Now You Say Yes Read online

  Published by

  PEACHTREE PUBLISHING COMPANY INC.

  1700 Chattahoochee Avenue

  Atlanta, Georgia 30318-2112

  www.peachtree-online.com

  Text © 2021 by Bill Harley

  Cover and interior illustrations © by Pierre-Emmanuel Lyet

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

  Edited by Vicky Holifield

  Cover design by Kate Gartner

  Interior design and composition by Adela Pons

  ebook ISBN 978-1-68263-430-1

  Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress.

  To Debbie Block

  in all ways, always

  —B. H.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  “The barbecue ones,” Conor says.

  “I know,” Mari says for the fourth time.

  “I don’t like the other ones. Especially not the vinegar ones. They’re bad.”

  Conor is standing sideways to the rows of snacks, facing the aisle that leads away from the meat section. His head is down—he’s not looking at her. He never looks at her. He’s not looking at anything except his fingers, which are opening and closing like they’re on the inside of a puppet and the puppet is talking. But the puppet is silent. It’s the motion of the hand that fascinates him, that has always fascinated him. Especially when things aren’t right.

  And things aren’t right.

  “I can’t find barbecue ones,” Mari says.

  “They have to be there. Edith’s Original Barbecue.” Conor’s head starts nodding up and down.

  She leaves him there and walks back up the aisle, hoping that someone put Edith’s Original Barbecue Potato Chips in the wrong place. There are thousands of bags of different kinds of chips, but only Edith’s Original Barbecue Potato Chips will do. She can feel things spinning slowly out of control, turning aimlessly like some asteroid hurtling out of the gravitational force of some solar system—but her job now is to find the right kind of potato chips.

  “Edith’s,” Conor repeats, loud enough for people in the aisle to turn and stare at him. He doesn’t stare back, because he’s an asteroid too, oblivious to the planet Normal. The other people in the aisle have sighted him through their own telescopes planted firmly on Normal, and they have stepped back to readjust the lenses. A woman with a baked-on tan, decked out in a fancy pantsuit from Rodeo Drive, turns her cart and heads in the other direction.

  “Edith’s Original Barbecue Potato Chips with the taste of real smoke and peppery barbecue. Homestyle recipe. Ten ounces net weight,” Conor recites from the hard drive of his memory. “Edith’s.”

  “I know,” Mari mutters.

  There they are. Thank God. What idiot put the Edith’s with the Lay’s?

  “Here,” she says, grabbing a bag. Conor turns to her, takes the bag from her hands, and clutches it to his chest. Without a word, he makes a hairpin turn and heads toward the checkout line in fourth gear, ignoring everything around him.

  Mari follows. She doesn’t call to Conor to slow down. It would just attract attention and he wouldn’t listen anyway.

  The express line is six customers deep. There are too many people around and Conor is beginning to stim.

  Stim. Stimming. Short for “stimulating,” or “self-stimulating.” It’s what some people on the autism spectrum do when things get weird for them—which is pretty often. If you’re not used to it, it’s one of the most disturbing parts of being around someone on the spectrum.

  People pretend to ignore Conor, which means they stare at him when they think no one will notice. Mari has seen this a thousand times. Right now he’s pretty interesting, since he’s muttering the slogan of Edith’s Original Barbecue Potato Chips under his breath, holding the chips to his chest with one arm, and staring at his flapping fingers with the other.

  It’s times like this that make Mari want to shout, “Excuse me. May I have your attention? This is my brother, Conor. He’s nine years old and is on the autism spectrum. Call it Asperger’s. He may seem weird to you, but he’s smarter than you’ll ever be. And yeah, he doesn’t look like me. I’m adopted and he’s not. Mind your own business.”

  But that would attract more attention and be a bad idea.

  Mari has many bad ideas.

  Mari slips her backpack off her shoulder and pulls her wallet out of the back pocket of the pack, hoping she has enough cash to buy the chips.

  “We have to pay for the Edith’s Original Barbecue Potato Chips NOW!” Conor announces. Everyone in every checkout line turns and looks at him.

  He has no clue about how he affects others.

  Mari wishes she could care as little as he does about what others think.

  Coming to the supermarket was now, officially, one of her really bad ideas, but she had to get him out of the hospital, and the Vons supermarket was just across the street. She’s in charge of Conor, but she’s anxious about her mom. The store is crowded, the line is long, and someone in front of them has decided thirteen items is okay in the express line. It’s the woman with the baked-on tan. Perfect. Rodeo Drive Lady is checking out her phone while the cashier rings up her items and everybody waits.

  “You can open the chips now,” Mari says to Conor.

  “No,” he says, shaking his head. “They aren’t purchased yet.”

  Conor’s sense of rules is so strong, so literal, so by the book, that sometimes Mari thinks he would gladly push the button to blow up the world if it were in the rule book. On the other hand, if a rule doesn’t fit in with the Official Rules and Regulations of Conor’s World, there’s no way he would follow it, even if it was a federal law and they’d send him away for life.

  Mari’s heart catches. “Conor’s World.” That’s what Mom calls his grid, his framework, his understanding of everything around him.

  “I can’t eat them until they’re purchased,” he repeats. “They are still owned by the store until they are paid for.”

  Mari remembers when Mom s
et this rule: the day when Conor opened up four candy bars in the checkout line, which made perfect sense to do, since they were sitting there at eye level, asking to be opened.

  “It’s okay to eat them while we wait,” Mari counsels.

  “We should pay now,” he says.

  People look away.

  If it weren’t so annoying, it would be funny. If a normal teenager talked out loud like this, being “inappropriate,” his friends would laugh at his brashness. It’s funny because it’s breaking a rule—you’re not supposed to talk this loud in a line of people you don’t know. It would be hilarious.

  “Pay now!” Conor repeats, a little louder.

  People squirm. Everyone is nervously trying to ignore both of them, which means they are staring even more.

  “We have to wait,” Mari says.

  And then her phone vibrates. She takes it out of her back pocket.

  It’s a text from Dennis.

  Get over here now.

  Rodeo Drive Lady is still busy on her phone, watching the girl bag her thirteen items.

  There are three other customers in line in front of them.

  “Let’s go,” Mari says, taking the bag of chips out of Conor’s hand. She puts the wallet back in her backpack and slips the pack over her shoulder.

  “We haven’t completed the sale!” he says, loud enough for half the store to hear. “We can’t leave until we complete the sale. Then they belong to us.”

  “Mom needs us,” Mari says. Holding out the potato chips, she turns and walks past everyone in line. She doesn’t look at anyone. She’s hoping it will work, and it does—like a dog tracking a rabbit, Conor follows the potato chips.

  They’re out the door and headed across the street to Hamilton Memorial Hospital, where their mom is on a bed with all sorts of tubes in her, and their mom’s stupid boyfriend, Dennis, is waiting for them, acting like he has the right to order Mari around.

  She hands the bag of chips back to Conor, who clutches them like some religious relic that will keep him safe from harm. She figures the people in the store—the customers, the cashiers, the stock boys—are glad to get rid of her and her brother.

  Taking a bag of potato chips without paying seems like a small thing when your mom is in the emergency room.

  Chapter Two

  Halfway across the street, the phone in her hand vibrates. Another text from Dennis.

  Where are you?

  Mari doesn’t like Dennis. She has never liked him, and what he’s done in the past hour hasn’t made her like him more. Dennis is a contractor. He does window replacements and is rail thin and squints every time he takes a drag off his cigarette. He does have a pretty good laugh—he leans back and his mouth opens and his Adam’s apple bobs up and down. But most of the time he laughs at the wrong things. He hasn’t moved into their house yet, but Mari is afraid he might.

  “He’s a jerk!” Mari had told her mom a couple of weeks ago. “All he does is smoke and eat our food and take up space!”

  Her mom had just shrugged, her broad back to Mari’s pleas while she washed her coffee cup in the sink.

  Mari never understood what her mother saw in most of the guys who passed through their little house in East Los Angeles. For two years after Kevin left (Mari won’t refer to him as “Dad,” since that would honor him in a way he doesn’t deserve), her mom hadn’t seen anyone. She’d just thrown herself into raising her two kids, one adopted, one with autism, and both of them trouble.

  But then it had started—one guy after another coming through the house, some lasting two or three days, some weeks, some months.

  “I just need someone around,” her mom had said one day. “To help out a little.”

  And a little was all she ever seemed to get. Except for Carlos, who was funny and had a new pickup. Mari had liked riding in it, high above the road. One day he’d slipped a Katy Perry CD into the player in the cab and at the end of the ride, he had given it to her. And then it turned out he had another family and Mari’s mom was just a side project of his. Finally his real wife put her foot down and said, “Enough!”

  While Carlos was in the kitchen with her mom, trying to explain himself, Mari had put the CD on the concrete floor of the patio behind their house and smashed it with a hammer.

  That was the second time she’d broken something with a hammer.

  She didn’t want to think about the first.

  Dennis often seemed annoyed that she and Conor were there. He made pathetic attempts at showing he cared about who they were and what they were doing. But even if he didn’t seem to like them, Dennis brought her mom flowers, and no one had given her flowers for a long time.

  For her mom’s sake, Mari put up with him.

  Until today. Mari was at her summer job working as a counselor at a day camp at the Rose Bowl pool when Dennis had called her on her cell phone.

  “I’m picking you up in five minutes. Your mom’s in the hospital. Be ready.”

  Before she could ask any questions, he’d hung up. When she met him in the pool parking lot, he already looked like a rat searching for a way out of the cage.

  “We gotta go get your brother,” he said.

  Conor was at a day-care program for special-needs kids at the elementary school.

  “What’s going on? What’s wrong?” Mari asked.

  Dennis was smoking and Mari rolled down the window so she wouldn’t asphyxiate in the gray cloud.

  “Your mom’s in the hospital. Something happened to her.”

  “What? What happened? Is she all right?”

  “I don’t know, okay? Something with her heart. She had them call me at work. So don’t ask me any more questions until we get there, then we’ll both find out. But you gotta go in and get Conor.”

  “But do you think—”

  “I don’t know, okay, Mari?” Dennis said, his voice rising. He looked at her, but the reflecting lenses on his sunglasses hid his eyes. He took a deep drag and let the smoke out slowly, trying to calm himself. “We’ll find out. But now you gotta go in and get Conor.”

  All Mari could think when she looked at Dennis was the question her mom would ask when Mari was trapped in a jam, surrounded by ill-behaved people who didn’t understand her. Or when Conor was stimming or staring off into space or had to have his way when her mom was busy, which left it to Mari to handle.

  “Who’s the grown-up here?” her mom would always ask.

  She meant Mari, who was just fifteen, which was not officially grown-up.

  Now Dennis should be the grown-up, but he wasn’t acting like one. She shut up and looked out the window.

  When the car pulled into Las Flores Elementary School, she got out and they buzzed her in at the door. Inside, she explained to Mrs. Gota that it was an emergency, that her mom was in the hospital. Luckily, she’d picked Conor up before, so the receptionist didn’t blink, and Mari signed her brother out. He didn’t ask any questions, which was a minor miracle. Until they got into the car.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Mom’s in the hospital,” Mari explained. “We’re going to see her.”

  “What’s wrong with Mom?” he asked.

  “I don’t know, okay?” Dennis exploded.

  Conor responded in kind. “Why don’t you know?” he shouted back. “Why don’t you know?”

  Routine and clarity are what Conor wants. Not knowing what’s happening is a recipe for disaster, because knowing what is going to happen and where things will be and when they will be there is the most important thing in Conor’s life. And that’s hard for a kid like Conor, whose life could be a movie called Uncertainty.

  “Calm down, Conor!” Dennis yelled.

  Which didn’t calm Conor down. At all.

  “It’s okay, Conor,” Mari said, being the grown-up. “It’s okay.”

&n
bsp; Although it wasn’t.

  Chapter Three

  Mari and Conor reach the other side of the street and head for the hospital entrance. Conor hasn’t opened the bag of chips. They’re still clutched to his chest, and it seems like he’s waiting for some official acknowledgment of the proper ownership of the potato chips before he opens them. Mari leads Conor past the person at the front desk.

  “Wait!” the woman calls.

  Mari turns and points to the Visitor sticker on her shirt. They’re official. Mari is not used to feeling “official” and she relishes showing she is. Conor doesn’t notice any of this. Then they’re on the elevator, going down one level to the emergency room.

  “I haven’t eaten any,” Conor says to himself, or to anyone who would listen. “We haven’t purchased them yet.”

  As they go by the check-in desk, a nurse raises her head and gives them a long look, following Mari as she leads Conor through the swinging doors and down the hall to her mom’s room.

  And then everything slows. Mari’s mind is making a hundred connections a second as she takes in the scene. There are two doctors and a nurse and an orderly in the doorway. And Dennis, who is looking at the floor. Everyone else is just standing there, like they are taking a break or something.

  Why aren’t they in there taking care of Mom?

  Then they all look up at once, like a herd of deer, or dumb cows. Their eyes rest on Mari and she knows.

  Mom is dead.

  They all take a step forward like the same herd of mute animals and hold up their hands as if to keep her from seeing.

  “Where’s Mom?” Mari asks, although she knows. She tries to push through the group, toward the door, toward where her mom is lying on the bed so they can make her well.

  Dennis grabs her and tries to hold her back.

  “No!” she says. He releases her and she walks in by herself. Conor stands still, unmoving in the hallway, avoiding all the grown-ups who might want to touch him and his potato chips.

  Now Mari is in the room, standing by the bed, and her mom’s face is turned away from her. They’ve got the sheet pulled up to her chest and there are tubes running in her arms and in her nose.