Page 22 of The Wrong Track
I kept the knife behind my baggy pants where I thought he couldn’t see it but after Selma’s gift, I knew that my clothes hadn’t been hiding anything as well as I would have liked. “I’m back from work,” I agreed. “Hold on.” I put the weapon away in my bag and when I came out of my room, Tobin was sitting on the couch and trying to put his cast up on pillows.
“Let me,” I said, and hurried over to help. He looked tired and I bet his leg might be hurting, but he was smiling again.
“Thank you. Jesus, I really needed to get out. And I got great news,” he told me. “While Lulu was over, I heard that my request to examine cold case files got approved. I’m going to do it from here, too, so I won’t have to worry about driving to the station. I meant, you won’t have to drive me to the station too much.”
“I don’t mind driving you.” I imagined getting a desk and a rolling chair so he wouldn’t have to stand up a lot, and a footstool with thick padding for him to rest his heel on, too. I could work on finding those things for him to help him be comfortable. “That will keep you busy.”
“And you’re free now,” he said. “Last day, right? School’s out for the summer?”
I looked through the window at the January night. No, it wasn’t even night, it was just pitch black all the time in this place. “Right. Summer,” I said hollowly, and he laughed.
“I swear, it’ll come again. Spring here is beautiful, too. And if I didn’t have this,” he said, flicking the cast, “we could go out and enjoy the winter.”
“What did you and Lulu do today?” I asked. I wondered in what ways he’d enjoyed her visit.
“Talked, mostly, then she wanted to show me the new place she’s living with her mom. Her parents are getting a divorce. She’s really sad.”
Well, it happened.
“She was really upset by this, too,” he told me, flicking the cast again. “She got very teary.”
I wondered if he had compared that to my reaction, which had been to tell him that his pain was all mental and he should get over it fast. “She cares about you.”
That had come out slightly weirdly and Tobin looked up at me, questioning. “Yeah, she does,” he agreed. “And I care about her.”
Oh. I sat on the couch, at the other end. “Are you two getting back together?”
He didn’t immediately say no, only looked thoughtful, so I guessed that it had been a topic of discussion for them today. “There were good reasons that we broke up,” he finally said.
“Did you do it or did she?”
His eyebrow raised. “Am I supposed to say that it was mutual? Actually, Lulu broke up with me. We sat down to talk and she asked if I was planning to end things, and when I said yes, she told me that she was doing it first. She wanted to be able to tell everyone that it was her idea, that she hadn’t been dumped.” He sighed. “And that was one of the reasons we broke up. We were both pretty immature.”
According to Hazel, that had all happened in November, the end of November. I nodded.
“I know what you’re thinking. How much could I have matured since then? It’s only February,” Tobin said, and I shook my head.
“It’s January,” I stated.
“Ok, but it’s the last day of January and I couldn’t have changed that much, right?” He went on to tell me that the relationship with Lulu had been a huge, eye-opening experience and he really had grown up a lot.
He talked and I listened, kind of, but I was stuck on what he’d just said about the date. Yes, I’d known that the botanical gardens closed at the end of January, and of course I was aware that today was my last day of work there. But how could this month almost be over? January was always so long and endless—but as I hadn’t paid attention, the days had passed by. I felt myself breathe harder and tried to control it. No, there was no need for panic because I still had plenty of time.
Tobin talked more about all the good reasons that he and Lulu had ended their relationship and how none of those things had changed. “We shouldn’t get back together,” he concluded, but looked thoughtful and questioning again instead of determined. At that point, I was pretty sure that today she’d demonstrated, physically, how it was a great idea for them to be a couple. I wondered again what they’d done, if they’d been in his bed in the other room with the books piled next to it.
But I had more important issues to deal with, immediate issues. “Maybe Lulu can help you out more around here. Because now that I don’t have my job, I should go,” I announced. “I need to move.”
He nodded slowly. “I thought you might say that today. I’ve been trying to think of a way to convince you to stay, but the only thing I came up with is to tell you that I really like having you as a roommate. You’ve done so much shit around here to help me and I appreciate it so much, the laundry and cooking and groceries and everything. But even more than all that, I think we get along.”
“We do get along,” I agreed, which was actually very surprising. We had little to nothing in common, not how we were raised, not our educations, not our families, not our criminal histories. “I like being here,” I further admitted, because it was true. I’d started to feel almost like I lived in this house, not that I was only stopping for a while until I moved on. Which I was, I was going to move on.
“So why not stay?” he invited. “I would really like it and I know Haze would, too.”
I had more than enough reason to believe that Hazel was only interested in my health problem. She would have liked me to stay with Tobin in order to give her more of a window into that. Even from afar, she’d been badgering me to go to the doctor, to eat, to rest, to plan for the future so I could maximize all the help she thought I’d need due to my incompetency. Now that I had a phone, she’d been using that to check in on me and since she was good friends with Tobin, she was here at this house a lot, too. Hazel’s presence wasn’t exactly the lure that he thought it was.
But interestingly? Tobin hadn’t said a word about any of the ways that I was messing up, how I should stay with him because (of course) I couldn’t be on my own. He seemed to need me here, for real. I thought of how I’d heard him tossing and turning the other night, not able to sleep, and how I’d gotten up to sit with him. We’d read together for at least an hour. Who would do that if I were gone?
Lulu. She could move in. “What about your girlfriend? Can she help you with things?” I asked.