All Fall Down by Carlene Thompson Page B

Peyton’s hysterics today, and now Robin’s sarcasm.
    Robin suddenly rose and began clearing the table. “I’m going to my room and study,” she said, her voice shaking slightly.
    Blaine reached out and put a hand on her arm. “I’ll clear up later, Rob. You go ahead.”
    Robin nodded and left the kitchen.
    Blaine sighed. “I’m so worried about her, Rick.”
    “ Worried? Annoyed, impatient, exasperated I could understand. But worried? Why? She seems to be handling this whole thing remarkably well.”
    “ That’s what worries me. She’s handling it too well. She hasn’t cried since we found Rosie, and she insisted on going to school today.”
    “Would you have been happier if she’d stayed here by herself all day, sobbing?”
    “No, although it might not have been much worse. As you can imagine, Rosie was the main topic of discussion with the students. I just wish Robin would show a little more emotion. She’s so self-contained.”
    “Too self-contained, if you ask me personally. Professionally, I’d say she’s a young lady of delayed reactions. Let her coast for a while in peace, Blaine. It’ll hit her later, and then she’ll really need someone.”
    “The person she’ll need is her father. But he’s not here, either.”
    “ You’re here. And I’m here, too. Or rather, I would be if you’d let me into your life.”
    Blaine looked into his hazel eyes now faintly rimmed with dark circles, and at the slightly crooked nose Rick told most people had been broken in a car wreck, but which Blaine knew had been broken when he was a first-year medical student and fainted at his first sight of a cadaver in a gross anatomy class, cracking his nose against the concrete floor. “It’s a common reaction,” he’d told her defensively when she’d burst into uncontrollable giggles at the story, “but the general public doesn’t know that, and I don’t want my practice jeopardized because people think I’m a wimp.”
    She reached out and touched his cheek. “Rick, you know how much your friendship means to me.”
    He groaned. “Oh, God, spare me the you’re-a-nice-guy-but speech.”
    Blaine laughed. “I wasn’t going to say that. I was just going to point out that Martin has been gone such a short time.”
    “Six months. And before that he gave you five months of hell.”
    “Rick!”
    “Well, he did. Look, Blaine, he was my friend, but he changed after that accident. He blamed you.”
    “I was driving.”
    “Because he’d had too much to drink at the New Year’s Eve dance.”
    “But it was snowing, and he always said I couldn’t drive worth a damn on snow, particularly in his car.” She sighed. “I guess he was right. If I hadn’t slammed on the brakes when I saw that other car coming at us, we wouldn’t have gone into that spin and his side wouldn’t have been rammed.”
    “No, yours would have been.” Rick squeezed her hand in his. “Blaine, you did the right thing.”
    “No, the right thing would have been to call a cab.”
    “Sure. This town has five cabs, all of which were tied up. I know because I tried to call one. Besides, Martin wouldn’t have waited. He was getting belligerent the way he did every New Year’s Eve and Fourth of July when he had too much bourbon. If you’d insisted on waiting for a cab, he would have wrestled the keys away from you and killed himself or someone else in the car. He was in no condition to drive, and you couldn’t help it because someone went through a stop sign and rammed the car. The accident was not your fault.”
    “I guess not. I only wish they could have found that driver.”
    “You think retribution would have made you feel better?”
    “I like to think of it as justice. What kind of person would leave us in that crumpled car in the snow?”
    “A scared person. Someone who’s never been found and probably never will be. So stop thinking about it. You’re not helping Martin. All you’re doing is tearing yourself up every