Rusty raised his voice over the trunk. “Looks like it’s been awhile. You’re lucky nothing’s gone wrong.” His words left off, and I heard the unmistakable crunch of boots over dirt as he came back to where I was changing. “You listenin’?” I yanked my top over my head and pulled it down, lightning quick, before I dropped the towel.
“Oh.” He stopped short as I smoothed my shorts over my legs.
I rolled my eyes, then leveled them right at him. “I heard you, Rusty. And yeah, it’s probably been a while, but it’s not the car that something’s gone wrong with, it’s you.” My voice came out icy. “Actually, it’s all wrong, if you haven’t noticed. See . . . my brother’s dead. Oh, wait—you reminded me of that last night in front of everyone.” Something like confusion, or shock, spread over his face, and I stepped right up into it, strengthened by his reaction. I lowered my voice. “But. My brother, who used to be your best friend, sent me this letter and these tickets, and now I’m on this trip, which wouldn’t be so bad, except for . . . you.” He flinched, and I took a step back, losing a little of my bluster. I looked at the ground and hoped he couldn’t see that I’d gone from shaking mad to hurt left over from the night before. And now my voice faltered more than a little. “You had no right last night.”
He didn’t say anything.
“And you have no right to say anything about how I handle this. You let him go, a long time ago.” It was cruel, I knew, because no matter how it had been between them when Finn left, I knew how much Rusty cared about him before, and that wasn’t the kind of thing that just disappeared all of a sudden. But once Finn enlisted, Rusty wrote him off, and that was a complete mystery to me. Best friends don’t do that. And if he was gonna tell me how wrong it was to be here the day after we buried him, I was gonna let him know how much more wrong it was to turn your back on a person who mattered to you.
Rusty was silent. Jaw-clenched silent.
And then I was too, and we stood there fuming at each other in the middle of the desert in New Mexico, with the heat beginning to rise all around and who knows how many miles in front of us.
He gave first. Looked at the ground, cleared his throat, and nodded. Then he raised his chin and stared right at me, and I saw something I thought I recognized in the green of his eyes. Sincerity, maybe.
“I’m sorry, H. About what I said last night.” He paused. “I didn’t have any right.” I waited. First, because it sounded genuine, and second, because I wasn’t ready to forgive him yet. He looked at the car, shiny black in the morning sun, and when his eyes came back to me, it seemed like a tiny thing had shifted somehow. For a moment, anyway. Then he held his hands out to his sides in a question. “What do you want me to do? To make it up?”
That was it? I fought the urge to shake him and realized that this might actually be the best he could do. And I was worn out. And starving.
“Buy breakfast,” I said flatly. A slow, knowing smile crept over his stubbly face, and I rolled my eyes. But I dug in my bag anyway and came up with Finn’s beat-up leather key chain looped around my finger. “And then drive awhile.”
I glanced out the window as I pulled out of our spot, and a twinge of emptiness hit me as we rolled past Wyatt’s bare campsite and back onto the road. It was that same emptiness that’s there when you wake up in the middle of one of those perfect dreams you can’t get back to, no matter how hard you try. I thought of his phone number tucked away in my purse and knew I would probably never call, because that’s just what Wyatt had been. A good dream that would linger a while and eventually melt into a tiny wisp of a feeling.
9
We didn’t say much over breakfast. I asked him to pass the syrup. He asked the waitress for more coffee. The clinking-dishes-and-fork restaurant noise and chatter of summer travelers ready to hit the road filled in the background until we finished. But when we stepped out the door and headed to the Pala, there was no avoiding it. I was still tense. I’d let go of being mad at him, but I wasn’t sure how to go back to acting normal around him. Whatever that meant now. For his part, Rusty didn’t seem to notice. The parking lot was already baking, sending wobbly waves of heat up to the cloudless sky, and I tried to think of ways to avoid strained silence in the car—small talk, loud music, windows rolled down, feigned sleep . . . With him there, this was gonna be a much longer trip than if I’d taken it alone.
Rusty stopped at the hood. “You still want me to drive?”
I nodded and tossed the keys over to him. “Yeah.” I almost said something about how long it had probably been since he’d driven or even ridden in the Pala before yesterday, but I stopped short, realizing that could be a tangly path to go down.
He swung open the heavy door and ducked into the car, and I did the same. We yanked them shut, almost at the same time, then sat there a moment in the obvious quiet that followed. I searched for something to say to fill it up, because the thing that was between us now wasn’t him being a jerk or me being mad. It was that small space in the car, with just him and me and no Finn. We both felt it.
Rusty looked like he was about to say something, then put the key in and revved the engine instead. He turned up the radio, adjusted the mirrors, got reacquainted, then sat back and surveyed the view from behind the wheel. “It’s been a while, Pala.” He gave the dash a satisfied pat and grinned over at me, one eyebrow raised. “California? Go see what’s-hername’s concert?”