How to Make a Wish

by Ashley Herring Blake

  “Not bad, if I’m being honest,” she says, patting her flat stomach dramatically.

  “We should ask Emmy to put it on the menu at LuMac’s.”

  “We’ll call it Summer Surprise.”

  “Instant classic.”

  Our laughter continues for a couple more seconds before she takes several deep breaths, each exhale a little shaky. She keeps her hand on her stomach as though she’s holding herself together.

  “Thanks, Grace,” she says. Then, before I can ask why she’s thanking me, she turns away and starts off down the beach. Even plodding through the sand, she’s graceful. I watch her get smaller and smaller. I keep watching, her spoon still in my hand, until she’s nothing but a speck on the blue horizon.

  Chapter Six

  PETE IS HUGE. HIS SUN-DARKENED ARMS ARE LIKE HAM HOCKS, and he likes to grab my mother’s ass. He’s smacked, tapped, flicked, pinched, or patted it seven times since he walked in the door five minutes ago.

  “So this is Grace! I remember you,” he says, after they make out for about ten damn hours while I busy myself digging around for some olive oil. He says my name like “Grice,” his lazy southern drawl warping the vowels. He and I only met once or twice while Jay and I were together—​obviously, neither one of us was too keen on meeting the parents. I had totally forgotten that his first name was Pete until a few hours ago. He was always just Mr. Lanier.

  Now he winks a gray eye at me and pats my shoulder. His brown close-cropped hair is speckled with sawdust. A little falls onto my forearms. “You sure do make pretty babies, sugar,” he says to Mom with a butt slap. She giggles.

  I grit my teeth and turn back to the chicken browning in the skillet. “I take after my father.”

  A charged silence fills the kitchen. I fight to keep the smile off my face and glance over my shoulder to find Pete frowning and Mom glaring at me.

  “Right. Well, I’m going to hop in the shower,” Pete says.

  “Okay, honey. Dinner in ten, right, Grace?”

  In reply, I stir the rice a little more vigorously than necessary.

  Pete winks at me again and smacks a kiss onto Mom’s cheek before disappearing down the hall.

  “You call that trying?” Mom asks as soon as he’s out of sight.

  “I call that the best I can do.”

  “‘I take after my father’? What the hell was that about?”

  I whirl around to face her, rice-covered spatula in hand. “What? I do take after him.”

  She flinches, then scowls as she cracks open a Bud Light. “For god’s sake, Grace. Grow up.”

  I can’t help but laugh at that one. Grow up? I grew up a long time ago, the first time I walked into the living room to find her passed out on the couch, cozied up with a bottle of vodka. I was eight. It was my birthday.

  A door down the hall creaks open and then slams shut. My stomach knots up. I turn off the burners, flip the chicken onto a clean plate, fluff the rice, my hands shaking through every movement.

  “Julian!” Mom calls, and I cringe.

  “Hey, Mrs. Glasser,” he says. I hear a barstool creak as he sits.

  “Oh, honey, call me Maggie. Please.”

  “Okay. Maggie.” He drawls her name out using what he thinks is his sexy voice. She giggles. I turn around and glare at him. He winks at me. What is it with these damn Lanier men and their damn winking and my mother’s damn giggling?

  “Baby, I think that’s enough,” Mom says next to me.

  “Huh?” I look down at the plate in front of me, half the pot of rice covering its surface. “Oh. Right.” I scoop some back into the pan and carry two plates to the table, accidentally kicking Jay in the shin as I pass him. He grunts but says nothing.

  Mom fills glasses with iced tea, and even Jay deigns to set out forks and knives. God, it’s like something right out of a 1950s sitcom. Jay and Mom banter back and forth in a way that can really only be described as flirting. I’m about two seconds from scratching both their eyes out when the doorbell rings and then the door opens. Luca pops his head through and calls out, “Hello?”

  “Luca!” Mom squeals, and runs over to him. She tackle-hugs him, and he lets out an Oof, nearly dropping the grease-stained paper bag in his arms.

  “Well, hello to you too, Maggie.” His sandy hair is longer since I last saw him, his curls sticking up everywhere. He’s got on his summer uniform—​ironic T-shirt, board shorts, and flip-flops.

  “How’s it working out with that girl Emmy took in?” Mom asks, gripping his already-tanned arms. Other than sun-deprived tourists, Luca’s the only person I know who swims in the ocean this early. “What’s her name? Ella?”

  “Eva. She’s doing okay, I guess, considering.”

  Mom presses a hand to her heart, and I fight an eye roll. Here we go again, I think. Then mentally slap myself because, Jesus, this Eva girl just lost her mother.

  “So heartbreaking,” Mom says. “I’m going to stop by LuMac’s really soon and meet her, okay? She’s our girl now, right? We’ll take care of her.”

  Luca flicks his eyes to me and then back. “You got it, Maggie.”

  Mom beams and finally releases Luca. He brings the bag from LuMac’s to the counter, unloading two tinfoil pans of pizza fries and a huge plate of brownies covered in Saran Wrap. Then he folds me into a hug, his arms swallowing me. He smells sort of coconutty, like sunscreen.

  “Mom sent over some goodies,” he says, my face pretty much still buried in his armpit. “A housewarming gift.”

  “Oh, I’ll be sure and thank her when I stop by,” Mom says, but her posture stiffens. She sniffs the brownies like she’s expecting them to be rancid or something.

  “She’d love to see you,” Luca says, releasing me.

  Mom nods, but it’s impossible to tell what she’s thinking. When Luca and I were around four years old, she and Luca’s mom met at a support group that Emmy was running for people with spouses killed in action. Emmy used to be a licensed counselor, specializing in grief and family therapy, and she immediately took to Mom. She even did a couple of private sessions with her. True to form, Mom clung to her pretty tightly at first but balked once anything got too hard to deal with. Not so coincidentally, that was around the same time she started dating Rob. Or maybe it was Rick. Whatever. Point being, Mom’s therapy was the definition of sporadic. Then, five years ago, Luca’s dad found greener pastures in his secretary’s pants—​god, the man is a walking cliché—​and moved to California, so Emmy decided to start over too. She quit her practice and opened LuMac’s. Without the counseling, our moms interacted less and less, and any lingering affectionate feelings they once shared disintegrated when Emmy tried to “steal” me.

  Now I’m the only one who’s really trapped in Mom’s rip tide.

  But only for another year. I think. Crap, I don’t know. I get chills just thinking about the whole thing, but I’m not sure if they’re the good kind. On the one hand, I’ve only got a year to put up with Mom’s messes. On the other, I’ve only got a year to get her to stop making them in the first place.

  Luca smiles at me and I steal a pizza fry off the top pan. A long string of mozzarella cheese stretches to my mouth. I hear an annoying clicking sound and turn to find Jay watching me. No, not watching. Leering. He wiggles his eyebrows, clicking his tongue again. I ignore him, meeting Luca’s boiling-anger expression. I shake my head and Luca nods, my nonverbal leave it alone received.

  “Can I get one of those, Michaelson?” Jay asks, reaching for a fry.

  “Sure, Lanier.”

  I stifle a laugh. Luca hates it when guys call each other by their last names. “Hey, look at me, I’m too manly for those girly first names,” he always says in an overdone booming voice with his chest puffed out.

  Mom calls Pete for dinner while I watch Jay and Luca fake smile and chomp on pizza fries. They never liked each other, even when Jay and I were a thing. It was a pain in the ass then, but the whole Tumblr-sexts incident pretty much cemented their en
mity and I’m just fine with that.

  “I’m starving,” Pete says as he comes into the room, his hair still wet. We all sit at the table, and he tucks his napkin into his collar. “Looks great, Mags.”

  Mom simpers. “Thanks, hon.”

  I bite the inside of my cheek and feel Luca’s gaze shift to me. He knows Pete would be hacking at a charred lump on his plate if I hadn’t intervened. But whatever. Let Mom play the adoring wife if that’s what makes her happy. God knows it won’t last long.

  Polite conversation ensues. Mom asks Luca about the diner and his brother and when Macon’s very pregnant wife, Janelle, is due. Pete asks Jay when training for fall football starts. Eventually, Luca forces me to talk by asking about the piano workshop in Boston. An instructor at Juilliard runs the whole thing. It’s scholarship based, which means if you’re good enough to get in, it’s paid for. That also means it’s basically one big sticks-up-their-asses ego fest. Mr. Wheeler says I got in because I’m just that talented, but really I got in because he went to high school with the director. Plain and simple. All the other kids there had private tutors and their own personal piano studios. I’ve got an uptight high school music teacher and part-time jobs. Either way, I went and learned a ton of new techniques and got some awesome tips for my audition.

  “That’s wonderful, baby,” Mom says after I spit out some details.

  “I need to get busy on all the stuff I learned,” I say, picking at my chicken. I cooked it too long. It’s a weird combo of dry and rubbery. “The piano probably needs to be . . . tuned . . .” I trail off as I look around the tiny living area. “Wait a minute.”

  I slide back my chair and get up. I walk slowly through the house, unbelieving eyes cutting into every corner.

  No. She wouldn’t.

  “Where the hell is my piano?” I ask when I circle back to the table.

  Mom sits back, squirming in her seat. Pete squirms right along with her. Luca looks at me like he’s waiting for me to combust, and Jay continues to shovel rice into his gaping maw.

  “Gracie—​” Mom starts, but I cut her off.

  “Where is it?”

  She visibly pales. “Baby. There . . . there just wasn’t room—​”

  “There wasn’t room?” I say, my voice a rising screech.

  “Oh, crap,” Luca mutters under his breath.

  “We had to consider Pete’s and Jay’s things too. But don’t worry. I got a good deal on it.”

  I nearly choke. “You sold it? You sold my piano? I have an audition in six weeks.”

  She folds her arms and huffs out a breath. “I’m aware of that. You still have your keyboard.”

  My nails cut half-moons into my palms. She can’t be serious. Despite my mixed feelings on leaving next year, I submitted a prescreening video to Manhattan School of Music back in January. You can’t just apply to that school and then sit yourself down in their performance hall and play them a little ditty. You have to get invited to play them a little ditty and, by some miracle, I was. My audition is on July thirty-first, which is the whole reason I went to the Boston workshop. It’s no small thing. It’s a huge, holy-shit kind of thing for serious pianists. I thought Mom knew that. She encouraged me to submit the video. She always said I was made for big things. She talks about when I’m a fancy-schmancy pianist performing in Carnegie Hall. Of course, over the years she’s said all of this with a wave of her hand, like we’re discussing whether to have chicken or steak for dinner, but still. And back in April, when the letter from Manhattan came, she squealed and jumped around our duplex’s kitchen and even tried to get me to drink some cheap wine cooler in celebration. More than that, she promised, over and over, to drive me to New York. She babbled on for days about how we’d make a trip out of it, a girls-on-the-town kind of thing. And now she’s making that trip happen. We’re really going. Mother and daughter, making our dreams come true. Our wishes.

  So, I still have my keyboard? Really?

  “My keyboard fits on my lap,” I say. “It has no dynamics, no pedal. It doesn’t even have eighty-eight keys. It’s not a piano. I can’t practice fucking Rachmaninoff on that thing!”

  Jay whispers a “damn,” and Pete clears his throat before tossing back a swig of beer. Luca stares at his lap, chewing his lip. Mom glances at all of them, gauging their reaction for how to respond.

  Finally, she says, “I’ll thank you to watch your language.”

  I gape at her.

  “Besides, baby, that thing was always out of tune. It’s hardly a loss.”

  As usual, her assessment is a hair shy of accurate. Tuning wasn’t my piano’s problem. It’s the A key, nearest to middle C. It buzzed and sometimes it stuck. But it was a real piano, something I never thought I’d have, so I made it work. When I was ten, a local church was getting rid of its old piano to make room for a beautiful black-lacquered baby grand. Mom haggled with the pastor, really amping up her charm, and we got the scarred upright for next to nothing. Its keys were yellowed, some of them chipped, but I took care of it and kept it in tune and it was mine. My canvas, my escape.

  “I’m sorry, baby,” Mom says, setting her hand on the back of Pete’s thick neck. “But sometimes sacrifices are necessary when you’re going to be part of a family.”

  I flinch like I’ve been slapped. Pete and Jay have the decency to look away, but Luca watches me calmly, his palms braced on the table like he’s prepared to get up and bolt, a gentle hand leading me away from the mayhem. He’s done it before, distracting me from drama at home or from sexts pasted all over the Internet with pizza-fry-eating wars and daydreaming about rearranging Mrs. Latham’s beach gnomes into R-rated positions.

  Mom watches me too, her expression all reprimanding mother. Family? Sacrifices?

  “Grace,” Mom says, taking a sip of her beer, “don’t make a big deal out of this. It’s just—​”

  “Right. It’s just music. I know.”

  Mom lifts her chin, defiant, but her eyes have gone soft. Pleading. “I don’t mean it like that, baby. We’ll figure it out.”

  “Right,” I say, always the acquiescent daughter.

  Usually. Usually I say okay with my mouth and bitch about everything in my head. Usually I move into the next apartment, deal with the next mess, figure out how to pay the next bill.

  But today, I’m sort of done with usually.Without another word, I turn my back on her—​on the family dinner—​and disappear into my room, slamming the door behind me like any normal red-blooded American teenager would.

  Chapter Seven

  I REPAINT MY FINGERNAILS. MOM STARTED PAINTING MY nails when I was three. She taught me how to do my own when I was five.

  Always glossy dark purple.

  Same as her.

  “Like sisters,” she had said, pressing a kiss to my thumb and closing her eyes. I knew she was making a wish. “We wish on our fingertips, baby, not the stars.”

  “Why?” I had asked, wide-eyed and still a little in love with my wild, beautiful mother. She held her hand over mine, showing me how to paint from the center of the nail out.

  “Because,” she said slowly, her tongue pressed to her top lip the way it does when she’s concentrating. “If you really want something, baby, the stars won’t help you. You have to reach out and take it.”

  It’s been several years since we huddled on the couch and did our nails together. It used to be fun, giggling and gossiping and carving a space out of reality where we were just sisters and the mother and daughter were the illusion. But I got tired of that script around the time I turned twelve and Mom decided I was old enough to hear about her occasional one-night stands in between boyfriends, which wasn’t really something a girl who hadn’t even had her first period needed to know. Plus, aside from my immaculate nails, the rest of me—​my hair, my attempts at makeup, clothes—​was a total freaking mess for all of middle school until Emmy finally taught me how to put on mascara and match a top to a skirt.

  Still, I haven’t been a
ble to shake the nail habit, though unlike Mom’s loyalty to aubergine, I dabble in all the purples. I tried red one time. Blue another. But other colors just looked weird on me, a stranger’s hands. Varying the shades is the closest I’ve been able to get to nail polish rebellion.

  Tonight I paint with Lavender Sunrise, every nail except my middle fingers. Those I coat in an almost bloody-looking blackberry color.

  “Is that supposed to be a subtle fuck you?” Luca asks, getting up from my bed where he’s been weaving together some old guitar strings into something that vaguely resembles a napkin holder. My roommate in Boston played guitar to blow off steam from piano performances and the workshop, which was pretty tense most of the time. She threw away a bunch of used strings, but I grabbed them out of the trash can, knowing Luca would love them. He’s always creating stuff out of totally random materials. Anything he can bend or melt or break into something weird and functional. After he graduates, he and Macon have big plans to start up some sort of industrial design business here on the cape. His mom pushes college, but he just waves her off.

  “Too obvious?” I ask, grinning up at him where he’s hovering over my shoulder.

  He paws at the clip I’ve been using to hold my hair in a messy pile on top of my head, and soon my face is covered.

  “Hey!” I swat at him, grabbing for the clip.

  He laughs, patting my head. “You need to come by the diner tomorrow. I want you to meet Eva.”

  “Oh, lord, here we go.” Luca is perpetually in love or trying to fall in love or thinking about how he might fall out of love so he can fall in love again.

  “It’s not like that,” he says.

  I smirk at him.

  “Okay, maybe it’s a little like that, but only because she’s really pretty. But life just crapped all over her. Half the time I don’t know what to say or do. She needs friends.”

  “Friends.”

  “Yes, friends. You know. Conversation. Time spent in each other’s company. Inside jokes. That sort of thing.”

  I growl at him. Literally.