What Happened to Goodbye(56)
Author: Sarah Dessen

“I’m offended,” Dave told her flatly.

Her eyes widened. “Oh, no. Really? I’m so—”

“I’m also joking,” he said.

“Oh, okay. Whew!” She smiled, her cheeks flushing. “Let me start by just saying that I’m so glad you invited me here. I love this kind of stuff. When I was a kid, I was crazy for miniatures.”

“Miniatures?” I asked.

“You know, dollhouses and such. I especially loved historical stuff. Tiny re-creations of Revolutionary War cottages, Victorian orphanages. That kind of thing.”

“Orphanages?” Dave said.

“Sure.” She blinked. “What? Anyone can have a dollhouse. I was more creative with my play.”

“Dave was, too,” I told her. “He was into model trains.”

“It was not trains,” Dave said, annoyed. “It was war staging, and very serious.”

“Oh, I loved war staging!” Deb told him. “That’s how I ended up with all my orphans.”

I just looked at both of them. “What kind of childhood did you people have?”

“The bad kind,” Deb replied, simply, matter-of-factly. She slid off her jacket, folded it neatly, and put it with her purse on a nearby table. “We were always broke, Mom and Dad didn’t get along. My world was messed up. So I liked being able to make other ones.”

I looked at her, realizing this was the most she’d ever volunteered about her home life. “Wow,” I said.

Dave shrugged. “I just liked battles.”

“Who doesn’t?” Deb replied, already moving on. “Anyway, I really feel, from my experience with large model and miniature structures, that the best approach in construction is the pinwheel method. And what you have going here is total chessboard.”

We both just looked at her. “Right,” Dave said finally. “Well, of course.”

“So honestly,” she continued as I shot him a look, trying not to laugh, “I think we need a total re-approach to the entire project. Are those the directions?”

“Yeah,” I told her, picking up the thick manual by my feet.

“Great! Can I see?”

I handed them over, and she immediately took them to the table, spreading them out. Within seconds, she was bent over the pages, deep in thought, drumming on her lip with one finger.

“Can I tell you something?” Dave whispered to me. “I love Deb. She’s a total freak. And I mean that in a good way.”

“I know,” I said. “Every day she kind of blows my mind.”

It was true. Deb might have been a spazzer freak, speed-metal drummer, tattoo expert, and constructor of orphanages. What she wasn’t was timid. When she took something over, she took it over.

“Think wheel,” she kept saying to me as I stood over the model, holding a house in one hand. “We start in the middle, at the hub, then work our way out from the center, around and around.”

“We were just kind of putting things in as we pulled them out of the boxes,” I told her.

“I know. I could tell the first moment I saw this thing.” She gave me a sympathetic look. “But don’t feel bad, okay? That’s a beginner’s mistake. If you kept it up, though, you’d end up climbing over things, houses piercing your knees, kicking fire hydrants off accidentally. It would be a serious mess. Trust me.”

I did, so I followed her direction. Gone were the pick-apiece, put-it-together, find-its-place days. Already, she’d developed her own system and fetched a red pen from her purse to adapt the directions accordingly, and by an hour in, she had us running like a machine. She gathered the pieces for each area of the pinwheel—she termed them “sectors”—which Dave then assembled, and I attached to their proper spot. Create, Assemble, Attach. Or, as Deb called it, CAA. I fully expected her to make up T-shirts or hats with this slogan by our next meeting.

“You have to admit,” I said to Dave when she was across the room on her cell phone, calling the toll-free-questions line at Model Community Ventures for the second time for clarification on one of the directions, “she’s good at this.”

“Good?” he replied, snapping a roof on a building. “More like destined. She makes us look like a bunch of fumbling idiots.”

“Speak for yourself,” I said. “She said my approach was promising, for a beginner.”

“Oh, don’t kid yourself.She’s just being nice.” He picked up another piece of plastic. “When you were in the bathroom, she told me your sectors are sadly lacking.”

“That is not true! My sectors are perfect.”

“You call that perfect? It’s total chessboard.”

I made a face, then poked him, and he poked me back. He was laughing as I walked back to the model, bending down to inspect my sector. Which looked just fine. I thought.

“. . . of course! No, thank you. I’m sure we’ll talk again. Okay! Bye!” Deb snapped her phone shut, then sighed. “I swear, Marion is so nice.”

“Marion? ”

“The woman at Model Community Ventures who answers the help line,” she said. “She’s just been a godsend.”

“You made friends,” I said, “with the help line lady?”

“Well, I wouldn’t say we’re friends,” she replied. “But she’s really been great. Usually, they just put those numbers on there but nobody answers. I can’t tell you how many hours I’ve spent on hold, waiting for someone to tell me how to glue an eave properly.”

I just looked at her. From across the room, Dave snorted.

“Hey, is Gus up there?” someone called up the stairs.

I walked over to see Tracey on the landing below. “Nope. He’s in a meeting in the event room with Opal.”

“Still? God, what are they doing in there?”

I had a flash of the pad with all those numbers, how her name had been awfully close to the top. “I don’t know,” I said.

“Well, when he finally emerges,” she said, pulling a pen out from her hair and sticking it back in with her free hand, “tell him that councilwoman called again. I don’t know how much longer I can put her off. Clearly, she’s undersexed and highly motivated.”

“What?”

“She’s hot for your dad,” she said, speaking slowly for my benefit. “And he is not getting the message. Literally. So tell him, would you?”