But then he’d stopped. He’d gotten out of his truck. He’d walked back to me. And he’d kissed me. If he’d done anything else—yelled, cajoled, tried to explain or intimidate, I wouldn’t have gotten in the car with him, not again.
But he’d kissed me. And I woke up. The Bonnie that sassed and sparkled and didn’t let Gran push her around, the Bonnie that laughed hard and fought harder, the Bonnie that had made the world love her against impossible odds, that Bonnie, that ME, woke up.
Some people might laugh or roll their eyes and accuse me of tired clichés. But there it was—hot food in an empty stomach, water on a parched throat, that first glimpse of home just around the bend, or that first bite of something you thought you’d never have the courage to try, only to realize it was the best thing you’d ever tasted. That was what Finn’s kiss was like. And in that moment, I realized I was starving and had been for a long time. I was starving. Hungry for companionship, affection, connection. And strangest of all, hungry for Finn Clyde.
Maybe it was because I was raised in Appalachia, raised in faith and poverty and little else, but I believed in things like fate and destiny. I believed in angels, and I believed in God’s ability to direct our paths, to guide us and move us in unseen ways, and I believed in miracles. Suddenly, Finn Clyde felt like a miracle, and I felt sure that Minnie had sent him to me.
“What do you believe in, Finn?” I whispered, giving voice to my thoughts, the darkness and quiet necessary ingredients for a discussion so important. I thought for a minute he wasn’t going to answer, that he’d fallen asleep beside me and there would be no sustenance for my suddenly ravenous appetite. But then he spoke, his voice drowsy and slow, and I tipped my face toward him to soak up the safety of his voice in the dark.
“I believe in numbers. The ones you can see and the ones you can’t. The real and the imaginary, the rational and the irrational, and every point on lines that go on forever. Numbers have never let me down. They don’t waffle. They don’t lie. They don’t pretend to be what they’re not. They’re timeless.”
“You’re smart then . . . aren’t you, Finn?” I heard the awe in my own voice. It wasn’t a question. I had never been school smart, and marveled at those who were. “I thought you were. I was never any good with numbers. Math has always been like a murky pond, and me, a hillbilly stabbing at the fish with a pokey stick, trying to get lucky.”
“That doesn’t make any sense, Bonnie.” Finn laughed softly.
“That’s my point, Clyde.”
“You’re your own kind of smart.” I loved the way he said the word “smart.”
“Smat,” I mimicked softly, and he pinched my side in response but continued his argument.
“Music doesn’t make any sense to me. I couldn’t pull a pitch out of the air the way you do no matter how hard I studied, no matter how many theorems I proved. Some are born with an ear. I was born with a calculator.”
“Does it come that easy for you? Like music does for me?” I marveled at the idea. “I’ve never had to work at it . . . or maybe it’s just that it never felt like work to me. The music was just always there, easy for me to hear, easy for me to re-create. I can’t imagine math being like that.”
“When we were little my dad would ask me and my brother to tell him about numbers. He would say, ‘Tell me about the number one.’ Fisher wasn’t interested, but I was. I would tell my dad everything I knew from my limited perspective. I would point to myself and say ‘one.’ I would point to Fish and say ‘one.’ And he would say, ‘Ah, but Finn, together you are two, aren’t you?’ And I would say, ‘No. One Finn. One Fish.’ As if we were the same—two halves of a whole.
“As I got older my dad would demand more. And I would recite everything he’d taught me, everything I’d learned. ‘Tell me about number four, Finn,’ he’d say. And I’d respond with something like ‘the first composite number, the second square, and the first square of a prime.’ Not difficult stuff, but more difficult than the ‘one Finn, one Fish’ stuff of my three-year-old answers.”
“That’s not difficult stuff?” I asked, and I could see my breath puff out from my lips as the temperature in the Blazer continued to fall.
“No. By the time I was in my mid-teens, my answers included things like Fermat’s last theorem, or Euler’s assertion, or Goldbach’s conjecture.”
“Holy crap! You won’t feel bad if I don’t ask you to explain what any of that means, will you?”
“No.” Finn laughed, creating a heavy white plume above my head that dissipated immediately. “Math is lonely in that way. Isolating. It’s the reason my parents split. My mom always felt excluded. She said my dad would go off into his own little world. Then he started taking me with him, and it was the final straw.
“My dad got offered a position at a college in another state, and my mom said she wasn’t leaving. They gave me and my brother a choice about where we wanted to go. But I was almost seventeen—I’d spent my whole life in Boston. I had friends and I played ball, and deep down, I didn’t want to leave Fisher or my mother, even though I blamed her for the fact that my dad was leaving us. I should have gone, though. Looking back, I should have gone. Because in the end, I left my mother anyway.” Finn stopped short and changed the subject. “You asked me what I believe in. What do you believe in?” I sensed his discomfort, talking about his family, and decided to let him pass the stick this once.