Elin Hilderbrand - Summerland

“Oh, right,” Jake said. He stuck out his hand, and they shook, and Jake didn’t sense anything but Hobby’s usual good-guy-ness.

“Great to see you, man,” Hobby said. “I mean, it’s really good to see you. When you walked out of my hospital room that day, man, I thought maybe that was it. I thought you were gone for good. ”

“Yeah,” Jake said. “I thought that myself.” If it weren’t for the grace of his mother, he would be attending the American School in Perth, wearing a blue suit and skinny tie like a Mormon, reading Yeats and Auden alongside the sons of foreign mining executives.

“Sit down,” Hobby said. He scooted over on the bench and moved the brown-bag lunch that Zoe had obviously packed for him. Jake recognized the chicken salad with pine nuts and dried cherries, the container of her homemade broccoli slaw, and the slumped brownies wrapped in wax paper. His stomach complained. The funny thing was that in all his deliberation about where to spend his lunch hour, he hadn’t once thought about food. But there was food-meaning pizza and takeout Thai, which Jake and his father were once again eating in order to survive-and then there was Zoe’s food.

“Um,” Jake said. Could he tell Hobby that he was on the way to the cemetery to sit on his sister’s grave? No. Never. “I don’t want to bother you.”

“ Bother me?” Hobby said. “Dude, I’m here by myself. I don’t have my license, and I’m too gimpy to walk anywhere. Last week I ate here with Claire, but today she’s tutoring some freshman in geometry.” He popped a grape into his mouth. “It’s a thing she’s started doing. Looks good on the transcript.”

“Oh,” Jake said. “Well, what about Anders and Colin and those guys?”

“They’ve been going to Nobadeer,” Hobby said. “They swim and throw the football around, and I’m just not that mobile yet.” He took a bite of his sandwich, and Jake tried not to stare, though it looked delicious, with baby lettuce peeking out like lace from between the slices of nutty whole grain bread. “Plus, Claire hates Anders. She thinks he’s common.”

This made Jake laugh. “She’s right.”

“She is right,” Hobby said. He chewed his sandwich, took a sip of iced tea out of his plastic thermos, then said, “So, I guess you’ve heard?”

Jake nodded, happy to have a topic to discuss that had nothing to do with him. “My dad told me. It’s true, then? You’re going to have a baby? ”

“A boy,” Hobby said. “Hobson the third.”

A boy, Jake thought. Hobson III. Penny used to say that she wanted five kids-three boys and two girls-and the oldest child was going to be a boy and she wanted to name him Ishmael, after the protagonist of Moby-Dick. Jake had pretended to like the name Ishmael for her sake.

“That’s great, man,” Jake said. But he wondered, was it great? Having a baby in high school?

“Well,” Hobby said. “It was unexpected. She, uh, got pregnant before the accident.”

“Oh,” Jake said. He hadn’t thought about that. “Wow.”

“And we’d pretty much decided to get rid of it,” Hobby said. “We were scared shitless, you know. But then when I was in the coma, Claire changed her mind. And when I came out of it, I was so happy that she’d decided to keep it. Man, it was the only thing that mattered.”

“Yeah,” Jake said. “I guess I can see that.”

“So now we’re having a baby and we’re psyched about it, and we’ve decided we’re still going to college-separately, you know, wherever we get in-and my mom and Claire’s mom are going to split time taking care of the baby.” Hobby swallowed. “It’s not a conventional arrangement, but Claire is bound and determined to get an education, and so am I, and we may end up together or we may not, but the baby will have four people who love him, so hopefully that will be enough.”

Jake bobbed his head. He could barely keep up.

“Sit down, man,” Hobby said. “You look like you’re going to run for the hills. It’s making me nervous.”

Jake hesitated, then sat. This was the same granite bench where he and Penny used to sit and make out after school while they waited for their parents to pick them up. Mentally, Jake threw up his hands. It was impossible to escape places and objects and people that reminded him of Penny. This was their high school; it was saturated with reminders of her.

Hobby said, “You want the other half of my sandwich? My mom packed too much for me, as usual.”

Well, Jake wasn’t about to turn down Zoe food. He picked up the half sandwich and thought, This alone was worth coming home for.

Hobby said, “There’s something I want to tell you, man.”

Jake tried to concentrate on the perfect composition of the chicken salad sandwich: The tartness of the dried cherries, the tang of the mayonnaise, the succulent chicken. He didn’t want to hear what Hobby had to say. He just didn’t want to hear it.

“I talked to Demeter,” Hobby said.

Jake thought he might gag. He swallowed with difficulty, then reached for Hobby’s thermos of iced tea, even though Hobby hadn’t offered it to him. His heart felt like clay that was oozing through the powerful fingers of Hobby’s clenched hand.

“She told me what she told Penny in the dunes,” Hobby said. “And it had nothing to do with you.”

“What?” Jake said.

“It had nothing to do with you or what you told me before you left. Nothing at all.”

Jake took a breath in, then forced it out. He did a neck roll.

He didn’t believe it.

“I don’t believe you,” he said to Hobby.

“Well, I wouldn’t lie. What she said to Penny had nothing to do with you.”

“What was it, then?”

Hobby popped a handful of grapes into his mouth and stared across the street. “Here’s the thing,” Hobby said. “I can’t tell you.”

“Oh, come on.”

“I promised Demeter I wouldn’t,” Hobby said. “And man, you don’t want to know it anyway. It’s… it’s adult stuff, nothing to do with us, none of our fucking business.”

“Well, whatever it was made Penny pretty damn upset,” Jake said. “Whatever it was made her want to pile-drive the car into the sand.”

“Penny was sick,” Hobby said.

“What?” Jake said.

“She was sick,” Hobby said. “She was depressed. Messed up in the head. Emotionally disturbed. Whatever you want to call it.”

“No she wasn’t,” Jake said. But he knew, even as he denied it, that Hobby was right. Ava had confirmed as much. Penny was sad and fragile, she cried a lot, every hard knock floored her, she missed the father she had never known, she felt broken, damaged, confused. Even her voice weighed on her as a burden. No one had been able to make her feel any better-not Zoe, not Jake, not Ava.

“Ultimately it didn’t matter what Demeter told Penny,” Hobby said. “Anything could have set her off-the thing about you and Winnie, or the fact that Claire was pregnant and I hadn’t confided in her. For the longest time, I worried that that was the reason. I thought Penny had found out about my secret with Claire and flipped out. But it was this other thing. Or maybe it wasn’t this other thing, maybe she just did it, maybe she’d been planning to do it for a while, or maybe it just occurred to her in the moment. We’ll never know. Blaming ourselves or each other isn’t going to help. She’s not coming back.”

Jake nodded. Penny wasn’t coming back. That was the simple, awful nut of the truth.

“We have to forgive ourselves, man,” Hobby said. “I’ve thought a lot about it. I even wrote to Demeter and told her not to blame herself because it wasn’t her fault either. It wasn’t anybody’s fault.”