“Thank you,” he told Bee softly. “You didn’t have to do that.”
He leaned down, setting a warm, wide hand on the back of Bee’s neck as his lips met hers. The kiss woke up her blood like a static shock. Better than any of Bee’s three cups of Folgers. It made her want to tug his tie off and rock his world with a Cosmo-style checklist of newlywed acrobatics before he went back to his office.
Lita humming along with “Rattlesnake Shake” reminded her how very impossible this dream was.
She extricated her mouth from Birdy’s, leaving his cheeks flustered pink. She ran her thumb over his lower lip, wishing she had the time and privacy to make his whole body turn this color. It was too easy to scandalize him into a full blush. It made her feel more like a dangerous femme fatale than a short killjoy.
“You gotta stop looking at me like that,” Birdy begged in a murmur.
Bee gently cuffed his chin. “I made a vow to never stop looking at you like this. Your brothers cried. Don’t you remember? I was dressed like a very sexy cupcake.”
“Like it was yesterday.” He kissed her knuckles before pressing his cheek to the same spot. “Speaking of cool things that happen in July—”
“One hundred and eleven days!” She beamed at the top of his head. Until he raised it, wearing his hangdog apology face. Round, sad green eyes and a pouty lower lip tinged with her Bésame Red. Bee’s stomach sank somewhere between the anchor tattoo on her left foot and the lighthouse on her right. “Oh. Oh no.”
She could hear Tito calling down to her from heaven, “You can’t always get what you want!”
“I got the call from Dr. Banns,” Birdy said with a wince. “He’s really doing it, honeybee. He’s going to retire. And then the office is mine.”
Counting back from ten, Bianca pictured the dentist office on Main Street. She knew all of its selling points: the natural light and high-tech dental equipment and proximity to the beach. Unlike Birdy’s current office, the Main Street location wasn’t sandwiched between the ugliest of the local motels. And it would put Birdy’s practice in the same part of town as the Salty Dog, rather than on the other side of the hill.
Not that they wouldn’t both continue to come home for lunch to be with Lita.
But regardless of everything else, Birdy had moved to Sandy Point with the intention of being the sole orthodontist. The only game in town. And it was finally happening for him.
“This is why we made sure everything was refundable,” he reminded her, nudging her arm so that she would make eye contact again. “Between the plane tickets and the resort fees, we should have enough for the deposit on the building. Dr. Banns is going to give me the official walk-through this evening, so I might be late. Is Bonnie on dinner duty?”
Bianca started to shake her head, but decided to spare her hair. “Mom has plans with Tony. I’m home for dinner. Cruz has a late appointment at the shop, so I’ll go back after Lita’s eaten to lock up.”
“I know pushing the honeymoon again is inconvenient,” Birdy said, guiltily twisting his black wedding band around and around. “But this is good news, Bee. Great news! Business is going to really explode. I’ll have an endodontist in the building and a real lobby. And we have Birdy Bash to look forward to in November! It’s not exactly summertime in Hawaii, but—”
“But it’ll have to be good enough,” she interrupted. If he started describing how going on a vacation with his army of siblings and great-aunts and third cousin Brewster “Squiggy” Birdy was anything like taking a private trip together, Bianca would scream. Just as loud and long as she possibly could, until she used up every molecule of air in her lungs.
Birdy watched her, waiting for more, expecting a fight that she didn’t have time to have. How was it already 12:10? She had to give Lita her afternoon meds soon.
“I need to get the toilet paper out of the tree,” Bee announced. “Lita’s knee has been bugging her, and I’m afraid we’re going to get some unscheduled rain.”
“Lita’s knees are never wrong,” he said, continuing to search her face.
Not wanting him to find what he was looking for, Bee slipped over to the hall closet to retrieve the mop bucket and broom. She hoped the handle would be long enough to reach the top of the maple tree.
“You’re on pizza bagel duty,” she told him.
Birdy steepled his fingers and inclined his head to her with faux seriousness. “And it is an honor to serve. Pizza bagels.”
He always tried to make Bee smile when she was upset. He thought that laughing could rinse away any lingering disappointment.
It didn’t work so well when he was the one disappointing her.
“Just remember to turn off the oven this time,” she said.
Bianca barely felt the mop bucket slapping against her leg as the front door closed behind her. Ignoring the paper fluttering on top of the tree, she checked the hydrangeas for any signs of harm. Thankfully, nothing appeared to be affected by Johanna Freeman’s random act of vandalism except for the tree.
Leaving Bee extra time to mope.
I can’t believe my honeymoon is canceled.
That wasn’t true. She could believe it. She did believe it. In her heart, she knew that the real mistake was believing that her honeymoon was ever going to happen.
Her brain tormented her with all the useless things she’d purchased for this canceled trip: six bikinis, two fancy dinner dresses, various floppy hats, and a variety of SPF-100 sunblock.
All useless in Sandy Point, where summers were almost never over seventy-five degrees.
To top it all off, she couldn’t even repaint the door of her own business because when Lita found out—and she would find out—she would either yell until Bee cried or cry until Bee cried.
Either way, painting the door ended in tears.
Like the Salty Dog, the deed to 20 Jetty Avenue was in Lita’s name. Bee had grown up in the little white house with her mom, Lita, and Tito. Her grandparents moved into the apartment over the shop when Bee was in the fifth grade in the name of “privacy.”
Privacy being code for “not listening to Bee and Bonnie fight about tampons.”
Tito died when Bee was in college. Two years later, Lita fell down the stairs in the shop. No one was sure how long she had lain broken behind the register before one of the artists had finally found her and called an ambulance. By then, the swelling in her face was horrific and the internal bleeding in her brain had to be surgically drained. Her broken leg hadn’t set well and it was a miracle both of her hips were intact.
Bianca turned down her acceptance to a hospitality management grad program so she could come home and take over as the Salty Dog’s manager while her mom took care of Lita.
Then Bonnie met Tony, and Bee ended up with both the business—minus their star artist—and Lita.
Bee didn’t blame her mother for falling in love. After all, Bonnie spent Bee’s entire childhood without a partner as she worked two jobs on top of apprenticing with Tito so that Bee could have things like SAT fees and food.
These days, Bonnie took special appointments, so the shop wasn’t losing all the income she used to bring in. But she had the freedom to do things like spur-of-the-moment trips to Portland wineries and indoor rock climbing. If Bonnie had planned a trip to Hawaii, it would have gone off without a hitch, Bee was sure of it.
Things would have been so much easier if there had been even one more person in their family. A Boria cousin who could drop by to take Lita to lunch. A sibling who could help get her in and out of the shower. An uncle with a mommy complex who wanted to repay all the love Lita gave him as a child with a guesthouse and paid caretaker and endless bootlegs of Santana concerts.
Bee just wanted help.
A white Mini Cooper screeched up the street, nearly crashing into the U-Haul parked next door. Bianca recognized Johanna Freeman behind the wheel.
Jo jumped out of her adorable—and expensive—British car and ran toward Bee. “Bianca, stop!”
Over her s
houlder, Bee checked the front window. The curtains were open, and Birdy was distracting Lita with a game of cards at the table. Good. The last thing Bee needed was Lita wheeling herself to the door, demanding that Jo speak up so that she could have the chisme firsthand.
“I was on my way to come clean up,” Jo said, stepping awkwardly as her kitten heels sank in the grass. “I had to do a favor for my sister, and high school lunch is earlier than I remembered. But I’m here now, so please let me get all this”—she made a circular gesture at the tree—“out of your way.”
Jo reached for the broom, but Bee stepped back and held it out of reach. She had spent all night in a spiral of Why Does Jo Freeman Hate Me? All of her dreams had been interrupted by memories of her and Johanna walking the same routes to school—never together—and vying for the same position in honor society and running into each other on the boardwalk where their families worked. Despite being neighbors, they had never been friends, but Bee had certainly never considered them enemies.
Until the toilet paper hit her in the face. After the TP gauntlet had been thrown, things felt suddenly personal. Acrimonious, even.
Bianca had to know why.
“Is this about Autumn? Are you mad at me because I stole your friend?”
“What? No!” Jo let out a startled laugh. “This isn’t second grade. My friends can have friends.”
“Are you really trying to convince me that you’re too mature for petty vengeance? Here?” Bee folded her arms. “Under my quilted maple?”
They both looked up. There wasn’t that much toilet paper, really. Less than a family pack. And Jo hadn’t managed to wrap any of the rolls fully around the tree.
Amateur work, Birdy had said when he saw it this morning. You should have seen some of the trees we used to hit back home. So much paper it looked like we’d mummified the lawn.
“This isn’t vengeance,” Jo said quickly. “I didn’t even mean for you to see it. I woke up to, like, twenty texts from my sister, and I had to rush out.”
“But I saw the tree,” Bee said. “Last night. When you threw toilet paper at me.”
“You scared me!”
Bianca thought of Lita shrieking at the bottom of the stairs. “I scared you? You were the one running around in the dark!”
Jo gave the smallest eyebrow flick of acknowledgment. In daylight, her tall posture crossed the line into rigidity. Like there was an invisible hanger holding up the back of her silk shirt. “Wine might have been involved.”
She reached out her arms again for the broom and bucket. Bee handed them over.
Using the broom handle, Jo flicked down one of the long strips of toilet paper. It fluttered easily into the bucket. She seemed pleased with this for a moment, but her face fell as she turned back to Bee, like she was surprised to find her still standing in her own yard.
“So, what?” Bianca asked, wrapping her arms around her waist. The self-hug made her feel brave enough to keep prodding this wound. “Did I ruin your family legacy of prom queens, too?”
Jo flicked down a second strip of TP and made a face over her shoulder. “What are you talking about?”
“Jen G is still pissed about prom. She won’t even say hi to me at the grocery store. Which is extremely awkward seeing as how she’s the head cashier now. Do you know what it’s like to not be able to make pleasant chitchat while you buy bulk pizza bagels and diet soda? All I can do is stand there and watch her bag everything upside down out of spite.”
“She’s probably mad that people still don’t know what the G stands for,” Jo said, voice strained as she stood on her tiptoes to reach a TP tail. “You should try moving to another lane.”
“It’s Sandy Point. There’s only one lane open unless it’s the day before Thanksgiving. If you’re going to be my neighbor again”—she thrust a finger at the U-Haul parked in the driveway—“I’d really like to know why you’re mad at me. Is it honor society? Do you still think you deserved to be president because your girlfriend did it first?”
Jo and Bianca had both been members of the Point High honor society their junior and senior years. Probably because the same counselor sold it to them as a clear path from Sandy Point to college, somewhere else. The honor society collected all the type As—A as in achievement, awards, and Adderall—in one room only to dole out jobs for upcoming community service projects. All the projects were designed by the president.
Wren Vos had wasted the club members’ talents on nonstop tutoring—on campus, at the middle school, at the library. No fund-raising or fun or socializing; only academic progress. The next year, Jo ran against Bee on a platform of more of the same, plus a readathon charity drive.
Bee offered the honor society the high school experience everyone wanted. Canned-food drives and safety patrol for the elementary school Halloween parade and decorating the school in homecoming colors. Basic. But the kind of basic that everyone actually wanted. She still offered to let Jo host the readathon. Jo declined.
“I’m not mad about high school, Bianca,” Jo said. She took a few steps away under the guise of reaching a new piece of TP. “You were good at being president. Is that what you need to hear?”
“No, I need to hear you apologize!” The last word echoed like a command, bouncing off the Hammerbecks’ porch across the street. “Because when you’re sorry, you say so! You don’t move forward like nothing happened! You say sorry and then you fix it!”
The sound of her own breathing was louder in Bee’s ears than the sound of the ocean. Without turning around, she knew that Lita had moved from the dining table to the front window. Lita was attracted to drama the way magpies were drawn to shiny things. She spent more time with daytime judge shows and telenovelas than people.
Chirrup-chirrup!
Jo and Bee both looked at Bee’s wrist, where her smartwatch displayed fireworks and Lita’s afternoon meds alarm.
Bee was running behind schedule. She didn’t have time to indulge in pity parties with high school acquaintances.
“I have to go do fifteen other things before I can even go to work,” she told Jo. “So you can leave the broom and the bucket on the porch when you’re done.”
Jo’s posture slumped again. “Bianca—”
Bee held her hands up in surrender. “It’s okay, Jo. I accept your lack of apology. You wouldn’t know this about me, but that is what I am absolutely best at.”
She could only storm as far as the front door before she had to stop and adjust her face back to faking it, so she could shoo Lita back to her lunch. Her meds had to be taken with food.
In college, Jo worked as an office temp instead of coming home for summers. She had been determined to drown out her parents’ businesses from her résumé. It helped prepare her for a life without summer vacation and covered the down payment on her Mini, but she never stopped having nightmares about needing to learn a new office culture by immersion.
It was the jargon that killed her—backronyms and mantras peddled by desperate management that she was supposed to automatically know and parrot. Like the company that wanted her to answer the phone, “This is Jo—that’s J-O, let’s go!”
Her family had become that office.
According to Eden’s ongoing, grudging translation, in their house refeasting meant having leftovers for dinner, eating in front of Netflix meant in the living room using their laps instead of tables, and the fie-fie meant the wireless router.
To make things worse, it wasn’t until Jo had her piping-hot refeasting plate in hand that she realized that she had the lowest level of seating priority. Her parents were on the couch and Eden swooped into the armchair; she was already folding her spindly legs in the seat, holding her plate over her head to keep from spilling enchilada sauce on herself.
“What’s the matter, Jojo bean?” her dad asked. Phil Freeman had a window-rattling deep voice that drew attention like a spotlight. “Are you lost?”
There is no third piece of furniture, Jo thought. How can there only b
e a couch and a chair in this room?
She tried to remember the last time all four of them had used the living room together. On a Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, Jo had sat on the floor between the tree and the fireplace. But now, in the off-season, the fireplace was an empty hole in the wall behind a metal grate.
The only seat left in the house was on the couch with her parents.
“Just not used to eating on the couch,” she said, slowly taking the seat next to her dad.
“You didn’t eat in front of the TV when you lived alone?” Eden asked in a disbelieving monotone.
Jo pictured her apartment. Through the Vaseline lens of perspective, it had been sheer bliss to eat takeout directly from the box, stretched out on her long leather sofa. Had she ever truly appreciated the feeling of complete and utter autonomy?
“I’m not used to it here,” Jo corrected. “We ate at the table last night.”
“That was a celebration,” her mom said, switching between remotes seemingly at random.
“We’re standing on ceremony less day to day,” her dad said.
“And the dining room doesn’t have Black Mirror,” Eden said.
“Black Mirror!” her mom cheered, waving the two remotes over her head.
“You guys are watching Black Mirror together?” Jo frowned over at her sister. “Isn’t that a little mature?”
Eden thrust her chin forward, looking exactly like the little kid she didn’t think she was. “Uh, okay, Grandma. I’m leaving for college in six months. I don’t need you to monitor my TV.”
“I’m not monitoring anything!” Jo said to her plate. She cut into an enchilada before adding, “But the first episode of that show is about a dude fucking a pig on live TV.”
“It’s political commentary!” Eden snapped.
“Is it, though?” Jo asked.
“Do you not want to watch Black Mirror, Jo?” Her mother’s voice wobbled. “I suppose we could try the new Johnny Appleseed show.”
“That show is supposed to be super horny,” Eden said.
“It’s fine,” Jo said over the sound of her baby sister saying horny at dinnertime. “Just surprised. I can watch whatever.”
The Throwback List Page 5