Page 15 of Rooke
He just smiles, nodding his head as he walks into my house like he’s been here a thousand times already. “Don’t you worry yourself,” he says over his shoulder. “I’m ready for you.”
******
“The first kiss scene. What did you think of that?” Kika asks, leaning forward across the dining table toward Rooke. “Wasn’t it justsoromantic?”
I wait for Rooke to look uncomfortable. I wait for him to say something stupid. I’ve been waiting for the past thirty minutes while the girls have each taken it in turns to stump the guy, if only out of pure surprise that he is here, and he’s done nothing but eat cheese and answer all of their questions easily and without embarrassment.
“Romantic?” he asks, chewing. “It wasn’t romantic. It was awful. They were down some dark, stinking alleyway. There were garbage bags spilling out of the dumpster, and there...oh my god. The rats!”
“The rats!”
Kika and Rooke say “the rats” at the same time, both of them laughing, and I want to punch a hole through the table. Who the hell is this strange alien creature who has invaded my comfort zone, and when, pray tell, is he planning on leaving? I would love to know, but I can’t ask because all four of the other girls appear to be completely smitten.
“Howoldare you?” Kayla asks. She sounds perplexed, like she can’t wrap her head around this young guy sitting at the table with us, spreading Roule onto garlic and herb crackers and drinking Pinot Noir like he’s some kind of goddamn grownup.
“I am twenty-three years old,” he answers. “Nearly twenty-four, if you want to get technical.”
God. I remember the days when I actually wanted to round my age up, too. Seems like forever ago. Kayla presses her hands flat against the dining table; it’s a weird thing to do, almost as if she’s trying to stop herself from reaching out to touch twenty-three-year-old Rooke. “That’s a great age,” she says, giggling. “I was dating this amazing keyboard player when I was twenty-three. He told me his band was going to be huge. He had the worst mulletever. I believed him, though. I let him go down on me at the movies and my mother and father were sitting in the seats in front of us. It was really hot, and pretty fucked up.”
“Kayla!” Ali looks stunned. “No way you did that.”
“I did so. Jeffrey Saunders. My dad told me if I married him, our children would be mentally compromised and we wouldn’t be allowed to use the beach house in the Hamptons on account of Jeffrey’s Depeche Mode tattoo, so I dumped him.”
I watch the conversation ping pong around the table, the girls firing questions at Rooke, Rooke answering confidently, as if being grilled by three women in their mid-thirties isn’t daunting to him at all. It’s certainly not how I assumed book club was going to go this evening, that’s for sure.
“What do you do for work?” Alison asks.
“I’m a watch maker. Actually I should say Irepairantique watches, but sometimes I get to make watches too. If something is too broken to fix, or the owner never returns to collect their watches, then I can cannibalize parts to create something new.”
“Why would someone not return to collect their watch?”
Rooke speaks around a mouthful of cracker. “They die. Old people own antique watches. They have a peculiar knack of dropping down dead a lot of the time.”
Silence falls over the table. Then, one by one, the girls all start to titter into their wine glasses. Whoarethese people, and what have they done with my friends?
“Did you go to college?” Ali asks.
Rooke shakes his head. “No. I was on track to admission at MIT, but then I got arrested and that goal kind of went up in flames.” He says it so matter-of-factly that I almost forget to process it.But then I got arrested…
Alison gawps. “Why were you arrested?”
Rooke’s been careful not to glance in my direction—I’ve been paying specific attention to how many times his eyes meet mine across the table—but now his gaze flickers to me and remains on me, and I get the feeling he’s uncomfortable for the first time. “I did something stupid. I took something that didn’t belong to me.”
“What did you take?”
“An Audi R8. I stole it from the parking lot at the Dodger’s Stadium. I crashed it into a cop car parked outside a Rite Aid in the Bronx forty-five minutes later.” This time no one laughs. Rooke doesn’t seem to care. Or perhaps he just doesn’t notice. He takes a healthy slug of his wine. “Don’t worry. No one was hurt. I was a stupid sixteen-year-old kid who was angry with his father. I’ve grown up since then.”
Sixteen years old seems very young, but it was actually only seven short years ago for Rooke. I take a deep drink from my own wine and clear my throat. “Why don’t we discuss the end of the book? Isobel decides to keep the baby. Who else thought that was pretty reckless on her part? James is hardly father of the year material.”
“I actually think it was the only way they were going to be able to stay together,” Rooke announces. “James was still too hard. Too damaged by the things that happened to him when he was a kid. He loved Isobel, but it was only a matter of time before he did something to fuck up their relationship. As a father, he had to get his shit together. In his mind, he couldn’teverlet down his own child.”
No one speaks. Slowly, Alison leans across the table and asks very gravely, “Rooke? Are you gay?”
“No. Do I seem very gay?”
Alison tilts her head to one side. “It used to be easier to tell, y’know. I’m not so sure these days. Even straight guys spend an awful lot of time doing their hair. But no, you don’t seem very gay.”
“Is that a good or a bad thing?” He seems genuinely interested, not in the least bit offended that she’s asking about his sexuality.
