down once again, like he was stopping himself from saying more. “You know,” he added. “You could’ve just asked me for help to begin with.”
Really, could I have, though? Instead I said another version of the truth: “I didn’t want to bother you.”
“Bother me?” He smiled—actually smiled, for the first time in I don’t know how long. “What do you think dads are for?”
I’m not sure anymore. But I didn’t say that either.
“Well, thanks again. I’m sure you saved us hours of not knowing what we were doing.”
As I started to walk away, he called me back. “Wait, Mai?”
“Yeah?”
“That boy,” he began. “Nice kid. Seemed, anyway.”
I shrugged, nodded. “Yeah, I guess so.” I didn’t want to appear too enthusiastic. About Chris. About this conversation. About anything, really.
“Is he . . .” He paused, and looked at me, hard, like he was waiting for the word to magically appear in the air between us. “Funny?” he finally finished, uncertain.
It took me a second to make sense of his intonation. I thought maybe he had heard us laughing, but no, he wasn’t talking ha-ha-comedy funny. I was going to make him say what he meant—that’s what Mallory would have done.
“Hilarious,” I replied, crossing my arms.
He rolled his eyes, either at me or himself, I couldn’t tell. “You know what I mean.”
“No.” I looked up at the ceiling, pretending to consider it. “I don’t think I do.”
He lowered his voice and said, “I meant gay, Maia.”
“Gay?” I repeated more loudly, and I saw him look over my shoulder toward the door, just in case Chris was still out there or h
ad somehow developed superhuman hearing. “You know that’s not a bad word, right?”
“I know that, thank you very much.” He turned back toward the counter and unpacked the plastic tray of frozen food and held it between his hands, picking at the edge of the plastic film. “I was just wondering. Something about him, I don’t know. I just thought—maybe?”
My parents were weird about plenty, but never stuff like this. They were pretty liberal. They taught us to be too, so I had no idea where this conversation was coming from, or where it was heading.
“Dad, how would I know?” I finally answered.
“Okay, okay,” he said, holding his hands up. “I won’t bring it up again.”
“Wait, why does it even matter?” I demanded. “Since when do you care about stuff like that?”
He lowered his chin and looked at me like I was the one who was completely clueless now. “Since never. I’m just trying to decide how worried I need to be.”
“Worried about what?”
“About you running around town with some kid nobody knows.”
“Oh,” was all I could say.
“Is that a problem?” he added pointedly, echoing the words I’d said to him, except the way it sounded coming from his mouth was totally different. Playful, not spiteful like mine had been.
Dad could surprise me sometimes.
I wanted to say, Touché, Dad, way to stand up to me, but that would have killed the moment. Instead I said, “No, it’s not a problem.”
“Good.” He placed his dinner in the microwave and closed the door. “Glad to hear it.”
“Well, I honestly have no idea if he is or not.”
And just as I was thinking, I hope not, Dad said, “I hope so.”
I pulled my hoodie down off the hook in the hallway. I was about to leave, but I ducked my head back in. “I’m gonna go for a bike ride. I won’t be late,” I told him.
He said, “Be careful.”
I knew he wasn’t only talking about the bike.
