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“I’d love to,” Cass calls after him. “I’m starving!”
This time there is no mistaking the laughter in his eyes, or the way his glance lowers quickly to my lips, then returns, i
I give up, bury my face in my hands.
“I’m having a great time,” Cass says, very softly, so quietly perhaps my big-eared mother and nosy cousin can’t hear. “All good.”
Is it? All I know is that I can’t seem to stop—this—or slow it down. Or remember exactly why that’s what I want.
Here’s what happens before di
Mom asks Cass to carry Emory to the couch. Em wakes up halfway, perhaps because Cass has him awkwardly slung over his back, head hanging. He starts to melt down until Cass agrees to read his current favorite book, which involves a “dear wee little fairy who lived under a petunia leaf.” Seven times, until Mom takes pity on either Cass or me and shuffles Emory off to take a bubble bath.
Grandpa Ben, in some sort of Old World display of machismo, reincarnating himself as a knife salesman (did he really ever do that? I haven’t heard one single story about it up till now), decides he needs to whack the head off the fish with one blow, and chop up all the vegetables with some sort of enormous butcher knife. Cass and I try to slog through more Tess but keep getting interrupted by loud thwacks and Portuguese curses from the kitchen counter.
Nic comes back in and he and Cass have another manly conversation in which they both use monosyllables and say basically nothing.
“Hey, man.”
“Dude.”
As the fish is cooking, Grandpa Ben comes over to the table and sits down across from us, gri
“Coitadinho! Olhe para os seus dedos! Olhe a sua mão!” And I open my eyes to find him pulling the note-taking pencil out of Cass’s fingers, calling for my mother. “Look at this, Lucia!”
Mom folds her hand on her mouth. “Oh my.”
“What is it?” I ask, a little frantically. Cass’s ears turn red, the flush rapidly spreading across his cheekbones.
“Your poor hands, honey. How long have they looked like this?”
“It’s nothing,” he says in a muffled voice, trying to pull his arm back from Ben. “They were much worse before.”
“What are you cleaning these with?” Grandpa demands. Cass has curled both hands into fists and buried them under the table.
“Uh. Hydrogen peroxide. Please. It’s nothing.”
Grandpa Ben smacks himself theatrically on the forehead. “No no no! That seals in the infection, na infecção. That’s how you get the poisoning of the blood.”
“What’s going on here?” I ask, grabbing for Cass’s right hand, expecting to see it oozing blood from every pore. I didn’t notice anything odd about them during the swimming lesson. Or on the boat.
“Nothing,” he mutters. “No big deal. Blisters, Gwen. I’m not used to mowing more than one lawn a week.”
I turn his hand over, gently pry his fingers open and suck in a breath. His palm is a mass of blisters, new and old, popped and unpopped, some of them blood blisters. It hurts to look at it.
Grandpa Ben barks a few Portuguese phrases at Mom.
“Don’t worry about it,” Cass continues,urgently. “I just pop ’em and wait for them to seal over. It’s not a big deal. The other hand isn’t nearly as bad.”
“No!” Grandpa Ben booms as Mom returns from the sink with a bowl full of steaming soapy water. “That is what you do not do. You let them pop on their own, heal under the gloves. Otherwise, you get the infecção. Are you wearing the gloves?”
Cass flinches, either because Ben is insistently lowering his hands into the hot water or because he feels incredibly self-conscious about all this attention. Or both. “Uh. No.”
“Is your father raising an idiot?” thunders Grandpa Ben. Nice, Grandpa.
“Do you have to scrub so hard?” I ask.
“Do you want your boy to get sick with the high fever?” Grandpa Ben doesn’t stop scrubbing away.
“Of course not,” I say swiftly, not even bothering to argue with the “your boy.”
“Does it hurt a lot?”
“Only my pride. ’S fine.” Cass’s voice is noticeably more cheerful than it was a moment ago.
Grandpa Ben finally stops his triage and barks another order at Mom, who returns a minute later with a clean towel and gently dabs at Cass’s hands.
“We’ll wrap them up for now,” she says. “Just until they dry out. Then leave them uncovered overnight with some antibiotic cream. In the morning, wash them with soap, let them air dry, tape ’em up. Wear work gloves, the canvas kind.”
“He doesn’t have any work gloves,” Ben growls. “Idiot. In the morning I will go to the Garrett’s Hardware and get him a pair of decent ones.”
After all this drama, di
“Walk him back to the Field House, you! He won’t be able to turn the key in the lock,” Grandpa Ben orders.
He’s suggesting I go to Cass’s apartment alone now? What happened to the knife salesman?
“It’s true, honey. Those hands must be so sore. I wonder how you’ve been able to do anything at all, Cassidy. You must be made of tough stuff.”
Cass shrugs, clearly embarrassed.
Tough stuff, Mom? Really?
All her vigilance and caution have apparently faded away in the light of Cass’s hands. Mom loves a victim. Even a self-inflicted one.
Or maybe it’s his charm, not his hands. Because that can make anyone’s caution fade away.
Certainly mine.
It’s a cloudy, moonless night, hard to see on the unlit High Road. I stumble and Cass’s palm catches me immediately under the elbow.
“Ow.”
“Don’t do that!” I say. “Your hands are hurting.” I yank my elbow away.
“Blisters, not shrapnel. It doesn’t feel any worse than it has for a while. Really. It’s not—”
“If you say it’s not a big deal again I will hit you.”
Cass starts to laugh, then laughs harder, until he has to stop on the darkened road. I can vaguely make out the flash of his eyes and his teeth, but not much else. “You send more mixed messages than any girl on the freaking planet,” he says when he finally catches his breath. “You need to come with a goddamn YouTube instructional video.”
“I do not. I’m very clear.”
More laughter. Now he’s practically wheezing. It’s hard to listen to someone laughing so hard without starting to smile yourself. “I’ve never given you mixed messages. The messages just changed. That’s all.”
“And changed again, and again, and again.”
“I’m not like that.” My voice thickens. Am I really some kind of confusing tease like the ditzy heiresses in Grandpa Ben’s movies? The ones you want to smack sense into? I’m not. Right?
“Watch out, the lawn mower’s right there,” he says, hauling me expertly around it with a little arm swing, like a dance move. Then he’s opening the door. No key.
“You didn’t lock it.”
“Course not. What are they going to steal? I don’t see Old Mrs. Partridge sneaking in to grab my gym shorts and a can of tuna.”
“But the whole reason I’m walking you home is so you don’t have to fumble with the key!”
“I wasn’t the one who came up with that excuse,” he reminds me, “but I was damned if I wasn’t going to go with it.” He reaches in to flick on the switch and the light slants out into the night, casting him in shadow, glinting off his hair, blinding my eyes.