Chapter 14: Soup

Tripp stayed on his knees in the red dust and held both hands up to me.

"I'll fix it," he said. "Babe, I swear. I was going to tell you everything after the launch."

Behind him the line of green shirts had stopped moving.

Three hundred people were watching the boy they had put on the homecoming float, and none of them looked sorry for him.

"Get up, Tripp," I said.

"Not until you forgive me."

"Then you'll be there a while."

Somebody in the line laughed, short and ugly, and then a man in a Marietta Tigers cap said, "Let him stay down there."

Tripp looked around for one friendly face.

Caleb's mother met his eyes and turned her back.

I handed my bib to Nolan, because it was hurting my chest, and I went to find Ezra.

He was standing at the end of the bleachers with his hands in his coat pockets, exactly where I had put him.

He didn't say a word the whole drive home, and he didn't need to.

That night the neighbor packed her duffel bag and her casserole dish.

"I'm sleeping in my own bed," she said at the door. "My knees are ruined from that couch."

"You don't have to go."

"I know I don't." She looked past me down the hall, where someone was climbing the stairs. "Eat what he brings."

Ezra reached my landing with a stockpot in both hands and a dish towel over his arm.

"It's soup," he said.

"I told you, no gifts."

"It's tomato. I made it."

"You made it?"

"Badly. The recipe was my mother's, and I'm told I'm missing an ingredient."

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