Page 16 of The Ripple Effect

“I need to think.” He pats the pocket where he keeps his wallet. His keys live under the sun visor of the Mystery Machine. Any passing teenager could boost the van for a midnight joyride, which McHuge naturally insists would never happen.

He pauses midstep. “Oh, and Stellar?”

“Uh-huh?”

“Yes.”

He doesn’t even look at me when he says it, just whistles for the dog and walks on, arms tensed like he wants to heave this fucked-up situation into the deepest part of the river. A minute later, the Mystery Machine rumbles down the road toward Pendleton.

It’s hardly the engagement I used to imagine. I mean, I certainly wasn’t envisioning anyone going down on one knee on the Kiss Cam at a hockey game.

I did think the moment might be sweet, though. Maybe some kind words or a nice gesture. And McHuge probably didn’t picture someone glaring at him and barking, “We have to do it.”

I look around. One hundred crappy chores need my urgent attention, but they can wait.

I’m going into town, too.

It’s a relief when the Mystery Machine pulls back into the parking lot a little after 7P.M. I’ve been back for over an hour,even though I went to Costco on a Friday afternoon, which is a live-action preview of the breakdown of Western civilization. If you cut the line in there, someone will cutyou, and they already have a three-pack of J.A. Henckels knives in their cart to get the deed done.

I was starting to think McHuge might not come back at all and conducting arguments with myself over what he meant by thatyes.

Not that I was upset to watch him walk away—no more than anyone else would be to see the calmest person they know storm off in a self-imposed time-out. I was unsettled, though. Even when he’s gone, he’s here, like one of the negative spaces on his body I can’t stop looking at.

McHuge doesn’t come find me, so I don’t seek him out, either. I already wolfed down my share of the grilled Halloumi and vegetable skewers Jasvinder left for us in the cookhouse, so we won’t be eating together.

We can’t avoid each other forever, though. I already tried that, in case he doesn’t remember, and this is how it ended up.

When I come back from the wash station after brushing my teeth, there’s an orange sack on the ground between his tent and mine. An unexpected surge of relief crashes over me. It looks like he hasn’t changed his mind about the engagement. I check the tag: he dropped eight hundred bucks on a six-person tent, so while we’ll go broke very slightly faster, we’ll have some breathing room.

He also bought two camp cots. Our place will be a low-budget version of the client tents, which I like. We can push the beds apart and tell the guests we won’t judge them if they don’t judge us.

I’m snug in my own tent, wearing my sleep shorts and mywornWOMEN BELONG IN THE RESISTANCET-shirt with the silhouette of Princess Leia, when the front flap of McHuge’s tent zips open, then shut. I think of the drawstring bag tucked into my backpack and mentally push that task to tomorrow. I don’t know how to give it to him, and besides, I won’t be able to sleep for hours afterward if I do it now. In the morning, when he’s rested and has had a chance to reboot his internal Zen—that’s the right moment.

“Stellar.”

His voice comes through my tent walls, startling me out of my exhausted half sleep. I pray the rustling of my sleeping bag covered my embarrassing squeak of surprise.

Jesus Christ, McHuge, is the right response to getting abruptly reawakened by the person who’s been giving me a taste of my own avoidance medicine for half the day. But he’d prefer kindness, so I suppress all responses that start with profanity.

“Yes, McHuge?” I reply through the nylon barrier.

“Did you make the call?”

“Yes.” I have a phone number that should work, but it’s fifteen years old. If all else fails, I can reach out through her talent agency, like I did when I was seventeen and clueless.

That was two days after I refused to drop my entire life for the “fresh start” Dad promised after finishing his five-year sentence for wire fraud. I’d worked hard to show Mom we were fine without him—pulling straight As, working a retail job for extra cash and discounted clothes, keeping the house clean and getting meals on the table when Mom had her sad spells.

But instead of realizing we didn’t need him, Mom kissedmegoodbye, told me I didn’t need her the way Dad did, and left me to dodge Child Protection Services until I got to university in the fall.

I should’ve known. Before he went away, he’d been teaching me how to tell when the con got too big or the mark got wise. When I got wise to him, there was nothing he could do but run.

Alone and more than a little panicky, I left a message for the half sister whose TV show Dad made me watch, though I’d never met her. I wasn’t sure she knew I existed, but thirty minutes later my phone rang, and someone said, “Hold for Ms. Summers.”

Then the voice of Deanna, the tall, pratfall-prone 4-H enthusiast fromCow Pie High, said, “Hi, it’s Sloane Summers. Is this Stellar Byrd?”

When I got over my stunned silence, I didn’t ask for help right away. I wanted to prove I could be useful and trustworthy before telling her how bad things were. It went well, I thought. I texted her a selfie of me in a hoodie from the university I’d be attending in the fall. She laughed at my Canadian accent. I promised to email her my contact information but decided to wait a day so I didn’t look desperate.

The next morning, I woke up to a curt email from her agency.Ms. Summers thanks you for taking her call. Regrettably, she has nothing to offer you, financially or otherwise.

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