Page 58 of Pete and His Precious

“All right then. That’s tomorrow. Same time as Monday?” she asks, and I nod, and our eyes meet for a moment, and I feel like something passes between us. Not words, for sure, but something, and it makes me really excited about the drawing lessons. Even though, I’ll probably feel about the drawing lessons the way she felt about ping-pong. Since I stink.

Chapter 20

Pete

“Yes, mom. I’ll talk to you tomorrow,” Baxley says, and then she pushes the button on her phone, and sets it on the buffet.

“I’m done,” she says.

The housekeeper comes, without Baxley having to say anything more, and gets the phone. Baxley doesn’t have a phone of her own, and I think her parents are probably wise in that regard, but regardless, she kind of looks at me.

“I want to go outside. Is that okay?”

“Sure. I go where you go, don’t mind me.”

She laughs a little, and then she says, “I really appreciated you playing ping-pong with me today.”

“It was fun. I don’t usually get to play with someone as good as you are.” And that’s the truth. She is really good. But, I want to make sure that she knows that, while not spoiling her. She does seem to have a lot of people waiting on her hand and foot, and she seems delightfully unaffected by that. I don’t want to be the one that comes in and ruins it by filling her head with how wonderful she is. I’ve seen men ruined for less. They get to be arrogant and insufferable and eventually they believe that they're so good, that they don’t need to work anymore, and that’s when things start going downhill.

I follow Baxley to the back door, where she goes out, and sits down on the top step in the dark.

I go out behind her, closing the door, scanning the backyard for any kind of threat.

I see nothing, nothing in the bushes, nothing anywhere. They have a security fence around the property, although I typically get there early enough that I can walk the grounds a bit and check things out.

I’ve never seen anything the slightest bit odd.

“I never thought I’d get Aunt Zoe to play with me. Maybe I didn’t think to ask her, so...”

“You never know what people will do unless you ask.” I smile at her happiness, but that is a lesson for me, too. Maybe I should just ask Zoe how she feels.

“It was nice of you to help her. I think she could be pretty good if she tried.”

Bexley doesn’t always try to talk to me, so this is a little bit odd, but I go over and lean against the railing, beside her. I don’t sit down.

“Your aunt is a pretty special lady.”

“I’ve never seen her laugh with someone the way she laughs with you,” Bexley says, and that sounds kind of mature coming from a ten-year-old, but I’ve already figured out she’s a mature ten-year-old. She lives with adults, and it makes sense to me that she acts like the people that she’s around.

Still, I can’t not smile with my whole heart over that comment.

“I think she makes you and me laugh too,” I say, wanting to be careful. Sometimes children are pretty astute, and she might be able to figure out exactly how I’m feeling, without me even saying it. For some reason, probably because I don’t want to embarrass myself any more than I already do naturally, I don’t want Zoe to know how I feel.

Not until I have an idea of how she feels.

“My mom says that Aunt Zoe will never get married because she insists that she has to make money before she does, and she’s never going to make any money as a voice actor.”

“I guess I feel like money isn’t everything,” I say, turning my head and looking at the stars. The same stars that are over Zoe right now, just a few miles away. It feels like a really long distance though, since I’m missing her.

“That’s what I thought too. Although, I’ve never really not had money. And, I just look at what Aunt Zoe has, and what my mom has, and sometimes I think Aunt Zoe is happier.”

“Money can’t buy happiness. That’s something everybody should know, although I think we all try at some point in our lives to test if that’s true. We think that if we just have enough money, we’ll finally be happy.”

“That’s not true?” Baxley says.

“I think that’s a little bit of a trick question. I read a study once that said you need enough money to pay the bills and be able to buy groceries, after that the amount of money you have does not matter because your happiness does not rise in proportion to the amount of money you have.”

“What does that mean?” Baxley says, wrinkling up her nose. I realize I used a few big words and could have explained it better.

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