Craft

by Adriana Locke

  She takes a nibble and shrugs. “Lemon bars. You don’t like lemon.”

  “I’m assuming you made me something?”

  “Nope.”

  My jaw drops. “Fine then. Second question is why are we not going to your mother’s party?”

  “I am not going to my mother’s because she’s impossible. And my sister is going to be there with her husband and their child and I have no interest in seeing them.”

  Reaching out, I make a point of taking a lemon bar from her bag. She watches me with a heated gaze. That part I ignore. For now.

  “May I ask why?” Bringing the bar to my lips, I take a bite. It’s sweeter than I thought it would be, brighter in flavor. Not really lemon-y, but fruitier. “This is really good.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Back to the sister?”

  “You’re so pushy,” she notes, putting the baggie back in her bag.

  “And your point?”

  She rummages in the bag again, but more aimlessly than before. There can’t be that much crap in there to take her this long. Still, I refrain from pestering her even if it’s harder than hell to do.

  “My sister,” she begins, forcing a swallow, “married my ex-boyfriend. Like, six months after we broke up they got married.”

  “You’re shitting me.”

  “I’m not.”

  Smacking my tongue off the roof of my mouth, things start to make more sense. “You’re thinking if she married him that fast …”

  “That they were screwing around while we were together? Correct.”

  I wonder vaguely what my reaction looks like from her viewpoint. Utter confusion as to how a guy who wanted to be tied down with a woman would walk away from Mariah? Pure venom spikes in my blood toward a man I don’t even know for putting that look on her face—like she’s not worthy of someone’s first choice.

  Fuck that guy.

  “You’re right,” I say, polishing off the lemon bar. “We hate her.”

  “You have no idea,” she grumbles.

  Shoving off my desk, I take a few steps toward her. Her perfume is different today. It’s still soft and feminine, but sexier instead of floral. Or maybe that’s her pheromones I’m picking up on. Either way, I feel my stomach knotting like it’s threatening to send instructions to my groin. Like I should show her just how desirable she is.

  “If you change your mind and want to go, I’m happy to go with you. Just as friends,” I say, hands up in the air when she snaps her gaze to me. Because I want this to feel normal, I add a little at the end. “But if there are benefits involved, I’m game.”

  She laughs. “I’m not going, but thanks. Now, back to Ollie. What’s up with that?”

  “If he asks you, we’re in charge of a student panel to study the cafeteria food. You picked a kid, I picked a kid. Got it?”

  “Oh, Lance,” she says, reading between the lines. “You’re kidding me.”

  “I put money in his account today. I don’t know what’s going on with him, but fuck, Mariah. How does a kid go hungry in this country in this day and age?”

  “Believe it or not, that’s one reason I bake a lot and bring it in.”

  “I thought that was just for me?” I pout.

  Her giggle winds the knot even tighter. “Sorry.” She heads toward the door, the clock threatening to tip as the bell rings. “If I can help, let me know. I’d love to.”

  There’s no reply from me because nothing I could say would be well-received. I’ve managed not to blow it so far today. Keeping my mouth shut now would probably be wise.

  Except, I’m not wise.

  “I have things you can help with …”

  She laughs, steps into the hall and disappears as the bell rings. My class begins to fill as students file in. They murmur their hellos and I ask them about their weekend on auto-pilot, all the while replaying mine in my head.

  The tardy bell is set to ring when Stacy comes waltzing in. “Hey, Mr. Gibson,” she sing-songs.

  “Better get to your seat before that bell rings.”

  “I have something for you.”

  Dropping my pen, I look up to see a red cupcake in a yellow liner sitting in the palm of her hand. “Ms. Malarkey sent this down for you.”

  “Thank you,” I say, taking it from her.

  “Mr. Gibson?”

  “Yeah?”

  Looking up at my student, I see a look of pure glee. She leans towards me and whispers, “You two would have gorgeous babies.”

  “And you’re tardy,” I say, motioning toward her seat as the bell buzzes overhead.

  The cupcake goes on the corner of my desk and Stacy’s comment gets filed away to a part of my brain I don’t want to revisit.

  Sixteen

  Mariah

  “How’s it going this week?” Whitney asks. She joins me at the trunk of my car and takes in all the desserts lined up. “It kills me you make all this and give it away.” Swiping up a banana cupcake with peanut butter icing, she shrugs. “I’m keeping one.”

  “Fine,” I laugh. “That can be your payment for helping me deliver them.”

  “You could at least buy me dinner.”

  “You could do this out of the kindness of your heart too,” I note, handing her a tray.

  “All my kindness got soaked up by a screaming three-year-old at around two this morning in the emergency room,” she says, wincing. “I think I’ll abstain from sex.”

  I give her a look, lifting a tray of lemon bars from the trunk and closing it.

  “For like two days,” she adds with a laugh. “So, how did it go with Lance?”

  We meander through the garden at the back of the nursing home. A few residents are outside, some in wheelchairs, enjoying the pretty day. The door to the game room opens into the expansive outdoor area.

  I love coming here to bring baked goodies and books and sometimes slippers or lip balms. It makes me feel connected to humanity in a very peaceful way.

  “It’s not going badly,” I admit. “It’s not so different from before, really. He still drives me crazy, makes lewd comments, only now he works in a lot of vague references to conversations we’ve had.”

  “I love your love,” she sighs happily.

  “You’re insane.”

  “I’m not nearly as crazy as you are. You just don’t see it.”

  I see it, but I’m not about to admit that to her. I am crazy. Ridiculously so. I haven’t been able to get off in days because the easiness of fantasizing about Lance is now too messy. Every day, every smirk, every lick of icing off his lips makes me want to freaking scream. All four afternoons this week when he didn’t make a call in my presence, when I didn’t even see his phone, made me giddy.

  Tempering myself, writing notes on my desk like ‘truth’ and ‘wisdom’ don’t even help keep my spirits at a sane level. It’s going to come crashing down on me one of these days because leopards don’t change their spots and neither do guys like Lance.

  I haven’t deleted the app off my phone in case he messages me at night. I want him to, even if I don’t necessarily want to see the string of those messages. Every evening when I climb in bed and scroll through social media, I have a little pep talk with myself. Tomorrow could be the day when everything goes back to normal. When the fun with me is over, and he moves on to someone new. I should prepare for that. I try. It’s occurred to me that this will be like a death—you can’t ever really prepare for it until the other person is gone.

  “Ah, it’s Mariah,” Gretchen says from her wheelchair by the aloe vera plant. “What did you bring us today, honey?”

  “I have banana cupcakes and lemon bars,” I tell her as the chatter increases in the room. “I have some other goodies in the car.”

  “Can I have a lemon bar?”

  “Let me check with the nurse and then I’ll bring you one, okay?”

  After getting the okay from the staff, we start dispensing the goods. I drop off the one red velvet to Mr. Henry before working my way
back to Gretchen. “Here ya go, sugar.”

  “These little visits just make my week,” she beams. She takes the lemon bar and holds it in her hand. “How was your day?”

  “Good. How was yours?”

  “Good, good. Same old stuff in here day after day. That’s why we love seeing you.” She takes a bite of the dessert. “Tastes just like the ones I used to make.”

  “I bet they’re not as good.”

  She pats my hand. “Where’d you learn to bake, anyway? Your mama?”

  “My grandma, actually,” I say, kneeling beside her wheelchair. “She was a lot like you. Sweet and beautiful.”

  “Ah, now you’re just being polite.”

  “Not true. I saw Mr. Henry checking you out when I walked in.”

  She laughs, but touches her cheek as it flushes. “He asked me to play chess with him later tonight. Do you think I should?”

  “Heavens yes you should! He’s handsome, Miss Gretchen.”

  “He is, isn’t he?” she giggles. “What about you? Do you have a handsome man you spend your evenings with?”

  “Sadly, no,” I say, thinking immediately of Lance. Wondering what it would be like to spend an evening with him, what we would do, what his habits are, I’m jostled by an elbow to the rib by Gretchen. “I dazed off.”

  She sinks her dentures into the lemon bar and throws her head back. “This is delicious. Make these for whoever he is you’re thinking of and you’ll win him over.”

  I study my friend. She’s one of the sweetest women I know and I look forward to seeing her every time I come here. Deciding to take a gamble, I go for it. “I made them for him,” I say.

  “So there is someone.”

  “Not really,” I sigh. “We’re more like friends.”

  “So not the good kind?” She raises a brow. “I’m old but I’m not dead, honey.”

  Laughing, I grab a chair and pull it over to her.

  “Tell me about him,” she instructs, the lemon bar now gone.

  “It’s long and complicated.”

  “As are all the good stories.”

  Looking around the room full of people on their last years of life, I wonder what choices they made they now regret. Which risks were worth it, which ones hurt badly but they’d turn around and do them again if they could.

  “Were you married, Gretchen?”

  “I was. For forty years. He was a good man,” she says, her eyes sparkling. “Kind of a menace when I first met him, but he panned out all right.”

  “A menace? You have to explain that.”

  “He was always in trouble, forever giving me grief about things. He was what my mother called a neighborhood kid, meaning the neighborhood took care of him. His mother was a wretched woman. Just awful.”

  “How did you meet?” I ask, trying to imagine her when she was my age.

  Rearranging the pillow behind her back, she gets situated before going on. “He was friends with my older brother. He’d tag along for meals a lot of days or Mama would leave a bottle of milk on the stoop for him to take if he didn’t stop by. One day he kissed me by the chicken coop and told me if I kissed another boy, he’d beat the tar out of them,” she laughs. “I never kissed another boy for my whole life.”

  “I love that.”

  “My daddy didn’t,” she laughs, thinking back. “My mother just loved him though. She kind of took him in and treated him like one of her own.”

  She pauses her story to talk to the nurse. Her evening meds are delivered and it’s a process I’ve watched happen a few times. It’s so regimented and carefully executed that it amazes me they can do it correctly so fast.

  When she turns back to me, she picks up where she left off. “He passed away back in ninety-four. Said his only regret was not making peace with his mother.”

  A heaviness sits on my shoulders as I relate to a man I never knew.

  “What is it, honey?” she asks.

  “Nothing. I just have an iffy relationship with my mom too. I kind of understand where you husband was coming from.”

  “Do the two of you speak?”

  “Kind of.”

  She takes a moment to let that sink in. “Want some unsolicited advice?”

  “I’d love some,” I say, letting her take my hand in hers. “What do you have for me?”

  “Don’t be a grudge holder, Mariah. I was one for years. My good friend passed away when we were in our thirties, she just had a baby, and her car went over an embankment and into a river. We had some stupid fight that I don’t even remember at this point. I was devastated for years. I still regret it. I never thought I wouldn’t get the chance to talk to her again.”

  “I try,” I tell her, thinking of all the times I try to be peaceful with my family. “I answer most of her calls. I listen to her tell me what a lousy person I am.”

  “Well that’s not true.” She squeezes my hand. “Maybe I should have a talk with her.”

  I give her an appreciative smile as I wonder what it would be like to have someone like her in my corner for real. I can’t imagine her being disappointed in or taking sides against her loved ones.

  “She has a party coming up this weekend for her birthday,” I tell her.

  “Are you going?”

  I make a face.

  “You should go. Be the bigger person.”

  “But she invited my sister and the two of them together are just poison to me.”

  “Take Whitney,” she says, pointing at my friend who’s feeding a cupcake to Mr. Henry. “Take her before she ruins my chess game tonight.”

  Laughing, I watch my friend tease him with a dab of icing. It’s clear Mr. Henry is having the time of his life. Still, I turn to my other friend and wink. “Whitney has nothing on you, Gretchen.”

  “Damn right.” A somber look crosses her face. “I want you to remember something for me, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “You can’t choose how people treat you or the actions they take. They get up in the morning and have to see the ugly things they do reflected in their face.” She rolls her wheelchair back and then centers it in front of me so we’re face-to-face. “You, dear girl, only have to live with how you let them affect you. When you look in the mirror, you get to see all the pretty that you are inside and which you radiate.”

  “Sometimes they make me feel really ugly,” I admit.

  “Because you let them.” It’s the simplest answer she could give and the one that hits the hardest. “When you get to be my age, you start thinking a lot about death. You look back on your life and think of all the people you already lost and know the people you see around this room will start dropping like gnats.”

  “Gretchen!”

  “It’s true,” she shrugs. “But listen to me—life isn’t that complicated. It’s meant to be lived with those we can’t live without.”

  “That sounds pretty complicated.”

  “It’s not.”

  It’s such a simplistic way of looking at things and couldn’t possibly hold true. There’s no room in that philosophy to account for the unknown: other people, or emotions, or the bad things that can happen to us.

  “You live your life and you fill it with all those people who make you feel like getting up in the morning. The ones who give you life. And the rest of them?” She blows a breath. “The rest of them you just let go.”

  “Even if it’s my mother?”

  “Maybe,” she shrugs. “Maybe not. Here’s a rule of thumb for you: treat people how you’d treat them if you knew they’d be dead tomorrow. Because they might be. Sometimes that means forgiving and moving on and sometimes it’s just forgiving. The key to it is finding your joy and what you need to do for you—not them.”

  The events coordinator taps me on the shoulder. “We have a man who just came in from outside and didn’t get a cupcake. He’s very upset. You don’t have any more, do you?”

  “You know I do,” I laugh. “I’ll go grab them.” Before I get up, I look back a
t Gretchen. “I appreciate you, you know that?”

  “You bring me joy. Great joy, Mariah.”

  I make my way outside. The sun is a bold orange with its promise to dip behind the horizon. Thinking about what Gretchen said and then about baby Betsy and my grandmother, I know what I want to do.

  Unlocking the car, I get into the back seat first. My purse is on the floorboard and I pull it up next to me.

  Grabbing my phone, I flip through the screen until I see the app. Just the green logo with blue letters make me feel like a different person. Stronger. More confident. And it’s not until I swipe my finger over the image and see Lance’s icon, that I realize why.

  This is why it was so easy for me to open up to him. He doesn’t just make me feel good in general. He makes me feel good about me.

  With each tap of my fingers on the screen, some of my confidence gets wiped out by nerves. I hit ‘send’ in a flurry before I can talk myself out of it.

  Me: Any chance you’d reconsider that date?

  The little bubbles appear almost instantly and I hold my breath until the words he typed appear on the screen.

  History Hunk: Oh, probably. My schedule is pretty open at the moment.

  What does he mean by that? Am I bothering him by asking? Maybe he’s over this. Maybe he has a date.

  Chewing my bottom, lip, I type out the fastest answer in the history of texting.

  Me: Well, if you’re busy …

  History Hunk: STOP. I’m free. Tell me when and where.

  My fingers are swift over the keys, falling right back into the groove.

  Me: My mom’s house. Saturday afternoon? *bites nails*

  History Hunk: I’ll bring Mace.

  Me: You’re the best.

  History Hunk: You haven’t seen the start of it. ;)

  Me: Gotta go.

  History Hunk: Chocolate cupcakes tomorrow? Peanut butter icing?

  Me: Bye.

  Seventeen

  Mariah