A Little Hope

by Ethan Joella

  The store is busy this Saturday. One hippie mother with too-long wavy hair is letting her kids run around freely, pulling pink rubber balls out of the plastic bin and giggling madly as they bounce. A divorced dad (he thinks) is guilt-buying a mechanical robot for his small son who barely answers his questions. The cash register is an old-fashioned one, and the gears inside ring and the drawer thuds open. “Have a fun day,” the cashier repeats over and over. She wears one of those multicolored propeller hats and a purple vest. Every so often she puts on an oversized foam hand to wave at kids and parents coming in.

  It’s too crowded. He feels hot in this six-person line, and he wishes the hippie’s kids would stop screaming. He scratches the four-day scruff on his face and regrets not shaving. Why is everything so hard? Some days, he barely does two things and it’s already four in the afternoon. He means to scribble song lyrics in the notebook he bought. He means to try to book some solo gigs. He has to get clean. He sleeps too much, regrets it all the next day. He looks down at his shirt and jeans. He reaches into his pocket and puts a Lifesaver into his mouth.

  When the door chimes again, he looks absently over to see what chaos is now coming through, and he recognizes the face right away. He is stunned, and his heart somersaults. Older but still as gorgeous: Ginger Lord, his girlfriend in his early twenties. Is he really seeing her? It feels surreal. It feels like he’s not standing there and she won’t see him. He wants her to see him. He has thought about her so many times. He has even looked at the online reviews of her vet clinic (Dr. Lord is patient and sweet; The vet is the saving grace of this place; She held our old cockapoo and said he was a handsome fella, which made us feel instantly comforted). Her light auburn hair is shorter, and she wears less makeup, dressed in a denim jacket, long sweater, and boots. She always looked Ivy League but never overdone. She notices him right away.

  “Luke,” she says, her eyes so wide, her face delighted.

  He pretends to be surprised. “Oh, hey.” She comes closer, and he doesn’t know what to do. Should he hug her? His hands are full with the large Bozo box. Right away he can smell the familiar perfume: Chanel. He looks down at his boxes as though offering an explanation for not touching her, but she doesn’t make any effort to come closer. “What are you doing in town?” he finally asks.

  “Just here for the weekend.” She smiles and tucks her hair behind her ears. “I’m actually going to be in Suzette’s wedding next month—remember her? The bridal shower is tomorrow at The Manor House.”

  “Suzette,” he says. “Yeah, I remember her. Didn’t she move to Iceland or someplace?” This sense of being so familiar with a person feels like what he’s been missing. He suddenly just wants to smile. He feels like he can tell Ginger anything. He stares into her round eyes, so sincere, and is proud of her. He knew, he knew, she was headed for good things. She was easily the best thing that ever happened to him, wasn’t she? He has a flash of memory of the day they broke up before she left for Georgia. Late summer. Her dog lying lazily on her parents’ porch. She kissed his forehead. Be good to yourself, Luke, she had said.

  “Finland.” She grins now. “She only stayed for four days.”

  “Huh,” he says. He advances in line, and she stays near him. He likes that she doesn’t try to leave just yet. “So what brings you to toy heaven?”

  “Oh.” She looks around. The cash register jingles again, and one of the hippie’s children is on the floor in a full-blown tantrum. “One of the other girls in the wedding asked if I could get some kind of princess crown for Suzette to wear tomorrow when she opens her gifts.” She rolls her eyes. “Always something, right? My mom told me about this place.”

  “Well, you’ll find that here.”

  “Definitely.” The man who’s paying is writing a check, which makes almost everyone in line sigh and grumble. But Luke marvels at his luck. His body remembers her. At a time like this, waiting in line, their hands would reach absently for one another. He remembers the feeling of her standing behind him and resting her head on his shoulder. He remembers how she closed her eyes whenever they kissed. Now here they are, both in their thirties, but sensing her so close makes him feel like he’s twenty-two again.

  He and Ginger had been broken up six or seven months when his dad died—is it really ten years now?—and the night he came home from the hospital, when they left his dead father there in that quiet room with the nurses starting to take everything apart, when he held the small cactus someone had bought his father and the Sports Illustrated rolled up that he meant to read to his dad, and the stack of cards people had sent, that night when he came home from the hospital, he remembers how Ginger rang the doorbell. She was home for spring break in her first year of vet school.

  He heard her soft footsteps coming up the stairs after Mary Jane let her in. She stepped into his room without knocking and hugged him and let him sob and sputter into her light blue turtleneck. She rubbed his soaked face and kissed his cheek, and kept saying, “I’m so sorry, Luke,” and listened to him bawl and talk in a way he never could with any other person. At the funeral, he glanced back every so often, and there she was in a far-off row, smiling dutifully at him. And then she was gone.

  “So how’s work?” he says now. “How’s Savannah?”

  “I love it,” she says. “But it’s too hot sometimes.” He notices an emerald ring on her finger and wonders if a guy gave it to her. Maybe she’s married. Could she be? He feels a familiar wave of disappointment, but what does he expect? Who wouldn’t be lucky to have Ginger? “It’s so nice to be here in the fall. I caught the leaves at just the right time.”

  “You really did,” he says. He looks down at his toys. “Do you know Mary Jane has a kid?”

  “I did see that, yes. She and I exchange messages on Facebook every so often. Her daughter looks like you, I told her.”

  “I don’t know about that,” he says. Something about her keeping in touch with Mary Jane makes him feel grateful. As if they could get back together and it would be seamless. What a silly thought. He wonders if she and his sister ever had a heart-to-heart, if Mary Jane ever says things like, If Luke hadn’t been such an idiot… The cashier motions him forward.

  “All set, sir?” she says, and holds the scanning wand to his purchases. “Some cool stuff here.” Luke’s palms start to sweat. He pulls the credit card slowly from his pathetic-looking wallet with the worn leather. He wishes he had cash. Cash is so definitive.

  “Twenty-four fifty,” the cashier says.

  He hands her the credit card, and she swipes it. He doesn’t breathe until he hears the paper printing. She tears off the first receipt and hands him an oversized purple pen. “Sign here.”

  Thank God. Thank. God. He holds the shopping bag. Ginger waits for him by the door. “I guess I should go find that crown,” she says, and shrugs. She reaches out and touches the side of his arm, such a familiar gesture, and he wants to freeze time, feeling her hand there in just that right way she always had with him.

  He knows his mother thinks he ruined things with Ginger. And he probably did. Of course he did. He had nothing going on when she graduated pre-vet from Fairfield. He could have told her he’d go anywhere with her when she was deciding which program she should attend—Cornell or Penn or Michigan State. She was accepted everywhere.

  But his dad was sick, and things with Jimmy and Murph and Chucky were going great. Their band had a monopoly on all the local haunts—two gigs a weekend sometimes, and he was happy doing that. His hands on the guitar, the encouraging audience, the way he and Jimmy would lean in to each other on the songs they’d cowritten and belt out the words. He loved being onstage and in the moment, forgetting all the bad stuff: his dad’s eyes when he would sit feebly on the back patio and stare at the trees, his mother’s insistence he find “something stable.” Looking back now, he wonders what he thought he wanted then. Did he just want to go on that way forever because nothing bad had happened yet, or did he have future plans—maybe a record de
al, marriage? A home with Ginger where she could run her vet practice right out of a downstairs office? Had he ever gotten that far in his mind?

  Yes, he remembers hoping all that would eventually happen. He remembers thinking they’d have a nice Connecticut home where he wrote lyrics or banged away on his drums in the basement, her coming downstairs with some injured animal in her arms. “I couldn’t leave him in the cage for the night,” she’d say. But he was so damn afraid of the future then. How could he wish their relationship were further along when he knew it meant his dad would be gone and Luke himself would be older with fewer and fewer chances of having made it (didn’t you need to make it when you were young?), and, God, his mother’s impatient prodding. Ginger’s future was so bright, it was guaranteed to be bright because that’s who she was, so where did that leave him? Her definite future made his feel scrawny. At times he was jealous, wondering what it felt like for everyone to know you’d end up well. For him, it was only if he stayed with Ginger that he’d be successful, and that slowly ate away at him.

  Ginger stopped coming to their concerts, and one night he kissed that girl with the eyebrow ring behind the stage, and he drank more than he should have, slept more than he should have, started messing with pills Chucky gave him. “Are you okay?” Ginger kept asking. “Fine and dandy,” he’d reply.

  When Ginger said University of Georgia offered her a great scholarship package, he said, “Hey, go for it. Take the midnight train, right?”

  He wanted to trick her with that pathetic statement. He wanted her to say she might go far away but he was worth waiting for. He wanted to feel good enough for her. He needed convincing, didn’t he? He wanted her to ask him to visit whenever the band wasn’t playing. Maybe he wanted more fight: them to fight for their love the way his father was fighting for his life. And he felt betrayed. Why in the world would she choose a school thirteen hours away?

  He didn’t know about the uncertainty of right then, but he had no doubt they would be together down the road. He wanted Ginger to say no place would be right without him.

  She didn’t. The girl with the eyebrow ring was the proof he needed. Their kiss was too dry, too foreign, and he bolted from her immediately afterward, saying, “Sorry. I’m sorry.” He only loved Ginger. He wanted to know she loved him as fully and as achingly as he loved her. It was a childish want, but he needed to be sure. If she had said she needed him, he would have quit the band then, wouldn’t he have? He likes to think yes. But her eyes looked so hurt after he said she should just go without him that he still tries to forget her expression. They were sitting in his car in her parents’ driveway. She had just moved out of her apartment. Her eyes were red, and he saw the late-day sun hit the small diamond on her necklace. “Be good to yourself.” She closed the car door gently, and he watched her walk inside the way he always did when he dropped her off.

  He meant to fix it. He meant to call her in Georgia some night, have one of their epic long talks, and all of a sudden, he’d be buying a train ticket, or she’d be in town, and little by little they’d reclaim what they had. But as the months went by, he knew she was doing better and better, and there he was, right where she’d left him, sinking.

  Now, at the toy store he tries to stand straighter (the way his mother would instruct). “Well, I hope you have fun at the shower,” he says. “It was great bumping into you.”

  “You, too, Luke.”

  “If you’re ever in town again, we should—”

  “Yeah,” she says. “Say hi to your mom and Mary Jane, and happy birthday to your niece.” She starts to walk away.

  “Um, do your parents still have Thunder?” He has no idea why he asks this. It’s been ten years, and ten years is an eternity for any pet. But in his head their border collie is still the puppy that used to love that red whistle ball Luke would throw. The happy dog that used to let out a certain bark when Luke’s car would pull up, and Ginger would say, “We knew it was you. Thunder told us.”

  “They do. He’s still kicking. He rides with my dad to the post office every day.”

  “That’s awesome.”

  “You should come see him,” she says. “He’d remember you.”

  “I should,” Luke says, and waves to her as she heads toward the back of the store. She turns sideways past a little girl winding the handle to a jack-in-the-box, and she smiles and helps a young boy who dropped puzzle pieces on the floor.

  “There you go,” she says to the boy, and she glides behind the next rack, her shoulder bumping a set of chimes before she’s finally gone.

  5. Yes to Love

  The green paisley dresses are not a hit.

  When Ginger agreed to be in the December wedding, she imagined velvet gowns. She imagined snow outside the reception hall, lanterns in the trees. She imagined a grand Christmas tree and poinsettias on the tables. She did not envision this scratchy green paisley with a small fur collar shawl that made her feel like an American Girl doll from the Victorian era.

  The other bridesmaids are incredulous as the seamstress kneels at their feet to pin the hems. Cameron, who is tall and lithe, who does CrossFit and Pilates on alternating days, who in high school had two football players fight over who got to escort her out on the field during homecoming, doesn’t even look good, and she’d look good with an army surplus blanket draped around her body. The cut of the dress is boxy and thick, and the waist is too high. “This is not what I pictured,” she says. “I look like Oscar the Grouch.”

  “You don’t like them either, do you?” Cecilia, Suzette’s grad school roommate, whispers to the quiet seamstress who appears to stare at the lopsided faux fur shawl Cecilia wears. The seamstress in her V-neck orange shirt and fall boots, who looks good for forty or whatever she is, takes a moment to register the question.

  “Well,” the seamstress says. “They wouldn’t have been my first choice.” She scribbles a note on her small clipboard. “But I’ve gotten fairly used to them over the weeks, and they’re definitely one of a kind. The bride seems to like them, no?”

  “Tuh,” Cameron says.

  “She’s just doing a psychology experiment on us,” Cecilia says.

  Ginger stands off to the side and tries to like herself in this dress. She squints and thinks about Luke Crowley with his messy hair and those complex eyes. What are the chances she’d run into him? She forgot how easily they could start talking, how sincere even his smallest words could be.

  She wonders if he still sings. She can hear his voice at the concert at Woodsen Park singing “The Air That I Breathe” that Memorial Day when they were twenty-one. She remembers how the people in the audience stirred with the chorus of that song (And to love you…)—with Luke in the T-shirt she had bought him from Macy’s—how the retirees, the teenagers, and the young kids on their mothers’ laps stayed still and just watched him. He was young and charming, his voice smooth and gravelly all at once. The sky wasn’t dark yet, and the pink magnolia trees were in full bloom. There were strings of lights crisscrossed above his head, and he hit every note. She remembers looking up at him, and the old woman who sat next to her, who saw her get to her feet as she listened, hands clasped with pride, tapped Ginger on the arm. “You’re smitten,” she said.

  Now Mags, who is the most petite, steps out of the dressing room. She has it the worst, Ginger thinks. She looks a bit like a Weebles toy. Or a character who rolls out with a prophetic message in a Tim Burton movie.

  The bell dings on the front door, and Suzette, the bride, comes in with her old Louis Vuitton bag over her shoulder, her hair light with beach waves, a car key dangling from her hand. She glances from girl to girl, and her eyes sparkle. “My crew.” Ginger is always amazed how Suzette has this way of instantly disarming everyone she meets. Once you get past her nonnegotiable level of beauty—her sturdy cheekbones, her smooth, blemish-free skin with perfectly placed freckles, she is warm and sincere, with eyes that laugh and a powerful hug.

  Suzette looks at you and makes you feel
as beautiful as she is. Ginger has never heard her say a bad thing about another person. She remembers how quiet Suzette got when her older sister Lisa died, and as a counselor how many forgotten teenagers in the foster care system Suzette had given her own jackets and scarves to, stuffed twenties and fifties into their hands, told them to call her day or night. Ginger adores Suzette, regardless of these dresses. “Well?” Suzette says now.

  There is a moment of stillness, five girls in green paisley stand before the trifold mirror, and the seamstress looks up at them and lifts her eyebrows. Ginger is the first to speak. “They are so elegant,” she says. “I feel like a winter queen.” The other girls quickly chime in with, “Love them!” and, “So original,” and Suzette touches her heart and smiles.

  “You all dazzle.” Suzette stands behind Carrie, her younger sister, who came in with her and quickly got her dress on. “Wow. The pearl necklaces are going to be amazing, and the white pine branch bouquets…” She shakes her head and smiles. “It’s all coming together.”

  Ginger glances down. She can’t look at the other girls. Seven weeks to go. “She’ll be in Vera Wang,” Cameron said earlier, “and we’ll be waddling in like my grandmother’s curtains come to life.”

  Later, the seamstress at Mrs. Crowley’s shop helps her out of the dress. Ginger stares at her own arms and quickly covers herself up. It feels glorious to get the itchy dress off her body. Couldn’t they request a softer lining at least?

  “Okay,” the seamstress says, and slides the dress onto a hanger, holding the faux fur shawl over one arm. She jots down a few notes. “You’re all gorgeous girls… don’t worry.” She pats Ginger’s back before closing the curtain. Ginger is not worried, she wants to say to the departing seamstress. She was shocked initially, but she’ll get over it. She’s worn worse. Most days at work, she can’t keep a shirt clean: cat vomit, bird blood, you name it. The wedding and dress and all this will come and go. She’ll be back on a plane the next day. Just like tomorrow. After the bridal shower, she’ll board her flight, making her way past the older couple holding hands or the fearful young parents with a baby on the seat between them, or the college-age couples who always seem like they’re going to a beach somewhere, who lean in every so often to kiss.