What We Keep Is Not Always What Will Stay by Amanda Cockrell Read Free Book Online Page B

it?”
    He couldn’t tell me much about the C-Leg though. “Pretty much everything in movies is made up,” he said. “If the technology we need doesn’t actually exist, we just lie.”
    After dinner, Mom called me up. “Angie, honey …” I could tell she was using her working-up-to-something-in-a-casual-fashion voice. “Did you have fun last night? Trick-or-treating?”
    “Yeah. And I’m not eating a bunch of candy.”
    “Darling, I was not calling you to quiz you on your candy consumption.”
    “Jesse’s little brother and sister got all the candy. Well, maybe I stole a Heath bar, but that’s all.”
    “Jesse. Mmmm. How old is Jesse Francis?”
    “Mom, Ben asked me that. And you already know, anyway.”
    “Well, I … do you think maybe he’s a little old?”
    “For what?”
    “Well, don’t you think maybe he ought to be dating—girls his age?”
    “There aren’t any still in school. Mom, he needs a friend.”
    “Honey, you want to come have a coffee with me? Maybe we could talk.”
    I hate having “discussions” over the telephone, so I said okay and met her at the coffee bar downtown. We got cappuccinos and sat down at a corner table. Mom poked the froth in hers around with her spoon.
    “Four years is a big age gap when you’re fifteen,” she said. “Later, it won’t make much difference, but right now the difference is huge.”
    “Boys my age are idiots,” I muttered.
    “Granted. But still.” Mom sighed. “I never thought I’d see the day when I’d encourage you to go out with Noah Michalski, but at least he’s your age.”
    “Mom! He tried to stick his hand up my blouse and then he told everyone I let him do it!”
    “I know. His mother says he’s sorry.”
    “You’ve been talking to his mother about me?”
    “Just in passing!” Mom looked guilty. And obviously she was scraping the bottom of the barrel if she was trying to fix me up with Noah.
    “This is ridiculous. You never worried about my friends before.”
    “Jesse may be a more complicated friend than you think,” Mom said.
    I thought about the mazes he draws around the pictures in his books and on the backs of his binders. But am I supposed to just abandon him because he’s four years older and he makes my mom nervous?
    “An experience like war affects people,” Mom continued. “There are things you just don’t see, but they’re there. It affects things like perception … judgment. I don’t know how stable Jesse is.”
    “He’s perfectly stable!” I said.
    “I’m just not comfortable having you go out with him,” Mom said.
    “I’m not ‘going out’ with him.”
    “How do you know how he feels about you?”
    “He thinks I don’t treat him like a freak, and he knows I don’t gossip about him.”
    “He’s too old for you.”
    “I’m not dating him.”
    We sat there and stared at each other. “Ben called you, didn’t he?” I asked her.
    “He thought I might be concerned.”
    And she paid attention to Ben this time instead of automatically taking the other side. That might be a good sign. But I didn’t say that. “I tell you what,” I offered. “I won’t stop being friends with Jesse, but I promise that if anything at all gets weird, I’ll tell you. Okay?” I left the definition of “weird” open.
    Mom hesitated, then slurped down a mouthful of cappuccino. “That seems reasonable. His mother’s worried, too.”
    “About me? She was nice when we were over there last night. And will you please stop discussing me with everybody’s mother ?”
    “I’m not. It wasn’t about you. She’s worried about Jesse hanging around with younger kids and not people his own age.”
    “Then why did she send him back to school? And give him some time. Nobody his own age has a clue where he’s been.”
    “And you do?”
    “No, but I don’t have to. I’m not his girlfriend.”
    “Okay,” Mom said. “As long as you keep it that way.”
    I wondered then just how Mom happened to get married