There wasn’t a second of silence at the table during the whole meal or the hour after we finished the last bite of pumpkin pie and still sat around the table, laughing. We covered every subject from politics to Millet gossip to things Adam and Eve had done, like breaking into the neighbor’s house and kidnapping their cat’s rubber mouse.
I’m not sure when I noticed Eric wasn’t talking. He was leaning back in his chair and holding his stomach. “Eric, are you okay? ”
“I’m not sure.” He put a hand to his forehead. “See if you think I have a fever.”
I did what he asked. “Feels fine to me, sweetie.”
“You’re holding your stomach. Do you have a stomachache? ” asked my mom the worrier.
“Sort of,” he said, rubbing his stomach. “Abdominal pain. Or at least the beginning of it. I definitely feel gurgling.”
“Gurgling? ” Amber repeated.
Eric nodded, still frowning. “Peristalsis.”
Amber sighed. “Eric, were you on your computer this morning? ”
“What? ” Eric asked.
“Amber,” I warned, knowing where she was going with this. She’d heard Eric talk about his ailments at school after microbiology class a couple of times. Couldn’t she just leave it alone?
“On the Internet? ” Amber pressed.
“I was looking up a few things,” he said to me, as if I’d asked the question.
“Like salmonella, for example? ” Amber guessed.
“Salmonella? ” Mom sounded horrified. “You think our turkey gave you salmonella? ”
“No he doesn’t,” I said, trying to lighten the situation, while shooting Amber a shut-up glare.
“I’ve never heard of anyone cooking a turkey all night, so I thought I’d check it out,” Eric admitted.
“I knew it,” Amber said, letting out a little laugh that made me redouble my glare.
“It’s not all that funny, Amber,” Eric said. “Salmonella is the second most common intestinal infection. Fourteen in one hundred thousand people are stricken by it every year, and it’s underreported. Only three percent of the cases are ever reported to a doctor.” He didn’t sound angry. I’d never seen Eric angry. It was more like he was lecturing a small child.
I knew from experience that Amber didn’t like lectures.
“Eric,” Amber began slowly, “you don’t have salmonella. You have a bad case of cyber-chondria.”
“What? ” Eric demanded.
“People who Google diseases on the Internet can get cyber-chondria,” Amber said. “Like hypochondria, only in cyber-space.”
I started to laugh, then swallowed it. The last thing I wanted to do was laugh at my boyfriend. “Amber,” I said, standing up and grabbing dishes, “help me clear the table.”
Eric still seemed as good-natured as ever. He got up from the table, but he didn’t look at me. “Thank you for the lovely meal, Mrs. Daley. Let me help with dishes.”
“No way,” Mom said. “Maybe you should lie down for a while.”
“Yeah, Eric,” I said, eager to be sympathetic.
Still, he didn’t even glance my way.
“If you’re sure you don’t need me,” he told Mom, “I think I will lie down a bit. Thanks.”
He was saying the right things, but it still felt like the closest Eric and I had been to a fight. I was a lousy girlfriend.
The rest of the afternoon Eric slept while Amber, Mom, and I cleaned up a million dishes and delivered turkey to the homeless shelter. We didn’t mention Eric, but I agonized inside. I’d wanted him to have a great time at our Thanksgiving. I wasn’t sure where things had gone wrong, but they had.
Mom dropped off Amber at her car, and she and I walked up the drive to our front door. The dogs were huddled together on the front step, and the house was dark.
“You poor babies,” I murmured, letting them in and rubbing their cold fur. “Eric? ” I called. He must have let them outside and forgotten about them.
“Eric? ” I walked back to my bedroom and peeked in. He was asleep. I shut the door and joined Mom and the dogs in the living room. Eve was still shivering. I turned to Mom. “Eric didn’t know they shouldn’t stay outside. He probably fell asleep after he let them out.”
“I know,” Mom said as we both tried to get the dogs to settle down.
I figured the dogs must have scratched at my bedroom door as soon as we’d left for the shelter. Then they would have started barking, and Eric wouldn’t have been able to sleep, so he’d let them outside. “They don’t have dogs,” I explained, feeling like I had to defend my boyfriend.
“Believe me, I can tell,” Mom muttered.
“Don’t you like Eric? ”
“I do, honey. I’m sure everybody likes Eric. Eric the captain of the swim team, Eric the captain of the debate team, Eric the student body president, Eric—”
“Eric my boyfriend,” I reminded her. “So? ”
She fiddled with Adam’s collar and didn’t answer for a full minute. Then she smiled up at me. “He’s just not Eric the dog guy, I guess.”
“He’s never had a pet, Mom. What do you expect? In fact, I’ve been thinking that the only thing keeping Eric from being perfect is the fact that he’s dogless.”
“And a cyber-chondriac,” Mom muttered. She grinned at me. “Being a dog owner was one of your requirements on your perfect boyfriend application, as I recall.”
“True. And I’m already working on that one.”
“Oh yeah? ”
The idea born at Eric’s Thanksgiving took root on ours. “I’m giving my boyfriend a dog for Christmas.”
10
The weeks after Thanksgiving, I doubled my hours at Grady’s.
“I don’t understand why you’re working so much,” Eric complained when I had to work the second Saturday in a row. He’d called my cell just before closing, and I was crouched behind the cereal boxes to talk.
“I need the money, Eric.” I had to pay down Mom’s credit card, but Eric didn’t need to know that one.
“But it’s your senior year. Our senior year. Talk to your boss. He can’t expect you to work Saturday nights.” As far as Eric knew, I was working “retail,” which to him might have meant selling jewelry. I never lied to him. He just hadn’t asked specifics, and I didn’t offer any.
“Bailey!” Sarah Jean hollered. “Where are you? Got a customer here buying a pack of smokes and a bottle of eyedrops. You’re on, honey!”
“Gotta go,” I whispered, and punched off. “Coming!” I shouted to Sarah Jean. This one was almost too easy. I pulled out my raspy, sexy Billie Holiday blues voice as I hurried up the aisle, singing, “You must realize / Smoke gets in your eyes.”
“That’s the ticket!” Sarah Jane said, laughing.
I knew all the lyrics because Mom must have watched Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dance to that song, “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” about a hundred times in some old movie. “They asked me how I knew my true love—” I stopped singing. There, waiting impatiently at the counter for the Grady girl to ring up her purchases, was my boyfriend’s mother.
“Bailey? ”
“Mrs. Strang? ” My orange cap never felt so heavy. I wanted to rip it off, but it was pinned on. My Grady dress felt scratchy and cheap. “Why are you here? ”
She held up the eyedrops. “I . . . I’m on my way home from a Red Hat meeting.”
I didn’t know or care what that meant. We didn’t say anything else as I rang up her pack of cigarettes and the box of eyedrops.
“Well,” she said, her smile twisting and disappearing again, “have a—see you.”
I watched her walk out, climb into her BMW, make sure her door was locked, then drive off.
Sarah Jane appeared beside me and put her arm around my shoulder. “What’s the matter, sweetie? ”
So I told her that my boyfriend didn’t know I worked at Grady’s, only now his mother did, and I was sure she already hated me.
“Don’t you worry now,�
�� she said, wrapping me in her hug. “That woman’s not going to tell anybody. Something tells me she’s good at keeping secrets.”
“What do you mean? ”
Sarah Jean laughed and smoothed back my hair the way I’d seen her do for Rudy a thousand times. “Did you know she smoked? ”
“She didn’t light up over Thanksgiving.”
“Not in front of you, anyhow. Something tells me she’s not going to tell anybody she was in Grady’s buying cigarettes.”
I tried to hold on to Sarah Jean’s assurance that Mrs. Strang wouldn’t rat me out, or herself. But Monday at school I couldn’t stop watching my boyfriend all during writing class to see if he’d changed toward me. But he hadn’t. He acted normal. He even confided in Jeannette and me about his fear that he might have been infected with some germ when he pricked his finger in microbiology. So he obviously wasn’t obsessing about Grady’s Gas and Snack.
In French class, I couldn’t wait to corner Roni. “Tell me the truth. Did your mother say anything about me last night or this morning? ”
Roni wrinkled her nose, which had a tiny silver ring through one nostril. “You mean, like, ‘Let’s put a hit out on Bailey to keep her away from my son’ ? ”
“I’m serious, Roni. I kind of ran into her last night.”
“Let me guess. She went all the way to Millet to buy her cigarettes?” I guess I looked shocked because she explained, “We all know she smokes, but nobody says anything, and she never smokes in front of us. It’s a Strang thing.” Her eyes narrowed. “I get it. She bought her secret cigs in Grady’s, right? ”
“You knew I worked there? ”
She nodded. “Some of my friends go there just to hear you sing.”
“You’re kidding. Have you been there? ”
She shook her head. “I figured you didn’t want us to know or you would have told us.” She grinned. “It’s a Strang thing.”
I felt stupid. “I don’t know why I haven’t told Eric. I love my job, and I know there’s nothing wrong with working at a gas station.” I thought about it and tried to be honest with myself. “I guess I thought Eric would be disappointed in me. Do you think your mother will tell him? ”
Roni shrugged.
For two days I obsessed about my Grady-girl secret. Amber had reached her listening limit. “Bailey, if you whine about this one more time, I’m telling Eric myself.” We were sitting on the floor of my bedroom, Adam in my lap and Eve curled next to Amber.
“Maybe she’s forgotten about it,” I suggested.
Amber groaned. “That’s it. I’m sure she’s wiped the image of you in that cute little orange costume right out of her sophisticated, well-coiffed head.”
“You’re right!” I cried, feeling more desperate than ever. “Eleanor Strang would never let her son be with any girl in an orange uniform.”
“Enough!” Amber grabbed a pillow and bonked me.
I figured she really had reached her crying-to limit. It was time to cry out to God.
God got right on it. I knew something had happened the next morning when Eric came running up to me at my locker. “Bailey!”
I braced myself. “What? ”
“You know how I’ve been griping because you work so much and—? ”
She’d told him. “Eric, I was going to tell you myself—”
“Well, what would you think about a job where you and I could see each other all the time, and it would be more like hanging out than working? ”
“Wait a minute. You lost me.”
“How’d you like to work at the Riverbend Country Club? ”
“What? ”
“I’ll bet the pay’s double what you’re making now. It’s a great job. I know dozens of guys on the waiting list to get in for a job there—any job. And you’d be on the social staff. You’ll sign people in and help plan parties. What do you think? ”
I couldn’t think. I’d been sure he was going to break up with me. Instead, he was offering me a job? A really great job. “But why me? How did you pull it off? ”
“It’s all Mother. She had to call in a lot of favors to get you that job.”
And then I understood. I could almost hear Roni whisper in my ear, “It’s a Strang thing.”
I knew Mom wouldn’t be easy to convince, so I chose the middle of her favorite movie, Doctor Zhivago, to tell her about my new job.
“Do you really want to clean up after rich people every day? ” she asked.
“It’s not like that. They’re my friends. Eric’s and my friends. And anyway, I won’t be a janitor.” I explained it the way Eric had. “Plus, I’ll make three times what I’m making at Grady’s.”
I could tell that one hit home. “It’s your decision, Bailey. But you’re the one who has to tell Sarah Jean.”
I hated quitting on Sarah Jean, but she understood. She understood better than anybody, in fact. I had a feeling Amber wouldn’t be so understanding, but I was wrong. She thought it sounded like a great job and even asked me to keep an eye out for an opening for her.
Only Roni voiced strong dissent. “I can’t believe you’d give up your job at Grady’s for that country club,” she complained, after refusing to talk to me for two days.
“What exactly do you have against my new job, Roni? ” I demanded. “Is it the lack of an orange uniform? The great hours? Or maybe the terrific pay? ”
She sighed. “It’s that you meet a much better class of people at Grady’s Gas and Snack.”
But Roni was wrong, and Eric was so right. I had the perfect part-time job. It didn’t take long for me to pay off Mom’s card, buy two new outfits and a pair of shoes, and still chuck some into my college savings account, which I thought of as my prom-dress account.
It almost took me until Christmas to convince Eric to accept the gift I wanted to give him—a dog. I think, in the end, I simply wore him down. He’d made a face like he’d just stepped in dog do-do, then resigned himself to the inevitable.
So, with only two days left before Christmas, Eric picked me up from my house, and we headed out to buy him a dog. “Where to? ” he asked, turning on his windshield wipers against a light snow that had turned Millet, Missouri, into a wonderland overnight. “We haven’t even talked about breeds. Are there any breeders in Millet? ”
“Head for the old highway,” I commanded. “We’re not going to a breeder.”
“Bailey, you can’t always trust pet stores. They might say the breed is pure, but you never know.”
“We’re not going to a pet store.”
“Okay, I give. Where are we going? ”
“To the animal shelter, of course. We’re going to rescue a puppy.”
Eric tried to talk me out of it, but I wouldn’t give in. “Don’t forget—this is my Christmas gift to you. I get to be boss of it.” I directed him to the shelter. Amber and I had been there a bunch of times. When we were about twelve, they let us walk the dogs and call ourselves volunteers.
Eric parked behind the building. “Why don’t I just wait in the car? ”
“No way! Dogs are members of the family. You have to help choose.”
The animal shelter looked like an abandoned warehouse. But inside, it was pretty modern and smelled like bleach. A young woman at the front desk asked us to fill out papers, but all of her questions and comments were directed to my boyfriend. “You live around here?” she asked, fingering her beaded choker necklace.
“Bailey does,” answered my helpful boyfriend, nodding in my direction.
She didn’t give me so much as a sideways glance, which was understandable, since her gaze was riveted on Eric. “It’s so wonderful of you to adopt a pet.”
I shoved the adoption papers at her. “There you go. Maybe we could see those dogs now? ”
The girl led us to a room packed with dogs in metal cages stacked on top of each other. At the first cage, a mangy dog limped to the front and whimpered. His tangled hair had bare spots where he’d probably been in a fight . . . and lost.
But there was something about his soulful eyes.
“What about this dog, Eric? ”
“You’re kidding. My mother wouldn’t allow that one in the house. Trust me.”
It made me mad that his mom had power, even when she wasn’t around. “You could keep the dog a secret.” Like your mom’s smoking addiction.
He put his arm around me and laughed. “Come on. Let’s at least look at the other dogs, okay? ”
We walked from cage to cage. I fell in love with every single dog, even the bulldog that growled at us. Why wouldn’t he growl? There were no outside smells or sounds in this concrete echo chamber. And in a matter of days, somebody would take this dog and kill it because nobody wanted him.
Eric didn’t like any of the dogs. I liked all of them. In the end, we just couldn’t decide.
As we left the shelter, I tried to think positive. “Let’s go look for dogs in Freemont. I’ve never been in their animal shelter, but it has to be pretty big.”
“Tomorrow, okay? I promise.” Eric grinned and opened the car door for me. “Right now, I’ve got a better idea.”
Eric drove to Freemont, refusing to tell me what he had planned. He went straight to Riverbend and pulled into a BMW car lot. “Let’s try some on for size,” he said.
“Cool.” Mom and I used to pretend we were car shopping. She’d let me pick any car on the lot, and then she’d ask to take it for a test-drive. We hadn’t done that in years, but I was up for it.
Eric did the choosing, and I went along for the ride. I loved the new-car smell and the adventure of trying out cars with my boyfriend. Mom and I had never owned a new car. We bought our used cars from friends or out of the paper.
When we were done, I thought we’d head back. Instead, Eric motioned for the dealer. “I’ll take this one.”
“Eric!”
He flashed me his smile. “It’s my Christmas gift and going-to-Yale present from my parents. I was pretty sure this was the model I wanted, but I thought it would be fun to try them out.”
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