The Pendleton Omens - 8. Chapter 8

“What?” Noah nearly shouted. He didn’t, because he normally doesn’t shout. But he could have.

Over dinner, I’d told him about lunch. He hadn’t noticed I was gone because his half-day of work had spread into a full one, and he was happy we hadn’t made afternoon plans.

“She wants you to do what?” he asked more calmly. This was during dessert.

“Only what I’ve been doing all my life.”

“That’s like me doing open heart surgery,” he joked. “I only have some of the training.”

“Well, I won’t kill anyone.”

It was basically what I’d told Sharon. Which Noah already knew. But the next thing was to figure out what I could do.

“You promised?” he asked.

I shrugged.

“You did, didn’t you?”

I sighed.

“I admire your loyalty,” he said, laughing. “It’s one of the things I love about you. But it can be a pain.”

“It’s only gonna take a day of phone calls,” I assured him. “That should cut off my going to LA. Because I know Scoot didn’t vanish without telling someone. I’ve just got to find the right person.”

“And you’ve got to do it tomorrow?”

Unfortunately. I can’t do it from work.”

“Why not start now?” he asked, glancing at his watch. “It’s only five in LA.”

“But why ruin a perfectly good evening?”

He got my point, and we found more interesting things to do. But lying in his warm bed, much later, I began sorting where I wanted to start.

It seemed that the last person to see Scoot was Amy, and I tried to remember everything he’d told me about her. I didn’t get very far. I didn’t follow talk of his girlfriends because, after Carla, none of them lasted very long.

“When he gets serious, I’ll remember his wife,” I’d told Sharon. But I really didn’t believe that. Scoot might be the kind of guy who was gonna get married a couple of times. I was surprised he hadn’t already started.

Or maybe that’s what he had done. Maybe he’d met someone, and they’d run off. I knew a guy who married a girl on a bet. They’d just met. Of course, that was Las Vegas, and it cost him ten grand the next morning to start correcting his mistake. “But it was a great night,” he always told me. “I’d do it again.”

Somehow, I couldn’t mix Scoot and showgirls. My son didn’t have the class. He was fair-enough looking. He also got a bunch of blond hair from me. But he wore it shaggy, usually with a four-day beard. And there were a couple of piercings I could have lived without.

“They’ll heal,” Sharon advised. “Not like tattoos that have to be lasered off.”

“Our parents had it so easy,” I told her. “The worse thing we did was get high.”

“And drunk.”

And pregnant. We hadn’t avoided that.

But what had we imagined for Scoot? What did we imagine for Jamie? I can’t say we pictured them doing any better than we had. We’d done fine and had it even easier than our parents. And we’d given our parents a lot of what they wanted, as I suspected Scoot and Jamie would give us. They just had to get through their twenties.

“We were so settled at their age,” Sharon had said.

“We had two kids.”

“Do you feel cheated?”

“Nah, I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.”

Well...

When did I start thinking about guys?

When was I not thinking about guys?

When did I fall for Sharon?

When Bryan left.

He wasn’t my best friend. That was always Owen. But we were all part of a group. Bryan was maybe the luckiest because he’d seen Sharon first. And she’d liked him. And after three years of dating, and maybe one of having sex, it only made sense they’d get married.

“We were gonna wait till after college,” he told Owen and me. “But we don’t want to.”

“Go for it,” Owen coached.

We graduated in June. The wedding was set for mid-July. Bryan had a full-time job and was going to start UMass part-time. Sharon also had a job. Then Bryan panicked. He began to drink more. He was always high. “I just can’t see going through with this, man. I won’t be cornered.”

“You love her,” Owen reminded him.

“Do I?”

“I love her,” Owen told me. “If I had a chance, I’d grab her in a minute.”

Yet when Bryan left, Owen didn’t.

“I didn’t mean I’d marry her right now,” he said. “I meant I’d like to date her.”

I wanted to date Owen. Well, no. And it wasn’t that I even needed to see him naked. I saw that lots, in the locker room. And it wasn’t that I could ever imagine being in love with him, even if I suddenly found out that was possible. Because when I thought about being in love, it was always with a woman.

When Bryan left, Sharon fell apart. Part of it was embarrassment. Far more was she had three years of feelings tied up in him. And all her plans. And Bryan was a good guy. So there was no way she could simply hate him. He was just scared.

I listened to Sharon more and more that summer. I listened to her every night. And there was a point where we just fell into bed.

“Marry me,” I’d offered. Almost as a joke in case she said no.

“I’d like that,” she’d surprised me by saying.

And did I worry about what I was gonna do about other guys? Did I worry about what it might be like raising a son? Nah, I never worried about that at all. I thought about it, but I have two brothers, one younger, one older. And if I never did anything stupid with either of them, it didn’t make sense that I’d mess up with anyone else.

Though I’d seen guys attracted to their daughters. And I’d seen daughters who teased their dads. One of my friend’s kids is constantly slinking around him in these tiny, loose fitting tops. She’ll flop down on the couch next to him, and you can just watch him getting aroused. Well, I can. And he’s a bit of a flirt himself, so I was always rooting for his daughter to take him to the edge then grin and walk away.

But would I touch Scoot? Not a chance. Would I sleep around? That was separate and came much later. So Scoot and women. Scoot and marriage. Scoot and grandchildren. It all brought up too many questions and was too much to handle. Until morning.