The One Who Waited novel · Chapter 7 of 24

Chapter 7: Rome

We drove up on Saturday morning with the dog sitting upright in the back seat.

Four hours up the Thruway.

The leaves got redder every exit.

Luke drove with one wrist on the wheel and let me pick the music.

He didn't complain once, even when I played the same song four times.

Somewhere past Albany I said, "I'm still mad at you."

"I know."

"I want that on the record."

"It's on the record. Do you want a sandwich? There's a sandwich in the cooler."

It was turkey and sharp cheddar on rye, cut in triangles.

"Did you cut the crusts off?"

"I don't know what you're talking about."

He had cut the crusts off.

My mother's house was the same yellow ranch on the same dead-end street.

The plastic geese on the porch were dressed for Halloween in little witch hats.

She opened the door before we knocked.

She was sixty-one and four foot eleven and had never once in her life let anybody see her cry.

She looked at me. She looked at Luke.

She looked at the dog.

"Well," she said. "At least this one brought a dog."

Then she hugged me so hard my ribs creaked.

She made pot roast.

She made Luke carry in three bags of mulch.

She asked him about his knee, his mother, his truck, his intentions, and his cholesterol, in that order.

He answered every question.

After dinner she caught me alone at the sink.

"I never liked that Lockwood boy," she said, drying a plate.

"Mom. You told me for fifteen years he was a catch."

"I said he was a catch. I didn't say I liked him. A catch is a fish."

Luke slept at his mother's place across town.

I slept in my old bedroom under a poster of a boy band.

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