“I don’t know if she’ll even be okay with us,” Emma said, forcing a laugh.
“Right,” said Peter, but he looked nervous.
“It’ll be fine,” she told him, though she wasn’t really sure. She hadn’t seen Annie since Christmas, when she’d brought home her boyfriend, Charles, a political analyst for the Washington Post. He’d seemed mildly horrified by the chaos that reigned in the Healy household, which only grew worse during the holidays. He’d since moved into Annie’s apartment, and Emma wasn’t all that certain he’d appreciate his girlfriend’s kid sister dropping by with her buddy the Civil War aficionado and the three-legged mutt they’d picked up at a Jersey rest stop.
“Have you ever been before?” Emma asked him, leaning back as the waiter set down their plates and trying not to meet the eye of the lobster on hers.
“To DC?” he asked, grabbing the butter. “Nope.”
“Where have you been?”
“New York City.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it,” he said.
Emma studied his face as he bent over his lobster, working his fork to split the shell with the expertise of a chef. There was so much she didn’t know about him. They’d grown up next door to each other, but she’d never even been inside his house. He’d come over to hers, of course, but then so had the whole town. Their front door was always open, and there was a constant stream of people filtering inside to join them, whether for a family dinner or a fireside discussion about the plight of polar bears in the Arctic Circle.
But Peter had a tendency to hang back, always unnervingly quiet when she was around. Her parents seemed to think he was talkative and engaging, but Emma thought it was possible that she’d heard him speak more in the last twenty-four hours than in all the previous years she’d known him. It wasn’t that he was shy, necessarily. He just seemed to be always measuring out his words, thinking before he spoke in a way that Emma couldn’t ever manage.
Growing up, he’d always been nothing more than the kid from next door, the one who wore glasses and had a funny haircut and whose pants were always a couple of inches too short. But Emma was realizing now that Peter was the kind of person who tended to get overlooked. He was unfailingly patient and genuinely polite, but he was also surprisingly confident, capable and dependable and utterly sure of himself, and she was suddenly grateful to have him along with her. Because it’s exactly these sorts of people—the ones who everyone’s always underestimating—that you want at your side when you’re running away from home, or driving the length of the country, or feeling somewhat confused as to your own illogical intentions.
“My dad was never big on family vacations,” Peter was saying now, half hidden by the tablecloth as he smuggled his share of corn bread to the hungry dog.
Emma tilted her head. “My parents weren’t either.”
“But you’ve been everywhere.”
“I’ve been to lots of colleges,” she corrected him. “Lots of universities and lecture halls and conference rooms.”
“I can’t wait to get to places like those.”
“We live in a place like that.”
“Yeah, but it’s different. I mean, don’t you want to go away for school?”
She shrugged. “My parents get free tuition there. And it’s not like I’d get in anywhere better, you know?”
“But don’t you want a choice? It’s a great school if you’re into history or literature or sociology. But what if you wanted to be a doctor or something?”
“I’m sorry,” Emma said, laughing. “Have we met?”
“You could be a doctor if you wanted.”
“Well, it’s lucky I don’t, then,” she said, glancing down at the dog beneath the table. She thought of her family and their books, the way everything came so naturally to them. “I’m awful at science.”
Peter set down his fork. “All I’m saying is that you shouldn’t limit yourself.”
“What about you, then?” she asked, eager to shift the focus from her and her academic failings. “Off to see the world? College in London? Masters in Paris?”
Peter smiled. “Wouldn’t that be nice.”
“And more trips to Gettysburg, of course.”
“Of course.”
“I can’t believe your dad never took you there before.”
“Yeah, well, he’s not such a big fan of reenactments either,” he said, and she noticed that he looked over—almost unconsciously—at a phone booth set just off the parking lot. “It’s not like we never did anything, though. He used to take me fishing sometimes. We never caught much, so I’d always bring a book, and he’d get annoyed at me for reading. Great father-son bonding time, those trips.”
“Well, you do read a lot,” Emma teased, and he threw his napkin at her.
“It’s not like it would kill you to pick up a book every once in a while.”
“You sound exactly like my parents,” she said, wrinkling her nose at him. But Peter only smiled, his ears turning as red as the half-eaten lobster on his plate.
Chapter fourteen
They’d barely gotten back on the highway when Emma began to tease him for driving like an old woman. There had been a faint hint of rain in the air after lunch, and so the top of the convertible was now up, and Peter felt hunched and slightly claustrophobic beneath it, his eyes trained on the road.
“What happened to the guy who tore into the rest stop?” she asked, propping her feet up on the dashboard and reaching over her shoulder to hand the dog a potato chip. “You were a maniac yesterday. Now I’ll bet we get pulled over for going too slow.”
Peter raised his foot with the intention of hitting the gas, but then saw yet another police car—this one tucked in the entrance of a fast-food restaurant just off the highway—and instead jammed down on the brake, causing the car to balk and both him and Emma to lurch forward in their seats. Behind them a truck driver leaned hard on his horn before swinging into the left lane and blowing past them in a haze of exhaust.
As they crawled past the dust-coated police car—a Maryland state trooper whose head was tipped back against the seat as he slept, his mouth propped open so that he looked a bit like a baby bird—Peter breathed out and loosened his grip on the steering wheel. It was nearly impossible to stop his heart from pounding each time they passed one, not necessarily because he was speeding or driving any more erratically than usual, or even because one of the taillights was cracked and refused to light up—though that last was also true. Mostly it was because Peter had started to see the face of his dad behind every shadowy windshield of every single emergency vehicle they passed.