And then, for the second time since sunrise, I sat and watched the only love of my life walk away from me. As he did, oddly enough, I kept thinking of Benji, running up the stairs to the outskirts of my father’s earshot earlier, these same words repeated like a spell.
I’m leaving.
I’m leaving.
I’m leaving.
It wasn’t really necessary to say, especially if you were already walking away. Almost redundant. And yet, there was a comfort in there being no question, no room for doubt. I’d assumed I had that earlier from Luke. But I was sure of it now.
11
“OKAY, SO, UM . . . I guess first, maybe just say and spell your name?”
Clyde looked at me, then back at the camera. “You don’t know who I am?”
“No, no,” Theo said quickly, “I do, of course. This is just a device to mark frame, have identification. It’s—”
“Completely unnecessary right now,” Ivy finished for him. “My apologies, Clyde. He’s an intern and a novice. Let’s just get started.”
Glancing at Theo, who was squinting through the camera lens, I saw the tips of his ears and much of his face were now red. Maybe you didn’t need to know someone forever to be able to read them from a distance after all. Nervous myself, I stuck another piece of gum in my mouth.
Meanwhile, Clyde was still studying Ivy with the same flat, unreadable expression he’d had since meeting her about a half hour earlier. Finally, he looked back at Theo. “My name is Clyde Conaway. C-L-Y-D-E C-O-N-A-W-A-Y.”
I smiled, then glanced across the Washroom, the Laundromat/ café Clyde owned, to check on Benji, who was eating a piece of pie. Theo and Ivy had been so gung ho to get going on the interview that we’d come straight from the office, so I’d arranged for my father to pick him up from here. Until then, I was plying him with Clyde’s homemade sweets and hoping for the best.
In the end, I had not had to hunt Clyde down; he called me. Or the office, actually, where he was at first just a single line blinking on the phone that Rebecca pushed across the desk. I’d just come back with Benji from a late lunch at Casa Sandbar on the boardwalk and was still chewing my complimentary mint.
“For me?” I said, and she nodded. “Who is it?”
“Didn’t say,” she replied. “Just that it was important.”
I was expecting Theo, since I knew he and Ivy were going nuts over at Sand Castles, wishing I’d go ahead and jump now that they’d told me how high. So it was with some trepidation, to say the least, that I pushed the button and said hello.
“Emaline,” a voice said in response. “It’s Clyde. Got a minute?”
I did. And it took not much longer than that to set up this very interview. Quick and dirty, as my dad would say. He named the time and place, I assured him they’d find it, now here we were. What happened from this point on, however, was anybody’s guess. Which was why I was glad I’d found a fresh pack of Big Red in my purse.
“I’d like to begin,” Ivy was saying now, “with summarizing your personal details. Where were you born?”
“North Reddemane. November twenty-first, nineteen sixty-eight.”
“And your parents were farmers, yes?”
“My father kept dairy cows,” Clyde replied. “Holsteins. My mother taught third grade at Sacred Heart Catholic School in Cape Frost.”
“Which is where?”
Again, Clyde looked at me. It had been clear since I arrived that, as far as he was concerned, there was a clear division here between Us and Them. It made me wonder, yet again, why he’d agreed to do this. Then again, it had been me who told Theo that nothing Clyde did made any sense. At least he was consistent.
“Cape Frost is about twenty-five miles east of here,” he was saying now. “Closest thing to a city we had then. And now, really.”
“And Sacred Heart, was that the school you attended?” Ivy asked.
Clyde snorted. “Nobody from North Reddemane went there. Except the Guadaleris. Right, Emaline?”
“The who?” Ivy asked.
I smiled. “The Guadaleris. Rich and super-Catholic. They could afford the tuition and gas.”
Ivy turned, looking at me. “It would be best if we kept this conversation between ourselves. We’re fine with you observing, but—”
“Hey,” Clyde said, cutting her off. “I asked her something. She was answering.”
She blinked at him. “I understand that. But in a documentary setup, we need the subject to have a relationship only with the camera, not people off screen.”
“Well, maybe she should be on screen,” Clyde said.
Ivy’s expression darkened. Ever since she’d arrived to find Clyde and the situation not exactly to her specifications, she’d been simmering, close to a boil. I would have enjoyed it more had I not been so worried about all of this collapsing for Theo.
“Actually,” I said, holding up my phone. “I need to step out anyway.”
I got up and slid behind the camera setup and out the back door. I could hear Ivy as she took a deep breath, then said, “All right. So you attended school here in town. Was that for all twelve grades?”
Outside, where it was considerably less tense, I returned a text from Daisy (You OK? Call me!), then looked around to see if my father had shown up yet. There was no sign of the Subaru, though, just Clyde’s beat-up truck, my car, and Ivy and Theo’s van, from which they’d earlier unloaded what seemed like an awful lot of equipment for just a single interview.