Page 37 of One for the Road
“Did you miss him a lot as a kid?”
“At first.” She nodded, reaching out to flick the radio between channels until it settled on a folk station, a mournful Gaelic song I was ashamed to admit I could only understand half of. “Until I grew old enough to understand that life only felt unsteady when he was at home. I think my mum loves the idea of him more than she actually loves him, if that makes sense. When I was a kid, she’d keep this big calendar on the fridge, counting down the days with a big red cross until he came home.”
“And when he was home?” I didn’t know why I was nudging. Why I was swallowing down every scrap of information she fed me like a starving man. The less I knew about Isla Lang the better.
“Endless screaming rows.”
So different from my childhood.
I was never sure if my parents were happy, exactly, or simply a product of the time and place, where marriage and babies were the norm and divorce wasn’t a consideration. Dad had been hard on us but rarely raised his voice. Why bother when his disappointment could be levelled with a single look?
I tried to imagine going through that alone, without my siblings to share the load.
I cleared my throat. “That sounds rough.”
She shrugged. “It’s done now. We don’t talk often.”
We drove the rest of the way up the winding road in uncomfortable silence. The kind that came after baring something deeply personal.
If you wanted someone to explain stage two Hodgkin lymphoma in layman’s terms, I was your guy. But emotional honesty . . . I’d never quite picked up the skill. It shouldn’t matter. The reason I wanted Isla in my car was to discuss my offer for her, not open up her childhood trauma.
By the time I pulled into the drive, she’d pressed or turned every button and dial on the dashboard. My hazards were still flashing when I clicked off the engine.
“Sorry for rambling about my very alive parents when your dad is—”
“Dead?”
“Exactly.” She unclicked her belt. “I would say thanks for the ride, but I didn’t ask so . . .”
“Wait. I . . . uh . . . I needed to talk to you about something.”Reckless. Stupid. I tamped that inner voice down.
She paused, the door half open and the interior light illuminated. “Related to my childhood-trauma dump?”
“The furthest thing from it.”
“And here I was thinking you’d given me a ride out of the goodness of your heart.”
“I almost always have an ulterior motive,” I said honestly.
She leaned back into her seat with a wry smile. “Well, that’s unsettling. I need to get my own back . . .” Her fingers drummed against her thigh as she considered. “I could tell you about my first period? Really make this car ride memorable.”
“That’s child’s play.” We were getting way off-track. I couldn’t seem to wrangle us back. Didn’t want to. “Got anything better?”
“How I lost my virginity? It’s a boring story though.”
I froze. The interior light flicked off, plunging us into dusky shadow.
Don’t ask, don’t ask. It would definitely be weird to ask. “Try me.”
I watched her tongue swipe over her lips, her next breath trembling out of her.
“Let’s just say he had roommates and slept on a very squeaky futon. He also had this weird poster on his ceiling of a mushroom smoking a spliff, and I kept accidentally making eye contact with it, and afterwards, I couldn’t stop wondering if I’d lost my virginity to Cameron or a hallucinating mushroom.”
We hit the moment I was supposed to start laughing, but I felt like I’d been socked in the stomach.
Cameron. She’d lost her virginity to Cameron Smith, who’d once squeezed his entire head into an extra-large condom on the school bus.
Had she been with anyonebuthim? I already knew the answer.
