by Lissa Linden
He raises his eyebrows. “I don’t.”
My neck tenses and I press my palms into my knees. “Teaching outdoor education actually uses a lot of the same principles as teaching in a school. I demonstrate new skills and campers, or staff, practice until they gain a certain level of competence and can move on to the next challenge.”
“Tell me.” Jerry leans back in his chair. “When is the last time you prepared students for an exam?”
“With pen and paper?” My feet plant themselves flat on the ground. “Years ago. But I’ve tested kids in ways that could have way worse consequences than a failing grade. For instance, I’ve taught campers water safety and wildlife awareness, then watched as they acknowledged their own limits, or identified fresh bear scat. Failing those tests could mean their lives. So preparing students for exams? That’s nothing.”
Jerry tents his hands over his stomach. “I assure you, Mr. Harding. It is not nothing to their parents.”
I lean forward. “I didn’t mean—”
“Or to their academic futures.”
“Sure, but—”
“I don’t mean to be rude.” His elbows knock against the table. “But I find that being blunt saves time.”
Amy’s voice rings in my ears—the way it lowers when she speaks through pain, and its fevered pitch in pleasure. “It could save years,” I say.
“Very true, Mr. Harding. So, tell me. How long have you spent working in outdoor education?”
My spine straightens. “Ten years, in total.”
He nods. “Laurie speaks highly of you, though he did forewarn me that you may be a little, shall we say, in need of polishing.”
My fingers curl into a fist. “Did he now.”
Jerry smiles. “He did. But he also said that I would be an absolute idiot not to interview you for this position. He told me that you have a knack for building rapport with teenagers, and that your practical knowledge of plant and wildlife biology is quite impressive. Though it seems to me that this is where your passion lies. On the practical side.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning, have you given thought to how you might organize the desks in your classroom if you were to be hired?”
I shake my head.
“And what about when you were student teaching? Did you think about it then?”
I hook a finger in my tie’s Windsor and pull it loose. “I didn’t. And I think you know that from the report in front of you.”
He flips to the second page and reads. “‘Paul’s approach to education is innovative and creative, but lacks structure. He has an uncanny ability to engage students, but would benefit from continued mentorship to establish a more conventional classroom environment.’” Jerry lets the pages fall. “To me, this sounds as though you’re a wonderful educator, but that your heart is outside the classroom. So, why do you want to make this change?”
My eyes flit through the office window to the polished floors, all shine and no life—nothing new growing from the old. Boys in blue blazers and beige pants slip through the polished halls in their wing tips. My toes curl in my boots. “To be frank, I don’t.” I rub the stress from my neck. “But if we were to shake hands and call this interview over, would that reflect poorly on Laurie?”
“It would not.”
I stand and hold out my hand. “Then I thank you for your time. But this isn’t the right move for me.”
*
Tanya snaps a squirming Sam into his high chair and takes a cutting board from the cupboard. “I can’t believe you walked out on Jerry.”
The chipped laminate of the kitchen counters is like a welcome mat after the forced perfection of that school and I hitch myself onto the surface. “I didn’t walk out on him. We both knew I wasn’t getting that job, we just saved each other some time.”
She looks up from the grapes she’s cutting in half. “Laurie’s going to kill you.”
I steal a slice from the cutting board and jump from the counter when she swats at me. “No, he won’t. Actually, it might be me taking him out. I mean, he could have warned me that he was teaching future corporate robots who already wear suits and probably think that walking on a lawn means they’re taking a hike.” I reach over her shoulder and grab another grape. “So, hope you’re ready for widowhood.”
She turns, knife still in hand. “Don’t you even joke about that.”
I push my hand into my hair. “You know I didn’t mean it.”
“I know.” She plunks a plastic plate with grapes, bananas, and a few cubes of cheese on Sam’s tray. “But the thought of being without him is just…”
My stomach rolls and I knead the back of my neck. “Yeah. I’m an idiot.”
Her eyebrows knit and she takes me in with her artist’s gaze. “How’re things going at camp?”
The kitchen chair slides back when I collapse into in. My arms cross on the table and I drop my head onto them. “Great. And terrible. There’s a good chance that I may have made a mistake.”
“You think?” she says. I peek out over my forearms and she rolls her eyes. She pulls out the chair next to Sam. “Come on, Paul. You quit the only job you’ve ever wanted without bothering to line anything up first. It’s not exactly a wise move.” She turns her back to me and pushes a cube of cheese toward Sam. He picks it up and promptly squishes it in his little hand. “You know they say you shouldn’t make any big changes for a year after losing—”
“So you’ve been telling me for the last four months. But I wasn’t talking about quitting.” My words are muffled in my arms as I watch the orange mush squeeze out from between Sam’s fingers, sure he’s making a visual representation of my guts.
T glances at me with a variation of the worried frown I saw every day I spent in the city this winter, taking care of my parents’ things. “Not going well with dream girl?”
“Went well,” I say. “Went really well. Then it went bad fast.”
Her frown irons out as her eyebrows shoot up and she spins toward me, leaving Sam to fend for himself. “What happened?”
My chest deflates in a sigh. “A lot. Then I told her I wanted to stay. That I didn’t think we were done yet and that I could help her out with stuff around camp.”
She drops her shoulders and gapes at me. “You didn’t.”
I sit back and fold my arms over the shirt that’s long since lost its tie and two of its buttons. “Sure did.” Tanya’s mouth opens and closes without a sound. She shakes her head and turns back to her son. “What?” I ask. “You’re the one who suggested it.”
“I suggested trying to work it out between you guys, yeah, but not that you make it sound like you want to do her job for her.” She pushes a grape toward Sam. “You do realize that it might sound like you just regret quitting, right? That you want to stay so you can have your job back?”
My mind flashes to Amy on my lap, every part of her soft under my touch. I open my mouth to tell Tanya that Amy knows exactly why I want to stay when my mind takes a detour to Amy next to me on the love nest she built, pulling away. Telling me camp isn’t mine. My lip rolls between my teeth. “Shit.”
Sam smacks his tray and cheese flies onto the wall. Tanya picks the chunks off and flicks them into the garbage disposal like this is totally normal. “Does she know what I told you? About talking in your sleep?”
“Nope. But she knows it happens. Seems that’s why she’s hated me for all these years. One of the reasons, anyway.”
“She hated you?” Tanya wets a rag.
“I think so.” I draw a hand down my face like it could somehow clean the slate that is me and erase the guilt over how I’d made her feel. “I kissed her. When we were sixteen. Then sleep-spewed some garbage that made her hide from me—that made her think I only kissed her because she was getting hot and that I didn’t actually give a damn about her.”
Her arm freezes mid-wipe of the wall. “She said that? About the way she looked?”
I rub my temples. “Yeah.”
“Huh? You’ve got to give me more than ‘huh.’”
She tosses the rag into the sink and leans against the counter. “Okay, two things. First,” her eyes dance, “you cheated on me, you asshole. At least I broke up with you before hooking up with Laurie.”
I raise my eyebrows. “Did you or did you not go straight to his place after we split?”
She waves her hand. “My point stands. Now. Second. Things weren’t always easy for Amy. I was in her cabin the year she tried to get out of doing biggest splash, and, well. Some of the girls weren’t exactly delicate when they told her why she had to be the one to do it. So, stick with me here.” Tanya picks a slice of banana from her son’s plate and squishes it between her palms. My body instinctually leans away from her, but she pounces and smears the crushed fruit across my cheeks and into my hair.
The chair slides out as I stand. “What the hell, Tanya?”
Sam claps and shrieks with laughter. “’Ell!”
“Way to teach my kid another great word.” Tanya plucks my hair until it stands straight up with banana gel. “But tell me. How do you feel?”
“Like I missed the memo on a food fight.” I step towards Sam’s tray, but she pulls me back.
“Hear me out,” she says. “You look absolutely ridiculous, and Sam clearly loves it, but how do you feel?”
I wipe banana from inside my nose. “Gross.”
She looks up at me. “Exactly.”
“I’m not in the mood for your art therapy, Tanya. What’re you getting at?”
“I changed the way you look, and now you’re Sam’s favorite thing.” He claps and shrieks. “For real. Has he ever paid this much attention to you?”
I shake my head and narrow my eyes at the kid. He, of course, finds this hilarious.
“But some banana on your head is the only difference, right? What you like and don’t like hasn’t changed. The way you treat people and see the world hasn’t changed. You’re the same person, just…”
A lump rises in my throat. “Now I’m Sam’s favorite.”
“Yeah,” she says. “But if you get rid of the banana…”
I nudge her away from the sink. “He’ll go back to ignoring me like he always does. And you think Amy’s afraid that I still only like her because she’s stunning as hell.”
“Right.” She pauses. “But that’s not all of it.” I raise my eyebrows and she goes on. “I knew Sam would lose his mind because I did this exact thing to Laurie last night. It doesn’t matter who’s wearing banana hair. The kid has a thing for punk spikes.”
But I didn’t reach for Amy in my dreams because she was a woman who happened to be in my bed. I didn’t lick a flood into her panties because her hair shines in the sun, or sway with her under the stars because her skin is butter beneath my lips. And I sure as hell didn’t spend last night half-awake because Amy’s breasts are beautiful and my hand fits the curve of her ass.
I grip the lip of the counter as my stomach reels with the possibility of what she thinks these days have been to me, and it crushes my last traces of denial.
“Paul? Do you get what I’m saying?”
“Yeah. I get it.” I douse my head under the faucet and scrub. “Your kid might like the punk look, but I fucking love Amy.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
The only familiar thing about these woods is the void in my chest. The trail marker points to the right, but I check my compass and the map to confirm. I drop the compass and the old plastic instrument sways over the taut fabric between my traitorous breasts. The breasts that were supposed to distract him. To fill his mouth with sex and pleasure and block the words he didn’t mean. The breasts that were supposed to channel Leah.
Only she didn’t come. I did.
Hard.
I hook my thumbs under my backpack’s straps and push myself up the mountain. Away from the camp that’s too quiet. Too empty, and still too full of Paul to give me any chance of actually figuring out what I want. To let me remove everything I knew and build a new life around whatever I actually miss.
My cell phone’s nearly forgotten ringtone cuts through the calm. I drop to my knees, digging around the trail food, water, and warm clothes stuffed in my bag. I find the phone nudged up against an air horn and roll my eyes to the sky when I glance at the screen. Curse my earlier attempt to figure out what I was missing. Not to mention the safety measures that wouldn’t let me leave my phone locked in the house and safe, like Chuck.
I tap to answer the call while hitching my pack back on. “Hey, Jen.”
“Leah! Hi!”
I close my eyes against my former assistant’s voice and immediately find my toes lodged under a root. My knees hit the soft forest floor and my lids pop open. “How’s it going?”
“Well,” she says, “I guess you could say…”
But I don’t know what I could apparently say. Because trees rise all around me. The trail is marked with stones. Some new. Some so at home that I can tell north from south on their moss. I breathe in deep and fill my chest with forest air. Damp. Warm. Full of life. “So,” I interrupt. “You left me a bunch of voice mails.”
“I did! You left some pretty big shoes to fill, lady. I mean, not that your feet are actually big, and your shoes are actually pretty to-die-for, but you know what I mean.”
I shift onto my butt and run my eyes over my now worn hiking boots. “Jen. Where are you right now?”
“Um,” she says. “At work?”
My eyes trail up a tree and rest on the blue sky breaking through the canopy of green. “Me too.”
“Right,” she says. “I know this isn’t your job anymore, so I really appreciate you helping me out, because the Miller wedding is this weekend and they’re insisting that we change their color palette to—”
“No,” I say. “Don’t change it.”
Jen hesitates. “But they’re the client. I just need your help because—”
“Don’t do it. She’s just scared she’s making the wrong choice.” I fill my lungs with camp air and the weight in my chest shifts. “And he’ll do anything for her. Just remind her how much she loves the gold she chose at the start. She’ll come around.”
“Okay!” she says. “I’ll try that. And then there’s the Nguyens. They’ve added another ten guests, which completely messes with the seating plans. I mean, unless they want these people sitting on the floor, I really don’t know where to put them, but technically we say the room can fit them. So, help?”
I pull my knees to my chest. “They were using round tables, right?”
The tap of her bracelet against a tablet filters through the phone and I can’t help wondering what color she’s chosen for today. Whether she’s gone vibrant and vintage, or classic Hollywood. Her creative flair always balanced my straitlaced suits. Made us a team everyone trusted. “You’re right,” she says. “All rounds except for the head table.”
“Switch them to rectangles. You can fit more people in without making them feel like sardines. Just skip the charger plates and stick extra place settings at each end.”
“Won’t they notice the plates are missing?”
My eyes follow a bird as it flits from one tree to the next. “For sure. But you’ll tell them about the change when you call to discuss the new table arrangements, and if they’d rather have the decor than their guests, well…”
Jen laughs. And it used to annoy me. Her laugh. The fact that she could see humor and light in everything. But sitting here, on the forest floor, far from the version of myself I’d left in the city, the familiar tension doesn’t come.
“What about the Virks?” she says. “The bride wants to change into her Western dress when they get here, but I don’t want any parents or whatever going up to the honeymoon suite with her. I mean, I wouldn’t exactly want to screw my new husband on the bed where my mom had been resting her aching feet and whining about the limo’s lack of air-conditioning, you know?”
&
nbsp; My giggles surprise me and I cover my mouth like I’ve burped. “Oh god. That would not be sexy.” But my mom’s image infiltrates my brain. Her face when I let Dan veto. When I canceled the dress she’d helped me pick. When I banned her from coming with us to choose a new one. And the giggles stop. “I know how I’d fix it, but you’re in charge now. What would you do?”
“Right.” The repetitive click of a pen filters through the connection. “I get it. I need to grab the bull by the balls.”
A small smile creeps onto my face. “Might be safer just to stick the bride in whatever room hasn’t been checked into yet, then buy housekeeping some treats for giving it another once-over.”
“Oh, for sure. Why didn’t I think of that?”
I get to my feet and brush needles from my shorts. “My guess is that you’re too busy thinking about all the things to think about any of them. How many hours are you working, Jen?”
“Um,” she laughs. “I kind of don’t want to count.”
I tilt my face to the sun. Close my eyes. “Been there. But, hey. If you need a break, you know, to talk about stuff that isn’t related to round versus rectangular tables or honeymoon suites, you could text me.”
She pauses. “Really? I kind of thought I annoyed you.”
Laughter bubbles from me and a bird calls its displeasure. “You did! But everyone annoyed me. I was a little, well, you know.”
“High-strung?”
“Definitely.” I toe the ground. “Have you hired an assistant yet?”
“Not yet, but I have some interviews lined up for tomorrow morning.”
“Good,” I say. “The job is definitely more tolerable when you can divide and conquer.”
“Don’t lie, Leah. You may have delegated, but you never really gave up control of anything.”
“Maybe it’s time I try to.” I pull the trail map from my pocket and my stomach flutters when my eyes trace the path I’ve been avoiding. “But Jen?”