She poured milk into a saucepan and then pumped in vanilla syrup.
“It really is about the best latte I’ve ever had,” said his mom. Her eyes were damn near dancing.
Kelsey put a hand on her hip. “Thanks, Willa, I agree.” She stirred the milk and looked at Jamie. “So you’ve got work today?”
“At four.”
“Okay, I’m coming with you, then. You really think they’ll hire me?”
“I can’t see why not. Didn’t even hesitate before hiring me, plus he told me specifically he wanted to hire another girl. Not too many there, apparently.”
“Got it. Perfect. I’m glad I brought something besides a bikini, then. Although it sounds like this guy might be more likely to hire a girl if she showed up barely clothed.”
“It’s like you’ve already met him.”
Kristin looked concerned, but Jamie shook his head. “Don’t worry about it, he’s harmless. Just a dork.”
She sipped her coffee with an if-you-say-so look that he recognized to also mean, If he tries anything, I’ll destroy him.
Kristin was a shark like that. One of the coolest people he knew, but he would never mess with her. And he’d advise anyone else not to either.
“Oh, yeah, I totally interrupted, Mom. So she just called you out of nowhere, first time in ten years, go on.” Kelsey popped up on the counter just like she always used to when they talked in the kitchen.
They continued talking about some story, some old best friend with a way-belated apology. He didn’t really listen, just ate his lunch and drank his coffee. But he couldn’t describe the feeling he got then.
It was like old times. Like how things might have been if they were here simply because it was summer, not because it was time to pack it up. Kelsey was supposed to grow up a bit, and start fitting in more with the women. He was supposed to sit there and listen, but not really. They were supposed to do this every day while they were all here; his hair was supposed to be grainy from sand, and Kelsey was supposed to be tan and getting blonder just like she used to. His dad was supposed to be out at the store getting beer and snacks with Phillip. Dolly was the only one who was behaving as usual, sleeping wherever she decided to lie down.
They were supposed to be watching movies at night, and now Kelsey and he would be allowed to watch anything with the parents.
The porch table was supposed to have two more chairs at it, not one fewer. He and Kelsey were supposed to be included in playing Trivial Pursuit now, and their parents were supposed to be impressed that they knew as much as they did. Kelsey and he were supposed to introduce them to new games, like the card game Presidents that he felt sure his parents didn’t know. Or wouldn’t. Whatever.
They’d be allowed to have a beer or two. Kelsey would get giggly, he was willing to bet, probably pink in the cheeks. He’d probably end up flirting with her, and their parents would tease them—she flirted with everyone, that was just how she met the world, so it would lean on him and he’d get embarrassed but it’d be funny anyway.
The nights were supposed to happily cap off busy, hot days. They were supposed to get boardwalk splinters out of their toes while his dad made those buffalo chicken tenders he used to make and while his mom made a salad she insisted on including “for nutrition.”
Then one day, when he and Kelsey weren’t the kids anymore, they’d have their own kids and start a whole new generation of memories here.
Not, like, their kids, but just the kids each of them had. You know.
He bit his bottom lip hard. He used to do this as a kid when he didn’t want to cry.
He wasn’t going to cry now, he was well beyond that, but still he felt extremely, supremely gypped. None of that could happen now. Nothing could ever happen like it was supposed to. And if everything happens for a reason, he couldn’t imagine how life being worse than it should be could ever have a reason.
His dad shouldn’t be gone. The fact that he was just made life a solid level worse.
He glanced up. Kelsey was staring at him. Their moms were chatting back and forth, his mom lively for once. But Kelsey seemed to see right through him and into his mind.
Jamie looked back at her. She gave a small nod, her brows just barely furrowed. Like she was saying, It sucks, it just does.
Maybe he was reading too much into it.
He had a feeling that he wasn’t.
Jamie was grateful for the seeming understanding from Kelsey, but was just as glad that she hadn’t brought it up. He put on his blue polo and khaki shorts, and after Kelsey laughed at him, he pointed out she was undoubtedly going to end up in the same dorky uniform. She stopped laughing.
They got in the car and she took control of the music—Jamie was, as always, impressed by her taste. Or at least glad it was so similar to his.
This wasn’t like things had been with Roxy.
They parked in the employee lot and went in the back entrance. They found Steve in his office.
Jamie knocked and pushed open the door as Steve said, “Come in!” and paused the old SNL episode he’d been watching on a laptop.
“Hey, there, Jamie, and—”
His puffy face turned hot pink and he stood up, inexplicably wiping his hands before handing her one to shake. God knew what he was wiping off them.
“Kelsey,” she said with an easy smile.
“Streve—Steve,” he said, and ran the back of his hand across his forehead.
“Hey, Steve,” she said, her face growing slightly pink.
Jamie knew it was an effort on her part not to call him Streve. He probably would have let her.
“Your girlfriend, Jamie? Lucky guy!”
“No, no, just a family friend,” he responded, as Kelsey shook her head, still smiling. “I know you mentioned you needed some more help around here, possibly a girl, and I happened to know one who was looking, so…”
He gestured at her.
“Well, when can you start?” Steve laughed heartily, although all three of them knew it was no joke.
“Today! I wore khaki shorts and everything.” She gestured, and Steve’s eyes followed down to her legs.
Jamie experienced a prickle of irritation with him.
“Have you ever served before?”
“No, I haven’t. I was a barista at Starbucks for a long time, but that’s it.”
“Ah, you have to get experience somewhere, right? Let’s get you a V-neck. Jamie, why don’t you head down to the expo line, and I’ll start training your pal here?”
“All righty,” said Jamie, for some reason using a term he never really used. Again he felt a pang, feeling like maybe he should stay with her. Maybe this was a stupid mistake having her work here too.
They started off, and Kelsey turned back to mouth, V-neck, and then point at his polo.
He winced at her, and then went down the kitchen stairs to the expo line.
The place was a mess and he ended up playing catch-up for almost an hour, throwing away the stale chips they never kept covered, ridding the fridge of expired Saran-wrapped premade house salads, filling and date-marking plastic containers of ranch, blue cheese, honey mustard, and house sauce (essentially Big Mac sauce). They weren’t that busy yet, but if he hadn’t scrambled for an hour, he would have felt three minutes behind all shift.
He got everything prepped and ready just in time for the happy hour rush. Two-for-one draft beers and sixty-cent oysters, clams, and peel-and-eat shrimp—it was a huge draw. It was almost impossible to rack up a bill higher than fifty bucks, so it brought in all the cheapskates—or so the whining servers had told him when they came into the kitchen to eat spare fries and complain about their tables.
Kelsey had been put right to work, not even shadowing another server—Steve had, nobly, taken on the responsibility of training her firsthand. This was total bullshit according to the one and only other female server, who said that when she got hired, she had to shadow another server for two whole weeks, basically doing everything and nev
er making any tips, even though she’d worked at Blue J’s down the road for almost a year.
Kelsey did seem to learn fast. She was flying through the swing door and happily checking on her food orders or sweetly apologizing for a mistake she’d made when sending the order through. The kitchen forgave her instantly, the fry cook especially, saying, “It’s no problem, Mami, it’s no problem,” every time.
You could argue that they were being kind since she had just started, but he doubted that was why. And considering the commiserating look she tossed Jamie after talking to him, he thought she had enough sense to see through it too.
They both worked through happy hour and the first dinner rush, when orders went from appetizers to more serious orders of blackened grouper and fettuccine Alfredo with seared shrimp.
Things always calmed down after that, and the late-night crew came in, the better bartenders stepped behind the bar, along with the lazier cooks who were decent enough only to make fried late-night food, and the DJ set up on the dance floor. Jamie and Kelsey were too young to work the late-night shift, and Jamie was privately glad that Kelsey wouldn’t have to deal with late-night drunk customers who would undoubtedly harass her.
He paused in his thoughts. Was he jealous? Who was he all of a sudden?
She came in, taking off the short little black apron she’d had tied around her waist, and said, “So, apparently I tip you out for running my food. That means it’s up to me how much you make.” She leaned on the silver island, grinning devilishly at him.
“I do make hourly, you know. More than you do.”
“Yeah, you make more in hourly, but I made a hundred freakin’ bucks.” Her face was alight.
His heart did a stupid trippy thing. “Are you serious?”
“Damn right. And so here’s what I’m thinking. As a celebration of us being reunited, and of us being employed together, I tip you out half what I made, and we go blow it all at the boardwalk. Hm?”
He tossed his rag in the bin. “You don’t have to tip me half.”
“Um, you got me the job, and they gave me a better position than you, all because I have boobs, so I think it sort of helps make up for the total unfairness of that. Plus you’re way smarter than all those dopey dudes out there, you should really be serving.”
He suddenly had a vision of her standing out there at the server station, surrounded by dopey dudes.
“I’m giving you half, so deal with it.” She threw down a pile of cash and looked up at him. “Apparently we get a discount at most of the places over there too. Thrasher’s fries, anyone?”
“What? He didn’t tell me about any discount.”
She laughed, and they exited the kitchen, passing the smoking cooks, going off shift. “Thank you, guys, see you tomorrow!”
They said their goodbyes, and talked in Spanish to each other after Jamie and Kelsey were a few feet away.
He was going to have to start learning a few phrases.
* * *
Kelsey kicked her sneakers off and put on the flip-flops she’d brought in her bag and made him close his eyes once they parked, so she could throw on a tank top instead of her work shirt. He grabbed a shirt from the back too, refusing to be the dweeb in the polo next to the hot girl in the spaghetti straps.
Hot girl, huh? asked a voice in his head.
He texted his mom and Kristin in the group text with Kelsey that she had started, and said where they were.
Sounds fun! answered Kristin.
Back by ten please! answered his mom.
Eleven*, corrected Kristin.
Kelsey and he laughed and started their journey of junk food along the boardwalk.
First stop was fries. Second was a hot dog smothered with everything from Boog Powell’s BBQ. Next stop after that was talking Kelsey out of an impulsive belly-button piercing. After that they went to Kohr Brothers for frozen custards.
“No, no, wait, let me order for you,” said Kelsey. “He’ll have, um … he’ll have the chocolate peanut-butter twist with extra chocolate sprinkles. Oh! In a chocolate-dipped wafer cone!”
“Nice,” he said. She remembered his order. He remembered hers too. “And she’ll have the vanilla custard swirl with orange sherbet, with a completely disgusting amount of rainbow sprinkles, in a cake cone.”
She laughed hard. “Oh, my god, how have we gone this long without this?”
She meant the custard, or maybe she didn’t. But he didn’t know how he’d gone so long without laughing with her, much less doing it over sticky custard.
Once they got their frozen custard, she grabbed him and said, “Oh, my god, they still have the crappy old photo booth. Come on, let’s commemorate this moment!”
“Holy shit,” he said as they came up to it. “We have so many of these strips.”
“I know. I’m so glad they haven’t replaced it with those new photo booths—you know, the ones that print in color and just are like worse than an ancient-digital-camera’s quality? This is old-school, black-and-white, always a little damaged, and they never take it at the right time, but they’re so much better.”
“I totally agree. Now get your butt in there, my custard’s starting to melt.”
She paused before entering. “Never has a more masculine sentence been uttered.”
“Shut up,” he said, but again his heart dinged in a way it hadn’t for quite some time.
They got in. The quarters felt quite a bit more cramped than when they were kids and used to sit there.
“Here.” He took her by the waist and planted her on his leg. No time for deciding whether it was awkward or not. It didn’t have to be.
She giggled and then squealed as a drip of sprinkle-ridden vanilla ran down on her hand. “Oh, crap!”
Flash.
“Oh, that ought to be really flattering of you,” he said, looking up at her. She glared at him.
Flash.
“You’re the worst!” she said in a singsongy voice.
They both smiled at the camera just in time.
Flash.
“Nope,” he said, then smoothed the frozen custard into her face, “now I’m the worst!”
She yelped and then smashed hers into his face, and, of course, then …
Flash!
They both collapsed into laughter and tried to clean themselves off, though the cramped box was making that hard, which only made them laugh harder.
They got out and grabbed napkins from a nearby table and cleaned themselves off.
The pictures printed and renewed the hilarity.
“Oh, my god,” she said. “They’re just perfect.”
“Here, I’ll hold on to them, I’ve got deeper pockets.”
“Don’t you dare lose them,” she said, with that fire in her eyes she always got when she bossed him around.
“I promise I won’t.”
There was no way he was going to lose them, or, maybe, her.
Chapter Thirty-one
Willa
In the week following our discussion about my new life, Kristin and I pulled the house together in a way that was so beautiful that even I was tempted to buy it. And, indeed, I wondered how I could possibly sell it with Ben there. I thought about all those articles I’d read about people selling ghosts on eBay and whatnot, but I didn’t want to get rid of mine. Somehow my grief had been slowly and subtly replaced by a hum of anticipation, never knowing when or where he’d show up.
For example: “Nice job,” he said behind me, as I finished carefully painting along a corner in the front room late one afternoon. “You’ve gotten better at painting.”
“I’ve always been good at painting. I just pretended I wasn’t, so you’d do it.”
“Ah.” He tapped his temple with his index finger. “I’m glad to see you’ve got everything under control. Makes it easier with what I have to say.”
“What’s that?”
“That it’s time for me to go. More to the point, it’s time for you to really go on without me.�
��
I stopped painting and turned to him. “What?”
“It’s time.”
The bottom dropped out of my stomach. “But … I need you.”
He gestured toward the painting job I was doing. “Clearly you don’t, you’re doing great on your own.”
I looked at the wall. Should I have acted less happy to see him? Should I not have slipped back into our easy rapport? Then would he stay here with me instead of abandoning me again? “Yeah, well, I wasn’t expecting you to help with this under any circumstances.”
“Good.” He lifted his hands. “I’m not equipped.”
I tried to think of something else to say, some way to move the conversation away from what he’d come to tell me, and yet it resonated so deeply that I knew it was true no matter what I said.
“Who are you talking to?” Kristin came into the room, paint splattered on her face and clothes.
I glanced from her to Ben, wondering if she could see or sense him even a little bit.
“You’ve been caught.” Ben moved behind Kristin, looking amused.
“No one,” I told her.
She frowned and unconsciously rubbed her hands on her arms. Behind her, Dolly started into the room after her, but stopped abruptly, turned, and went back into the kitchen. “Are you okay?”
“Of course.”
“We haven’t talked about him in a while. Did you … did something happen?”
Man, I couldn’t fool her for anything.
“She’s a good friend,” Ben said.
I gave a slight nod in response to him, but she took it as an answer to her question. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I figured I should just follow your lead, but I don’t want you to think I’m tired of hearing about him by any means.”
“I appreciate that, but…” I shook my head. “It’s all too crazy.”
“What is?”
“Come on,” Ben urged. “Tell her I’m here. What have you got to lose?”
I gritted my teeth for a minute, then said to Kristin, “You know what? My phone is just ringing like crazy. The buzzing is just—” I took my silent phone out of my pocket and pretended to answer. “Hello? Oh, yes, this is Willa.” I held up an index finger to Kristin and went into the kitchen, whispering, “Come!” to Ben as I passed him.
Every Time You Go Away Page 20