Thirteen
That night, I tried
to wait up for my dad, so I could ask him about the councilwoman
and what I’d seen between them at the model that day, although I
wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answer. Still, I busied myself
packing and repacking my suitcase for the beach, trying not to
think abt all the other times I’d folded clothes this same way, in
the same bag. Once that was done, I made myself a pot of coffee and
sat down on the couch to study for my last big test before break,
feeling confident that the task and the caffeine would keep me
awake until he returned. Instead, I woke up at 6:00 the next
morning, the room cold and my mother’s quilt tucked over
me.
I sat up, rubbing my
eyes. My dad’s keys were in the dish by the door, his coat thrown
over our worn leather chair. Distantly, down the hallway, I could
hear the water running in his bathroom. Just another morning. I
hoped.
I took a shower, then
got dressed before making a bowl of cereal and another pot of
coffee. I was pouring a second cup when I heard a knock at the
door. Glancing out the front window, I saw a black Town Car parked
at the curb. Which could mean only one thing. Sure enough, when I
opened it, I found myself facing a wide expanse of gray cashmere. I
looked up and up, and there was Chuckles. Opal had mentioned he was
back in town, but a home visit was a surprise.
“Mclean,” he said,
smiling at me. “Good morning. Your dad around? ”
“He’s in the shower,”
I told him, stepping back so he could come in. He had to duck under
the low door frame, but something in the easy way he did it made it
clear he was used to this. “He should be out in a minute. You want
some coffee?”
“No thanks, I’m
already covered,” he said, holding up a travel mug in one of his
huge hands. “This stuff has totally spoiled me. I have to take it
with me when I travel now. Nothing else compares.”
“Really? What is
it?”
“A special blend,
grown and roasted in Kona, Hawaii. I’ve been doing some business
there lately and discovered it.” He uncapped the lid, holding it
out to me. “Take a whiff.”
I did, although it
felt a little odd to do so. It smelled amazing. “Wow,” I said.
“Hawaii, huh?”
“You ever
been?”
I shook my head. “I’d
love to, though.”
“Really,” he said,
watching me as I folded the quilt, putting it back on the arm of
the couch. “Well, that’s good to know.”
I glanced up,
wondering at this, but then my dad was coming down the hallway,
hair damp, pulling a sweatshirt over his head. “Isn’t it a little
early for door-to-door salesmen?” he asked.
“Trust me,” Chuckles
told him, capping his coffee and taking a sip, “you want what I’m peddling.”
“You always say
that.” My dad picked up his keys and phone. “You on your way out of
town?”
“Yep. Just wanted to
stop by to bug you one more time.” He smiled at me. “I was just
telling your daughter about how good this Kona coffee
is.”
“Let’s talk outside,”
my dad said, pulling on his jacket. “Mclean, I’ll just be a
sec.”
“Good to see you,”
Chuckles called out as he ducked back through the door, onto the
porch. “And aloha. That means hello and
goodbye in Hawaii. Remember that, okay? It’s useful
information.”
“Okay,” I replied a
bit uncertainly. “Aloha.”
My dad shot him a
look, and then the door was shutting behind them. I watched them go
down the walk, their contrasting heights the oddest of pairings.
Just as they got into the back of the black Town Car idling at the
curb, my phone rang.
I pulled it out, then
flipped it open, my eyes still on the car. “Morning, Mom,” I
said.
“Good morning!” she
said. “Are you in a rush? Or can you talk for sec?”
“I can
talk.”
“Great! Today’s going
to be nuts, getting packed and driving down, so I wanted to just
confirm our times and everything before the madness starts.” She
laughed. “So are we still on for four, do you think?”
“It should be fine,”
I told her. “I’ll be back here by three forty-five at the latest,
and I’m already all packed.”
“Don’t forget your
bathing suit,” she said. “Our maintenance guy called yesterday and
it’s official. The pool and hot tub are both up and
running.”
“Oh, God,” I said,
glancing down the hall at my bag, sitting by the bed. “I totally
forgot about that. I’m not even sure I have a suit
anymore.”
“We can pick one up
for you,” she replied. “Actually, there’s this really cute boutique
on the boardwalk in Colby that my friend Heidi owns. We’ll stop in
there if we get in before they close.” There was a loud wail in the
background. “Oh, dear. Connor just dumped a bowl of Cheerios on
Madison. I’d better go. I’ll see you at four?”
“Yeah,” I said. “See
you then.”
Her phone went down
with a clatter—she always had to get off the phone in a hurry, it
seemed—and I hung up mine, sliding it back in my pocket. I turned
around just in time to see my dad coming back in, Chuckles’s car
pulling away in the window behind him.
“So,” I said as the
door swung shut, “I hope this is a good time to let you know I’m
going to be needing a new bathing suit.”
He stopped where he
was, his face tightening. “Oh, for God’s sake. He told you? I asked
him specifically not to. I swear he’s
never been able to keep his mouth shut about
anything.”
I just looked at him,
confused. “Who are you talking about? ”
“Chuckles,” he said,
annoyed. Then he looked at me. “The Hawaii job? He told you.
Right?”
Slowly, I shook my
head. “I was talking about the trip today. Mom has a
pool.”
He exhaled, then ran
a hand over his face. “Oh,” he said softly.
We just stood there
for a moment, both of us still. Coffee, Kona, aloha, not to mention
Luna Blu’s apparent reprieve and his date with the councilwoman: it
suddenly all made sense. “We’re going to Hawaii?” I asked finally.
“When?”
“Nothing’s official
yet,” he replied, moving over to the couch and sitting down. “It’s
a crazy offer anyway. This restaurant that’s not even open yet and
already a total mess . . . I’d be insane to agree to
it.”
“When?” I said
again.
He swallowed, tilting
his head back and studying the ceiling. “Five weeks. Give or take a
few days.”
Immediately, I
thought of my mother, how I’d averted the custody issue with my
promises of this trip and weekends, not to mention how things had
improved between us since. Hawaii might as well have been another
world.
“You wouldn’t have to
go,” my dad said now, looking at me.
“I’d stay
here?”
His brow furrowed.
“Well . . . no. I was thinking you could go back home to your
mom’s. Finish the year and graduate there, with your
friends.”
Home. As he said this word, nothing came to mind.
Not an image, or a place. “So those are the options?” I said.
“Mom’s or Hawaii?”
“Mclean.” He cleared
his throat. “I told you, nothing is decided yet.”
It was so weird. Just
then, suddenly and totally unexpectedly, I was certain I was going
to cry. And not just cry, but cry those hot, mad tears that sting
your throat and burn your eyes, the kind you only do in private
when you know no one can see or hear you, not even the person that
caused them. Especially them.
“So this is why
you’ve been with the councilwoman,” I said slowly.
“We’ve just been on a
couple of dates. That’s all.”
“Does she know about
Hawaii?”
He blinked, then
glanced at me. “Nothing to know. I told you, no plans have been
made.”
“Except for the meat
order going from monthly to weekly,” I said. He raised his
eyebrows. “Doesn’t bode well for the restaurant. Means you’re
either running out of money, or time. Or both.”
He sat back, shaking
his head. “You don’t miss much, do you? ”
“Just repeating what
you told me back in Petree,” I said. “Or Montford
Falls.”
“Petree,” he replied.
“In Montford, they had time and money. That’s why they made
it.”
“And Luna Blu won’t,”
I said slowly.
“Probably not.” He
rubbed a hand over his face, then dropped it, looking at me. “I’m
serious about what I said, though. You can’t just pick up and move
halfway across the world so close to finishing school. Your mother
wouldn’t stand for it.”
“It’s not her choice,
though.”
“Why don’t you want
to go home?” he asked.
“Because it’s not
home anymore,” I said. “It hasn’t been for three years. And yeah,
Mom and I are getting along better, but that doesn’t mean I want to
live with her.”
My dad rubbed his
hand over his face, the sure sign that he was tired and frustrated.
“I need to get to the restaurant,” he said, starting out of the
room. “Just think about this, okay? We can discuss it further
tonight.”
“Mom’s picking me up
for the beach at four,” I said.
“Then when you get
back. Nothing has to be decided right now.” iv width="1em"
align="left">He got to his feet, then
turned to start down the hallway. I said, “I can’t go back there.
You don’t understand. I’m not . . .”
He stopped, then
looked back at me, waiting for me to finish this sentence, and I
realized I couldn’t. In my head, it went off in a million
directions—I’m not that girl anymore. I’m not
sure who I am—each of them only leading to more
complications and explanations.
My dad’s phone,
sitting on the table, suddenly rang. But he didn’t answer, instead
kept looking at me. “Not what?” he asked.
“Nothing,” I said,
nodding at his phone. “Never mind.”
“Stay right there. I
want to keep talking about this,” he said as he picked it up,
flipping it open. “Gus Sweet. Yeah, hi. No, I’m on my way. . .
.”
I watched him as he
turned, still talking, and went down the hallway into his bedroom.
As soon as he was out of sight, I grabbed my backpack and
bolted.
The air was sharp,
clear, and I felt it fill my lungs like water as I sucked in a
breath and started around the house to my shortcut to the bus stop.
The grass was wet under my feet, my cheeks stinging as I pushed
myself forward through the yard and into that of the building
behind us.
Dusted with frost, it
looked even more bereft than usual, and when I got to its side
yard, the bus stop in sight ahead, I stopped, then bent down,
putting my hands on my legs, and tried to catch my breath and
swallow back my tears. I could feel the cold all around me: seeping
through my shoes, in the air, moving through and around this empty,
abandoned place beside me. I turned, taking a breath, and looked
over, seeing my reflection in one of the remaining windows. My face
was wild, lost, and for a second I didn’t recognize myself. Like
the house was looking at me, and I was a stranger. No home, no
control, and no idea where I was, only where I might be
going.
“Mclean. Wait
up!”
I bit my lip at the
sound of Dave’s voice, calling out from behind me. Between studying
and some extra credit work I needed to do before the end of this,
the last day of the grading period, I’d managed to avoid just about
everyone for the entire school day. Until now.
“Hey,” I said as he
jogged up, falling into place behind me.
“Where have you been
all day?” he said. “I thought you cut or something.”
“I had tests,” I told
him as we moved with the rest of the crowd through the main
entrance. “And some other stuff.”
“Oh, right. Because
you’re leaving.”
“What?”
“For the beach.
Today. With your mom.” He looked at me, narrowing his eyes.
“Right?”
“Oh. Yeah,” I said,
shaking my head. “Sorry. I’m just, you know, distracted. About the
trip, and everything.”
“Sure,” he said, but
he kept his eyes on me, even as I focused my attention steadily
forward. “So . . . are you leaving right away or are you coming to
the restaurant for a while?”
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“Cool. Ride with
me.”
Being alone,
together, at right this moment, was exactly what I didn’t want to
do. But lacking any way of getting out of it, I followed him to the
parking lot, sliding into the passenger seat of the Volvo. After
three false starts, he finally managed to coax it out of the space
and toward the exit.
“So,” he said as we
turned onto the main road, the muffler rattling, “I’ve been
thinking.”
“Yeah?”
He nodded. “You
really need to go out with me.”
I blinked. “I’m
sorry?”
“You know. You, me. A
restaurant or movie. Together.” He glanced over, shifting gears.
“Maybe it’s a new concept for you? If so, I’ll be happy to walk you
through it.”
“You want to take me
to a movie?” I asked.
“Well, not really,”
he said. “What I really want is for you to be my girlfriend. But I
thought saying that might scare you off.”
I felt my heart jump
in my chest. “Are you always so direct about this kind of
thing?”
“No,” he said. We
turned right, starting up the hill toward downtown, the tall
buildings of the hospital and U bell tower visible at the top. “But
I get the feeling you’re in a hurry, leaving and all, so I figured
I should cut to the chase.”
“I’m only going to be
gone a week,” I said softly.
“True,” he said as
the engine strained, still climbing. “But I’ve been wanting to do
it for a while and didn’t want to wait any longer.”
“Really?” I asked. He
nodded. “Like, since when?”
He thought for a
second. “The day you hit me with that basketball.”
“That was attractive
to you?”
“Not exactly,” he
replied. “More like embarrassing and humiliating. But there was
something about it as a moment. . . . It was like a clean slate. No
posturing or pretending. It was, you know, real.”
We were coming into
town now, passing FrayBake, Luna Blu only a few blocks away.
“Real,” I repeated.
“Yeah. I mean, it’s
impossible to fake anything if you’ve already seen the other person
in a way they’d never choose for you to. You can’t go back from
that.”
“No,” I said. “I
guess you can’t.”
He turned into the
Luna Blu lot, parking beside a VW, and we got out and started
walking toward the kitchen entrance. “So,” he said, “not to sound
pushy or desperate, but you haven’t exactly answered—”
“Yo! Wait up! ” I
heard a voice yell from behind us. I turned just in time to see
Ellis’s van sliding into the spot beside the Volvo. A moment later,
he was jogging toward us, his keys jingling in one hand. “Am I glad
to see you g. I thought I was late.”
Dave glanced at his
watch. “Actually, we’re all late.”
“By two minutes,” I
told him. “I don’t think she’ll flog us or anything.”
“You don’t know
that.” He pulled open the back door. As Ellis ducked in, and I
followed, he said, “This is Deb we’re talking about.”
“Actually,” I said,
stopping in front of my dad’s closed office, “I need to stop in
here. I’ll catch up with you guys.”
“Uh-oh,” Ellis said.
“She was our sympathy vote.”
“But now we can say
it was her fault,” Dave said. To me he added, “Take your
time!”
I made a face, and
then they were gone, the door that led into the restaurant banging
shut behind them. I leaned a little closer to my dad’s door: I
could hear him inside talking, his voice low.
“Wouldn’t knock just
now,” someone said, and I turned to see Jason standing down the
hallway, clipboard in hand, in the narrow room where they kept all
the canned and dried goods. “Your dad said no interruptions until
further notice.”
“Really,” I said,
looking at the door again. “Did he tell you what was going
on?”
“I didn’t ask.” He
nodded, checking something off his list. “But they’ve been in there
for a while.”
I was about to ask
him who was with my dad before deciding against it. Instead, I
stepped back, thanking him, and headed upstairs.
The restaurant was
empty and quiet. The only sounds were the beer cooler humming and
the ticking of the fan over the hostess station, turned on too high
a speed. I stopped at the end of the bar, looking down the row of
tables, each neatly set and waiting for opening. Like a clean
slate, I thought, remembering what Dave had said earlier. Even
though each shift started the same way, on any given night,
anything could happen from here.
It was surprisingly
quiet as I climbed the stairs to the attic room, and I wondered if
Dave and everyone else had left or something. When I got to the
landing, I saw them all gathered around Deb, who was sitting with
her back to me on one of the tables, her computer open in her lap.
I couldn’t see what was on the screen, but everyone was studying
it.
“. . . got to be some
kind of joke,” she was saying. “Either that or just a
coincidence.”
“I’m sorry, but they
aren’t just similar. I mean, look at that one and then that one.”
Heather reached forward, pointing at the screen. “It’s the same
girl.”
“Different names,
though,” Riley murmured.
“Different
first names,” Heather said. “Like I
said: same girl.”
“What’s going on?” I
asked.
Deb jumped, startled,
and shut the laptop, turning around. “Nothing. I was
just—”
“—updating the
Ume.com page for the
model and linking our accounts to it,” Heather finished for her,
opening it up again. “Imagine our surprise when we put in your
e-mail and five profiles popped up.”div
“Heather,” Riley
said, her voice low.
“What? It’s weird, we
all agreed on that ten minutes ago.” She looked at me as Dave and
Ellis turned their attention back to the computer. “What are you, a
split personality or something? ”
I felt my mouth go
dry as the impact of what they’d discovered finally began to hit
me. I stepped forward, my eyes narrowing to the screen on the
table, and the list of names there. Five girls, five profiles, four
pictures. MCLEAN SWEET. ELIZA SWEET. LIZBET SWEET. BETH SWEET. And
at the bottom, just a name, nothing else for Liz Sweet. It was as
far as I’d gotten.
“Mclean?” Deb said
softly. I looked at her, still very aware of Dave studying the
screen only a few feet from me. “What’s all this
about?”
I swallowed. They’d
all been so honest with me, so open. Dave and his past
embarrassments, Riley and her dirtbags, Ellis and the Love Van, Deb
and, well, everything. Even Heather had pointed out her house and
talked about her dad, the technophobe Loeb fan. With this, they had
perfectly good reason to doubt everything I had told them in
return. Even if, I thought, looking at Dave, it was
true.
“I . . .” I began,
but no words came, nothing, just a gasp of breath, and then I was
turning back down the stairs, picking up speed as I went. I moved
quickly back through the restaurant, past Tracey, who was stacking
menus at the bar.
“Hey!” she called
out, a blur in my side vision. “Where’s the fire?”
I ignored this as I
moved on, through the door and down the hallway to the back
entrance. I was just pushing the door open, my palm flat on the
flimsy screen, when I heard Opal come out of my dad’s office,
behind me.
“You should have told
me,” she said over her shoulder. Her face was flushed, angry. “You
let me just go along here like an idiot, thinking things were
okay.”
“I didn’t know for
sure,” my dad said.
“But you knew
something!” She stopped, whirling around to face him. “And you knew
how I felt about this place, and these people. You knew, and you said nothing.”
“Opal,” my dad said,
but she was already turning, walking away, pushing open the door to
the restaurant with a bang and going through it. My dad watched her
go with a sigh, his shoulders sagging. Then he saw me. “Mclean.
When—”
“So it’s official,
then,” I said, cutting him off. “We’re leaving?”
“We need to talk
about it,” he replied, coming closer. “There’s a lot to
consider.”
“I want to go,” I
said. “I’ll go whenever. I’ll go now.”
“Now?” He narrowed
his eyes, concerned. “What are you talking about? What’s
wrong?”
I shook my head,
stepping out onto the ramp that led to the door. “I have to get
back to the house. Mom’s . . . she’s waiting for me.”
“Hey, hold on a
second,” he said. “Just talk to me.”
It was what everyone
wanted. My mom, my dad, my friends upstairs, not to mention all the
people in all the places I’d left behin. But talk was cheap and
useless. Action was what mattered. And me, I was moving. Now,
again, always.