“Why’d you come back?” he asks, and I can sense it—genuine interest.

I shrug. “I wanted to show Pearl where I grew up.” I’ve said this half-truth so many times, it’s beginning to feel true. Perhaps there is no diagnosis, no knot on the side of my head, and this is only an innocent trip in which an older man wants to show his granddaughter where he learned how to ride a bike or catch his first fish.

I reach up and touch the knot again, to be sure. It doesn’t seem like Tom has seen it—if he has, he’s kept his eyes from wandering back to it.

“When did you get in?” he asks.

“We drove across the bridge, oh, about an hour ago.”

He nods, taking it all in. “Where are you staying?”

I give a half-hearted, wry smile. “No plans. Any recommendations?”

He glances down at his expensive watch, grabs on to it, and turns it this way and that on his wrist. “You should come stay with me,” he offers, and his voice is still so neutral I can’t tell if he’d genuinely like that or not.

“Oh, I don’t know,” I say, looking out the window, squinting in the sun.

“You’ve got no other options. Trust me. Not anymore. Unless you want to go back out to the highway.”

I glance over at you. Your plate is empty, the grilled cheese polished off long ago. You nod eagerly, smiling first at me and then at Tom. “I’d like that.”

“There you have it,” I say, trying not to sound too relieved. “I guess you have houseguests.”

There’s a banging in the kitchen, someone swears loudly, and someone else complains.

“What about Shirley?” I ask suddenly without thinking. “How is she?”

But Tom doesn’t hear, or pretends not to. “Jenny!” he calls into the back.

“Jenny?” I ask.

“The waitress.”

“Oh.” I glance over at you. “Pearl thinks she’s a witch queen.”

Tom gets a peculiar expression on his face, and it’s the closest he’s come to a smile since we first saw each other. “Is that so?”

You nod, your eyes wide, eager to see how this adult will respond to your imagination.

Tom leans in close. “You’re not far off,” he says, and now his eyes are definitely smiling.

You grin from ear to ear.

“Jenny!” he shouts again, and this time there is something playful in his voice. He turns to us. “We eat things besides grilled cheese in Nysa, you know.”

Night Swimming

We spent the rest of that summer before our senior year of high school cleaning up Tom’s family cabin. His parents gave him a chunk of money for his “road trip,” and those were our funds. The four of us ripped out carpets, tearing up our knuckles, and laughed after we pulled so hard we fell backwards. Tom and I did light roof work, mostly patching the obvious holes and splits. We reinforced the dock and replaced some rotted boards on the deck. We trapped mice inside the house and groundhogs outside. We mowed and mowed with a mower we borrowed from our closest neighbor, about five miles away. We found four old kayaks at a garage sale.