Page 17 of Sublimate
But I also wasn’t ready to share what I was looking for, so I only shook my head. “I’m good,” I told her. “I got what I needed.”
“Good,” she echoed back to me, and then I watched her start to poke around in her hair with her finger. “Yesterday at the gas station, I ran into a girl I graduated with. From high school,” she clarified. She had found a fat, springy curl and she slowly twirled it. “We weren’t really friends but we knew each other.” She told me about a field trip that they had all taken to a town with great fried chicken restaurants, but that wasn’t the point of the story. She twirled faster as she got to that: “She said that she’d just seen Nolan Whitaker. Remember how you were asking me about him a few months ago?”
“Yeah, I remember.” I hadn’t discussed him with her since then, though. There hadn’t been much to say.
“He told her he had been away for a while, but now he’s back.”
The last time I had seen him, he had been on his way home from the airport after a trip. “I guess he gets around a lot,” I commented. “You had said that he has his own plane.”
She nodded and quickly spun her hair. “I was also thinking about how you wanted to see pictures of his house. It’s not too far from here,” she noted. “Maybe half an hour.”
I knew that, because I had done a little more looking on the library computer when she hadn’t noticed. Not on my own phone, though, because that had turned into an issue. “It seemed very nice.”
“It is. I went out of my way to drive by there,” she said. She was talking fast and swirling her hair even faster, like the topspeed of a mixer in the baking videos I’d been watching. “Wasn’t that weird? I don’t know why I did it but when I heard that girl talking about him…I don’t know. Yeah, it was weird,” she answered her own question. “I’m twenty-eight, not eighteen. But when I was a teenager, I wouldn’t have done that. It would have taken too much nerve and I was afraid of almost everything back then. I’m much better now,” she assured me.
“Did you see him there, at his house?” I asked, but she shook her head.
“I would have been very embarrassed because then he might have seen me, too.” She took a moment to find another curl and started to spin that one instead. “Um, have you talked to him lately?”
“No. We had coffee once, but that was in January.” I had thought that maybe I would hear from him afterwards because that was what he’d said, that he’d be in touch. But I hadn’t heard anything and it had probably been for the best. “I have no idea how he is or what he’s doing.” Maybe he had returned to Hawaii or maybe he’d gone someplace where he’d needed to speak French. He had known what “crudités” meant, after all.
“Oh. Never mind,” she said, and went quickly over to her desk.
I had to get to work, too. I had one house to do and then I was going to see about picking up something else to add to my income. My cleaning business hadn’t expanded very much, although Cadence had tried to help by editing my online ads. She had worked with me on making a spreadsheet of myschedule and the contact info of all my clients, so I was more organized (she was a huge fan of organization).
She had also posted about my services on her social media. “I only have ten followers,” she’d admitted. “But maybe one of them is looking for help around the house.”
All of those things had been great, but unfortunately had not resulted in any new business for me. I was having to look elsewhere for income, which I wasn’t looking forward to…I just wasn’t sure what else to do. It had been a hard winter.
I left the library and cleaned the one house, and the whole time? I was thinking about Nolan Whitaker again. It wasn’t as if I’d spent the past few months with him stuck in my brain but he had run through my thoughts once or twice. Or more. I had wondered what he was doing and I’d looked at pictures of Maui, imagining him there.
But he could have been anywhere. There were no restrictions on someone with plenty of money, no job, and a plane, right? Life was boundless.
My own boundaries seemed extremely restrictive right now but I could do something about them. I could leave and go somewhere else—anywhere else. That had been my search at the library, in fact: new places to live. But for the moment, I was heading back to Kolter’s house and I was feeling pretty defeated, too. There were thousands of other towns and cities, but there were problems. One was not having enough money to buy gas, to eat, and to get a place to stay. Another was running into sometype of vapor that pursued me and melted my skin, but money was the real issue.
A few weeks before, the snow had also melted in the driveway. It had exposed deep ruts of mud and I had to be careful that my low car didn’t get stuck in them. Then I carefully walked over the dirt to the steps, and I picked the places that I knew were sturdier as I went up them. The pine needle I’d balanced on the door handle was still there, which was a good thing. It was always a question in my mind when I came home: was I going to walk in and find Kolter waiting for me? His car had broken down but he was getting dropped off, sometimes by friends and often by his mom. She couldn’t have been aware of why he wanted to stop by so often.
Anyway, I always set up the pine needle so I could at least have a moment to prepare myself if I saw that it had fallen. But despite the all-clear signal now, I didn’t go in quite yet. I sat on the top step, on the left side near the edge where it didn’t dip very much, and thought more. There really was a lot to consider: where I was going to live, how I would get there, if I really wanted to go through with the job I had agreed to do, and again, Kolter. When the furnace had started to fail, he had stuck around for a little while. But the day he’d left for his mom’s house to play video games had signaled a big change in our lives. Since then, he hadn’t spent the night here but maybe he would want to again since it was getting warmer as the last frost date was approaching. How would I deal with that? I had gotten more used to being alone, less afraid of animal noises and the soundof the wind in the trees. I wasn’t thinking as much about the old graveyard that was only three miles away.
In fact, the graveyard put me less on edge than the thought of having Kolter around, but it was his house. I had kept on paying his mother even if he wasn’t living with me, and he had mostly been keeping up with the utilities. Not regularly, but I still had water and lights. I thought about staying longer and planting a garden, like Cadence wanted to do. I could put flowers around the door where there was currently a piece of a car (something from the engine). Maybe I could deal with him and his visits, as long as I had this place. I could start watching videos about construction instead of bread and fix everything up.
But I would still have Kolter. I sighed and rested my chin in my hand.
A car went flying past, its own engine intact, and I absently watched it. Not too many people used this road to the middle of nowhere. But then another one also approached and it was moving in a funny way—it was slowing down, which didn’t make sense.
This was an SUV that I didn’t recognize, a new one. I could clearly see the driver. He was tall with blonde hair and he did look a lot like the guy in the movie that Cadence had talked about, the old one with the pool player who was so handsome. I had watched it in increments on the library computer.
He slowed down even more and then he carefully turned in, a smart strategy due to the mud. His car looked brand-new and it would have been a shame to muck it up in the mess of thedriveway. I watched as he got out and also stepped around that mud to approach me. “Do you want me to park in the road again?” Nolan called.
Due to my shock, I didn’t even process his question. “Why are you here?” I asked instead of answering.
“I thought I’d stop by to see you. I tried the number you gave me before but it didn’t work.” He took off his sunglasses and squinted a little as he looked at me. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine, I just had to get a different phone. I have a different number, too.” That had been a big issue in my life, but I had gotten the new stuff very recently. That meant that there had been weeks—no, there had been months of silence between us when he hadn’t tried to get in touch, but there could have been a good reason. “Were you out of the country or something? Can you text people when you go different places?”
“Yes, you can,” he said. “Do you mind if I sit with you?’
“I wouldn’t do that. I mean, the Constitution basically gives us freedom of movement.” I’d read it at the library, which had taken forever. “The problem is that these steps are rotting and you could fall through.” And he had on nice clothes, not a suit, but still better than the sweatpants that I had worn to clean today and my T-shirt that had a picture of some hardware and the words “SCREW U.” Anyway, my attempts to fix the pokey and broken parts of these boards with glue hadn’t been successful, so I stood and walked back down to him.
