Free Promise of Safekeeping : A Novel (9781101553954) by Lisa Dale

He saw that it was coated with moist, fresh dirt, and that Lauren’s bleach-white sneakers had suffered a similar fate. She must have had to pry the phone out of the ground. When he looked up at her face again, she was beaming with pride. He knew that feeling well: the joy of discovery. Some part of her pleasure echoed in him.
    He said, “Not bad for a beginner.”
    “How old is it?”
    “I’m not sure. Old. Maybe around 1906?”
    “How much can you get for a phone like that?”
    “’Bout as much as a person is willing to pay for it,” he said. “Maybe five, six hundred. But if somebody wanted it bad enough, there’s no telling.”
    “So it’s really just about how bad a person wants a thing. . . ”
    “Everything in the world’s about that.”
    They stood a moment in silence that wasn’t as awkward as Will might have expected, staring down at the phone Lauren had found.
    “Will?” Lauren was looking at him. The light caught her eyes, lit them like a sunbeam through a glass of iced tea. “Are you the one who paid for Arlen’s lawyer? At the retrial?”
    “Do I even have to reply if you’re just going to know the answer anyway?”
    She smiled. “I knew it was you. I’m glad you did it.”
    “Someone had to,” he said.
    “I know,” she said, her face stricken with what could only be guilt. “I should have been paying more attention. I just . . . I need to apologize.”
    Will held her gaze. He knew what she was getting at. She wanted to know if he’d talked to Arlen—if he was going to make something happen for her. He hadn’t, yet. “But apologizing . . . that’s about
you
, isn’t it? Not him?”
    “I’d like to think it’s for both of us.” She took a step closer. He wondered if she was thinking of touching him—like she might reach for his shoulder or take his hand. But her arms stayed at her sides. “You’ll help me, won’t you? You’ll talk to him for me?”
    Will needed some space. He couldn’t think. How could a person have such guileless eyes and yet be so disconcertingly
knowing
? He took a few steps away for no reason except that she was standing too close. “I don’t know if I can help. He’s carrying around all this anger like nobody I’ve ever seen. It’s unlike him. And I’m worried . . . ”
    “You’re worried that the old Arlen is gone.”
    He tried to conceal his reaction. He hadn’t expected her understanding. He didn’t want her to know how much it mattered. “Everybody keeps telling me to watch my back. I don’t think Arlen’s bad. But he could
go
bad if he doesn’t change course. I won’t let that happen.”
    “That’s why you came looking for me.”
    He nodded. “You show up in town, hoping that Arlen’s gonna be nice to you. Hoping he’ll forgive you and you can start feeling better again. But here’s the thing: Everything Arlen hates about theworld, everything he’s angry at,
all
of it is condensed down into one single point.”
    “Me,”
she said. It wasn’t a question. She took in a deep breath and when her phone buzzed in her back pocket, she did something to silence it. “And you feel the same way about me, don’t you? I’m a symbol of everything you don’t like in the world. Everything that went wrong.”
    Will held her stare. In some small way, she brought out the boy he was when he was fifteen—rejected, poor, and pissed off at the world. He was annoyed that she knew what she did to him. “This isn’t about me. There’s only one reason I’m doing this. If
Arlen
can forgive you, he just might have a chance.”
    “That makes two of us,” she said.
    A light wind made the leaves above them whisper, and the anger that Will had managed to hold on to throughout the course of the morning left him, suddenly and completely, like a rope slipping between his fingers. Lauren looked up at him. Her eyes hid nothing. He wondered what kind of woman she was, to work all the time, to bear the burden of insight into