Lost Between Houses by David Gilmour Page B

my mind.
    But psychology is everything, that’s my theory. So I didn’t call.
    One night, when I was gabbing with my mother in the kitchen, the phone rang.
    “So how come you didn’t call me?” she asked.
    “I didn’t want to bug you,” I said.
    “How would that bug me?”
    “You know. Being too available.”
    “What are you saying? You’re not available?”
    “Sure I’m available. I just don’t want to be a bore about it.”
    “There’s nothing boring about somebody liking you.”
    “Yes there is,” I said.
    “You sound like you’re speaking from experience.”
    “I am, sort of.”
    “Yeah, well there’s a difference between being hard to get and being a prick,” she said.
    “Mostly a question of degree,” I said and then laughed, this being an excellent joke.
    “You think you’re so funny. You’re never serious about anything. You should be an actor.”
    “I don’t have the looks for it.”
    “You don’t have to be good-looking to be an actor.”
    “That’s pretty nice, Scarlet.”
    “That’s not what I meant.”
    “Yes it is.”
    “It is not. I mean you got to be good-looking to be a movie star. That’s not the same thing as being an actor.”
    “Whatever.”
    “Let’s not get mad at each other, all right? It’s just a big waste of time. We’ll just end up making up anyway. So let’s not do it.”
    I sat there sort of stunned. She was smarter than I thought.
    “So you call
me
next time, all right? I don’t want to look like a loser either,” she said.
    Man, that was a great summer. Harper and me just pissing around, lying on the dock all day getting a tan and then staggering back up to the house, all whacked out from the sun, seeing moons.
    On really hot days, when you could hear the leaves rubbing their hands together over your head, we’d take the boat into town, bouncing like crazy over the whitecaps. When you took the engine cover off it sounded like a speedboat.
    I always loved that part just before town when you’re coming in off the lake, the water’s getting shallow, you can see theweeds whizzing by underneath; you go into that channel with the dark, dead logs on the side and the snapping turtles and the wake washing against the river wall and some guy’s fishing down there and he pulls his feet up to get away from the rising water.
    We’d park the boat at the marina and get her gassed up.
    “Charge that to Mr J. P. Albright,” we’d say.
    Charlie Blackburn, who owned the joint, was a beer-bellied, hard-working guy, and he figured us for spoilt little twerps, driving around in our daddy’s boat, not having a job. In fact sometimes I sort of expected him to say no, fuck you. Pay for it yourself, you little prick. But he didn’t. Besides, we gave him a lot of business: he fixed up the engine every time we fucked it up. Come to think of it, Charlie was a pretty decent guy. One time, a couple of summers ago, we roared out of the dock with one of the back ropes still tied on, we got about ten yards and boom, everything came to a big stop, we just about went over the bow, miracle the dock didn’t come apart. But when things cooled down, the engine sounded sick as a dog, and we took it in to Charlie Blackburn. He took one look at it and said, “What in
hell
did you guys do this time?”
    The old man was super steamed when he got wind of it and a week later, when we picked up the boat, he asked Charlie, right in front of us, whose fault it was. Charlie waited a second, he didn’t look at us but you could definitely smell the wood burning, and he said, “Just natural wear.” I could have kissed the son of a bitch right on the spot. I mean you just never know in this life who’s going to surprise you and who’s going to fuck you. I mean like never.
    We never did much in town, just go up and down the main street about a dozen times; sit on the Town Hall stairs and watch all the people go sweating by; all those girls from summer campcoming through town.