Bitter End

by Jennifer Brown

  I nodded. “I totally get it. No problem. It won’t happen again.”

  Georgia stood and put her hand on my arm. “I know it won’t,” she said, reaching over and patting my elbow. “You’re one of the few I can count on.” She put her hands on my shoulders and spun me around, so I was facing out of the office. “Now get out there and get to work, you spoiled brat. You think the front line’s gonna prep itself while you primp for a cotillion?”

  I flicked her a salute. She had definitely forgiven me. All was back to normal.

  I headed to the walk-in and grabbed a bag of lettuce, some tomatoes, and the pickle tub and stacked them high in my arms. I liked doing prep. It was easy and I got to move around, rather than stand at the cash register, filling green tea order after green tea order, not to mention I didn’t have to pick up dining room trash. And I always found the rhythm of slicing vegetables to be soothing, sort of like listening to the radio.

  The day stayed busy. Customers trickled in, a pretty constant stream. I kept having to abandon my prep work to ring someone up, which resulted in a lot of plastic gloves going in the trash, and it was getting closer and closer to dinner rush with the front line not prepped. That stressed Georgia out, so she abandoned paperwork in the office and came out to run the register while I feverishly chopped and diced and filled tubs and refilled tubs.

  I was chopping so diligently I didn’t even hear Cole’s voice. Georgia cleared her throat meaningfully, and I glanced up. She had a warning look in her eyes. I knew what the look meant: Don’t stand around chatting all day. We’ve got work to do.

  “Hey,” I said, turning to the counter and pressing my belly against it. I tried to smile, but it didn’t feel right on my face. Suddenly I was so nervous. I still wanted to be mad at him for last night, but already last night seemed like a long time ago. He smiled that soft smile that always brings out the little dimple on one side, but something about it seemed wary, as if he knew he had some serious making up to do. And just the fact that he knew he was in the wrong and was going to make up for it made it easier to forgive him.

  “Hey yourself,” he said. Georgia handed him a coffee and he held it up. “Thirsty.” Georgia took his money and handed him his change without a word, then flicked a sideways look at me again. I could almost hear her thoughts: Think of Lily!

  Cole moved a couple of steps down the counter and stood right in front of me. I could smell his cologne. The smell made my hands shake, even though I wanted to stay mad at him.

  “I can’t talk,” I whispered, not looking up. “I’ve got to get this done.”

  “I know,” he said. “I was just going to chill until you got off.”

  I glanced at the clock behind me. “I don’t get off till five.” I continued chopping.

  “I’ll wait,” he said.

  “You’re going to wait for two hours?” As if he hadn’t already done that a hundred times before, but I was trying my best to seem irritated.

  Suddenly I felt his hand touch my cheek. I looked up. He was stretched across the counter, gazing directly into my eyes. His hand caressed my cheek so softly I might have passed out right there on the floor.

  “I’d wait for you forever if that’s what it took,” he said.

  Despite myself, I smiled. Something about his touch was so much more real than the strange things he’d said and done last night. And I couldn’t help it. I loved him.

  Then Georgia’s voice rang out from the office—“Alex, you get the eggs chopped yet?”—and just like that the spell was broken.

  I went back to my prep work, but I was completely distracted and frazzled again. I kept glancing up at the dining room, and every time I did, Cole was looking right at me, leaning back in his chair, holding his drink in one hand. I felt a shot of electricity surge through me every time we connected, and it was like my brain kept getting short-circuited. I’d look back down at whatever I was doing, and it would all look so foreign to me. Had I really been slicing cucumbers? I didn’t remember that.

  Everybody has a bad day, Georgia had said. Everybody. Even Cole. Maybe that’s all last night was—Cole’s bad day. Colossally bad, but forgivable.

  I spent so much time looking up, I wasn’t caught by surprise when Bethany walked in.

  She walked up to the counter, and I could see Georgia’s shoulders slump after a second of talking in a low voice.

  “Alex,” she said. “Your friend needs to talk to you.” She pursed her lips and then mouthed, Make it quick.

  Unlike with Cole, when I saw Bethany my feelings weren’t in the least mixed. I felt only one thing: guilt. So much so, in fact, that my feet didn’t even want to walk toward her. My best friend for my whole life, and I was afraid to talk to her. I didn’t know what to say.

  “Hi,” I said.

  She wasn’t smiling. She wasn’t even really looking at me. Instead, her gaze fell on the countertop, somewhere around my hands. She pushed her glasses up. “When do you get off?” she asked.

  “Five,” I said.

  “We’d like to talk to you,” she said, sounding weirdly formal. “Zack and I. Can you come over?”

  “Listen, about last night…” I said, but stopped short when her face snapped up to meet mine. Her eyes still looked really red.

  “I don’t want to talk about it here,” she said. “I know he’s sitting right over there, and I don’t want to start anything. The thing is… well, the thing is, we need to talk. At Zack’s. Will you come?”

  I looked over her shoulder at Cole, whose face had gotten a very lined, flat look to it. He wasn’t looking at me but seemed instead to be willing her to turn around and face him. I hesitated. Suddenly the silent treatment I’d been getting all day wasn’t looking so bad. Everyone wanting to talk all of a sudden seemed way worse.

  “Will you?” she prodded, snapping my attention back to her.

  I took a deep breath. Basically there was no way I could win in this situation. I nodded. “I’ll be home by six,” I said. I didn’t look back at Cole. But I didn’t need to. I could feel him watching anyway.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Even though Georgia had lightened up on me, by the time I got off, the dinner rush was really getting rolling, and her tension had made everyone grumpy. I’d found myself wishing that Granite-Ass would just show up and declare everything okay and put her out of her misery. Really, Georgia was an awesome manager, and she was as honest as the day is long. Dave had nothing to worry about with a store that she ran. I wished she could see that, too.

  I was glad to get out of there. And glad I didn’t have to work again for a few days. Maybe Dave would calm down and Georgia would be her old self again.

  I stepped out into the dining room, where Cole was still sitting. He stood when I came in, and walked over toward me.

  “My car’s out back,” he said. “Next to yours.”

  He put his hand on the small of my back and guided me through the doors. I took off my visor as we walked, and pulled the rubber band, which kept snagging random hairs at the base of my neck, out of my hair.

  “You’re not really supposed to park back here,” I said. “It’s employee parking.”

  Cole made a gruff sound in his throat. “And how would anyone know I’m not an employee?”

  “Well,” I said, “I know.”

  But Cole didn’t seem to care much about where he was parked. He coolly reached over and opened the passenger door.

  “Something tells me you’ll overlook my little infraction,” he said, grabbing my belt loops with his fingers and pulling me toward him. “Don’t write me a ticket, Officer Alex,” he fake-whimpered. He kissed me on the forehead.

  I smiled and leaned into him. He felt so good. Warm. Relaxed. Comfortable. And despite last night, he still felt… safe. If I closed my eyes and breathed him in, I could almost make myself believe that nothing had ever happened last night.

  I tilted my face up to his, and he used his finger to push up one corner of my mouth and then the othe
r. I rolled my eyes, but the smile stayed. He leaned down and kissed each corner of my mouth and then my nose and each eye. By the time he pulled me in closer to him, my eyes were closed and I was breathing in his scent and feeling the muscles of his arms around me, and suddenly I couldn’t remember how I’d been so mad at him. The anger was just gone.

  He took a step to the side and I slid into the car. He shut the door, walked around, and got in the driver’s side. The seat made a leathery groan underneath him, and a whiff of leather puffed into the air, reminding me of our first date and giving me butterflies.

  Once inside, he didn’t move. Just sat there, his hands lying limp in his lap, staring straight ahead at the peeling paint on the back wall of The Bread Bowl. I watched him, then turned my head to the cars passing by, and at one point watched as the back door opened and Jerry hauled a trash bag out to the Dumpster, the whole time eyeing Cole’s car suspiciously. I sank a little lower in the seat.

  After several long minutes, Cole cleared his throat, tapped his thumbs on his thighs, and said, “About last night. With your friends. I’m sorry.”

  I blinked. “You already told me,” I said, hoping I didn’t sound accusatory.

  He ran his finger along a ledge of his dash, swiping the dust off. “I know. But I wanted to tell you again today. You know, not in the heat of the moment. I could tell you were really mad all night.”

  I nodded, my fingers automatically lifting to the dream catcher. “They’re my best friends,” I said. “I don’t even understand what happened. Bethany was trying to be nice. What you did was really… uncool.”

  He gazed at the peeling wall, his thumbs drumming on his thighs rhythmically. “She’s controlling,” he said. “She controls you. You know that, right? With all this Colorado shit…” He trailed off, shaking his head. “What’s the deal with this trip anyway? You know, I would never ask you to be okay with me going on a trip out of town with another girl. A ‘best friend.’ ” He made quotation marks in the air with his fingers as he said the last two words.

  Suddenly it made sense to me. Yes, Cole was jealous of Zack. That much I knew. But he was jealous only because he didn’t know everything. How could he? Every time we’d talked about our families, I’d changed the subject as quickly as I could. He had no idea what it meant to me to keep my best friends in my life. He had no idea how many times they’d been there for me, or how many times I’d been there for them. He wasn’t there when we made the plan to go to Colorado to figure out the mystery of my life. He wasn’t there when we vowed to take this trip together, the three of us, sitting on the woodpile in Bethany’s backyard. He had no idea about any of it.

  I bent one leg under me and turned to face him. I grabbed his hand, stopping the agitated drumming, and pulled it into my lap. His cheeks had flushed red circles high up on them. I reached over and touched one. It felt hot under my fingers.

  “Colorado is everything to me,” I said. “It has been since I was eight and my dad gave me this.” I pulled the dream catcher necklace out from under my shirt and let it dangle between my finger and thumb.

  He stared at the necklace, his face confused, then looked back into my eyes. He’d stopped drumming with his other hand now, and I knew that I would make him understand and everything would be good again.

  I let the necklace fall against my chest and held his hand with both of mine, looking directly into his eyes. And I told him everything. I told him about Mom dying. I told him about the photos and how I used to obsess about them when I was little, and about Dad calling Mom crazy as goosehouse shit. I told him about the nightmares and the therapy and the necklace that was supposed to bring me closure and how I’d never taken it off since, and about Shannin and Celia and how they never seemed to really care. I told him about how Dad could barely tie his shoes in the morning, much less do anything to take care of us, even all these years later.

  And I told him about Colorado. About how it wasn’t just that it sounded fun, but that I needed to go there. That sometimes I felt as though no matter what I said or how hard I tried, I’d never be able to put into words why I needed to go there. That it was like describing a hole to someone—other than deep and black and lonely, there was no description.

  I told him that it wasn’t about playing games and getting romantic or letting Zack and Bethany get so close to me there was no more room for him. It was about closure. It was about solving the mystery. Getting the answers Dad couldn’t, or wouldn’t, provide. It was about me getting where Mom wanted to go and putting her memory to rest. It was about me stepping up on a mountaintop and seeing if I could feel her there. It was about my life, and I couldn’t just let it go because one of my best friends happened to be a boy. I needed to know that she wasn’t just… abandoning me. That there was something better in Colorado. There had to be. I wasn’t left behind because of… a whim. A stupid road trip.

  I’d talked until the sun had gone completely down, and the lights had turned on, bathing us in an orangey glow. The cars whizzing past were using their headlights now, and I was glad for the feeling of privacy in the car.

  At some point I’d started to cry. “You have to understand,” I said, tracing the back of Cole’s hand with my finger. “This is something I have to do. And I have to do it with my best friends, because they’ve been there through all of it. Both of them. Sometimes Zack even more than Bethany.”

  Cole had stayed silent through everything I said, and when I finished, he didn’t move for a few minutes. Then, slowly, gently, he pulled his hand out from under mine. With one finger, he traced the strap of my necklace. “You’ve never taken it off?” he asked.

  I shook my head.

  “Why not?” he asked.

  “Because,” I said, making a fist over the necklace, my hand enclosing his. “Because it’s all I have left of her.”

  He seemed to think about it for a while, then pulled his hand out of mine, straightened up just slightly, and dug his car key out of his front pocket. Then he started the car with a roar.

  “I have to get home,” I said. “I have to talk to…” I paused at first, then sat up a little straighter and finished. “I have to talk to Bethany and Zack. About last night. I have to smooth things over with them.”

  “This won’t take long,” he said. “I just want to show you something.”

  He put the car in drive and headed out of the parking lot.

  “I have to be home by seven,” I said, curiosity winning out over my sense of urgency. I’d just have to tell Bethany and Zack that I’d had to work a little late is all. They’d understand. They always did.

  Cole flicked on the radio and pulled into the street, hitting the gas pedal so hard I felt pressed back into my seat. He had that determined look on his face again. The same one he’d been wearing last night at the lake while playing football. The one that said he was going to get exactly what he wanted, no matter who or what got in the way. The one that said “winner.”

  After a few turns we were in a neighborhood, and Cole finally slowed down. A few more turns later, he parked in front of a gray house.

  I peered out the windshield at the darkened house in front of me and then looked at Cole questioningly.

  “C’mon,” he said, opening his door. “I want you to see what you’re missing out on.” He stepped out and shut his door, but this time, rather than walk around and open mine for me, he just stood where he was. I opened my door and got out, looking at him over the top of his car.

  “It doesn’t look like anyone’s home,” I said.

  “Oh, she’s home,” he said. “They both are.”

  He didn’t say another word to me as I followed him inside, wondering why his voice sounded so bitter when he said the word “she.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The house was completely dark when we walked in. Cavelike, almost. And had it not been for the echoing drone of sitcom dialogue off in the distance, followed by bouts of prerecorded laugh track, I’d have thought for sure Cole and I wer
e alone.

  Cole deposited his keys with a clatter on a little table next to the door, then strode through the front room so quickly I had to follow fast in order to keep up with him. I tried to take in as much as I could while we walked, but it was hard in the dark.

  The house looked minimally decorated. No pictures on the walls. Only a couple knickknacks here and there on the sparse furniture, just blobby shapes in the dark. A basket on the floor with a blanket spilling out of it. A candle here. A book there. I wondered if the rest of their things were still in moving boxes, or if their house always looked so bare.

  We walked through the front room and into a kitchen. Here the sound of garbled audience laughter got louder, and I noticed the blue-gray flickering of changing television images lighting up a short staircase on our right. Someone was downstairs watching TV.

  “Want anything to drink?” Cole asked, opening the refrigerator. A yellow light patch cut across the linoleum and made me squint. Already my eyes had gotten used to the darkness.

  I shook my head. He grabbed a can of something and popped it open, shutting the refrigerator and blanketing the room in what seemed like an even darker dark. Did Cole always live like this? Wandering around a shadowy house, listening to wisecracking and cheap laughter all night long?

  “Cole,” I said, but he’d already started toward the stairs.

  “Come on. I want you to meet my parents.” He stopped at the top of the stairs and held out an arm toward me. I couldn’t see his face in the shadows and was suddenly glad of it. Something told me it was grim. Something told me the warmth of the guy caressing my cheek and telling me he’d wait for me until the end of time was missing at the moment. I walked toward him slowly, then grabbed his hand and held it as he led me down the stairs.

  We ended up in a long, skinny living room that, had the TV been off, would’ve been darker than any room I’d ever seen in my life. The floor was tiled in a deep color—brown, maybe, or even black—and the walls were paneled. A sliding glass door was covered with a dark-colored curtain, and in front of it sat a large shadowy mass that I took to be a couch.