If for Any Reason

by Courtney Walsh

  She averted her gaze. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  He took another bite. When she finally looked at him, he shot her a “too bad” kind of look, not unlike the one she gave him when he didn’t want to talk about retiring from baseball. She obviously remembered the same moment because she quietly looked away.

  “It’s a long story,” she said. “But I’m basically broke.”

  Hollis straightened. “What do you mean ‘broke’?”

  “I mean I have no money, broke.” She leaned back in her chair, acting nonchalant and Emily-ish, as usual. Inside, she had to be freaking out, didn’t she?

  “What happened?”

  She took a quick drink, set her water down, and went back to leaning in the chair. She glanced up at the sky and ran her hands over her forehead. Even without a stitch of makeup left on her face, with her hair all messy and unkempt, and wearing dirty clothes, Emily still looked beautiful in the moonlight.

  Just friends. Just friends. Just friends.

  The words raced through his mind purposefully, an important (if unwanted) reminder.

  She pinched the bridge of her nose in that endearing way she did when they were kids. “I guess the short story is—”

  “I don’t want the short story,” Hollis interrupted.

  “Trust me, you do.”

  He shook his head. “That’s not how this game works.”

  “Well, whoever made up the rules was not thinking clearly,” she shot back. She picked up her pizza crust, stared at it, then dropped it back onto the plate.

  “I travel a lot.”

  “Yeah, I saw your collection of keys.”

  “Really?” She glanced at him.

  “Winny showed them to me,” he said. “He said you keep one from every place you’ve lived?”

  She nodded. “Yeah, I don’t know why.”

  “Take a little piece of each place with you, I guess? It makes sense.”

  She shrugged. “It’s not cheap, traveling like I do.”

  “I know,” he said, starting to sense she was procrastinating. He’d traveled at least a little bit, enough to know it wasn’t cheap, though he’d never paid a dime for his accommodations. “You know whatever happened, you can tell me.”

  Her eyes found his for the briefest second, and he could see they were filled with tears. Knowing Emily, though, she’d refuse to let them fall. “It’s just . . .” She sighed.

  “Emily?” Hollis set his plate down. “You don’t have to tell me. Forget it. I’ll ask you something else. What’s the best country you’ve ever visited? Or what’s the craziest food you’ve ever eaten?”

  She hugged her knees to her chest, wrapping her arms around her legs. “No, maybe it’ll be good for me. I kind of want to tell you about it.”

  His heart flip-flopped.

  “I’d just finished working on a tour, living in Australia, having the time of my life, when I got this crazy idea that I could . . .” She looked away. “That I could launch my own show.”

  “Like onstage?”

  She nodded.

  “What’s so crazy about that?”

  “Well, it’s crazy when it’s a dismal flop,” she said.

  His lip twitched. “I’m sure it wasn’t that bad.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “No, it was.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “It probably all sounds silly to a professional athlete, but that show was my shot to become something more than a former child star, and I failed. If I’d been smart, I would’ve workshopped it in a tiny venue that cost next to nothing, but I had to go all in. I thought I knew so much when really I was nothing more than a giant failure.”

  “Don’t say that,” Hollis said.

  “Oh, I don’t have to. The critics said it for me. The thing was, after traveling all my life and only working when I felt like it, I blew through a lot of money. I made a couple of bad investments, but I really thought this one was going to be solid. I thought I was going to be solid.”

  “You had a project that maybe didn’t do as well as you wanted it to, but that doesn’t make you a failure.”

  “It does, though,” Emily said. “I’m not even sure I’m qualified to be directing a children’s show. The critics were right—I should’ve kept the play in my desk drawer and never been stupid enough, arrogant enough, to think it needed an audience.”

  “They said that?”

  She nodded sadly.

  “Well, critics don’t know everything,” he said.

  “They know enough.” She looked away. “I just wanted something of my own, I guess. Something I was good at.” She turned back and met his eyes. “Do you think less of me now?”

  “What? Why would I?”

  “Because unlike you, I am not a huge, crazy success. I am a person who peaked at age eleven. The end.”

  “Maybe you need to redefine success.”

  She crumpled her napkin into a ball and tossed it onto her plate.

  Hollis took another slice of pizza from the box. “So that’s why you’re here this summer.”

  “It’s my second chance.” She turned to look at the house, lights filtering from the kitchen windows and spilling out onto the patio. “My second-chance house in Nantucket, of all places.”

  “I’m really sorry, Emily,” he said.

  “Yeah, me too.” She swiped at her cheek, and for a split second he thought maybe one tear had actually escaped.

  “Right,” he said. “And now you have a job at the arts center, so off you go.”

  She laughed. “I’m not even sure that pays.”

  “It pays,” he said.

  “How would you know?”

  He shrugged. “I’m a well-connected guy.”

  She stared at him for a few long seconds. “It was you, wasn’t it?”

  “What was me?”

  “Who sent me all those people to help with the show.” She sat up straighter. “I thought it was your mom, but it wasn’t. It was you.”

  He set his plate down. “I plead the Fifth.”

  She shook her head, a smile playing at the corners of her lips. “You’re something else, Hollis, you know that?”

  “I do, in fact, know that,” he said. “I also know that I better get going. But we should do this again.”

  “The dinner or the humiliating conversation?”

  He narrowed his eyes on her. “You’re not really humiliated telling me this stuff, are you? After what I told you?”

  She shrugged. “A little. I mean, you’ve had a big, wonderful life, Hollis.”

  He held her gaze. “But I don’t have any of that anymore—does that make my life less important somehow?”

  “No, of course not.”

  Sometimes he wasn’t so sure.

  “Dinner tomorrow on me. You’ll have the first rehearsal under your belt, and you can tell me all about it.”

  She shot him a look. “Okay, but this time, you’re back in the hot seat.”

  “That’s fair,” he said, realizing he didn’t mind telling Emily his secrets.

  He stood, gathered the plates and the pizza box, and waited while Emily picked up both of their glasses of water.

  He followed her inside, but before she opened the door, she turned to him. “Thanks for listening.”

  His gaze dipped ever so slightly from her eyes to her lips and back again. “Of course. Anytime.”

  She inched up on her tiptoes and kissed his cheek, sending the smell of something vanilla and intoxicating straight to his nostrils. He was thankful his hands were full; otherwise, he might not have been able to keep them to himself.

  She turned, opened the screen door, and went inside. He followed, warning bells going off in the back of his mind. Get in, drop the stuff, get out. That’s all he could do right now.

  He couldn’t linger. He couldn’t be around her any longer without breaking his promise to Jolie. Tomorrow he’d come prepared with a healthy dose of willpower, but tonight he was all tapped
out.

  “I’m kind of nervous for tomorrow,” Emily said as they made their way into the gutted kitchen.

  “You’re going to do awesome,” Hollis said. “Maybe this is the thing you’ve been hoping to find.”

  She laughed. “Working with kids on an island thirty miles from civilization? I doubt it.”

  They entered the room and Emily came to a stop so quickly, he almost ran into her.

  Turned out, he didn’t need willpower after all.

  Standing in front of the spot where the wall used to be was an older version of the woman he remembered from so many years ago.

  Eliza Ackerman, dressed in a slick black pantsuit and heels and wearing a horrified expression.

  “Hi, Grandma,” Emily said weakly. “I made a few changes to the house.”

  Dear Emily,

  Let’s talk about your grandparents for a minute. As you know, I haven’t always had a perfect relationship with them, but when it mattered, they’ve been there for me. They’ve helped me support you and still get an education. They made sure we’ve had everything we could ever need or want. However rebellious I was against their seemingly rigid rules as a teenager, I’ve learned something as I’ve gotten older.

  Grandma and GrandPop come from a different time. They see the world differently. In fact, their world isn’t exactly “the real world.” That’s what happens when you’ve got a lot of money. I’ve never loved money. I’ve never cared about it. Someone once told me that was because I had it.

  Maybe they were right.

  Regardless . . . (Notice I didn’t say “irregardless.” Since we’re chatting like this, I want to make it very clear that “irregardless” is not a word. Got it? Anyway . . .) Regardless, I’ve come to appreciate my parents, and I hope you will too. I want you to have a good relationship with them. They may not always have the best way of going about things, but they do always have good intentions, and I really believe they’ll always be there for you—no matter what.

  Will they make you feel like a walking disaster? Maybe. But in spite of that, there is still a lot of love.

  I just thought you should know.

  Love,

  Mom

  CHAPTER 32

  EMILY STOOD AWKWARDLY IN THE DOORWAY of the kitchen. She still held two plastic cups, and she stared into the room imagining how awful it looked to her grandmother. After all, her job wasn’t to demolish the house; it was to make it better—and right now, it looked a whole lot worse than it had when she arrived.

  “I must say, Emily, this was not what I was expecting.” Grandma waved a hand toward the wall.

  “I was thinking it would open up the lower level, let in more light, make it more conducive to family functions—that sort of thing.”

  She could hear herself floundering. She sounded like an idiot. Suddenly all of her plans for the house felt misguided and silly.

  And she’d been so sure before.

  “Is my room still intact, or did you knock down walls upstairs too?” Grandma’s smile was terse.

  “It’s still intact. We’ll be painting it, though. I already picked out the colors—you can see the swatches taped to the wall.”

  Grandma raised an eyebrow, looking at Hollis as if seeing him for the first time. “I didn’t realize you had a . . . friend on the island.”

  One thing Grandma was never quiet about was her disapproval of Emily’s boyfriends. There hadn’t been a single one Grandma had liked, unless you counted William Justus (Emily didn’t), the grandson of a wealthy couple who ran in the same social circles they did. Grandma decided he was a perfect match for Emily in the tenth grade and tried to set them up on numerous occasions.

  Sadly, Emily didn’t take to William, a sensible boy Grandma hoped would talk Emily out of traveling the world. She still hadn’t decided if it was William’s body odor or his lack of manners that turned her against him permanently, but regardless, she and her grandmother had different ideas about who would make a good match for Emily.

  “You remember Hollis, Grandma. His family always rented the cottage next door,” Emily said. “They own it now.”

  She threw that last bit in there as if owning the cottage made Hollis more respectable. Not just a renter anymore, Grandma. An owner. But she didn’t want to cater to her grandmother’s snobbery. She silently told herself to knock it off.

  “Good evening, Mrs. Ackerman,” Hollis said like the perfect gentleman he was.

  Grandma gave him a nod. “Hello.”

  “Hollis played professional baseball,” Emily heard herself saying, as though she needed to give her grandmother a reason other than sheer goodness to accept this man in her home. Of all the people she’d known in her life, Hollis needed the least amount of talking up. He was genuinely kind and good all on his own.

  But those things rarely mattered to Grandma.

  She was doing it again. Presenting her choices with a spit shine so Grandma would approve. Stop defending yourself. Stop apologizing for who you are.

  “I’m tired,” Grandma said abruptly. “I’m going to sleep. We’ll talk about the house in the morning.”

  And just like that, Eliza Ackerman walked out of the room, leaving Emily to wonder when exactly the other shoe would drop.

  She turned to Hollis, wide-eyed.

  “Did you know she was coming?” he asked.

  Emily shook her head, then spoke quietly, just in case Grandma was outside the room listening (because there was a very good chance she was outside the room listening). “I had no idea. I’ve mostly avoided her calls, but when I talked to her the other day, she didn’t say a word.”

  “Why have you avoided her calls?” Hollis whispered back.

  Emily took a step closer to him, which she quickly realized was a mistake. He smelled like heaven—or some kind of woodsy aftershave, though those two things might be identical. He looked at her with those crazy beautiful hazel eyes and not a speck of judgment, even after she’d confessed everything.

  Why was she surprised? She should’ve known Hollis was safe. He’d never done anything but try to protect her.

  Like the time he punched a day-tripper in the face because he didn’t like the way the kid talked to her.

  He had bright-red hair, pale skin, and freckles all over his face and arms. Hollis, Hayes, and Emily were minding their own business down at the beach and this “punk kid,” as Hollis called him, started making chicken noises as they walked by. At first, the trio thought the kid was just goofing off, but then he and his buddies walked by again and the boy clucked at them and started flapping his arms like a chicken.

  Hollis, Hayes, and Emily stopped, looked at each other, then back at the kid, whose friends had fallen in behind him. “Those are some sweet chicken legs, girlie.”

  The boys laughed, and Emily shrank under the weight of the insult. Skinny and boyish had been her curse, though she’d never much cared until that moment.

  Emily stuck her hands on her hips and drilled a glare straight into the boy’s face. “At least I’m not an ugly ginger!”

  “Maybe you’re not a ginger, but you’re still ugly,” the boy said, laughing.

  Emily felt her stomach knot. She stepped toward the kid—confident she could punch him square in the jaw and make him look like a fool in front of his friends. But Hollis moved in front of her, hand held out to prevent her from going any closer.

  “You wanna say that again?” he challenged.

  Emily had to admit her kindhearted friend did “threatening” very well.

  The boy, shrimpy compared to Hollis, cringed ever so slightly, then jutted his chin out and puffed up his chest. “Which part? The part about her having chicken legs or the part about her being ugly?”

  Hollis took a step closer. “You should walk away.”

  Again, the boy straightened and advanced toward Hollis.

  “Barry, let’s go,” one of the friends said. “You’re gonna get creamed.”

  But Barry wasn’t a good listener. Ins
tead, he squared off with Hollis and said in a squeaky, annoying voice, “Chicken lover.”

  Hollis responded with a fist in Barry’s face—punched him right in the nose. Barry’s head shot backward as he stumbled a few steps, struggling to keep his balance.

  Seconds later, a man down the beach hollered, “Hey!” and came running toward them.

  Barry practically growled at Hollis, and Emily grabbed his hand. “Let’s go!”

  “You should learn to watch your mouth,” Hollis said to Barry, whose nose was covered in blood.

  “Come on, Hollis,” Emily said as the man drew closer, but her friend didn’t appear to be in much of a hurry. Finally he started off toward the street, away from the beach, the day-trippers, and the bleeding boy with a big mouth.

  It was years ago, but that fire for keeping her safe was still going strong. She’d seen it so many times since she’d come back to the island. Hollis might not say much, but he was fiercely loyal, and though they’d only recently become reacquainted, she was sure that he’d stand in front of a bus for her.

  She didn’t know anyone else in the world who would do that—not even her grandmother.

  “Grandma can be difficult,” Emily said.

  Hollis laughed.

  “I know that’s an understatement.” She tossed the cups in the garbage can and stuck the leftover pizza box in the nearly empty refrigerator, which had been relocated to the dining room. She returned to the kitchen and found Hollis watching her.

  “You haven’t told her about the money yet, have you?”

  Emily shook her head. “You’re the only person in the world who knows what a loser I am.”

  “You’re not a loser,” he said matter-of-factly. Then, “You know she’s going to find out.”

  “I don’t want to think about that. I have to figure out what I’m going to do with her all day long tomorrow to keep her out of Jack’s way.”

  Hollis nodded. “Well, I’ll be back in the morning. Maybe I can help.”

  “Okay.” She forced herself to smile at him.

  “Okay.”

  It was almost like he was stalling, like he wasn’t quite ready to leave. But he had to leave. She needed him to leave. Because if he stayed here, in her house, with that face and those eyes, she might do or say something she would very much regret.