Her hands weren’t shaking anymore. Instead they were braced and rigid around the wheel as her eyes darted across the roads, her whole body alert and anxious. Just over ninety minutes of tension, cursing herself for leaving the dorms without her coat. It was probably still in that guy’s room, her driver’s license and debit card in the pocket along with her school ID. All she’d needed for a night out. No sense bringing a purse. But she’d needed the ID to get into the over-eighteen bars that didn’t card once you were inside. And she’d always brought her debit card since that one time in October when everyone wanted to split a pizza at three in the morning and she’d used up all her cash on beer.
I have to cancel it, she thought now. God. He could have bought, like, an Xbox or something by now. My parents will kill me. And I need a new license. How do you even get another one? The DMV. Perfect. Just perfect.
“Catherine?”
Henry was motioning to the self-checkout. The other lines were still closed this early. “Chill out. I’ve got the difference.”
She started to say thank you, but he just shook his head. “Forget it. It’s Christmas. We’ll just add your stuff to mine.”
She nodded and watched him scan each item. Molly was doing the same, her eyes bright with interest at the beeping machine. “Who puts sprinkles in glass?” Catherine mused as he put the sugar in a separate bag; it already had a small hole in one corner, a fine stream that arced to the floor. Molly licked at the grains eagerly.
Henry grimaced. “Same people who sell those Le Creuset things for two hundred bucks each. Here, where’s your cash?”
She handed him her twenty.
“Thanks.”
“So the girl,” she said, watching Henry feed her bill through the machine, then pull the difference from his own wallet. “Back there.”
A sigh. “She’s my ex.” The change jangled and the machine spat out the short receipt.
“I thought you said you didn’t know her.”
“I wish I didn’t know her. Does that count?”
“No.”
He had the grace to look abashed for a second. “Okay, fair. It didn’t end well. Which was weird, considering it wasn’t that serious to begin with.”
“Looked pretty serious.”
“More to her, I think.”
Catherine, looking at Henry, could picture that quite clearly.
“Heartbreaker,” she said.
They walked outside, the cold stinging. The light snow had shifted into rain, a cold pattering she could feel on her scalp. People thought it rained constantly in Washington but that wasn’t exactly true; the bulk of the rainfall came in the coldest months, between October and March, which had always struck Catherine as kind of unfair: cold and wet at the same time. And irritating—the rain never quite heavy enough to be a storm, just a constant drizzle, like a dripping faucet no one had managed to fix.
Catherine ducked her head as they walked to Henry’s car. “So this was recent,” she said. “The breakup.”
“Recent enough to make me feel bad about it,” he admitted, letting Molly into the backseat and climbing into the driver’s seat. “I know it wasn’t my fault, but still…” His voice trailed. She gave him an expectant look as she fastened her seat belt but said nothing.
“It was…”
“You don’t have to tell me,” she said at once.
“No—it’s—”
But then there was a dog bark, slightly muffled, coming from a nearby car, and Molly threw herself against one of the back windows, barking madly in response.
“Ah, Christ,” Henry groaned. “Molly, no. Bad! Here.” He reached into his jacket pocket and took out what looked like a very small Tupperware, but after a moment Catherine realized it was a single-serving peanut butter snack, like one a kid might have in a packed lunch. She watched as Henry peeled off the top and half threw it into the backseat. Molly dived for it, completely diverted.
“Sorry,” Henry said, turning back to her. “Only thing that really gets her going these days. Other dogs. Sometimes squirrels.”
“So…peanut butter.”
“Works as good as anything.” His smile faded. “We didn’t work. Her and me, I mean. She wasn’t—wasn’t the most stable girl I’d ever met, let’s just say. I don’t think I’ve ever met a stranger person.” A pause. “Save you, obviously.”
“Says the boy with random things of peanut butter in his coat.”
So unexpected, how easy this felt, talking to him. Like a language she’d forgotten her fluency in. It reminded her of the years when it had been almost exclusively them, when conversations with Henry had been as natural as any other sound in her world: the slapping hands of schoolyard rhymes or the chiming bells of the ice cream truck.
“What made her so strange?”
He shrugged. “Things,” he said, and when she continued to look at him, added, “What made college so shitty?”
“Things.” She stared out the window. They were older now, and some words were harder to say. “I saw this Christmas post the other day. It was about the Grinch. It said, Let’s remember that the Grinch didn’t hate Christmas. He hated people, which is fair.”
Henry gave a snort of laughter.
She turned to him. “Do you ever do that?”
“What?”
“Hate people.”
It was his turn to look surprised; then he seemed to consider the question. “Sometimes,” he said. “Maybe.”
She looked back at the windshield. “So do I.”
He drummed his fingers on the wheel. “I met her at Falls when I was working at the library. Thought she was cool, normal. Fun. But she wasn’t any of those things, and by the time I realized that, it was too late. She lied to people. About something…something really personal. She, like, got off on it. Embarrassing me—” He broke off, shook his head. “Forget it.”
She looked at him—his flushed cheeks, his fingers tense on the wheel—and felt a surge of sympathy. “Thank you,” she said. “For helping. With the jars, and everything.”
He smiled briefly at her before starting the car. “Well, all credit should really go to Molly. She’s a service dog, you know.”
Catherine laughed and reached back to scratch Molly’s ears, so careful to brush gently around her stitches she didn’t notice a single tree on the trip back to her house.