“You’re not trashy,” I tell her.
“Yeah. You’re pretty and smart,” A insists. “And more talented than Clara will ever be. Forget that dude.”
“That’s what I’m trying to do,” E assures him. “I want to move to Pittsburgh and make new friends and forget that I ever spent time in this stupid small town.”
Usually, I would be in full agreement. But selfishly, I don’t want E to leave just yet. Also, a few of the things she’s saying just don’t add up.
“Hey, weren’t we just talking about how much we’re going to miss this town a few days ago?” I ask. “And maybe don’t write August off just yet. Can you walk us through exactly what happened to make him invite Clara to prom?”
“I just told you!” E answers.
“Yeah, well, tell me again. This time step-by-step. Like I gave you your phone back and what did you say when you answered all those texts he sent?”
“I said, ‘Hey,’” E replies, in a tone that insinuates her one-word answer should have been obvious.
“All you said was hey?” A asks, his innocent round face crinkling with confusion.
E rolls her eyes. “What else was I supposed to say? He left me, like, a wall of messages.”
I don’t know what’s cringier. That all E said after two weeks of total radio silence was ‘Hey,’ or that up until very recently, I would have responded the exact same way. If I responded at all.
“And what did he say?” A asks.
“Where the hell have you been?—sorry for cursing Cynda, but that’s what he said.”
“Got it,” I answer, letting it go this once. “And then, what did you say?”
“’Hanging with the fam. How you?’ And then it was like…dot, dot, dot for the longest time. And like two hours later he tells me he invited Clara, who he knows I hate to prom.”
“I know I’m not cool like you,” A says, his voice cautious. “But how you responded after two weeks feels kind of wrong.”
“So this is all my fault?” E demands, her voice immediately becoming defensive.
Apparently this is the one argument A’s not willing to have with his twin. He cuts his eyes at me, like, your turn.
I clear my throat. “No, it’s not your fault per se. I mean, I get it. When you’ve lost as many people as you have, it makes it hard to put yourself out there. Sometimes it feels easier to act like you don’t care about someone, even when you do. But the thing is, it only feels that way. When it comes right down to it, people who never risk looking stupid or making themselves vulnerable end up alone. It doesn’t matter whether you’re here or in Pittsburgh. If you can’t be honest with the boys you like and tell them how you really feel, then you’ll never get the kind of relationship you want—”
“Who says I want a relationship?” E asks, cutting me off. “I’m going to go to Carnegie Mellon and work my ass off and then I’ll become a huge actress. And I’ll show him. I’ll show everyone.”
I admire the determination burning in E’s eyes. But at that moment I know three things.
First, she’s not going to text August back and explain things. She’s only eighteen and she’s just not there yet. Hell, I’m still terrible at explaining myself, and I turned twenty-eight back in January.
Second, she is going to put her heart and soul into becoming a famous actress, and she will succeed. But the third this is…
After she acquires everything she wants, she’ll still be alone. And low-key miserable.
Just like me.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Realizing all of this, I hug E and negotiate her down to moving at the end of the summer after I’ve sold the house.
“That will give me enough money to pay for housing for both you and A, since I’m not going to be there.”
The twins don’t argue with me about my decision not to move to Pittsburgh. But E asks, “What are you going to do without a house and a job?”
It starts to rain outside right after she says that. And I try not to take it as a bad omen, as I answer, “I’ll probably move to St. Louis. Or maybe even Atlanta. Someplace with more hospitals and more nursing jobs. From what I’ve been reading, there’s plenty of RN jobs available other places for people who want them. Just not in Guadalajara.”
E shifts, her expression shadowing over with guilt. “You love this town. I wish there was a way for you to stay and us to go to CMU without you having to sell the house.”
“You don’t think Dr. Prince will give you back your job, now that…?” A trails off, but he and I both know what he’s talking about.
“No,” I answer. “That was just...temporary. After this, we’ll both be moving on.”
I wait to feel a surge of anger over what he’s done: buying my dad’s practice and turning it into an DBCare. Taking the small town doctor out of medicine and pushing our country even further into a health system with jacked up prices and less humanity. And for what? Because some messed up girl dumped him three years ago?
All of those things should make me furious. But I only feel sad.
So sad.
It was only six months but memories of that time keep flashing through my head. The laughter. The dates. The lazy mornings when we both had the day off. The amazing sex.
And the quiet afterward as we lay in each other’s arms.
“Derick Miller just asked me to Zoom Prom,” E announces later that night, interrupting the relentless highlight reel.
We’re supposed to be watching the fifth and final season of the She-Ra reboot together. But I’m all caught up in the past and E’s been texting on her phone the entire time.
A, who decided to re-watch the season with us, pauses the TV to ask, “The quarterback?”
“Yep, take that, August Brandt, you Lacrosse Asshole!” E says, raising her phone triumphantly.
I smile and laugh along with her and A.
However, weird feelings stir inside of me even as I pretend to be happy for her. E’s only eighteen. But I’m already relating to the regret she’ll feel in ten years when she learns the same lessons I have. The hard way.
The rain has turned into a thunderstorm by the time I crawl into bed that night. Lightning flashes across my window followed by muted booms a few seconds later.
Maybe that’s why I can’t fall asleep that night. Why my emotions eddy and swirl until there’s nothing but a pool of muddy thoughts inside my head—
Thunder booms again. This time so loud the house shakes, and I hear something drop to the floor with a muffled thump.
I sit up in bed, breathing hard.
And wait for the twins to come running in. They grew up in California before moving to St. Louis. So they didn’t understand anything about real weather until they came out here. When the thunder gets too loud, I sometimes end up with two teenagers huddled in my bed. And we watch Netflix on my computer until the storm passes.
But I guess they really have grown up. My door remains closed, even as my heart beats wildly.
Eventually, I turn on the lamp and get out of bed to investigate whatever made that thump.
The answer is scattered across the floor of my closet.
My keepsake box lies sideways along with its contents: my Queen America participation trophy, my father’s notepad, the one Dansko shoe, and the two letters from my biological mother….
They’re all spread out on the closet’s carpet. Separate, but somehow part of the same big mess.
My first instinct is to shove everything back into the box, then return it to the shelf where it belongs.
But then suddenly a memory flashes into my head, clear as a bell in a sea of forgotten things.
My mother singing, “I Told the Storm” when we went to church with my grandparents in St. Louis.
She wasn’t part of the choir at the Lutheran Church we went to in Guadalajara. But once when we visited my grandparents in “Beverly Hills,” we went to the church she grew up in for Sunday Service. The old pastor said, “Why is that Lil’ Maril
ee Smith in the back of the church? Come up here, girl, and join the choir for a song.”
My mom, a proper doctor’s wife, had, of course, demurred. But the pastor, who apparently didn’t care that the service had already clocked two hours, insisted until the whole church was in a tizzy. The pastor, my grandparents, people who knew my mom as Marilee Smith, even folks who didn’t know my mother from Adam were insisting she get up and sing.
I’d never heard my mother sing and I just stared up at her wide-eyed, wondering what all the fuss was about.
I soon found out when she finally agreed and joined the choir on stage in her yellow Jackie O dress and white church hat.
My mother couldn’t just sing, she could “sang” as Black people from Missouri with thicker accents than us liked to say.
She started out slowly but by the end of the song, she was a wild thing on stage. Jumping and hollering, waving her hat and sweating as she sang about how she told the storm that it was time to pass.
Dad had shouted and clapped along. But I had stood there wide-eyed and stunned. I’d never seen my mother sing gospel like that. And I never would again.
That pastor died less than a year later and he was replaced by a young reverend who’d actually gone to a formal divinity school and didn’t carry any fond memories of when my mom used to sing in the church choir.
It would be years and after both my grandparents’ deaths before I heard the original Joyful Noize version of the song. And yeah, that choir did a fine, soul-stirring job. But I’ll go to my grave thinking my mother sang it better.
And it’s her voice, not the ones from the Joyful Noize choir that keeps me from immediately shoving everything back into that box.
My hand goes to pick up the second letter, the one I refused to read. And instead of hiding it out of sight, if not mind again, I sit crossed legged on the floor to read it.
Chapter Twenty-Three
The thunderstorm is still raging and I’m soaked to the bone by the time I make it across the yard in bare feet. It’s a good thing I cut all my hair off because my old horse of a ponytail would not have made the journey.
I’m not wearing any make-up and my eyes are red from crying, so I can only imagine what I look like when Rhys opens the door.
“Cynda,” he says, his eyes as angry as mine are sad. “Why are you knocking on my door at two in the morning?”
His face then suddenly morphs from hard to concerned. “Is there an emergency? Is everything okay with the twins?”
My heart melts at his questions. How had I forgotten that about him? Some of the other doctors advised their residents to care less about our patients. Years of working in a St. Louis City emergency department had hardened their hearts. But not Rhys.
He’d been the kind of guy I’d call to share a Weiss Fox beer after losing a patient bad and quick. He’d cared, truly cared about people. Even when he didn’t want to.
I thought this would be hard, but actually it’s quite easy.
“No, I’m knocking on your door because I’m sorry,” I yell over the pouring rain. “I’m sorry for breaking up with you by text. I’m sorry for not explaining myself. I’m sorry about not telling you how I really feel.”
He shakes his head and opens his mouth—probably to say something else about how he’s still not ready to forgive my trifling ass.
But I push on before he can. “I didn’t break up with you because I didn’t care about you. I broke up with you because I cared about you too much. That’s the last thing I talked about with my father. How I liked you enough to bring you home to meet him. But then he died, and I was scared. So I clung to what I still had. The twins, this town, because I was afraid. But I kept something.”
I raise up the glittery purple Dansko that I grabbed before running over here. “I kept this shoe even though I knew I’d never get the other one back. I couldn’t throw it away. And I don’t regret staying here for the twins after their mom left. But I do regret ending things the way I did with you. The thing is losing my mom really messed me up and losing my dad made it even worse. I didn’t want to put myself out there because I really didn’t think I could take losing anyone else. But the twins don’t want me to move with them to Pittsburgh. And I just read the second letter from my biological mom. As it turns out, she’s a lot like me. She had to fight herself and a lot of demons to finally find some peace, and now she’s happy, but she has so many regrets. About the things she did and the things she didn’t do. She’s upset she was too scared to come to her parents’ and sister’s funerals and that she didn’t get up the courage to write me until now. I don’t want to live my whole life being scared. Or regretting the things I didn’t say or do.”
I let out a shaky breath as the rain continues to batter me. Then I make my biggest confession of all: “Those six months weren’t just a fling. That was me starting to have real feelings for you…starting to fall in love with you. And I’m sorry. Not just for all the other stuff. But for being too much of a coward to tell you how much I really, really liked you.”
He looks at me.
He looks at me for such a long time.
Then he closes the door. Right in my face.
My heart crumples, just as crushed as I’d feared it might be when I considered telling him how I really felt before. For several moments all I can do is stand there, with cold rain and hot tears running down my face.
But then the door suddenly opens again and to my shock, Rhys is holding something I never thought I’d see again.
The other glittery purple Dansko.
“You were a problem for me from the start,” he says. His tone is quiet but somehow I can hear him easily over the rain. “I never felt that way about another woman. Never met someone who made me want to upend my life just for the chance to be with her. You didn’t leave the shoe at my place, Cynda. I hid it.”
My mouth falls open with shock. “You…you hid it?”
He nods. “After you first informed me of your trip to your hometown, you went into the loo. And I snuck out of bed and placed it under my pillow so that you wouldn’t be able to find it. I knew those were your favorite pair of work clogs, and I…”
He turns his face away and his jaw sets in one hard line. “I had a bad feeling and wanted to give you a reason to come back. But obviously that plan didn’t work.”
He glances back down at the shoe. Then he says, “You most likely are only here to save your father’s practice from becoming an DBCare clinic.”
“I’m not—” I begin to say.
“And it doesn’t matter,” he says before I can finish my protest. “I don’t want to have any regrets either. And I held back my real feelings when we were together because I knew it would take time for you to come round to what I already knew. I love you, Cynda. Obviously, I’m madly—some, including Ingrid, would say insanely in love with you. And I meant what I said on your steps. You. You’re all I want. You’re the reason I moved here. You’re the only future I desire. Here or in Chicago or even back in Europe if you want. I don’t care, just tell me you love me again, and I’ll do whatever you want. Go wherever you want.”
I stare up at him in the pouring rain. Okay, did I say I was falling in love with him? I’m gone. So, so gone.
And this time when my heart gives out, it doesn’t feel like sudden heart failure, but like I’m finally submitting to a truth too long denied.
I tell him what I should have told him back in St. Louis when he showed up on my steps. “You’re all I want, too.”
Then I double down. “And you know what, I love you, too.”
His eyes widen like he doesn’t believe me. Like he’s afraid to believe me. “You love me too?”
“Obviously, I’m madly—some, including myself, would say insanely in love with you,” I reply, remixing his words. “I mean, this is probably no big deal in Drosselholz. But standing in the pouring rain is not really a thing us American Black girls do.”
A shocked moment. Then a smile breaks acros
s his entire face. Like the sun coming up at dawn.
And that’s it.
No more hating.
No more games.
He pulls me into his arms and kisses me.
Then he says, “Christ, you’re wet. Get in here before you catch a cold.”
A few minutes later, I’m right back where I’ve secretly wanted to be since leaving the back house. Snug as a bug in Rhys’s bed and wearing his warm, dry Death Buddha shirt, while I wait for the man I love to finish making us tea at the stove.
Normally I’m not a tea drinker, but I swear nothing has ever tasted as good as what’s in the mug he hands me, teeming with smoke. Like flowers and second chances.
“What kind of tea is this?”
“Chamomile,” he answers, climbing into bed with his own mug. “Best tea for getting back to sleep.”
“Oh,” I say, raising both eyebrows. “Is that what we’re trying to do? Get back to sleep?”
Rhys looks at me, for a long wicked beat, then sets his untouched tea aside. “No, I don’t believe we’ll be getting much sleep tonight. We’ve a lot of making up to do. And the only thing worse than the cicadas is all this rain.”
“But doesn’t it rain a ton in England?”
“Ssh!” he croons, taking my tea from me, and setting it aside too.
Then we get busy making up.
And yes, that tea was the best thing I’d ever tasted.
But our happy ending tastes even better.
Epilogue
“Still no word from Gina?”
“No!” Billie answers. “The private investigator tracked her all the way to Wisconsin. But her trail disappears after that.”
“Maybe she really did make it to Canada before the border closed,” I suggest.
I want to offer both Billie and me some hope. And, it’s possible, since Gina’s French Canadian on her mother’s side. She’s never even visited Canada, but it came up a lot during her Queen America packages.
Cynda and the City Doctor: 50 Loving States, Missouri (QUARANTALES Book 1) Page 15