Page 71 of Keepsake
At last my brain caught up to the situation, and I clapped my hands. “So you both blew off work on a Monday to watch me pick apples?”
“You don’t have to work,” Griffin said from the end of the orchard row. “You all should take a walk. Show ’em the view.”
“That’s very kind of you, Griffin,” my mother said, smiling up at him.
“We should have brought bikes,” my father mused. Back in the day we’d all gone for bike rides on family vacations. I’d forgotten that until he said it.
“We have bikes,” Griff said, brushing dirty off his hands. “Hey, Zach? You know where they are, in the back of the tractor shed?”
“Sure.”
“There’s four. You can go, too.”
“What a lovely idea,” my mother crowed.
I gave Griff the hairy eyeball. “There’s really no need to blow off a workday.”
He just smiled at me. “Have fun, Wild Child. Stay loose, Zach.” Griff chuckled and Zach glowered.
Great. Now nobody was happy with me. Poor Zach. Meeting the parents was supposed to be carefully planned in advance. And now he’d met my parents with his tongue in my mouth, only a few hours after our big night together.
Ouch. I would have to make it up to him later.
Zach dutifully walked my parents through the orchard toward the tractor shed. I tried to catch his eye, but he asked my mother how her drive from Boston had gone.
Although I’d ever entertained the thought of introducing Zach to my parents, the guy was a natural parent-pleaser with those gentle eyes and perfectly deferential manners.
One by one, Zach lifted three bicycles off the wall of the shed. “Dylan keeps them oiled and in good shape,” he promised. “The road is fairly flat if you go right out of the driveway. Left is a nice downhill, but Dylan says that getting back up it is a pain.”
“Aren’t you coming?” I asked him after he’d set us up with three bikes. My eyes begged. But Zach shook his head. “Please?” I asked. “Griff really won’t mind. We can make it a short ride.”Don’t leave me alone with my well-meaning but nosy parents.
“I can’t,” he said quietly.
“Sure you can.”
He looked up into the rafters. “No, I really can’t.”
“Oh.” There was an awful silence while I realized what Zach was saying. It never occurred to me that he’d never had a bike. Every kid should have a bike. “We won’t bike, then. We’ll walk instead.”
His eyes flared. “Go ahead, okay? Have some fun. See you later.” Giving my forearm a gentle squeeze on his way past me, he left the tractor shed. I watched through the open doorway as he speed-walked back toward the orchard and Griffin in the distance.
After he disappeared, I turned back to my parents, who were watching me. “So,” I said, clearing my throat. “That was Zach.”
My mother looked down at the bicycle under her hands. “You didn’t tell us you were involved with a boy.”
A boy. She made me sound like a child again. “He’s a nice boy,” I said lightly. “Vermont has been good to me.” I rolled Dylan’s bike out into the sunshine. “Let’s go.” If I had to spend a day being observed by the parents, we might as well be in motion.
We saddled up and I led us down the Shipleys’ drive and onto the dirt road which would take us past the bungalow and then toward the Abrahams’ farm. “There’s a swimming hole up ahead,” I said as we pedaled. “It’s pretty. I’ll show you.”
My parents rode behind me in silence, and I felt their eyes on me. But I had the breeze at my face and an open road. So I pedaled faster.
19
Zach
“You didn’t go biking?” Griffin asked when I joined him on the way to the cider house.
“Never ridden a bike,” I said, my voice gruff. “Not going to try for the first time in front of Lark’s parents.”
