“I appreciate that,” Weldon said.
“But call your dad when you get a chance, okay? He cares about you.”
Weldon nodded. The phone in his aunt’s bag chirped. She reached for it, and put it to her ear. Weldon wandered a few steps away from her, tipping his head back again. He checked his watch; he’d been walking for eight minutes. Another two minutes would be good enough to avoid any muscle cramps.
“Weldon,” said his aunt. He turned to look at her. She was holding the phone out at a right angle from her body, her face pinched.
“What is it?”
“That was my neighbor Mrs. Vos. She’s an older lady who lives close to the park by the water.”
Weldon waited, not sure what she was trying to say.
“She was walking her dog at the park, and she saw you with Stella Kendrick’s daughter. She said you two were talking. You seemed … engaged with each other. Then you walked out of the park together.”
Weldon continued waiting, baffled by his aunt’s behavior. Was she upset? He didn’t understand what her expression meant. It seemed halfway between disbelief and anger.
He forced out an awkward “Ye-es?” His aunt’s right-angle-extended arm twitched. She seemed to realize she was holding her phone strangely and stuffed it into her bag.
“I don’t like the idea of you hanging out with that girl,” she said.
Weldon frowned.
“But I already went to dinner at her parents’ place…” he said, his voice trailing off. Is she seriously uncomfortable with me hanging out with Mir? The thought was followed by a flash of anger. Is she seriously telling me not to hang out with Mir? Because that will be a problem.
“That’s different,” said his aunt. “That’s Stella being Stella and trying to make friends with everyone. She’s always been like that, even back in high school. She had to make up for the fact that the families were fighting by befriending everyone with the last name Warrick. You should have seen her with your uncle.”
What the hell? Weldon thought. Did my uncle and Mir’s mom have a thing? In the back of Weldon’s mind, a tiny, eager voice piped up: Does that mean me and Mir can have a thing?
“Stella was the only…” His aunt hesitated, her eyes darting away from Weldon. “Well, it was no wonder the boys flocked to her. She was always calling attention to herself. She had pink hair in high school.”
“Miriam’s nice,” said Weldon, bristling. “I don’t know anyone in Sandford. She’s the one person I’ve met who I get along with.”
“I know, you’re stuck in the house all the time and you’re away from your friends in California,” said his aunt. “But I don’t want you to make friends with—with people who aren’t good people to know. And then there’s the whole history between our families. That man, Stella Kendrick’s father, what was his name—”
“Micah Kendrick,” Weldon said.
“Micah Kendrick. He tried for years to take everything from your grandfather and father. He dragged out that court case over those comic books for over two decades, demanding he be paid for ideas he legally sold and was well paid for. He was so ungrateful for everything Warrick Comics did for him.”
“I thought he sold the rights to the TomorrowMen for nine hundred dollars,” said Weldon.
His aunt shook her head vigorously.
“Micah Kendrick made a lot of money off the TomorrowMen. He was paid very well to draw the comics for as long as he chose to draw them. Then he threw a fit and sued because he hadn’t been made an equal partner, something he didn’t deserve in the slightest. It was your grandfather who ran the publishing business that sold the comics, that made them the success they became. Micah Kendrick had nothing to do with that. Nothing.”
Weldon’s aunt spat the final nothing out between her teeth.
“All this nonsense about that man being a genius that some cruel company took advantage of. And then after he died Warrick Studios had to pay Stella Kendrick a huge amount of money to end that legal nonsense. That’s why she can sit around painting all day, instead of working for a living like the rest of us. She dragged the Warrick name through the mud with that legal case, made us all look like thieves and cheats, and then she took money she wasn’t entitled to. Warrick Studios had to pay her to go away.”
His aunt’s expression went slack, her fury suddenly exhausted. Weldon felt battered by the force of her tirade. Sandford was a very small town. Stella and his aunt must have bumped into each other a few times over the past thirty years. Stella must have sensed his aunt’s simmering resentment. She must have known no amount of well-cooked vegetables would fix things between them.
“You can see why I object to you hanging out with Miriam Kendrick,” said his aunt. She put her hand to her forehead, brushing back an imaginary stray hair. “Her mother has said some very vicious things about how the Warricks treated Micah Kendrick, things she has yet to apologize for. You are old enough to know how to correctly choose the company you keep, Weldon. I believe you’ll make the right choice in this matter.”
“You bet,” said Weldon lightly. It was unnervingly easy to lie.
His aunt smiled.
“Can I get you anything while I’m in town, Weldon?”
“Some bananas, if you’re going by the grocery store,” said Weldon. “I like to eat them before I run. They’re good for energy.”
His aunt nodded, still smiling, and left him standing on her neatly trimmed lawn. Weldon went inside and showered, still thinking about Mir. After putting on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt, Weldon lay down on his bed, pulling Stella’s painting out from behind the bedside table. Skylark and Skybound stared past him, their elegant hands reaching toward each other. He stared at their hands for a long time, imagining himself reaching for Mir like that.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Mir lay facedown on the couch in her parents’ living room, rolling the awfulness of the day around in her head. Weldon had distracted her on the walk home, but once she’d opened the door to her house, the reality of losing her job had made her so sad she couldn’t bear to do anything but lie facedown on the couch. The house was empty, her dad and Nate off for what Stella called their “weekly father-son bonding,” a wilderness club that mostly did hikes through a nearby forest. Nate was good at smuggling home all kinds of weird bugs and slimy things, which he kept in a small terrarium on the front porch. Stella had forbidden him to bring anything alive into the house after an incident with an escaped lizard.
Mir glanced at the clock in the living room: five minutes to five o’clock. She steeled herself. Nate and Henry would come racing through the front door any minute—
Mir heard the clatter of the screen door, but it was Stella who walked through it, a pile of vegetables in her arms. She looked at Mir in surprise.
“Oh, you’re home early. I was in the garden. Didn’t see you come in.”
Mir sat up, then changed her mind and lay back down on the couch, pressing her face into one of the nearby pillows. The couch was from a local consignment store, but it had been nearly new when Mir’s parents had bought it. When Henry and Stella had hauled the couch home, there had been a stern lecture to Mir and Nate that this couch was not like the old one, it was not to be jumped on. This couch needed to last.
Mir heard Stella’s footsteps as she walked across the living room. The couch sagged a bit as Stella sat down, putting a hand on Mir’s shoulder.
“Are you okay?”
“I got fired,” Mir said, her voice muffled by the pillow.
“What?”
“I got fired,” Mir said louder, turning her head sideways. “The Emporium of Wonders is going out of business. I lost my job.”
Stella put her other hand to her mouth, eyes wide.
“The store’s closing? What about Berg? He sank everything he had into that store.”
“He did a terrible job running it,” Mir muttered, annoyed that Stella’s first thought was for Berg and not her. “If he’d been a better manager, I m
ight still have a job.”
Stella frowned.
“It might not be his fault, Miriam. Sometimes things fail despite a person’s best efforts.”
What if I fail? Mir thought. What if I try my hardest and go to university and graduate and I still don’t know what I want to do? She shrugged, trying to dislodge her mother’s hand.
“I should call him,” said Stella. “Poor Berg.”
“I don’t know what to do,” Mir muttered. The day had wrung her out, but there was an angry spot simmering in her chest, waiting for the right moment to bubble up. Stella sighed, rubbing her hand sympathetically across Mir’s shoulder.
“What do you want to do?”
“I want the hand of God to come down from the sky and tell me exactly what I should do with my life,” Mir said. “I want to make a decision that’s the right decision.”
The span of the summer stretched before Mir. The months used to be comforting, a buffer against the start of the final school year and all the decisions she would have to make. She thought of the university pamphlets Ms. Archer had given her, filled with the faces of students who had taken the plunge and chosen this school or that school. Mir had stared at the faces in the pamphlet photographs, looking for one that seemed doubtful or unsure. Did any of those students regret their decision?
“I had to make a really important decision once,” Stella said softly. “I had to decide if I was going to drop my father’s legal case against Warrick Comics. All I could think was how every option seemed like the wrong one.”
Mir turned her head to look at Stella out of the corner of her eye. Stella in profile was beautiful, the soft curve of her forehead matching the curve of the back of her skull, like she was carved from marble.
“I could only make the decision that was right for me at the time. Some people thought I was crazy, that I was throwing away millions of dollars. Your grandfather would have hated me for doing what I did, if he’d still been alive.”
Stella smiled distantly, in a way that made Mir’s heart ache.
“Sometimes I regret that decision, but most days I know it was the right one. It was right for me at the time.”
Stella looked over at Mir, the distant smile still on her lips.
“What do you want to do, Miriam?”
“Leave,” said Mir.
The word hung between them. Relief washed over Mir. The lightness she’d felt earlier when talking to Weldon hummed in her chest. There was the thing she wanted, finally. Leave. Leave Sandford, go somewhere that didn’t feel so small and cramped. Somewhere with more than one downtown street.
“Okay,” said Stella. “Where do you want to leave to?”
Mir thought.
“Toronto. I think I want to go to the University of Toronto. I want to try a bunch of different subjects and find out what I really like doing. I want to live in a city. I want—” She ducked her head, not quite sure how to continue.
“You want to live somewhere that’s not confined. You want to walk down streets and not bump into people who have known you your whole life. You want to start fresh in a place that feels like you could explore it for a lifetime and still not discover all its secrets,” Stella said.
Mir looked up at her mother, surprised.
“Yeah, exactly. How did you know?”
Stella put her chin in one hand, smiling at Mir.
“This may surprise you, Miriam, but after your father and I graduated from high school, I wanted to leave Sandford. Henry and I talked about it for a long time.”
“But you didn’t leave,” Mir said. “You stayed here.”
“We stayed,” said Stella. “Together we decided it was best. Your father’s family is here, and despite its problems, I like Sandford. Toronto is huge and full of possibilities, but that doesn’t mean it would have been a good home for us, or a good place to raise our kids. Besides, the property prices are insane. What we paid for this house wouldn’t buy a hole in the ground in Toronto. Here we can afford to live, and I can paint rather than work a day job to pay a mortgage.”
Mir wiggled onto her back, folding her hands on her stomach. “So now what? Now I know I want to go to school out of province, but how do I pay for it? You guys don’t have any money, and what I have saved from my job isn’t enough.”
“We’ll find a way,” said Stella. “I’ll set up an appointment with your school guidance counselor and we’ll make this work. Somehow. There must be scholarships available to you. Your grades are really good. Or maybe financial aid…”
“I’ll need to find another job,” Mir said. Her chest ached as she remembered how she liked organizing the superhero toys in the Emporium of Wonders, plastic men and women in clear boxes, their incredible physiques replicated in perfect miniature. I really did love that job, Mir thought. It wasn’t stupid.
“You will. Have you asked Evan’s dad about work? He’s hired you before.”
“Ugh,” Mir said, putting her hands over her eyes. “Landscaping is so much work. So much sod carrying and raking and digging. Dirt is so heavy. And Evan’s dad yells when things aren’t perfect.”
“It’s only for a summer,” said Stella. “Think about the money you’ll earn, and how it’ll pay for your escape from Sandford. It makes awful work so much easier when you have something to look forward to. And”—Stella squeezed Mir’s shoulders with both hands—“you have a really big adventure coming up.”
“I haven’t even been accepted into university yet,” Mir said. “It might not happen.”
Stella smiled.
“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”
There was a thump and a clatter on the porch outside, and Nate came charging into the house, his jacket streaked with mud. Stella lunged off the couch and grabbed for him, stripping the jacket off before he could smear the dirt on anything. When Nate was muddy he liked to share that mud with everything around him: walls, couches, beds, people. Henry came into the house at a slower pace, stopping to unlace his boots, which were also caked in mud.
“Looks like you had a good time,” said Stella, her hands on her hips. Henry reached for Stella and swept her into a crushing hug.
“Be normal parents!” Mir yelled from the living room, sitting up on the couch. “Stop being so … smoochy. You’ve been married for like twenty years or whatever. Act normal, for Pete’s sake.”
“Twenty years!” Henry gasped, pretending to be shocked. “Has it been that long? ’Pon my word, I swear it was naught more than nineteen years. Good woman, was I wrong?” He held Stella at arm’s length, looking her up and down.
Stella put a hand on his arm.
“Stop making jokes. Miriam’s had a rough day.”
Henry walked over to stand beside Miriam, looking down at her. He was wearing his usual plaid shirt and jeans combination, his blond hair sticking up every which way, like it was straw in need of a pitchfork.
“What happened?”
“I lost my job,” Mir said. It felt more real to say it this third time. Maybe next would be Evan or Raleigh. I should really call Raleigh, Mir thought. Enough of this weirdness. I’ve known her forever and Jamie’s only known her for a year. She wouldn’t throw me away completely because of him.
Henry frowned, his blond caterpillar eyebrows drawing downward.
“Really sorry to hear that, Miriam. What happened?”
“The store’s going out of business,” said Mir. “Guess it’ll become another Starbucks or some tourist trap build-your-own-canoe place.”
“Is Berg okay? He’s had that store for years.”
“Everyone is very concerned about Berg,” Mir muttered, then felt guilty for being annoyed. “I mean, I am too. It’s terrible for Berg too.” Mir dragged a chunk of her hair over her shoulder and picked at the ends of it. “That was kind of jerky of me. Sorry.”
“You’re upset, you’re allowed to be jerky,” said Henry.
Stella moved into the living room, sitting on the floor and crossing her legs.
<
br /> “Miriam’s made a decision about next year,” said Stella. “Go on, tell him.”
Henry’s gaze moved from Mir to Stella and back to Mir again, his eyes bright. Sometimes he seemed like a little kid, always overly excited by things, always curious. He and Nate were so similar, collecting weird odds and ends, telling stories that always seemed to evolve into absurd adventures. “It’s never too late to have a happy childhood,” he would say to Mir when she told him to grow up and be like the other dads. “Stop being so silly!” Mir had yelled at him once, and Henry had marched around the kitchen, an exaggerated frown on his face, lecturing the stove to “stop that, stop being so silly!”
“I want to go to Toronto for university,” Mir said. Henry blinked, surprised. “If I get in,” Mir finished. Henry’s gaze darted toward Stella, then back to Mir, confused. He rubbed a hand through his hair.
“Are you—are you sure? That’s so far away.”
His voice sounded small and shocked. Sitting cross-legged on the ground, Stella looked up at her husband, frowning.
“Would you prefer she stay here and not go to university?” Stella said. There was an uncharacteristic edge in her voice. Henry looked down at her, still rubbing his head with his hand. His hair looked like a starburst of static.
“No, of course not. I want Miriam to go to university if that’s what she wants. But why Toronto? There are universities in this province. I don’t know why she’d have to go all the way to Ontario for school. That’s a two-day drive away. It’s an airplane flight.”
“I want to see what living in a big city is like,” Mir said. It was strange watching her father and mother disagree on something. They argued occasionally, but never in front of their kids. She couldn’t remember ever hearing them yell at each other.
“There are cities here!” Henry said. “There are cities two hours away. There’s Halifax, and Fredericton…”
“Henry—” said Stella, uncrossing her legs and starting to stand up.
“People leave and they don’t come back,” said Henry. The lines around his eyes seemed to deepen, dragging his face downward. “My brothers left for Alberta and the oil sands industry when they graduated high school, and they didn’t come back. I see them maybe once every five years. This country is too damn large.”
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