by Sarah Dessen
“Yeah,” I said, as she left the doorway, heading to the kitchen, where my sister and her swatches were waiting. “It was.”
I left them downstairs, my mother listening dubiously as Caroline explained about how corduroy wasn’t just for overalls anymore, and went up to my room, putting my laundry basket on the bed. After I’d stacked all my T-shirts, shorts, and jeans in the bureau, and laid out my info desk clothes for the week to be ironed, the only things left were Kristy’s jeans and the tank top. I went to put them on my desk, where I’d be sure to see them the next time I was leaving for work and could return them, but then, at the last minute, I stopped myself, running the thin, glittery strap of the tank top between my thumb and forefinger. It was so different from anything of mine, it was no wonder my mother had noticed it instantly. That was why I should have returned it immediately. And that was why, instead, I slipped it into my bottom drawer, out of sight, and kept it.
On Sunday, my sister was cooking dinner, and she needed arugula. I wasn’t entirely sure what that was. But I still got recruited to go look for it with her.
We’d just started down the second aisle of the farmer’s market, my sister deep into an explanation of the difference between lettuce and arugula, when suddenly, there was Wes. Yikes, I thought, my hand immediately going to my hair, which I hadn’t bothered to wash (so unlike me, but Caroline, convinced there was going to be some mass rush on exotic greens, had insisted we leave right after breakfast), then to my clothes—an old Lakeview Mall 5K T-shirt, shorts, and flip-flops—which I’d thrown on without considering the fact I might see anyone I knew, much less Wes. It was one thing for him to see me catering, when, even if I was in disarray, at least I wasn’t alone. Here, in broad daylight, though, all my old anxieties came rushing back.
“. . . not to be confused with field greens,” Caroline was saying, “which are an entirely different thing altogether.”
He was at the very end of the row, with a bunch of sculptures set up all around him, talking to a woman in a big floppy hat, who was holding her checkbook. Looking more closely, I saw one big piece, which was sporting a SOLD sign, as well as several smaller ones. They were all whirligigs, a part of each spinning in one direction or another in the breeze.
I took a sudden left, finding myself facing a table full of pound cakes and crocheted pot holders, as Caroline kept walking, still talking about various types of greens. It took her a second to realize I’d ditched her, and she doubled back looking annoyed.
“Macy,” she said, entirely too loudly, at least to my ears, “what are you doing?”
“Nothing.” I picked up one of the pot holders. “Look, aren’t these nice?”
She looked at the pot holder—which was orange and spangled and not nice at all—then at me. “Okay,” she said. “Tell me what’s going on.”
I glanced back down at Wes, hoping he’d gone to look for arugula too, or had maybe gone to help the woman get the sculpture to her car. But no. Now, in fact, he was looking our way.
My way, to be exact. The woman with the floppy hat was gone, and he was just standing there, watching me. He lifted his hand and waved, and I felt my face flush as I put the pot holder back with its hideous brethren.
“Macy, what on earth is wrong with you? Are you okay?” Caroline squinted at me from behind her entirely too expensive designer sunglasses, then turned her head to see what, exactly, had made me turn bright red. I watched her gaze move across the tables of fresh corn, goat cheese, and hammocks, until, finally: “Oh.”
I knew what she was thinking, could hear Kristy’s voice in my head: Sa-wooon.
“Do you know that guy?” she asked me, still staring.
“Sort of,” I said. Now that we’d all seen each other, there was no amount of pot holders, or hammocks, that could save me. Thinking this, I took Caroline by the elbow. “Come on.”
As we got closer, I looked at the sculptures and realized there were no heart in hands on display. Instead, I noticed another theme: angels and halos. The smaller pieces were all stick figures made of various bits of metal and steel, with gears for faces and tiny nails for fingers and toes. Above the heads of each was a sculpted circle, each decorated in a different way. One was dotted with squares of different colored glass, another had long framing nails twisting off in all directions, an angel Medusa. On the large sculpture with the SOLD sign, barbed wire was threaded around the halo, much the same as on the sculpture on Sweetbud Drive, and I thought of the Myers School again, the way the wire there had curved the same way around the fence, roped like ribbon.
“Hey,” Wes said as we came up. “I thought that was you.”
“Hi,” I said.
“These are amazing,” Caroline said, reaching out her hand to the large sculpture and running a finger along the edges of the gear that made up its midsection. “I just love this medium.”
“Thanks,” Wes said. “It’s all from the junkyard.”
“This is Wes,” I said, as she walked around the sculpture, still examining it. “Wes, this is my sister, Caroline.”
“Nice to meet you,” Caroline said in her socialite voice, extending her hand. They shook hands, and she went back to circling the sculpture, taking off her sunglasses and leaning in closer. “What’s great about this,” she said, as if we were in a museum and she was leading the tour, “is the contrast. It’s a real juxtaposition between subject matter and materials.”
Wes looked at me, raising his eyebrows, and I just shook my head, knowing better than to stop my sister when she was on a roll. Especially about art, which had been her major in college.
“See, it’s one thing to do angels,” she said to me, while Wes looked on, “but what’s crucial here is how the medium spells out the concept. Angels, by definition, are supposed to be perfect. So by building them out of rusty pieces, and discards and scraps, the artist is making a statement about the fallibility of even the most ideal creatures.”
“Wow,” I said to Wes, as she moved on to the smaller pieces, still murmuring to herself. “I’m impressed.”
“Me, too,” he replied. “I had no idea. I just couldn’t afford new materials when I started.”
I laughed, surprising myself, then was surprised even more—no, shocked—when he smiled at me, a heartbreaker’s smile, and for a second I was just in the moment: me and Wes, surrounded by all those angels, in the sunshine, on a Sunday.
“Oh, wow,” Caroline called out, shaking me back to attention, “is this sheet metal you used here? For the face?”
Wes looked over to where she was squatting in front of a figure with a halo studded with bottle caps. “That’s an old Coke sign,” he told her. “I found it at the dump.”
“A Coke sign!” she said, awed. “And the bottle caps . . . it’s the inevitable commingling of commerce and religion. I love that!”
Wes just nodded: a fast learner, he already knew to just go along with her. “Right,” he said. Then, in a lower voice to me he added, “Just liked the Coke sign, actually.”
“Of course you did,” I said.
A breeze blew over us then, and some of the halos on the smaller pieces began to spin again. A small one behind us was decorated with jingle bells, their ringing like a whistling in the air. As I bent down closer to it, the bells whizzing past, I saw the one behind it, which was turning more slowly. It was a smaller angel with a halo studded with flat stones. As I touched one as it turned, though, I realized it wasn’t a stone but something else that I couldn’t place at first.
“What is this?” I asked him.
“Sea glass,” Wes said, bending down beside me. “See the shapes? No rough edges.”
“Oh, right,” I said. “That’s so cool.”
“It’s hard to find,” he said. The breeze was dying down, and he reached out and spun the halo a bit with one finger, sending the light refracting through the glass again. He was so close to me, our knees were almost touching. “I bought that collection at a flea market, for, like, two bucks. I wasn
’t sure what I was going to use it for, then, but it seemed too good a thing to pass up.”
“It’s beautiful,” I said, and it was. When the halo got going fast, the glass all blurred, the colors mingling. Like the ocean, I thought, and looked at that angel’s face. Her eyes were washers, her mouth a tiny key, the kind I’d once had for my diary. I hadn’t noticed that before.
“You want it?”
“I couldn’t,” I said.
“Sure you can. I’m offering.” He reached over and picked it up, brushing his fingers over the angel’s tinny toes. “Here.”
“Wes. I can’t.”
“You can. You’ll pay me back somehow.”
“How?”
He thought for a second. “Someday, you’ll agree to run that mile with me. And then we’ll know for sure whether you can kick my ass.”
“I’d rather pay you for it,” I said, as I reached into my back pocket for my wallet. “How much?”
“Macy, I was kidding. I know you could kick my ass.” He looked at me, smiling. Sa-woon, I thought. “Look. Just take it.”
I was about to protest again, but then I stopped myself. Maybe for once I should just let something happen, I thought. I looked down at the angel in his hand, at those sparkling bits of glass. I did want it. I didn’t know why, couldn’t explain it if I had to. But I did.
“Okay,” I said. “But I am paying you back somehow, sometime. ”
“Sure.” He handed it to me. “Whatever you want.”
Caroline was coming back over to us now, picking her way through the smaller sculptures and stopping to examine each one. She had her purse open, her phone to her ear. “. . . no, it’s more like a yard art thing, but I just think it would look great on the back porch of the mountain house, right by that rock garden I’ve been working on. Oh, you should just see these. They’re so much better than those iron herons they sell at Attache Gardens for hundreds of dollars. Well, I know you liked those, honey, but these are better. They are.”
“Iron herons?” Wes said to me.
“She lives in Atlanta,” I told him, as if this explained everything.
“Okay, honey, I’m going. I’ll talk to you later. Love you, bye!” She snapped the phone shut, then dropped it into her purse before slinging it back over her shoulder. “All right,” she said to Wes, “let’s talk prices.”
I hung back, holding my angel, as they walked through the various pieces, Caroline stopping the negotiations every so often to explain the meaning of this or that piece as Wes stood by politely, listening. By the time it was all over she’d bought three angels, including the Coke bottle cap one, and had gotten Wes’s number to set up an appointment for her to come see the bigger pieces he had out at his workshop.
“A steal,” she said, ripping her sizeable check out of her checkbook and handing it to him. “Really. You should be charging more.”
“Maybe if I show someplace else,” he told her, folding the check and sticking it in his front pocket, “but it’s hard to get pricey when you have baked goods on either side of you.”
“You will show someplace else,” she told him, picking up two of her angels. “It’s only a matter of time.” She looked at her watch. “Oh, Macy, we have to run. I told Mom we’d be home for lunch so we could look at the rest of those color swatches.”
Something told me my mother, who that morning had picked out windows and a skylight with about as much enjoyment as someone getting a root canal, would not be broken up to miss that conversation. But I figured it wasn’t worth pointing that out to Caroline, who was already distracted checking out another angel with a thumbtack halo, which she’d somehow missed earlier. “Well,” I said to Wes, “thank you again.”
“No problem,” he said, glancing over at my sister. “Thanks for the business.”
“That’s not me,” I told him. “It’s all her.”
“Still,” he said. “Thanks anyway.”
“Excuse me,” a woman by the big sculpture called out, her voice shrill, “do you have others like this?”
Wes looked over. “I should go, I guess.”
“Go,” I said. “I’ll see you later.”
“Yeah. See you around.”
I stood there watching as he walked over to the woman, nodding as she asked her questions, then looked down at the angel in my arms, running a finger over the smooth sea glass dotting her halo.
“Ready?” Caroline said from behind me.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m ready.”
Chapter Nine
“Now this,” Delia said to me, her voice low, “really makes me nervous.”
Looking out from the kitchen, I could only nod in agreement. But while Delia was referring to the fact that we were in a house where delicate antiques crowded just about every level surface and Monica had just been sent out with a trayful of full wineglasses, for me it was something else entirely. Namely the fact that a mere two feet from the door in which we were standing, in prime grabber location, were Jason’s parents.
Since we’d arrived I’d been in the kitchen with Wes, shelling shrimp as fast as humanly possible because Delia, distracted by another crisis involving the ovens not lighting, had forgotten to get it done earlier. Suddenly, I’d heard a trilling laugh I recognized. As Kristy pushed through from the living room, her tray picked clean of the biscuits she’d walked out with only minutes earlier, I saw Mrs. Talbot. And as the door swept shut, I was almost certain she saw me.
“Unbelievable,” Wes said.
“What?” For a second I thought he meant Mrs. Talbot.
“Look at that.” I followed his gaze, realizing he meant the shrimp in my hands, as well as the pile in front of me, which was twice the size of his. “How are you doing those so fast?”
“I’m not,” I said, sliding the shrimp out of the shell and dropping it on my pile.
He just looked at me, then down at the one he was holding. “I’ve been watching you,” he said, “and while I’ve been working on this one, you’ve done five. At least.”
I picked up another one, ripped the legs off, then slid off the shell in one piece, dropping the shrimp onto my pile.
“Six,” he said. “This is getting embarrassing. How’d you learn to do that?”
Starting another one, I said, “My dad. In the summers, we used to buy a couple of pounds of shrimp to steam and eat for dinner. He loved shrimp, and he was super fast. So if you wanted to eat, you had to keep up.” I dropped the shrimp onto my pile. “It was a Darwinian thing.”
He finally finished the one in his hand, putting it on the pile. “In my house,” he said, “it was the opposite. You did everything you could to keep from eating.”
“Why?”
“After the divorce,” he said, picking up another one and, eyeing how I was doing it, ripping all the legs off at once, “my mom got into natural foods. Part of the whole cleanse your life, cleanse your body thing. Or something. No more hamburgers, no more hot dogs. It was lentil loaf and tofu salad, and that was a good day.”
“My dad was the total opposite,” I told him, starting another one. “He was a firm believer in the all-meat diet. To him, chicken was a vegetable.”
“I wish,” he said.
“Shrimp! I need shrimp!” Delia hissed from behind us. I scooped the pile in front of me onto a plate, then ran to the sink, rinsing them quickly and patting them dry as she hurriedly piled toothpicks, napkins, and cocktail sauce onto a platter.
“Those biscuits are going fast,” Kristy reported as she came back through the door, balancing her tray on her upturned palm. Today, she was in her most striking outfit yet: a black leather skirt and motorcycle boots paired with a loose white peasant blouse. Her hair was held back at the back of her head with a pair of red chopsticks. “That crowd is all professor types, and they’re so weird that way, ultra polite but really grabby at the same time. Like they say, ‘Oh, my, doesn’t that look tasty,’ and then clean out your whole tray.”
“Two and move,” I said.
“Don’t I know it.” She blew a piece of hair out of her face. “It’s just work, is all I’m saying.”
There was a crash from the other room, just as Delia handed off the shrimp tray. We all froze.
“Shit,” Delia said. “I mean, shoot. No, actually, I mean shit. I really do.”
Kristy eased open the door a tiny bit. “It wasn’t anything of theirs,” she reported, and I saw Delia visibly relax. “But a couple of wineglasses bit it on the carpet.”
“Red or white?” Delia asked.
“Ummm,” Kristy said. “Looks like red.”
“Shit,” Delia said again, crossing the room to the plastic Tupperware container she always brought with us. “And Bert would pick today to have other plans.”
I looked at Wes quizzically, and he said, “Bert’s a whiz with stains. He can get anything out of anything.”
“Really,” I said.
“Oh yeah.” Wes nodded, slowly de-shelling another shrimp. “He’s a legend.”
Delia yanked a bottle of carpet cleaner and a rag out of the container. “And how are you?” she asked me, handing them to me.
“How am I what?”
“At getting out stains.”
I looked down at the rag and cleaner in my hands, as Kristy pushed out the door.
“Um,” I said. Through the still open door, I could see Monica down on the floor, slowly picking up pieces of broken glass as the hostess of the party stood by, watching. “I’m not—”
“Good,” Delia said, pushing me through the door. “Go to it!” She’d given me such a nudge I actually stumbled over the threshold: luckily, I was able to catch myself right before doing a face plant into a nearby end table. I caught my breath, then crossed the room over to Monica, who’d made what looked like very little headway in the cleaning up effort.
“Hey,” I said, starting to kneel down beside her. “You okay?”
“Mmm-hmmm,” she said. But then she stood up, wiping her hands on her apron and starting across the floor to the kitchen, leaving me and the tray behind her. So much for teamwork, I thought, as I dropped the cloth and cleaner beside me and began to pick up the broken glass as fast as I could. I’d just gotten what I hoped was all of it and begun spraying the carpet when I heard a voice.