Ignited (Roman Holiday 5)

“Come on. Enough with the crying.”

She wiped at her eye with the edge of her finger. “I’m not crying. I’m doing great.” Her voice wobbled. “I just want you to go awuh-waaay.” The last word transformed into a sob, and she turned away from him and folded her forearms on the trailer wall and made the most horrible, ugly, naked sounds.

He remembered how, in the truck, when she’d cried and sang to him, it had been like being stabbed with her sorrow.

This should have been worse. In a way, it was worse. She was crying a lot harder now, and he badly wanted her to stop.

There was a difference, though. This time, he didn’t feel like she was doing this to him. Ashley didn’t expect anything from him. She wasn’t crying because she wanted his help or his attention, or because she wanted to annoy him.

She was crying because she felt terrible, and the impulse to leave her here to fend for herself came and went in an instant, barely registering.

Talk to her. Touch her. Help her.

Ironic that he should meet his worst fear here, in the trailer she’d insisted they bring along: that he might have no choice left to him but this. That Ashley might push him into some place he couldn’t get back from.

And that he would go willingly, full of doomed hope.

He studied the shape of her back, the fall of her hair, the outline of her bra strap against her yellow T-shirt. He wasn’t ready to touch her. He didn’t even know what to say.

He took a deep breath, thinking, It starts with a question. Any question.

“What’s the story with the tap shoes?”

It took her a long time to pull herself together enough to answer. Even then, the words came out broken. “I wore those for, like, six wuh-weeks one summer. I’d got it into my head that I wanted taps on my shoes. I told Grandma, and she brought those pink shoes home one day. I tapped everywhere. All of the time.”

Ashley in pink sparkly shoes, her skinny legs even skinnier back then. Her face not quite finished yet. Dancing around the pool, into the office, toward the beach.

“It must have driven her absolutely insane, but she never said. She let me do that kind of stuff, if I wanted to. She wasn’t big on limits.”

“What about that stuffed hot dog?”

“That’s from when we camped overnight next to the Oscar Meyer Wienermobile once.”

“The Wienermobile camps?”

“Not normally, but they had a flat or something. Engine trouble? I can’t remember. It was just a freak coincidence. The driver—his name was Steve—was super-nice. Grandma made him dinner, and he gave us the little waving wiener to remember him by.”

She turned around, smiling a little, and the tension at his temples eased.

“Grandma made wiener jokes at him all night. I think he was about ready to throttle her by the time he left in the morning.”

That was the Susan Bowman he remembered. Not big on limits. Or tact. Friendly, but in an undiscriminating sort of way. She’d called Roman “hon” and acted like she was excited to see him when he picked up the rent check, even though she was the one who’d made it a condition of accepting the offer that he show up in person once a quarter to retrieve the rent.

She was the one who’d insisted that he not speak to Ashley about the terms of the sale, then or now.

“I’m guessing the beads are from Mardi Gras.”

“No. They’re from Fardi Gras.”

“Do I want to know?”

“It’s not as bad as it sounds. There’s a bunch of RV people who meet up in southern Oregon every year and work on this miniature train track that’s open to the public, but only in the summer. A group of them call themselves the Old Farts, and they throw Fardi Gras in September, right before it gets cold enough to make them scatter for warmer climates. We celebrated it with them one year. It was really fun. Fardi Gras is light on the carnival floats and ‘Show us your tits,’ heavy on the drinking and high-speed miniature train rides.”

“I hope you wore a helmet.”

“No.” A memory made her smile faintly. “I fell off in the tunnel. Nearly got run over by the next train that came along.”

He looked at the piles along the walls. Box after box of memories, packaged up and preserved. Ashley’s version of merit badges and handbooks, dusty compasses and campfire cookware.