The wind and the whirligigs moving made everything feel in motion. The mulch that the landscapers had laid around the beds was now scattered across the grass and the street, and small cyclones of flower petals and grass clippings were swirling here and there in smaller gusts. In the midst of all of it was Wes, and now me, standing still, with the length of the walk between us.
“What are you doing here?” I asked him. I had to raise my voice, almost yell, but the wind seemed to pick it up and carry it away almost instantly. Somehow, though, he heard me.
“I was dropping something off,” he said. “I didn’t think anyone would be up.”
“I wasn’t,” I said. “I mean, not until just now.”
“I tried to call you,” he said now, taking a step toward me. I did the same. “After that night. Why didn’t you answer?”
Another big gust blew over us. I could feel my shorts flapping around my legs. What is going on, I thought, glancing around.
“I don’t know,” I said, pushing my hair out of my eyes. “I just . . . it just seemed like everything had changed.”
“Changed,” he said, taking another step toward me. “You mean, on the Fourth? With us?”
“No,” I said, and he looked surprised, hurt even, but it passed quickly, and I wondered if I’d been wrong, and it hadn’t been there ever, at all. “Not that night. The night I saw you. You were so—”
I trailed off, not knowing what word to use. I wasn’t used to this, having a chance to explain a good-bye or an ending.
But Wes was waiting. For whatever word came next.
“It was weird,” I said finally, knowing this didn’t do it justice, but I had to say something. “You were weird. And I just thought that it had been too much, or something.”
“What had been too much?”
“That night. Me being so upset at the hospital,” I said. He looked confused, like I wasn’t making sense. “Us. Like we were too much. You were so strange, like you didn’t want to face me—”
“It wasn’t like that,” he said. “It was just—”
“I followed you,” I told him. “To say I was sorry. I went to the Waffle House, and I saw you. With Becky.”
“You saw me,” he repeated. “That night, after we talked outside Milton’s?”
“It just made it clear,” I told him. “But even before, we were so awkward, talking, and it just seemed like maybe everything on the Fourth had been too much for you, and I felt embarrassed. ”
“That’s why you said that about Jason,” he said. “About getting back together. And then you saw me, and—”
I just shook my head, letting him know he didn’t have to explain to me. “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “It’s fine.”
“Fine,” he repeated, and I wondered why it was I kept coming back to this, again and again, a word that you said when someone asked how you were but didn’t really care to know the truth.
Something blew up behind me, hitting my leg, and I glanced down: it was a bit of white fabric, blown loose from someone’s backyard or clothesline. A second later it took flight again, rising up and over the bushes beside me. “Look,” I said, “We knew Jason and Becky would be back, the break would end. This isn’t a surprise, it’s what’s supposed to happen. It’s what we wanted. Right?”
“Is it?” he asked. “Is it what you want?”
Whether he intended it to be or not, this was the final question, the last Truth. If I said what I really thought, I was opening myself up for a hurt bigger than I could even imagine. I didn’t have it in me. We’d changed and altered so many rules, but it was this one, the only one when we’d started, that I would break.
“Yes,” I said.
I waited for him to react, to say something, anything, wondering what would happen now that the game was over. Instead, his eyes shifted slowly, from my face to above my head. Confused, I looked up, only to see the sky was swirling with white.
It was like snow, almost, but as the pieces began falling, blowing across me, I saw they were made of the same white, stiff fabric as the piece that had blown onto me earlier. But it wasn’t until I heard a yelp from behind the house that everything clicked together.
“The tent!” my mother was shrieking. “Oh, my God!”
I turned back to look at Wes, but he was walking toward his truck. I just stood there, watching, as he got behind the wheel and started to drive away. So I’d won. But it didn’t feel like it. Not at all.
We had a shredded tent. A yardful of flowers missing their petals. And now, rumbling in the distance, thunder.
“Uh-oh,” Caroline said under her breath, nudging me, and I felt myself start, coming to. I was so out of it, even as I went through the motions, doing my best to soothe my mother’s frayed nerves. When the tent people said no, they didn’t have another, and all their crews were booked, so we’d just have to do our best with what we had, I’d patted her hand, insisting no one would notice the tent at all. When the wind kept blowing, knocking over the chairs and tables as quickly as we could set them up, I nodded agreement to Caroline’s idea of doing away with them altogether and allowing, in her words, more of a “milling around sort of thing.” And when my mother, minutes earlier, had stepped off the driveway of the model townhouse to cut the red ribbon stretched across there and broken the heel of her shoe, I’d stepped forward instantly, offering up my own while everyone chuckled. Through it all, I felt strangely detached, as if it was all happening at a distance, far enough that whatever the outcome, it wouldn’t affect me at all.