by Sarah Dessen
“No,” Delia said firmly. “We’re not.”
“Monica was on ice,” Kristy said, continuing the count. “Macy was utensils, and Wes was glasses and champagne. Which means that the ham belonged to—” She stopped abruptly. “Oh. Delia.”
“What?” Delia said, jerking her head out of a box filled with loaves of bread. “No, wait, I don’t think so. I was on—”
We all waited. It was, after all, her system.
“Main course,” she finished.
“Uh-oh,” Bert said.
“Oh God!” Delia slapped a hand to her forehead. “I did have the hams on the side table, and I remember being worried that we might forget them, so while we were packing the van I put them—”
Again, we all waited.
“On the back of my car,” Delia finished, placing her palm square in the middle of her forehead. “Oh, my God,” she whispered, as if the truth, so horrible, might deafen us all, “they’re still at the house. On my car.”
“Uh-oh,” Bert said again. He was right: it was a full thirty minutes away, and these people were expecting their ham in ten.
Delia leaned back against the stove. “This,” she said, “is awful.”
For a minute, no one said anything. It was a silence I’d grown to expect when things like this happened, the few seconds as we accepted, en masse, the crashing realization that we were, in fact, screwed.
Then, as always, Delia pushed on. “Okay,” she said, “here’s what we’re going to do. . . .”
So far, I’d done three jobs with Wish since that first one, including a cocktail, a brunch, and a fiftieth-anniversary party. At each, there was one moment—an old man pinching my butt as I passed with scones; the moment Kristy and I collided and her tray bonked me in the nose, showering salmon and crudités down my shirt; the time when Bert had hit me with another gotcha, jumping out from behind a coat rack and sending the stacks of plates I was carrying, as well as my blood pressure, skyrocketing—when I wondered what in the world I’d been thinking taking this on. At the end of the night, though, when it was all over, I felt something strange, a weird calmness. Almost a peace. It was like those few hours of craziness relaxed something held tight in me, if only for a little while.
Most of all, though, it was fun. Even if I was still learning things, like to duck when Kristy yelled, “Incoming!” meaning she had to get something—a pack of napkins, some tongs, a tray—across a room so quickly that only throwing it would suffice, or never to stand in front of swinging doors, ever, as Bert always pushed them open with too much gusto, without taking into consideration that there might be anything on the other side. I learned that Delia hummed when she was nervous, usually “American Pie,” and that Monica never got nervous at all, was in fact capable of eating shrimp or crab cakes, hardly bothered, when the rest of us were in total panic mode. And I learned that I could always count on Wes for a raised eyebrow, an under-the-breath sarcastic remark, or just a sympathetic look when I found myself in a bind: no matter where I was in the room, or what was happening, I could look over at the bar and feel that someone, at least, was on my side. It was the total opposite of how I felt at the library, or how I felt anywhere else, for that matter. Which was probably why I liked it.
But then, after the job was over and the van packed up to go home, after we’d stood around while Delia got paid, everyone laughing and trading stories about grabbers and gobblers and grandmas, the buzz of rushing around would wear off. As I’d begin to remember that I had to be at the library the next morning, I could feel myself starting to cross back to my real life, bit by bit.
“Macy,” Kristy would say, as we put the last of the night’s supplies back in Delia’s garage, “you coming out with us tonight?”
She always extended the invitation, even though I said no every time. Which I appreciated. It’s nice to have options, even if you can’t take them.
“I can’t,” I’d tell her. “I’m busy.”
“Okay,” she’d say, shrugging. “Maybe next time.”
It went like that, our own little routine, until one night when she squinted at me, curious. “What do you do every night, anyway? ” she’d asked.
“Just, you know, stuff for school,” I’d told her.
“Donneven,” Monica said, shaking her head.
“I’m prepping for the SATs,” I said, “and I work another job in the mornings.”
Kristy rolled her eyes. “It’s summertime,” she told me. “I mean, I know you’re a smarty-pants, but don’t you ever take a break? Life is long, you know.”
Maybe, I thought. Or maybe not. Out loud I said, “I just really, you know, have a lot of work to do.”
“Okay,” she’d said. “Have fun. Study for me, while you’re at it. God knows I need it.”
So while at home I was still fine-just-fine Macy, wiping up sink splatters immediately and ironing my clothes as soon as they got out of the dryer, the nights when I arrived home from catering, I was someone else, a girl with her hair mussed, a stained shirt, smelling of whatever had been spilled or smeared on me. It was like Cinderella in reverse: if I was a princess for my daylight hours, at night I let myself and my composure go, just until the stroke of midnight, when I turned back to princess again, just in time.
The ham disaster was, like all the others, eventually averted. Wes ran to the gourmet grocery where Delia was owed a favor, and Kristy and I just kept walking through with more appetizers, deflecting all queries about when dinner was being served with a bat of the eyelashes and a smile (her idea, of course). When the ham was finally served—forty-five minutes late—it was a hit, and everyone went home happy.
It was ten-thirty by the time I finally pulled into Wildflower Ridge, my headlights swinging across the town common and into our cul-de-sac, where I saw my house, my mailbox, everything as usual, and then something else.
My dad’s truck.
It was in the driveway, right where he’d always parked, in front of the garage, left-hand side. I pulled up behind it, sitting there for a second. It was his, no question: I would have known it anywhere. Same rusty bumper, same EAT ... SLEEP ... FISH bumper sticker, same chrome toolbox with the dent in the middle from where he’d dropped his chainsaw a few years earlier. I got out of my car and walked up to it, reaching out my finger to touch the license plate. For some reason I was surprised that it didn’t just vanish, like a bubble bursting, the minute I made contact. That was the way ghosts were supposed to be, after all.
But the metal handle felt real as I pulled open the driver’s side door, my heart beating fast in my chest. Immediately, I could smell that familiar mix of old leather, cigar smoke, and the lingering scent of ocean and sand you carry back with you from the beach that you always wish would last, but never does.
I loved that truck. It was the place my dad and I spent more time together than anywhere else, me on the passenger side, feet balanced on the dashboard, him with one elbow out the window, tapping the roof along with the beat on the radio. We went out early Saturday mornings to get biscuits and drive around checking on job sites, drove home from meets in the dark, me curled up in that perfect spot between the seat and window where I always fell asleep instantly. The air conditioner hadn’t worked for as long as I’d been alive, and the heat cranked enough to dehydrate you within minutes, but it didn’t matter. Like the beach house, the truck was dilapidated, familiar, with its own unique charm: it was my dad. And now it was back.
I eased the door shut, then went up to the front door of my house. It was unlocked, and as I stepped inside, kicking off my shoes as I always did, I could feel something beneath my feet. I crouched down, running my finger over the hardwood: it was sand.
“Hello?” I said, then listened to my voice bounce around our high ceilings back to me. Afterwards, nothing but silence.
My mother was at the sales office, had been there since five. I knew this because she’d left a message around ten on my cell phone, telling me. Which meant that either sometime in th
e last five hours my father’s truck had driven itself from the coast, or there was another explanation.
I went back down the hallway and looked up to the second floor. My bedroom door, which I always left closed to keep it either cooler or warmer, was open.
I wasn’t sure what to think as I climbed the stairs, remembering how many times I’d wished my dad would just turn up at the house one day, this whole thing one big misunderstanding we could all laugh about together. If only.
When I got to my room, I stopped in the open door and noticed, relieved, everything familiar: my computer, my closed closet door, my window. There was the SAT book on my bedside table, my shoes lined up by the wastebasket. All as it should be. But then I looked at the bed and saw the dark head against my pillow. Of course my father wasn’t back. But Caroline was.
She’d just stopped in for a visit. But already, she was making waves.
“Caroline,” my mother said. Her voice, once polite, then stern, was now bordering on snappy. “I’m not discussing this. This is not the place or time.”
“Maybe this isn’t the place,” Caroline told her, helping herself to another breadstick. “But Mom, really. It’s time.”
It was Monday, and we were all at Bella Luna, a fancy little bistro near the library. For once, I wasn’t eating lunch alone, instead taking my hour with my mother and sister. Now, though, I was realizing maybe I would have preferred to eat my regular sandwich on a bench alone, as it became increasingly clear that my sister had come with An Agenda.
“I just think,” she said now, glancing at our waitress as she passed, “that it’s not what Dad would have wanted. He loved that house. And it’s sitting there, rotting. You should see all the sand in the living room, and the way the steps to the beach are sagging. It’s horrible. Have you even been down to check on it since he died?”
I watched my mother’s face as she heard this, the way, despite her best efforts, she reacted to the various breaches of the conduct we’d long ago agreed on concerning my father and how he was mentioned. My mother and I preferred to focus on the future: this was the past. But my sister didn’t see it that way. From the minute she’d arrived—driving his truck because her Lexus had blown a gasket while at the beach—it was like she’d brought him with her as well.
“The beach house is the least of my concerns, Caroline,” my mother said now, as our waitress passed by again with a frazzled expression. We’d been waiting for our entrees for over twenty minutes. “I’m doing this new phase of townhouses, and the zoning has been extremely difficult. . . .”
“I know,” Caroline said. “I understand how hard it has been for you. For both of you.”
“I don’t think you do.” My mother put her hand on her water glass but didn’t pick it up or take a sip. “Otherwise you would understand that this isn’t something I want to talk about right now.”
My sister sat back in her chair, twisting her wedding ring around her finger. “Mom,” she said finally, “I’m not trying to upset you. I’m just saying that it’s been a year and a half . . . and maybe it’s time to move on. Dad would have wanted you to be happier than this. I know it.”
“I thought this was about the beach house,” my mother said stiffly.
“It is,” Caroline said. “But it’s also about living. You can’t hide behind work forever, you know. I mean, when was the last time you and Macy took a vacation or did something nice for yourselves?”
“I was at the coast just a couple of weeks ago.”
“For work,” Caroline said. “You work late into the night, you get up early in the morning, you don’t do anything but think about the development. Macy never goes out with friends, she spends all her time holed up studying, and she’s not going to be seventeen forever—”
“I’m fine,” I said.
My sister looked at me, her face softening. “I know you are,” she said. “But I just worry about you. I feel like you’re missing out on something you won’t be able to get back later.”
“Not everyone needs a social life like you had, Caroline,” my mother said. “Macy’s focused on school, and her grades are excellent. She has a wonderful boyfriend. Just because she’s not out drinking beer at two in the morning doesn’t mean she isn’t living a full life.”
“I’m not saying her life isn’t full,” Caroline said. “I just think she’s awfully young to be so serious about everything.”
“I’m fine,” I said again, louder this time. They both looked at me. “I am,” I said.
“All I’m saying is that you both could use a little more fun in your lives,” Caroline said. “Which is why I think we should fix up the beach house and all go down there for a few weeks in August. Wally’s working this big case all summer, he’s gone all the time, so I can really devote myself to this project. And then, when it’s finished, we’ll all go down there together, like old times. It’ll be the perfect way to end the summer.”
“I’m not talking about this now,” my mother said, as the waitress, now red-faced, passed by again. “Excuse me,” my mother said, too sharply, and the girl jumped. “We’ve been waiting for our food for over twenty minutes.”
“It will be right out,” the girl said automatically, and then scurried toward the kitchen. I glanced at my watch: five minutes until one. I knew that Bethany and Amanda were most likely in their chairs already, the clock behind them counting down the seconds until they finally had something legitimate to hold against me.
My mother was focusing on some distant point across the restaurant, her face completely composed. Looking at her in the light falling across our table, I realized that she looked tired, older than she was. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen her really smile, or laugh a big belly laugh like she always did when my dad made one of his stupid jokes. No one else ever laughed—they were more groan inducing than anything else— but my mother always thought they were hysterical.
“When I first got to the beach house,” Caroline said, as my mother kept her eyes locked on that distant spot, “I just sat in the driveway and sobbed. It was like losing him all over again, I swear.”
I watched my mother swallow, saw her shoulders rise, then fall, as she took a breath.
“But then,” my sister continued, her voice soft, “I went inside and remembered how much he loved that stupid moose head over the fireplace, even though it smells like a hundred old socks. I remembered you trying to cook dinner on that stove top with only one burner, having to alternate pans every five minutes just to make macaroni and cheese and frozen peas, because you swore we wouldn’t eat fish one more night if it killed you.”
My mother lifted up her hand to her chin, pressing two fingertips there, and I felt a pang in my chest. Stop it, I wanted to say to Caroline, but I couldn’t even form the words. I was listening, too. Remembering.
“And that stupid grill that he loved so much, even though it was a total fire hazard,” Caroline continued, looking at me now. “Remember how he always used to store stuff in it, like that Frisbee or the spare keys, and then forget and turn it on and set them on fire? Do you know there are still, like, five blackened keys sitting at the bottom of that thing?”
I nodded, but that was all I could manage. Even that, actually, was hard.
“I haven’t meant to let the house go,” my mother said suddenly, startling me. “It’s just been one more thing to deal with. . . . I’ve had too much happening here.” It can’t be that easy, I thought, to get her to talk about this. To bring her closer to the one thing that I’d circled with her, deliberately avoiding, for months now. “I just—”
“It needs some new shingles,” Caroline told her, speaking slowly, carefully. “I talked to the guy next door, Rudy? He’s a carpenter. He walked through with me. It needs basic stuff, a stove, a screen door, and those steps fixed. Plus a coat of paint in and out wouldn’t hurt.”
“I don’t know,” my mother said, and I watched as Caroline put her hand on my mother’s, their fingers intertwining, Ca
roline’s purposefully, my mother’s responding seemingly without thinking. This reaching out to my mom was another thing I’d been working up to, never quite getting the nerve, but she made it look simple. “It’s just so much to think about.”
“I know,” my sister said, in that flat-honest way she had always been able to say anything. “But I love you, and I’ll help you. Okay?”
My mother blinked, then blinked again. It was the closest I’d seen her come to crying in over a year.
“Caroline,” I said, because I felt like I had to, someone had to.
“It’s okay,” she said to me, as if she was sure. No question. I envied her that, too. “It’s all going to be okay.”
Even though I scarfed down my linguini pesto in record time and ran the two blocks back to the library, it was one-twenty by the time I got back to work. Amanda, seated in her chair with her arms crossed over her chest, narrowed her eyes at me as I let myself behind the desk and, as I always did, battled around their thrones to reach my crummy little station in the back.
“Lunch ends at one,” she said, enunciating each word carefully as if my tardiness was due to a basic lack of comprehension. Beside her, Bethany smiled, just barely, before lifting a hand to cover her mouth.
“I know, I’m sorry,” I said. “It was unavoidable.”
“Nothing is unavoidable,” she said snippily before turning back to her computer monitor. I felt my face turn red, that deep burning kind of shame, as I sat down.
Then, about a year and half too late, it hit me. I was never going to be perfect. And what had all my efforts gotten me, really, in the end? A boyfriend who pushed me away the minute I cracked, making the mistake of being human. Great grades that would still never be good enough for girls who Knew Everything. A quiet, still life, free of any risks, and so many sleepless nights to spend within it, my heart heavy, keeping secrets my sister had empowered herself by telling. This life was fleeting, and I was still searching for the way I wanted to spend it that would make me happy, full, okay again. I didn’t know what it was, not yet. But something told me I wouldn’t find it here.