Mac clapped his hands over his ears. “LALALALALALA.”
She smiled.
He smiled, too.
“You used to like Roxy Music,” he ventured quietly, into the delicate, soft little silence.
“Maybe my tastes have changed.”
“Maybe you’re lying.”
She didn’t disagree with this. But she was restless now; her eyes had gone guarded and cool.
“I think the only stupid thing about that song is that the singer gets back up on that tightrope over and over even though she falls off and gets hurt over and over again. Every time.”
That sure sounded like a message. Maybe a warning.
He didn’t much care for innuendo. Some instinct of self-preservation prevented him from poking at it.
“Hey, Avalon?” Mac said suddenly. “You know what else the deer and squirrels might not appreciate?”
He reached into his back pocket and withdrew the thing he’d found while he was trimming back some oleander. He gave a little flick of his wrist.
Her blue bra unfurled and fluttered in the breeze, twisting and dancing gaily from his fingers.
“Littering,” he said.
She stared at it. Hilarity and outrage mingling in her face; her cheeks went pink. It was about as adorable as it gets.
Then she snatched it from his fist. “I was wondering where that got to,” she said.
She was smiling when she returned to the house. Despite herself. It was just that Mac’s explanation for why he didn’t like that song was so at the ready, so idiosyncratic, sohim, that everything in her leaped with pleasure at its force and originality. She remembered that Mac had kind of felt, in fact, like a song you could really dance to. Or the kind like, say, “Stairway to Heaven,” with soft parts and loud parts and crescendos.
And she was happy to get her bra back.
And she understood something else clearly in that moment: Corbin’s ethos of rejecting anything commonplace did not in and of itself constitute taste. Or a personality. It was what he did because he didn’t know himself; it was what he did because he feared, and probably rightly, that he just wasn’t terribly interesting.
It was quite an epiphany.
And Mac had remembered about Roxy Music.
Something soft, something perilously teenage, something that felt like hope, turned her insides tingly until she ruthlessly squelched it. After all, he’d soundly mocked her fantasy about slow dancing out there on Devil’s Leap. And he was still that guy who had no patience for spectacle.
So she kept “Don’t Cry Out Loud” going at whimsical intervals all day while she washed her walls. Just to show him she meant business, until about nine thirty at night.
Which was when the fuse blew.
Instant blackness was accompanied by a sort of groaning sigh that spelled the expiration of all lights and appliances.
She froze where she stood, a Hot Pocket with one bite out of it clutched in one fist and a Jellystone Park glass full of iced tea in the other.
“Huh.”
The living room had become a cavern. The corners she’d swept so thoroughly were suddenly dense with shadowy mystery. Out the big windows the dark was that kind of thick-textured, velvety purple dark that you only get in the country. Trees speared up into it.
She used a slanting stripe of moonlight as a road to get to the couch, which was where, serendipitously, she’d propped her lantern. She settled her Hot Pocket and her tea down on the overturned box reincarnated as a coffee table, curled up on the sofa that smelled like her family’s rec room and therefore her family, and pressed a number on her cell phone.
“Hey, pumpkin.”