Chapter 26: Terms

Tara and Cal had spent the night at a motel by the interstate, and Tara would not say who paid for it.

At seven the next morning, Byron drove us to the lab in town.

Tara followed in the gray sedan.

She had told me she wasn't letting her son out of her mirror, and she didn't.

Poppy sat in her car seat behind me, and Cal sat on the other side of her with his knees against the back of the bench.

Byron kept both hands on the wheel and said nothing for eleven miles.

I turned around in my seat.

"I'll ask you three things," I said to Cal. "You can say pass."

"Okay."

"What do you play?"

He looked surprised.

"Strong safety," he said. "Junior varsity. They're moving me up in the spring."

"Do you like it?"

"I like hitting people who aren't expecting it."

In the driver's seat, Byron made a small noise that was almost a laugh.

"Last one," I said. "What do you want to happen today?"

Cal looked at the window for a while.

"A yes or a no," he said. "Either one. I've had the middle for sixteen years."

Nobody said anything.

Poppy held out a graham cracker to him, wet and half chewed.

He took it, and he ate it, and he said, "Thanks," in a voice that cracked on the second letter.

The lab was in a strip of offices beside a pharmacy.

The tech was a young woman with a clipboard and a sweet, bored manner, and she put us in a small room with three plastic chairs.

She had a pack of cotton swabs with a long white tip.

"Open," she said to Byron. "Inside of the cheek, rub for thirty seconds."

He did it with his eyes on the wall.

I watched his hands, and they were steady until she sealed the tube, and then the left one shook.

I covered it with mine.

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