On the Corner of Love and Hate

by Nina Bocci

  “It’s detention Saturday,” Nick explained, tipping his head back in the direction of the high school where Henry taught English.

  “You know, for someone who never served detention as a student, he spends an awful lot of time there as an adult. Maybe he doesn’t want to hang out with you guys. Ever think of that?”

  “He is too wholesome for us,” Cooper admitted casually, coming up from behind me with his hands in his pockets.

  “Got her number already? New record,” I said, grabbing the trike and rearranging the handlebar basket. As I pulled it toward me, I accidentally on purpose ran it over Cooper’s foot. “Oops. Hope your new lady friend doesn’t mind a man with a limp.”

  Rolling his ankle, he winced. “I’m sure in some way I deserved that,” he mumbled.

  “Nick, you didn’t recognize that woman?” Cooper asked.

  Nick looked around us toward where the mother and daughter were packing up their belongings. He shook his head, shrugging. “Should I?”

  “You of all people should. She’s the restoration expert we met last year, remember? The woman from Mount Hazel?” At hearing his explanation, I bit back the remark I’d had at the ready. Restoration expert?

  “Oh, yeah,” Nick said, waving a belated hello in her direction as she craned her neck to get a final glimpse of Cooper. “You wanted her to do something at the library, right?”

  I was growing more embarrassed by the second. It wasn’t like it was a far stretch to assume Cooper was trying to pick the woman up. But still. I hated when people jumped to conclusions about me. It was hardly fair for me to paint Cooper’s actions with the same brush.

  I waited for him to transfer his packages and bags into Nick’s truck as they continued chatting about the work she could potentially do around town.

  Nick pulled out his cell phone while he was waiting for Cooper to finish. “Okay, Emma, what day works for you to meet up?”

  Opening my calendar app, I checked my schedule. “I’m free Wednesday from twelve fifteen to twelve thirty-five. Come by the office, and we’ll get lunch and make a plan.”

  He nodded. “You and your plans, Emma. Also, how can you eat and talk in that amount of time? When do you digest? When do you have snacks or secondsies?”

  “We’re not Hobbits. Clearly you’ve been hanging around with Henry too much,” I teased.

  Cooper was nearly done unloading when Nick shouted, “Aw, for me? You shouldn’t have!” He held out his hands toward Cooper over my shoulder, causing me to turn around to see what the fuss was about.

  I followed his line of sight to a red box of chocolates that Cooper appeared to be trying to hide behind his dry cleaning. The plastic wrap surrounding the box crinkled as he laid it gently on the shady part of the truck’s backseat.

  Cooper narrowed his eyes at Nick and gave him the tiniest of head shakes. “Oh, they’re for Emma?” Nick shouted, smiling at me. It was the last thing I expected or needed. Nick had enough ideas about Cooper and me. An innocent box of chocolates as a peace offering would only have him jumping to the wrong conclusions.

  “They’re not for you. I’m sorry. I can get you a box, though?” Cooper offered lamely, and I imagined the ground opening up to swallow me whole.

  Speaking of jumping to conclusions.

  This marked my cue to leave. No matter what I said, did, or thought, nothing about Cooper Campbell-Endicott would change. Not even his running for mayor.

  Tamping down my reawakened annoyance, I moved my bike against the parking meter outside the dry cleaner’s. “You’ve overstayed your welcome on my Saturday. Later, boys!” I shouted, disappearing with my bag into the shop and leaving them behind.

  • • •

  ONE BY ONE I checked off the items on my list, even managing to stop into Viola’s Sweet Shop for an ice cream.

  As I rode along the newly lined bike lane, my sense of pride surged, and I couldn’t help but smile as I passed each new addition to the town. If you looked at Hope Lake like it was a ship, Borough Building and my end of town was its masthead. The bustling business section of town was its starboard side, and the stern was my parents’ end of town.

  The center of town was simply a square with a brick-paved pedestrian plaza surrounding a three-tiered fountain. In it, you could access all of Hope Lake’s small shops and cafés. The other two points led toward the river, the mountains, or the lakeside. When the town’s founders had built the town two hundred and fifty years before, they’d had the foresight to use nature as a guide. This time of year, just after the crazy summer rush, a few dozen people still milled about, but it was nothing like how busy it would be in the thick of July. The time when tourists flooded the town in search of the cozy, kitschy shops and the outdoor excursions that Hope Lake had become known for. A summer destination was what we hoped to become and what we were slowly getting to be.

  The CDO had been instrumental in making this happen, what with the great number of improvements we’d helped make to the town. How many small pieces had I had a hand in helping to create? The new bike lane had been completed last fall, just in time to allow the Girl Scouts to organize a bike race for charity. The new antique-style lampposts lit up the town square and gave it that old-town feel that tourists loved, and the clock tower—which had been broken for a good thirty years—now ticked away thanks to a federal grant we had secured for cityscape improvements. Hiring local had helped us complete everything under budget and on schedule: another feat we were proud of.

  Those were the achievements made possible by having someone like Mayor Dad in charge. With both him and the town council on board, we had been able to secure more grant money for all of the improvements we’d made. Still, though, there was plenty of work left to be done. Some buildings were still empty and falling into disrepair.

  That was another reason I was so nervous about the prospect of Kirby beating Cooper. Kirby and Cooper had very different opinions on what this town needed to do to thrive.

  Cooper had a vision that was thankfully similar to my father’s: building up the tourism offerings in Hope Lake and finding new businesses, especially locally owned shops, that would support the efforts to change the demographics of the population. Bringing in younger people, preferably our age with new families, was the ultimate goal. Without them, Hope Lake would melt into an aging population and a town full of retirees.

  Kirby, on the other hand, had made it known that putting money into local and family-owned businesses wasn’t a priority for him. Instead, he wanted to bring in megastores and big chains, the polar opposite of what we’d been trying to do for years. Half the reason the town had started attracting summer tourists was the emphasis we’d placed on local businesses. Why would we want to risk a formula that was clearly working? You couldn’t ignore how polarizing Kirby’s vision was when compared with that of Mayor Dad and his chosen successor. Because of that, Cooper should have been a slam dunk.

  Yet he hadn’t had that strong a showing in the primary. Granted, no one had run against him, but that didn’t mean hordes of people were coming out of the woodwork to vote for him, either. That was worrisome.

  On my way home, I took the road that led toward the school campus, where all of the public schools were lumped together on one huge parcel of land. From the outside, you could tell they were old. The elementary and middle school buildings had been built sometime in the late 1800s and the high school in 1909. I had hoped to use the free time before dinner to just sit and people watch, but I spied Kirby coming out of the elementary school. It wasn’t odd per se—he did have two kids at the school—but why was he there on a Saturday?

  That was when I saw his wife, approaching him with a stack of bright blue papers. Flyers, maybe? A woman appeared at the front door.

  “Yeah, that’s not great,” I said aloud, tucking my bike behind the massive oak tree near the large brick Hope Lake Elementary School sign.

  Kirby stood on the steps, prattling on with the teacher while his wife made trip after
trip to the car. What a gentleman. Finally, on the last run, she pulled out what looked like a basket tied with a bright red bow.

  Kirby handed everything over to the teacher, and then she and Kirby shook hands with her and made their way back to the car. From my vantage point, I couldn’t tell what was in the basket, but I had an unsettling feeling that it wasn’t good.

  Kirby had always maintained that Cooper was out of touch with the everyday folks of Hope Lake, while he was proud to be one of them. He needed to be sure that every demographic saw him as the definitive best choice. If that meant Kirby was courting the teachers, Cooper was even more screwed than I’d thought.

  8

  * * *

  Riding home from my errands, I got caught in a surprise rainstorm. I really needed to get better at the weather-forecasting thing. Soaking wet and trudging up the steps to my apartment with my bags after a long day of errands was the last thing I wanted to do on a Saturday night. Scratch that; having an early-bird dinner with my mother was the last thing I wanted to do on a Saturday night.

  I loved my mother, but she could be a bit overbearing sometimes. Consciously I knew that she wanted what was best for me, but her vision of my best life and what I wanted out of life were drastically different. If it had been up to her, I’d have followed her path to happiness: married right out of college and started on the family plan immediately. And she still hoped I’d get to that path sooner rather than later.

  Though she tended to be a bit overbearing on the love-life front, it could have been worse. She could have not cared at all. I kept the notion in the back of my mind that she just wanted me to have what she thought would make me happiest. Even if her advice did come with a lot of emojis.

  On the way up to my apartment, the oranges from my stop at the grocery store broke free from my paper tote just as I got to the landing. I’d forgotten the cold medicine, but I had gotten the vitamin C. Too bad they were now bouncing one by one down the stairs. Why had I needed to have the top floor, again?

  As the apartment door swung open, though, I got my answer.

  When I’d first looked at this apartment building, I’d considered the unit facing the expansive Campbell woods. They were named after Montgomery Campbell, Cooper’s great-great-great- . . . something or other grandfather, who had founded the town. A vast region of still unsettled, and thankfully protected, town-owned territory that stretched as far as the eye could see.

  But then I had seen this apartment. The view out of the three angled bay windows in the living room made me smile no matter the weather, and the windows’ wide white molding framed the town like a Norman Rockwell painting. I was elevated enough to see over the gracious oak, sycamore, and maple trees lining the streets below, and beyond them I got the full view of Hope Lake with all its colorful buildings. On a clear day, you could see out to the mountain where my parents’ house sat hidden among the trees. When the sun set, it bathed the entire town in a warm orangey hue. Sometimes I would zone out staring at it. It brought me a sense of peace, especially after a long day at work.

  I sighed. Time to get ready for my wild Saturday night.

  My mom texted while I was in the shower, again while I was getting dressed, and once more as I was heading out the door. She would call only if there was an emergency, so I ignored her. That was the beauty of personalized text tones: I knew when to toss my phone into my bag and pretend it wasn’t permanently tethered to my body like most of society and when I needed to answer right away.

  Since dinner was just me and my mom, there wasn’t any need to dress up, but if I didn’t at least look presentable, she would tsk-tsk and proclaim that this was why I didn’t have a man in my life yet. So I left the house wearing ripped black skinny jeans that my mother hated, a fitted white sweater with buttons on the shoulder, and my trusty red flats.

  Thankfully, by the time I reached the parking lot out back, it had stopped raining.

  I loved my car, but there wasn’t much need for me to have one here. With the exception of getting up the mountain to my folks’ place, I didn’t travel many places where it was necessary to drive. I could work on the bus that took me into New York City or Philadelphia, and my bike got me around town. Getting to the top of the mountain where my parents lived, though—that was the one thing I needed my little old Jetta for.

  My parents’ house sat in a large clearing on Carey Mountain, sort of like a lighthouse on a cliffside. Although the drive out there didn’t take too long, their house was the only one up there. Lampposts were sporadically dotted along the dirt road, so the only consistent light guiding you up the hill besides your headlights was the fading sun.

  As I wound my way up the skinny road to my parents’ house, I noticed that the number of downed trees was more substantial than I’d realized. Even with the damage, though, it was still breathtakingly beautiful out here near the small pond on their property in the early evening. Neither of my parents ever went near it, because it smelled bad and had a muddy bottom. But they loved the peacefulness they got from being away from nearly everyone.

  I turned off the exit ramp and onto the gravel road that ribboned up to my parents’ fieldstone house, causing a deer and a pair of grouse to scurry back into the woods as I rolled by. Just as I set foot onto the weathered wraparound porch, one of the heavy oak front doors swung open.

  “Why are you here? I thought you were golfing!” I exclaimed, immediately suspecting the worst as my dad reached out to pull me into a hug. Nothing—except for the direst of circumstances—would cause my dad to miss his favorite night of the month.

  “Hi, sweetheart. It’s nice to see you,” he said sweetly. Too sweetly. As he came forward onto the porch instead of pulling me into the house like he usually did, his broad frame blocked the doorway so I couldn’t enter. “How was your day?” he added quickly, leaning his arm against the frame.

  He was acting strange, and it wasn’t just the couple of beers he’d likely had at the country club talking. I tried ducking underneath his arm to get inside the foyer, but he blocked me again.

  “Is it Mom? Is she okay? Wait . . . is she naked? Am I early and interrupting things?”

  I mock gagged, earning a hearty laugh.

  “No, no. We just got here. I have a wonderful surprise.” Nothing in his tone made me think it was actually a good surprise.

  “Did you get me the dog I always wanted?” I asked sarcastically. “Mom wanted one, too, you know.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about your mother. She couldn’t be happier right now,” he explained, stepping out of my way so I could head inside.

  And there was Cooper standing in my parents’ foyer, being smothered in one of my mother’s bone-crushing hugs.

  “Oh, look, you did bring a dog home,” I groaned, stepping back onto the porch.

  I could make a run for it. They haven’t seen me yet.

  I noticed a pair of car keys clutched in Cooper’s hand as my mother squeezed him again. Maybe he was on his way out. Thank God.

  “What is he doing here?” I whispered.

  “Now, now, is that any way to talk about our future mayor?” my father asked, smiling broadly.

  “You said it, not me,” Cooper said, pointing upward and earning another moony smile from my mother. Even she wasn’t immune to his charm when he laid it on.

  Dad turned to me, his eyes slightly unfocused. “The rain washed the tournament out. The back nine was all water hazards, so I came home to surprise you.” He squeezed my cheek affectionately as though I were still ten years old. He was trying to make me feel better about Cooper being there, so I decided to behave instead of making things awkward for him.

  “Cooper and I saw each other at the clubhouse while I was having my postgolf beer,” my father continued.

  “But you didn’t golf,” I reminded him, laughing when he shrugged.

  “Cooper stopped in with Nick, and we got to talking. I invited him over to discuss a few things. It’s not really right if we talk at my office,
so we’re squeezing in meetings wherever and whenever we can.”

  “And we’re so happy he’s here,” my mother interrupted, patting Cooper’s hand like she would that of a well-behaved toddler. “And running for mayor—I couldn’t think of a better replacement for my honey.”

  My father smiled at his ridiculous wife. She was practically beaming at Cooper. There must have been wine during dinner prep. She was still wearing her rainbow waist apron over a pair of zebra-print capris, which were paired with a plunging-neckline top. Her hair, though, was oddly understated for a change. She must not have realized she was having company other than her only child. Her long dark hair, so much like mine, was pulled up in a twist, showing off her massive golden hoop earrings.

  “Mother.”

  “Oh, don’t ‘mother’ me, that makes me sound old,” she huffed, still patting Cooper’s hand. Jesus. If she kept this up, we’d need to surgically remove her from him. “I’m trying to talk Cooper into staying for dinner. Wouldn’t that be nice?” She said this pointedly, while at the same time wrapping her arm around his like a persistent octopus. She leveled me with her gaze, daring me to say something other than the expected Of course you should stay, Cooper.

  Judging by the cat-eating-the-canary grin that he was sporting, he was waiting for it, too. Not willing to give either the satisfaction, I deadpanned, “Sounds fun.”

  My father closed the door behind me, snickering as I tossed my purse and umbrella into the small overstuffed closet next to the stairs. “Seriously? You couldn’t have warned me?” I whispered to him as my mother continued to fuss over Cooper.

  He looked tired and still a little bit drunk. “We had two or three beers while discussing things. Cooper had to drive me home,” he snorted.

  “You still could have warned me,” I said, resting my head on his shoulder. Sometimes you just needed your dad to lean on while you worked through complicated emotions like hate mixed with irritation mixed with confusion.