Yell at me. Shove me. Look at me.
She didn’t say another word as we walked back down the hill.
15
Stepping Stones
Friday, late afternoon
I hid in Elle’s bedroom, spying on Casey from behind her daughter’s purple curtains.
She’d been sitting on the dock, her back to the house, for hours. She hadn’t said anything about tackling the rest of the list. She hadn’t spoken to me at all.
At two I’d taken Jett for a walk by the water, hoping Casey would thaw, at least speak to me.
Every sense on high alert, Jett sniffed her way up the rocky shoreline just north of The Shipwreck, along the western curve of the lake. At one point she spotted a duck and barked furiously, then froze, some ancient instinct from her bird-dog lineage transforming her into a furry black arrow from nose to tail.
I turned to face Casey and smiled, hoping she would notice, call out. We were only twenty feet from the dock, so she had to have heard Jett barking.
But she remained stone-faced, staring out at the water.
It was too much, what Alex had tried to do. She thought she could lay out memories for us, simple as the chain of stepping stones in the deep part of Meriwether Stream. Like all we had to do was hop from object to object to get over the past. As if a flimsy Polaroid, a small tile could hold us.
Whatever her reasons for reaching out now, it had been too long and some things couldn’t be repaired. It was time to go home.
* * *
I was packed, my clothes rolled into neat cylinders in my suitcase, when my phone vibrated.
New message from
[email protected] to
[email protected]
I wasn’t in the mood for one of Sam’s digital pep talks.
But the subject line said—
Urgent!!! Concern Re: Design Modification on Youth S. Slv. Tees
So I clicked on it.
Gotcha.
How goes it? Impressed you haven’t chickened out. Don’t chicken out, LC.
Then there was a chicken drumstick, a skull and crossbones, and what I thought was a smiling chocolate kiss but on closer examination turned out to be poo.
Below that was a link to his twitter, @goofyfootSF. Sam spent hours on Twitter, posting surfing photos and inspirational memes that he hoped would go viral and rack up followers. It made his day when he got retweets, or when a C-list celebrity responded. He called it “starfuckery,” as if he didn’t care, but clearly reveled in it.
I clicked the link. His latest creation wasn’t bad. An old photo of him bailing out on a huge, crystalline wave, taken at the second he’d jumped off his board and gone airborne.
Below it said, “If you never wipe out you never get better.”—Sam “Goofy Foot” Gilman. 1981, Waimea Bay.
Well played, Sam.
But I was going. Casey didn’t want me there; she was perched at the end of the dock, her chin on her knees, still as a gargoyle.
I checked under the bed to make sure I hadn’t dropped anything, zipped up my suitcase, and felt inside my purse for my car keys. My hands brushed against something smooth and flat. A photo. I’d found it in a box of keepsakes in my closet and tucked it into my purse Thursday afternoon in a moment of optimism.
I sank onto the bed, lost in the old picture, for a long time. Waiting for it to lose its power. But the longer I stared at the overexposed image, the more my chest ached. Its smiling subjects had no idea how complicated life could become.
I would try talking to Casey once more. If only to say goodbye.
* * *
It was getting dark when I sat next to Casey on the dock. Twenty-four hours into our weekend, and we were right back where we’d started. No, worse. She was chillier than she’d been when I’d arrived.
Casey was folding the clue sheet into a paper airplane on her thigh. She held it up, scrutinized the neat creases, and adjusted the nose, then lifted it and aimed at the center of the lake.
When she pulled her arm back to launch it I clutched her wrist. “Case, don’t.”
She turned, eyes flashing, pulling her arm but unable to free it from my grip. “Why do you still go along with every stupid scheme she cooks up? You still worship her that much?”
I let go, surprised by how tightly I’d gripped her. How fragile Casey’s wrist bones felt in my hand. And how desperate I’d been to stop the list from sailing into the water.
She watched me, her eyes daring me to stop her as she recoiled her arm again. “Buh-bye, Scavenger Hunt. Buh-bye, Terrible Poetry.”
Buh-bye, tatters of what had once been friendship. She was right. It was too late for us anyway. “Throw it, Casey.”
Her eyes softened and she dropped the list on my lap. “Oh, hell. You throw it.”
I touched its edges, sleek as the real gliders people flew off the bluffs near Sam’s shop. Sam and I watched the gliders sometimes. I always said it looked like fun, pure freedom. Sam said I was a brave chick, that he’d never fly in anything lighter than he was.
I set the clue sheet on the dock, securing it under Casey’s sandal, and pulled the old Polaroid from my back pocket. “So I carried this all through college. All four years.”
She accepted the photo but didn’t look at it. “Tell me you didn’t wear cargo shorts all through college. The South is formal, I hear.”
“I had these linen drawstring skirts with zippered pockets. Very artistic. Very weather-appropriate.”
“Good to know.”
“The other thing I wanted to tell you is this. My college roommate was this girl named Elaine Carter. She was from New York and she was into ceramics. That’s pretty much all I ever learned about her. She tried to be friends at the beginning but... Anyway. She was so nice. She’d ask me to go to parties with her but I’d hide in the studio all night. Ask me to wake her up so we could sit together at breakfast. But I’d sneak out while she was still sleeping.”
“Poor Elaine.”
“Yes. Poor Elaine. And another thing I wanted you to know about, besides the Polaroid, and poor Elaine, is I bought a Greyhound ticket Thanksgiving break of freshman year. I was going to come see you. Forty-four hours on the bus each way. I made it all the way to the depot.”
Casey kept her eyes fixed on a couple of kayakers across the lake.
“I just wanted you to know,” I said. “In case it makes a difference.”
“Anything else you wanted to share?”
“Yes. I still want to finish your mom’s list. If you’re up for it. I understand if you’re not, but I’d very much like to finish. We were doing okay until the hike.”
She studied the picture. “God. We’re so young.”
“Sixteen. You can tell my age in our high school pictures by the thickness of my eye shadow.” Like figuring out a tree’s age by the rings in the trunk.
“Summer after sophomore year. Those awful keggers. We thought we were so cool at first, getting invited to senior parties. God. Look at us.”
I leaned a little closer to study the girls in the picture.
Alex had taken it. We were in Casey’s bedroom, ready to go out. Casey was in a tank top and jeans, her hair in a sloppy bob. I’d just exchanged my cargo pants and shorts for a happy discovery—cargo miniskirts. My hair was carefully styled, cascading down my shoulders, and my heavy eye makeup didn’t belong with my innocent smile.
I had another photo like it at home, taken a second later. That one was more posed and clear. But I preferred this one. We’d turned to each other and laughed, goofing off right as Alex had pressed the button, so my right arm and Casey’s left were blurs, as if one.
“We look happy,” I said.
“We were happy.” She handed the picture back.
We were quiet for a few minutes, then she said,
“I guess we owe it to those girls to finish off the list. I guess I can do that.”
“Good.” I’d had almost the exact same thought, examining the picture up in Elle’s room. Those girls wouldn’t have given up so easily. “Number five isn’t far. Jade Cove.”
Casey gazed to our right, toward the distant clump of trees on the east shore of the lake that hid our old swimming spot. “The picture’ll be dark, but I doubt my mom’ll disqualify us for that.”
“Or we could blow off the list until tomorrow. We have plenty of time. I want to see your bookstore.”
She smiled. “Tour of the failing businesses of Coeur-de-Lune?”
“No, actually I’ve wanted to see it for years. Ever since my mom told me you bought it.”
“Sure. I’ll take you. Do you...” She hesitated, then went on. “You want to drop your suitcase off at your place first?”
We both glanced across the water at my empty house.
“No. I want to stay here for the rest of the weekend. If you’ll still have me.”
Casey set her head on her knees and looked up at me, the corner of her mouth raised in the faintest hint of a smile. “I guess I can handle it.”
One step forward.
16
Dreaming Shepherd Books
I liked Casey’s bookstore right away. It felt like her: unpretentious and lovely.
There was a big stencil in the window, with the store’s logo. An elegant line drawing of a shepherdess napping on a rock, her book tented over her eyes, a single sheep jumping over her. A Wow. I wondered if Alex had designed it.
At the front of the store was a window seat catching the sun, overstuffed armchairs in the corners, and of course a wall of used paperbacks.
The teenager at the counter guiltily hid his ACT prep book and hopped off his stool. “Didn’t think you were coming in today.”
“Tim, this is Laura.” So I’d earned an introduction at last. I’d have preferred “Laura, my old friend,” or “Laura, she grew up here.” But I’d take it. “You can go. I’ll close up.”
She looked around the empty store. “We do actually get customers once in a while. It’s just that it’s ten minutes ’til closing.”
“Of course. Did your mom design your shepherdess?”
“Yep.”
“I love it.”
“You don’t think it implies our books put people to sleep?”
“No.”
Casey watched silently as I walked through the small, overstuffed rooms, running my hands along shelves. She had a table of local history books; my dad would have approved. A whole LGBTQ wall, clearly marked, right up front; our town had changed with the times.
In a back corner by a window there was a giant hollow papier-mâché tree with a generously sized cutout in the trunk. A mound of overstuffed pillows waited on the floor inside, winking out invitingly, but mostly obscured by a curtain of candy wrappers strung across the opening in the tree. Not just butterscotch this time. Sheer pink, pistachio, translucent red. It was magical, shot through with sunlight. I climbed in through the crinkly cellophane strips and smiled from behind it. “Casey.”
She leaned down to peek inside at me. “The kids seem to like it.”
In her back office she made me coffee. She held up a stack of envelopes and grimaced. “The HVAC bills are brutal. This place has zero insulation.”
I sipped my coffee. “But look what you created, all by yourself.”
“I know I should probably sell, take the gain on the building and run, but...I love it too much. I love being part of the town.” She clenched and unclenched her left hand.
“Is your hand okay?”
She looked down and shook it. “Yeah, touch of carpal tunnel. Overdid it on the ten key. The one part of owning the store I don’t love, data entry. Anyway, I do like being my own boss.”
“Me, too. Some of my clients require major hand-holding, though.”
“Like that Sam guy who keeps texting? Your boyfriend?”
“He’s most definitely not my boyfriend.”
“Got it.”
“He’s seventy, only a friend. I hang out at his café sometimes. He’s funny, you’d like him, though he can be an unfiltered know-it-all.”
She started to say something but sipped her coffee instead.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“Tell me.”
“I was going to say he sounded like the father-figure type.”
I paused, tried to laugh this off. “Sam’s way too obnoxious for that.”
“I’m sorry, it was a dumb thing to say. Your dad’s not replaceable.”
“It’s okay.”
It was unsettling, that she could size up my life so quickly, so well. Sam’s sense of humor was the opposite of my dad’s. Inappropriate to the point of infuriating. But there was something to Casey’s assessment. My closest adult relationship was platonic, with an irreverent, much older man.
Casey grabbed a canvas Dreaming Shepherd tote bag from a box, dropped in a bunch of bookmarks, and handed it to me. “Shopping spree, on the house. I recommend the Highly Flammable section. But take whatever you want.”
“That’s so generous, are you s—”
She closed her eyes and pushed her hand toward me like a traffic conductor. Stop.
“Thank you. But you pick them out. Surprise me.”
As Casey filled the bag there was a rap on the door. Though it was obviously after-hours, the assault on the glass continued, surprisingly loud given that the customer seemed about eighty. When Casey opened the door a sweet voice trembled out, “Oh, dear, are you closed?”
I should have guessed who it was from the passive-aggression.
One glance at too-pale face powder, white hair teased into a cotton helmet, a yellow handbag, and I knew: Barb Macon, my mother’s ancient church friend.
I ducked inside the papier-mâché tree.
Casey rang up her purchase, not complaining about the intrusion. And, mercifully, not calling for me so Barb and I could chitchat about old times.
“I heard you had a visitor. Ingrid Christie’s girl?”
I held my breath, afraid exhaling would set the wrapper curtain a-wafting.
“She’s at the house.”
When Barb left Casey laughed. “You can come out now.”
I crawled out of the tree trunk. “She’s nosy as ever. I didn’t even tell my mother I was coming.”
“She must’ve heard around town.”
“What did she buy? Religious poetry? The complete works of Rick Warren?”
“She special-orders large-print romance novels. She has a special passion for Scottish lairds.”
Raunchy old busybody.
* * *
I rummaged through the tote bag as we walked to Casey’s house from the grocery. She’d given me e.e. cummings poetry, Candice Bergen’s autobiography, The Bluest Eye, and Valley of the Dolls.
The last one I pulled out was an oversized paperback with a pink stain on the spine.
The Girl’s Total Guide to Beauty.
“No way.” I smiled at the familiar cover. A woman’s face divided into four quadrants, a different “look” in each section. One eye was rainbowed in blue and yellow shadow under fluffy bangs, one sported false eyelashes under gelled hair. One side of her lips was baby pink, the other scarlet. “I can’t believe you kept it.”
“Elle found it in a box of your stuff from the vanity. A few months ago. My mom had held on to all of it—your old makeup, an embarrassing collection of scrunchies, and of course, The Girl’s Total Guide.”
“God.” I flipped pages. “I studied this. I thought I looked so mature. Remember when I tried to do highlights and burned my scalp? My hair was coming out by the roots for weeks.” I examined the price sticker. “You p
riced it at a dollar and still no takers?” I laughed. “Smart girls.”
Casey peered into her canvas bag, rearranging groceries. “Oh. I only had it out for a few days. Some teenager tried to buy it but...” She shrugged. “I gave her a free copy of this other makeup book instead. Aren’t you starving? I’m starving.”
17
Vanity
Early June 1997
Summer before junior year
“So which rager am I getting ready for?” I said to Casey’s reflection.
Casey was lying on her back, a paperback of Queenie tented over her head. I was doing my makeup at her antique vanity, the one Alex bought at an estate sale in Twaine Harte. I’d never seen her use it; Casey’s beauty routine consisted of scraping a comb through wet hair as she pounded down the stairs two at a time.
“Hmm?” She was absorbed in the book but bouncing her legs along to Sheryl Crow. Her green giraffe, Jasper, by her feet, was bouncing to the beat, too.
“Which party are we going to—Matt Pomeroy’s or Deva Vance’s?”
“What difference does it make? All the parties in this town are the same.”
“True.”
I had The Girl’s Total Guide to Beauty open to the section on eyeshadow. Subsection: The Four-Shade Method. I leaned close to check my work in the mirror. My four shades were Smoky Taupe, Amethyst, Midnight Pearl, and Buff. The book said if you only blended well enough you could make any colors work together.
I loved Casey’s dressing table. But the fine grain of the wood was hidden under papers and books and the dirty mosaic tiles Casey pried out of the gazebo in the park nearly every Saturday night. She had twenty tiles now and tossed them onto the vanity carelessly before we’d climb into bed. I arranged them in a neat grid whenever I came over, but when I returned they’d be disturbed again. I’d redo my work while Casey laughed at my compulsion. (You’re borderline OCD, she’d say. Could you even fall asleep here without doing your tile rows? The truth: probably not.)
“Matt Pomeroy’s in love with you.” Casey licked her finger and turned the page.
“Please.”
“Matt Pomeroy’s throwing this whole party for you. It’s all very Great Gatsby.”
The Summer List Page 12