by Mary McNear
“And being a librarian is dope,” Van continued, sipping his beer. “You . . . what? Sit there all day and do, like, nothing. Just read at story time or whatever and then you get paid for it. That’s cool.”
This was wrong, too, Luke knew, but he didn’t say anything. He wished they’d stop talking about his mom, though. He felt bad. She thought he was at Nature Camp. It was where he was supposed to be. But he hadn’t gone this morning, even though camp had only started three days ago. He’d waited until his mom had left for work, and then he’d called Margot and told her he wasn’t feeling well. She’d been nice about it. She hadn’t asked to talk to his mom or anything. She’d just told him to hurry up and get better because the Black Bears—that was the seven- and eight-year-old group he helped out with—would miss him. After they’d hung up, Luke had left the house and, careful to avoid Main Street, skateboarded to the rec center, where he’d met Van, who often hung out there in the mornings. (He felt like he needed to tell Van he was grounded and had his cell phone taken away. Otherwise Van might think he was avoiding him.) After they’d left the rec center they’d come here, and J.P. had met them later with the beer.
The time before J.P. had shown up had been the best. Luke and Van actually talked about stuff. They didn’t just talk—they skateboarded while they talked—but Van told him stuff, like how he was going to move to LA one day, after high school, maybe, and how he was going be part of a skateboarding crew there that had a house on the beach and just chilled and skateboarded all day. He’d asked Luke if he wanted to go, too, once, and that was when Luke had told him about Alaska. About his dad. And about how he wanted to find him and maybe go visit him. Van thought that was cool. So now, when they hung out, they talked about LA and Alaska and how they were going to save up for airfare. Luke already had over a thousand dollars in a bank account, most of it from birthday money and Christmas money, but he didn’t tell Van that. It might make him feel bad, because Luke didn’t see how Van would ever get the money to go away. He didn’t even have enough for a hot dog at the Quick and Convenient; when they went there, Luke had to buy one for him.
Still, for someone who seemed so broke, Van had a lot of video games at his house. Maybe that was because his dad played them, too. He didn’t play them with Van and Luke. He was never home when Luke was there. And Van’s mom had moved out. Maybe that was another reason Luke liked Van. He didn’t think it was weird that Luke didn’t know who his dad was. Unlike Luke, though, Van didn’t seem curious about where his mom had gone. All he’d said about her was that she’d left one day when he was little, and she hadn’t come back. He seemed okay with it, but Luke wondered sometimes how he could be. Maybe it was because his aunt came over sometimes. She did some cooking and cleaning for Van and his dad. Luke didn’t think she did a very good job, though. Most of the time their place was a total wreck.
Luke watched now as Van took his skateboard out into the parking lot and practiced kicking the tail of his board down while he jumped so that it popped into the air. He made it look easy, even on this crummy surface. Van, who had hair so blond it was almost white and light blue eyes, was small for his age. He was kind of skinny, too, but he was stronger and faster than he looked. He’d gotten in a fight once at school with a guy who played middle school football and he’d won. The kid, Michael, was a total jerk, and Van only fought with him because he’d said Van and his dad were trashy.
Luke put down his can of beer—it was still only half-empty—and stepped on his skateboard. He started to push off from it, then stopped. His stomach felt weird, and he knew if he skated now, the beer would just slosh around and he’d feel worse. Plus, he was hungry. He thought about the lunch his mom had packed for him, still sitting on the kitchen counter, and wished he’d remembered to take it. Maybe they could go to the Quick and Convenient?
“You’re not going to get sick, are you?” J.P. asked, already finishing another beer. God, how did he do it?
“I’m fine,” Luke said, watching Van skate.
J.P. shook his head. “You should have gone to that day care center you work at,” he said disgustedly.
Luke didn’t answer him.
“Don’t they need you to change diapers there?” he asked.
“I told you, there are no diapers,” Luke said, too hot to work up any real anger. “It’s a day camp. You have to be five to go there.” He knew no matter what he said, though, J.P. would keep calling it a day care center. He was almost missing it, too, when Van skated over.
“Let’s go back to my place,” he said. “We can play Halo, and my aunt got pizza pockets yesterday.”
“Cool,” J.P. said, chugging the rest of his beer. He crushed the can when he was done and kicked it away, too. Luke tried not to worry about littering, and thought about how stupid J.P. and Van would say he was if they knew it bothered him.
“You coming, Luke?” Van asked him now.
“I gotta get back,” he said, picking up his skateboard. He was thinking that he should go to Nature Camp now and tell Margot he felt better. Of course, he’d have to buy some gum on the way there; he couldn’t show up smelling like beer. With any luck, though, he’d be in time for the afternoon activity, using solar ovens made out of pizza boxes and aluminum foil to make s’mores. This was actually kind of lame—the younger kids could care less about solar energy, and instead got covered in melted chocolate—but at least Luke could eat some of the graham crackers and get rid of the sloshy feeling in his stomach.
“What, are you going home to mommy?” J.P. asked in a baby voice.
Luke started walking away. “Later,” he said to Van over his shoulder, ignoring J.P.
“Later,” Van said with his funny smile that was only on one side of his face. And then Luke was on his skateboard, pushing off hard, feeling the breeze on his face. Somehow he got back to the Nature Museum without seeing anyone he knew, and he was at the library, as planned, by three o’clock that afternoon to meet his mom.
CHAPTER 11
One afternoon about a week after he’d arrived at the lake, Cal found himself at his sister’s gallery in town, holding a paperweight in his hand. He had no idea why he’d picked it up other than the fact that he was bored; he’d been waiting for fifteen minutes while Allie spoke to a prospective artist who was hoping the gallery would show her work. The young woman in question was in her early twenties, Cal guessed, and her long blond hair was braided, dirndl-style, into a crown on the top of her head, her slender arms adorned with rows of clanking silver bracelets. Add to that her outfit—a flowy skirt, a Central American–style poncho, and UGG boots—and she lent an odd yet appealing note to an otherwise staid Butternut afternoon. Cal hadn’t been listening to her pitch to Allie that carefully, but he gathered that her specialty was found object animal sculptures. It definitely was not his kind of thing, and judging from the expression of strained politeness on Allie’s face, it didn’t appear to be her kind of thing, either, but she hadn’t yet been able to convince her visitor of this. Now Cal held the azure paperweight up to his eyes and looked at the two of them through its blue swirls, then tilted it kaleidoscopically, so that they tilted with it. When he put it back down, Allie was frowning at him slightly. He shrugged.
He lingered, though, in this same corner, where Allie displayed the gallery’s hand-blown glass. There were some nice pieces here, and they had the added attraction, for him, of being the kind of thing Meghan hated. She would never have allowed any of them into their apartment. It was absolutely imperative to her that all lines be “clean lines,” that all surfaces be free of clutter. Clutter. Meghan could never say this word without a little shudder; it was something she believed she must be continually on guard against. If she gave even an inch to it—by, say, placing a framed family photograph on an end table, or a ceramic bowl on a shelf, or a clock on a mantelpiece—then it seemed she’d begin a slow but irreversible slide into hoarding, only to be discovered one future day buried under stacks of old newspapers and takeout food contain
ers.
“Thank you so much for showing me your portfolio, Holly,” Cal heard Allie say. “Your sculptures are very intriguing, not to mention highly sustainable. Right now, though, I just don’t have the space to show them.”
“I understand,” Holly said cheerfully, snapping her portfolio shut and tucking it into the folds of her poncho. “But if you change your mind, let me know. Because honestly, I think the bottle cap prehistoric bird sculptures would look amazing in here. I got a ton of compliments on them at a craft fair last weekend.”
“I’m sure you did,” Allie said, ushering her toward the door. And as they passed him, Cal looked over—he’d been pretending to study an oil painting of pheasants taking flight in an autumnal setting—in time for Holly to grace him with a fetching smile. He smiled back at her reflexively. She was a picture of Bohemian prettiness, and he waited for something, anything, to register with him, but it didn’t, and then she was gone, out the door. With the exception of Meghan, he realized, he’d rarely thought about women lately. No, that wasn’t true. He had thought, at odd moments, about Billy. Billy from the wedding. Billy with the freckles. He had no idea why she’d stayed in his mind, but she had. He wondered now what had happened to her son, and whether she was at the library today.
Allie, who’d walked Holly out to a beat-up light blue Chevy pickup, came back into the gallery. “Sorry about that,” she said to Cal, walking over and giving him a hug. “I didn’t know you were stopping by. What a nice surprise.”
“I hope so,” he said. “Are you sure, though, that you don’t want just one of those bottle cap prehistoric bird sculptures?”
“Maybe one,” Allie mused. “But I’m going to have to pass on the woolly mammoth made out of deflated footballs.”
“Was there a picture of that in her portfolio?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Now, that I would have liked to have seen,” Cal said.
“No, she’s sweet,” Allie said. “I think she should stick to her current occupation, though.”
“Which is?”
“Doggie day care.”
“Ahh,” Cal said. He watched as Allie went to straighten up the counter. “Do you have time to come to Pearl’s with me?” he asked, gesturing across the street at its red-and-white-striped awning.
“I’d love to, but I can’t close for more than five minutes. I can make us both a cup of herbal tea to have in back, though,” she said. She had a cubbyhole-sized office tucked behind the gallery.
“Got anything stronger than herbal tea?”
“Like coffee?”
“No, stronger than that.”
“At this time of day?” Allie frowned.
“Why not?”
“Cal, you’re not a drinker,” she reminded him, going to stick a “Back in Five Minutes” note on the outside of the gallery’s front door.
“That’s only because I haven’t had time to be a drinker before. I’m seriously considering it now.”
Allie came back over to him, her frown deepening.
“What?” Cal said.
“Nothing. But since when are you growing a beard?”
“I’m not,” he said. “I’m just not shaving every day. I’m on vacation. Besides, stubble is very in right now, or haven’t you noticed?”
“Oh, I’ve noticed,” Allie said. “Caroline and Jax and I watch The Bachelorette. And trust me, there’s not a single clean-shaven contestant in sight on that show. How do they do that, though? How do they get their stubble just the right length?”
“Beats me.” Cal shrugged. Meghan had always preferred that he shave once a day. Otherwise, she said his face was scratchy when they kissed, and then there was something else, too, that she’d tried to impress upon him, something about the exfoliating benefits of shaving. He cringed inwardly and vowed to banish words like exfoliate from his vocabulary.
“No, the stubble’s fine,” Allie said, leading him back to her office. “You’re just not looking like your usual crisp self.”
“That’s because I’m reveling in my bachelorhood,” he said of his uncombed hair, faded T-shirt, and old jeans. “It’s been very liberating. Dropping my clothes on the floor. Leaving my bed unmade. Not putting the cap on the toothpaste tube.”
“Wow, things sound like they’re really going to seed over there,” Allie teased, turning on an electric kettle on the counter in her office. “No cap on the toothpaste. What’s next? Hanging up a hand towel crookedly?”
“Laugh all you want,” Cal said, sitting down on a swivel chair. “You don’t know what I’ve escaped from.”
“Escaped from?” Allie raised an eyebrow. Cal knew she thought he was being uncharacteristically dramatic.
“No, it’s true. You have no idea what it was like, living with Meghan. She had all of these rules. You couldn’t wear shoes in our apartment because the carpeting was white. You couldn’t read the newspaper on our couch—also white. You couldn’t put a glass down on any surface without a coaster underneath it. I didn’t complain about the rules, for the most part. And I didn’t have any real trouble following them, either. I’m already pretty neat without someone constantly reminding me. But still, if I even slipped up a little . . .” He sighed. “Once I forgot the ‘absolutely no dirty dishes left in the sink’ rule. I’d made a cup of coffee, and I left the teaspoon in the sink. A few minutes later, I’m sitting at my desk, working on my computer, and Meghan comes in and waves a teaspoon in my face and says, in this weird little singsong voice, ‘Are you trying to drive me crazy?’”
“Jeez,” Allie said. “What if you’d left the coffee cup in the sink, too?”
Cal drew a finger across his neck.
Allie laughed, but then she turned serious. “Cal, can I ask you a question?” He nodded. “Do you . . . do you miss her, though? Ever?”
Cal shrugged. “Her, specifically? And not just our life together?”
“Yes, her, specifically.”
“I don’t know. Sometimes I do, I think.”
“You think?”
He lifted his shoulders. No, he didn’t miss Meghan. Not after what she had done. But he hadn’t told Allie about that yet. His hurt was still too new, his anger at her dishonesty still too raw. As far as Allie knew, the reason for their divorce was “irreconcilable differences,” and if she wanted more information than that, she’d been careful not to press Cal for it. She was waiting for an answer, though, and since Cal knew it would seem wrong to her that there was nothing he missed about someone he’d been married to for five years, he told her something he thought was at least partly true.
“I miss . . . I miss the idea of her. The person I thought she was when I met her. I thought I knew how everything was going to turn out for us. And now, it’s like . . . when you read the book with the big twist at the end. You should have seen it coming, but you didn’t.”
“Cal,” Allie said. She’d been putting tea bags into teacups, but now she looked over at him, her face softened by a sadness that for some reason made her look even younger than usual. “I didn’t know you felt that way.”
“I’ll survive.”
“Of course you will,” she said, pouring boiling water into the teacups. “I’ve never doubted that. In the meantime, though, if you need anything—anything at all—even just to talk, like now, please don’t hesitate to ask me. Okay?”
There was a silence that lasted a beat too long. And Cal, unused to the serious turn their conversation had taken, said lightly, “You know what I need, Allie? A day without lawyers.”
She handed him a cup of tea and sat down across from him. “Lawyers, as in, plural?”
He nodded and sipped his tea. “What is this?” he asked.
“It’s called Tension Tamer.”
He took another sip. He’d never liked herbal teas. “You wouldn’t rather just be tense?” he asked.
She ignored him. “How many divorce lawyers do you need, Cal?”
“One. But I don’t just need one for the divorce.”
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She looked at him, puzzled.
“I need one for the business, too.”
“Are you . . . being sued?”
“No, although that is an occupational hazard. I need one because I’m selling my share of the firm.”
“What?” Allie said, and he saw that she was only slightly less shocked by this news than she had been by the news of his divorce. She set her teacup down, hard, on the little desk between them. “What are you talking about, Cal? It’s your firm. It has your name on it. It’s Franklin & Cooper.”
“Was Franklin & Cooper,” he said. Franklin was Guy Franklin, a friend of Cal’s from graduate school who was from a wealthy Seattle family. They’d started the firm together several years ago, and between Guy’s family’s money and connections, Cal’s drive and talent and, frankly, luck, they’d made a name for their firm in a relatively short time. “Now it’s going to be Franklin, Hoult & Washburn,” Cal explained to Allie.
“You’re just . . . quitting?”
“I’m not quitting. I’m selling my shares in it. It’s not the same thing.”
This distinction, though, was lost on Allie. “Did you and Guy have some kind of falling out, too? Is this like . . . another kind of divorce for you?”
“No,” Cal said, taking offense. “Guy and I are still friends. Personally. Professionally, though, there have been some . . . philosophical disagreements between us.” When he and Guy had started out, they’d found their niche converting warehouses into office spaces for start-up companies, but for the last couple of years the firm had designed large office buildings in downtown Seattle, which was much more lucrative than lofts, but also much less interesting to Cal. But Guy was determined to keep designing them, and for the last year, especially, they’d had some conflicts over the direction the firm was taking. “This kind of thing happens all the time in this field, Allie. Architectural firms can be very fluid. One partner leaves. Another comes in. It’s not a big deal.”