Flavor of the Month

by Georgia Beers

  Instead, though, she kept running into people she knew. Old school classmates. Friends of her parents. Her aunt and uncle. A couple cousins. Three different bakery customers who wanted to chat and give her suggestions for pie flavors. Her brother—one of only two full-time, paid firefighters in an otherwise volunteer station—was manning the beer table to raise money for the firehouse and kept refilling her plastic cup and introducing her to his volunteer firefighter buddies as “my big sister Sharlie.”

  By four in the afternoon, she was a little bit tipsy, which hadn’t been part of her plan. But the day was beautiful, sunny and gorgeous, and it put everybody in a great mood. Charlie could remember more Summer Fests than she could count growing up that had ended up rainy or windy or both.

  “No, no more,” she said vehemently now and pulled her cup away as Shane tried to grab it and fill it. She glanced across to the other side of the walkway, and her gaze was snagged by Emma standing in front of a booth that was selling pottery. She was still at Summer Fest, too, and Charlie smiled at the thought. Emma looked super cute in her denim Bermuda shorts and white tank top, and Charlie tried not to stare at her legs—Emma had always had spectacular legs, long and toned and smooth. The lightweight hoodie she’d had on earlier was now tied around her waist, her backpack still slung over one shoulder. Her mass of dark curls was still pulled back, and Charlie realized, oddly, that since she’d been back, she had yet to see Emma with her hair down. As she squinted, Emma’s eyes locked with hers, and Shane laid a heavy hand on her shoulder.

  “What are you doing, big sister of mine?” He asked it quietly and without any sort of judgmental tone, but it was definitely knowing.

  Charlie swallowed and felt like she’d been caught doing something wrong. “Nothing.”

  “Go easy. Okay?” When Charlie turned to look at him, look into his kind blue eyes, she saw love. She also saw warning. She nodded, and he squeezed her shoulder, then gave a shout of greeting over her head and went back to pouring beer.

  Emma was still looking her way, though the distance was too great for Charlie to read her expression. With a toss of her cup into the trash can, Charlie smoothed her hands over her hips, cleared her throat, and crossed through the flow of people to the booth where Emma stood.

  “You’re still here.” Perfect. Awesome opening line. Way to go, Captain Obvious.

  “So are you.” Emma’s smile was easy, soft, and Charlie recognized it.

  “Have you also been slightly overserved?”

  Emma scrunched up her nose in an adorable show of thinking really hard. “I believe…yes. Yes, I have.”

  “I was going to go home about”—Charlie looked at her watch—“like, four hours ago?”

  “Same,” Emma said, and they both laughed. “You want to walk me?” The question must have surprised her because her eyes widened in an almost comical way, and Charlie chuckled lightly at the sight.

  “Walk you where?”

  “Home.”

  “I do. Absolutely.” The words were out before Charlie could review them, think about them, edit them. And it was probably the beer, but she was fine with that. “I can get an Uber from your place.”

  “Perfect.” Emma held out her elbow, and Charlie hooked her hand through it without question. “It’ll be Tom.”

  “Tom?”

  “He’s pretty much the only Uber guy. He and I go way back.”

  They were tipsy, but they weren’t drunk. Not enough to not understand what they were doing or how they were feeling. At least, that’s how Charlie felt. As they strolled, smiled, and said hi to people they knew, she was ultra-aware, not only of how they must look to other people, but how she felt walking side by side with Emma this way.

  It felt familiar.

  It felt comfortable.

  It felt like home.

  She tried to shake those thoughts out of her head. Tried to scrub them away. Tried to ignore them. But they kept coming back, especially that last one. How was it possible? How, after everything she’d done, after all the decisions she’d make differently, after how vehemently she didn’t want to come back here, how was it possible that walking next to Emma, arm in arm, felt like home? How?

  And what the hell was she supposed to do with it?

  * * *

  “You got quiet,” Emma said as they reached EG’s and she led Charlie around back to the door to her upstairs apartment. “You okay?”

  It was weird being this close to Charlie, and it was also good. It was frustrating and it was comfortable. It fanned an angry spark in the pit of Emma’s stomach, but it also warmed her heart.

  She had no idea what to do about any of it.

  “Yeah.” Charlie smiled. “Just coming down from the day, I think.”

  “I get that.” Emma slid her key into the door, pushed it open, and headed up the stairs.

  “Is it a blessing or a curse that you live above your workplace?” Charlie asked as she followed Emma up.

  “It’s both.”

  “I bet.”

  At the top of the stairs was another door that she knew she should lock but rarely bothered to, and she pushed it open. “Welcome to my humble abode,” she said, holding out an arm like a model on The Price Is Right.

  Charlie walked in, walked past Emma, and strolled into the wide-open space.

  Taking a look around, Emma tried to see her place through Charlie’s eyes. It was open-concept and very bright—two things that had been nonnegotiable when she had it fixed up. Working in a dim restaurant and windowless kitchen made her long for natural light during the times she was home. The hardwood floors had been buffed and polished to a pristine shine. Her furniture was simple but classy, and halfway between modern and traditional.

  Charlie walked slowly, dragged the tips of her fingers over shelves, picked up knickknacks, then set them down, seemed to take it all in.

  Emma set her bag down near the coat closet, unknotted her hoodie, and tossed it onto a chair as she watched Charlie out of the corner of her eye. There was a small table in the far corner of the living space that held several framed photos, and Charlie reached it before Emma could steer her away from it.

  Crap.

  Charlie stopped, picked up different photos, studied them, set them back down. She finally found the one way in the back. The one Emma hid but couldn’t bring herself to toss in the garbage or pack away forever.

  Charlie turned to her, held up the framed photo of the two of them on graduation day, and raised her eyebrows.

  Emma knew the photo by heart, knew every line, every color. Their arms wrapped tightly around each other, their smiles enormous and giddy. She gave Charlie a sad smile and a shrug.

  No words were spoken about it.

  “Want some water?” she asked, needing to do something other than stand there and fidget as Charlie examined her apartment.

  “Love some.”

  The kitchen looked out into the living area, but Emma opened the fridge with her back to Charlie and bent toward the water bottles. A moment. She just needed a moment to steady herself. To breathe. To get her pounding heart to shut the hell up. Why did she feel so weird all of a sudden? Was it the alcohol? She wasn’t drunk, just a little buzzed, but was getting more sober by the second. What was her problem?

  Back out around the counter and into the living room, she handed a bottle of water to Charlie, who was holding another frame. The photo in it showed three people nearly twenty-five years ago. A white woman, a black man, and their light-skinned three-year-old daughter. All of them smiled widely, and if there was a happier family photo in existence, Emma had never seen it. Less than six months later, her father had left her and her mother. Fled. Abandoned them. Never looked back.

  Charlie looked at her, and Emma could read the question on her face; they’d always been able to do that, and it was so bizarre that they still could.

  “I know where he is. I found him on Facebook a year ago.”

  “You finally looked.”

  �
�I had a weak moment.” Emma gave a bitter laugh. Charlie had tried to get her to look for her absentee father for years, but she’d always had an excuse why she didn’t want to.

  “Where is he?”

  “Nashville.”

  “Huh. Did you contact him?”

  Emma shook her head. “He’s got a new family.”

  “What do you mean?” Charlie set the photo down and cracked her water open.

  “I mean just that. He’s got a new family. Wife. Twin sons. I think they’re, like, ten? Twelve?”

  “Okay. So?”

  Emma flopped onto the gray microfiber couch and blew out a long breath. Charlie had always been an advocate for Emma finding and reaching out to her dad. “So it’s been almost twenty-five years since he left. I haven’t heard from him at all. That’s a pretty clear message, don’t you think?”

  Charlie sat down next to her. “I mean, it’s been a really, really long time. People change.”

  Something in Charlie’s tone made Emma turn to her. “Do they?” Their gazes were locked, and Emma couldn’t have turned away if she tried.

  Charlie’s swallow was audible, and her voice was just above a whisper when she said, “They do. And they have regrets. And they wish they could go back and do things differently.”

  “But they can’t.” She kept her voice just as low.

  “No.” It was Charlie who looked away, down at her hands fiddling with the water bottle. “And that’s the hardest part.”

  “Do you have regrets, Charlie?” The alcohol in her system was making her bold. Emma knew that but couldn’t stop herself from asking the question she wasn’t sure she wanted the answer to.

  Charlie kept her eyes on her bottle, let go of a sarcastic smile. “More than I can count.”

  Emma wanted to delve into that. And she didn’t. She wanted to know more about Charlie’s regrets, what she would’ve changed or done differently. But she also didn’t. Because it was too late, wasn’t it? The damage had been done. Charlie had left her behind for something better, just as her father had left her and her mother behind.

  “Does your mom know you found him?” Charlie asked, then took a slug from her bottle.

  Emma shook her head. “I debated telling her, but…” She shrugged. “I’m really not sure how she’d take it. She’s never offered to help find him. She’s never said anything nice about him since he left. You know how she got.” Charlie was the only one who knew. She’d spent so much time at Emma’s house that she’d witnessed more than her share of her mother’s meltdowns.

  “I remember. What were we, thirteen? Fourteen? And you told her you wanted to know more about your dad, asked her if she knew where he was, and then she went on and on for, like, an hour, just ripping him to shreds and telling you how much it would hurt her if you looked for him. So. Yeah. I get it.”

  It had been hard on Emma, the bashing of her father that her mother did. Charlie knew that, too, was one of the few who did. While Emma understood her mother’s devastation at being left that way—she felt it, too—the fact remained that half of her was her father. So any bad things her mother said about her father, she was also, in a way, saying about Emma. As a teenage girl, that had been hard to reconcile. Am I like him? Would I do something horrible to the people I love? Questions like that plagued her off and on her entire life.

  “Anyway.” It was time to change the subject. “How’s the pie baking going?”

  Charlie’s demeanor changed a bit at the question, and again, Emma felt something inside her warm at the sight. “It’s pretty great. Unexpectedly so.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well…” Charlie hesitated, as if she was trying to find the right way to say something. “I mean, I didn’t come back here to make pie. You know?”

  “Why did you come back?” It was the question that had been on Emma’s mind since the moment she’d stepped out of the kitchen at EG’s and seen her ex standing there after years of no contact. She’d been afraid to ask it. But why? Afraid of what? The answer?

  Charlie pursed her lips, chewed one, then the other, as if contemplating her response. “I came back because I didn’t have a choice.”

  Emma waited silently for more.

  And Charlie blew out a breath of what seemed like defeat. Of resignation. “When I moved to New York, I worked at Darcy’s firm and shared a place with six other girls. It was crowded and small and hot and I hated it. But I loved the job.” She looked Emma in the eye, then looked away quickly as she said, “When things started to…develop with Darcy, she moved me into her penthouse apartment. It was stunning, which I’m sure doesn’t come as a surprise. It was a whirlwind at first.”

  Emma was proud of herself for sitting there and listening and actually being okay with it. She had no desire to run, to clamp her hands over her ears and shout La, la, la! like a toddler so she couldn’t hear. She found herself completely interested in Charlie’s story, and when Charlie ventured a tentative glance up at her, Emma simply nodded for her to go on.

  “It was only a couple months in when Darcy claimed me as her personal assistant. I got to do so much. It was amazing. Her company is very active in several charities and works with some nonprofits, and she asked me to take that over, so she could focus on growing the commercial side of the business.”

  “So you did.”

  “So I did. And I really loved it, both things. I loved the advertising work more, but I was just happy to be so busy, and at first, it didn’t matter to me that all the work I did didn’t actually pay. But after a while, I was too busy.”

  Emma was starting to get the picture. “So you were doing what Darcy wanted you to do, but at the expense of your own career, your own independence, and your own joy.”

  “It didn’t feel that way at first.” A smidgeon of defensiveness slipped into Charlie’s voice, which Emma was actually happy to hear. “I enjoyed it for a while.”

  “You were happy.”

  “For a while.”

  “And then?” If you had asked Emma a year ago if she had any interest in hearing about Charlie’s glamorous life in the Big Apple, she’d have waved a dismissive hand and walked away. Somehow, somewhere along the line, that had changed. Seeing Charlie had changed her opinion, and not because she wanted to revel in Charlie’s failure, but because she was unexpectedly okay having her back in town, and she simply wanted to know why she was.

  “And then…her hours got long. I saw her less and less. I didn’t love what I was doing, and I missed the excitement I’d experienced working with paying clients. I hated not having much of my own money. I mean, as it was, I started to feel dependent on Darcy.”

  “Because you were. She made it that way.”

  Charlie sighed. “Yeah. And then she met Tatiana.” She rolled her eyes with such exaggeration that Emma burst out laughing. “Right?” Charlie grinned at her. “Doesn’t that just sound like somebody who’s about to wreck your relationship?”

  “It kinda does, not gonna lie.” They laughed some more.

  “So, when she finally told me she wanted to be with the home wrecker, I had none of my own money and no way to afford finding another place to live.”

  “Ouch.”

  “Right? Darcy offered to pay for something, but at that point, my ego was too bruised. I look back now and think I should’ve taken some money and run with it, but…”

  “That’s not who you are.”

  “No. It’s not. And I was so incredibly embarrassed because I’m pretty sure everybody knew something was going on except me.”

  Emma grimaced.

  “So my only option was to come running home to my parents with my tail between my legs. Their big city executive daughter was a miserable failure, in business and in love.”

  “I’m sure they don’t see you as a failure.”

  “Well, I do.”

  The shame that colored Charlie’s expression was hard to see, so Emma said softly, “I’m really sorry you went through all of that.
”

  Charlie barked a laugh and bumped against Emma with her shoulder. “Oh, please. You are not. You’re loving this story.”

  “Well…” Emma held her thumb and forefinger millimeters apart. “Maybe a tiny bit.” Charlie looked at her then, met her gaze, held it. There was that sizzle again, and Emma felt a wash of something that made her clear her throat.

  “It’s okay,” Charlie said. “You’re allowed to find joy in my catastrophe. Absolutely. That’s called karma.” A beat went by, then another, as the eye contact held. Finally, Charlie whispered, “I’m so sorry, Em. I’m so, so sorry for what I did, for how I hurt you. I wish I could go back and do things differently. I really do.”

  Of all the things that might have happened, of all the variations of how the day could have gone, this one was the very last one Emma ever would have predicted. Sitting on her couch, now completely and instantly sober, listening to Charlie apologize for devastating her was…unexpected seemed too weak of a word to describe it.

  She looked down at her hands, fiddled with a string hanging off the hem of her shirt. “We were young.”

  “We weren’t that young,” Charlie said. Then she sighed, gave Emma a sad half grin.

  Emma chuckled and reached for Charlie’s hand. They entwined their fingers—which was so perfectly familiar, it made Emma’s chest ache—and sat there quietly for several minutes. Finally, Emma turned to Charlie and asked, “Hey, are you hungry?”

  “Oh my God, it’s about damn time. Why the hell do you think I followed a chef home?”

  Emma’s laughter bubbled up from deep in her body, a big belly laugh that she hadn’t let loose in longer than she could remember. With a push and a groan, she stood up and went into the kitchen to find something to whip up for the two of them. Charlie stayed on the couch, and as Emma worked, she made little glances in Charlie’s direction, watched as she looked at the stack of books on Emma’s coffee table, as she thumbed through the cooking magazines there, and the realization hit her out of nowhere, though it wasn’t unexpected.