by Reiss, CD
It was my shop, which meant I could come and go as I pleased. But it was my shop, which meant my absence was noticed.
“You’re not going to Catalina.” Brian sat on the other side of my desk, slouched in the leather-and-chrome chair with an ankle over his knee. He was twelve years older than me, but while I wore suits, he was a Henley-and-jeans guy. He weaponized casual. Nothing showed you were too good for all this shit like sneakers. “You’re not going to Martha’s Vineyard, the house on Lake Como, or the Reykjavik retreat. What am I supposed to think?”
“What you think is up to you. What you’re not supposed to think is that I’m making side deals.”
“Why shouldn’t I?”
“Because you trust me.”
“This might be a bad time, don’t you think?” He tapped his thumbs together, the only indication that anything serious was happening. “We’re in the middle of a crisis. Our investors are concerned.”
“They knew the risks.”
“That’s going to go over like double-dipping in the latrine.”
“What does that even mean?”
“‘You knew the risks’ isn’t a way to do business if you want to continue doing business.”
“I’m not going to continue doing business. I overleveraged.” I pressed my hands to the desk glass. “I had a good run, but it’s over. If you want it, make an offer.”
He smirked. “You’re so young.” He leaned forward, putting his hand out to stop my objections. “It’s fine. That was always your selling point. No one wants an old genius. But listen. You’ve never dealt with the ups and downs. Shit crashes. You pick up the pieces. It’s not that big a deal.”
“It’s a big deal.” I picked up my bag and slung it over my shoulder. Having started out as a bike courier, I never got over the easy weight distribution of a messenger bag. No one on the street used briefcases anymore anyway. “I don’t know if I’m hungry enough to drag the fund out of the gutter.”
He leaned back into his relaxed dude posture. “It’s in your blood. If you’re not hungry, you’re not Chris Carmichael.”
“Maybe.” I left room for the fact that he could be right, but I wished I didn’t have to. If I was nothing but a hunger, who was I when I was fed? And if there was more to me, what was it? “I have to get my head together.”
“Don’t take too long, kid. The market moves fast.”
Chapter 6
CATHERINE - SIXTEENTH SUMMER
The first time I got close to Chris, I was a week into the summer after my junior year at Montgomery High. I was leaning on the court fence, waiting for my coach, and Chris was edging the grass with a Weed Whacker. I heard it and felt the pricks of cut grass on the backs of my calves. I stepped away from it.
“Sorry, miss.”
“It’s all right, I—”
My voice hadn’t drifted off or gotten lost. I didn’t swallow the rest of the sentence or forget what I was saying. The final words never existed. Everything before I saw him was fake, and after that moment, my life became real. Like Dorothy walking out of her black-and-white world into a three-dimensional colorscape.
My life wasn’t divided into the years before that moment and the time after because he was handsome or strong. It wasn’t because he was charming or interesting.
It was because he was mine.
We stood watching each other through the chain-link fence, and I knew I was just as much his. We claimed each other in those first seconds.
Blue is blue and the sky is up and the earth is down. These aren’t articles of faith or belief, but knowledge. Necessity. Denying gravity existed wouldn’t hurt you, because it was always the law, and up was still up and down was still where you landed when you jumped.
A yellow ball bounced behind me, skidding and clicking against the fence.
“Catherine!” Dennis, my coach, called. He could hit drunk, but speaking was harder. He slurred at the ends of his sentences. He’d always said muscle memory was more powerful than anything the brain could remember. He said your body was smarter than your mind.
He was right. My body knew this young man with the blades of grass stuck to his pants and the specks of dirt on his cheeks.
“Hey, Catherine.” The boy said my name like a prayer that had already been answered.
The ball rolled by my feet. I tapped it, bouncing it under my control, until I got the string face under it and I could let it roll across. Admittedly, I was being a bit of a show-off before I replied.
“Hi, Weed Whacker guy.”
“I’m sorry if the noise bugs you. I can do court seven.”
“You’re not bothering me.”
The distance between us, the fence, the next hour of lessons, all of it overwhelmed me. Too many obstacles.
He made the first move, stepping away from the fence and saluting. “Next time then.”
He took his Weed Whacker to court seven, and I hit the ball back to my coach.
I never hit so hard or so accurately. I astonished Coach Dennis, but I wasn’t surprised. I was sure everything I’d do from then on out would be right and true.
When I finished my lesson, the boy with the Weed Whacker and I found each other by the water fountains, attracted like magnets. We didn’t say hello or introduce each other.
Wide-eyed, he said, “Did you feel it?”
I knew exactly what he meant.
“I did. I did feel it.”
We stole to the back room of the pro shop to marvel at this unnamed thing that changed everything.
“What was it?” I asked when he closed the door.
“I don’t know.” He touched my arm.
It felt as though two planets that had been on separate trajectories for light years had finally collided and melded. I stared at his hand, and when he tried to move it, I put mine on top of his.
“Have you felt it before?” I asked.
“No. But I still kind of… it’s still there.”
“Yeah. Me too. I’m…” What I was about to say had felt so trivial, I almost skipped the step. “I’m Catherine.”
“I know.”
Of course. In our little fishbowl, I was famous.
“I’m Chris. Chris Carmichael.”
“Chris.” I said his name the way he’d said mine, finally understanding how to pray for something I’d already been given. It was almost the same as praying that it not be taken away.
“I have to see you again,” he said as if waking from a half-dream.
I could. I had to. I had no choice. But I couldn’t agree before Irv, who ran the shop, burst in with a clipboard. He had a huge round belly, crooked teeth, and a soft spot for Barrington kids who needed jobs.
He froze when he saw us. “Carmichael, get out to court seven and finish the job.” His eyes flicked to me and back to Chris.
“Yes, sir.”
“And young lady?”
I held up my chin. I was an heiress and a club member.
“I believe you don’t want your mother to hear back about this. So keep it quiet.”
I didn’t realize at the time that he was protecting Chris, but later, after I realized it, I was grateful to him.
Though in the end, no one could protect Chris but me.
Chapter 7
catherine - PRESENT
His letter was folded up in my pocket. It didn’t change anything right away. It took a day or so to think of Chris with a smile on my face, and another day or so to see the conditions I lived in. The patchwork of pipes and electrical work. The bare walls and barren floors. My clothes were in good shape because Ronnie was a seamstress who could repair anything, and my hair was decent because the Snip-n-Save needed every customer they could get.
I wiped down the green tile kitchen counter, seeing every encrusted piece of grime as if for the first time. A person got used to things. A bit of grime that didn’t come out on the first scrub just stayed there until new eyes saw it.
Harper flew down the stairs in the yellow polo shirt she
had to wear at the Amazon distribution center where she and half the town worked, her blond hair tied into a loose ponytail.
“Hey,” she said when she burst into the kitchen and opened the fridge. “Taylor’s hanging out here today. You should put him to work.”
“Can he do anything?”
“Yeah.” She pulled out yogurt. “Surprisingly, for such a nerd.”
“He didn’t seem like a nerd to me.” I got a bowl and a box of granola from the cabinet. “He’s quite handsome and confident.”
She blushed a little, taking the granola and bowl. “He’s all right.”
Harper was a nerd herself, spending hours in front of a computer she’d built from parts. She’d gone to MIT for a year, but came home when Daddy got sick. She never went back. Staying in Barrington was a terrible waste of her mind. A brilliant, stubborn, loyal mind.
“Do you remember Chris Carmichael?” I asked. “From the country club? He gardened for us one summer. Lived in the trailer park by the station?”
“Yeah, duh.” The granola tinkled into the bowl.
“He sent me a letter.” I peeled the top off the yogurt container and plucked a spoon out of the rack.
Her eyes went as wide as her bowl. “Really? What did he say?”
“Lance died.” I dropped a lump of yogurt into her bowl and gave her the spoon.
“Aw,” she said, poking her spoon against the bottom of the bowl. “Percy’s the last of that litter.”
I didn’t give myself a second to doubt my next question. I just spit out what was on my mind, too late to sound casual. “I was wondering if you’d look Chris up on the computer? See how he’s doing?”
She put her back to the counter and held the bowl in front of her, swirling the granola into the yogurt. “Why?”
“Because I’m asking.”
“Yeah, but I don’t know what you’re asking for exactly? Do you want to know where he works or do you want his bank account info?”
“Harper Barrington!” I scolded. “You said you stopped that!”
She shrugged. Did I like that she was a hacker? No. But I could only make her promise she wouldn’t steal or cheat. She’d never promised to stop hacking. At this point, she was a grown woman and I was so ignorant of the digital world, I didn’t even know what the promise meant.
Besides, she needed to exercise her mind, not shut it down.
“I don’t want his bank information,” I said.
“Too bad.” She ate like a prisoner of war.
“What do you mean?”
She scraped the last of the yogurt out of the curve of the bowl. “He’s loaded.”
My heart twisted and my skin got hot. Not because he had money. She could have revealed that he was a schoolteacher and I would have had the same reaction. My body reacted to the fact that she, my sister, anyone in the same room as me, knew anything about him. It was like touching him from a universe away.
I didn’t know how much further I wanted to go, but Harper wasn’t one to slip through a door quietly; she burst through.
“Has his own hedge fund and a seat on the Exchange. Ex-wife but no kids.”
He’d gotten married? That seemed impossible. How could what we had be replicated in the same lifetime?
“Really?” I held up my chin. I didn’t want to show her that I was tripped up.
“Italian model. I forget her name. He’s got a sweet penthouse on Central Park West and a net worth around—”
“Stop!”
She obeyed, washing the bowl with a roll of her eyes. My own sister was closer to him than I was. And the ex-wife…
I had to swallow a lump of jealousy before I spoke again. “You’ve been talking to him?”
“Hell, no!” She put the bowl in the rack. “But I’ve been watching, more or less. He can’t see me do it and it’s mostly legal.”
“Mostly?”
“I won’t get caught and I don’t touch anything.”
“Fine, I guess.” I pulled a towel off the rack and dried the bowl. “He seems all right?”
“Yeah. Kinda. Healthy, wealthy. He doesn’t go out much. Just big events.”
“And he’s divorced?”
“Yeah. Recently. She’s dumb. I can tell.”
I laughed a little but not a lot. The jealousy was pushing its way back up my throat. “As long as you say so.”
“Why are you asking?”
I would have to tell her at some point. The minutes before she ran out the door were as good as any. “He’s coming back to bury Lance.”
“Wow.” She shook her head a little, staring at me as if the shock kept her from averting her gaze. “We have to clean up.”
“I can manage it.”
“And the thorn bush?” She indicated the backyard with a flip of her fingers. “That’s not going to go over well—oh.” She froze as if realizing something unpleasant. “Reg.”
“I keep telling you there’s nothing between Reggie and me.”
“But I keep hoping.”
“You’re sweet. But no.”
With a glance at the clock, she started out. She gave me a list of things to pick up when I went shopping, including a strange men’s toiletry item. I assumed it was for Taylor, and as she drove away, I felt that little bit of jealousy well up again. My sister was performing mundane tasks for a man she cared about. I longed to do the same.
I’d dated men since he left. I’d had some sex with those men, none of it memorable. There was no love like his. I’d tried to find it and come up emptyhanded enough times to give up. I’d given up on him coming back a decade ago, given up on doing more than treading water, given up on dating.
Most days, I didn’t think about him at all. Sometimes when the roses were blooming and the evening wind blew the right way, I’d remember how he made me feel, but not him in particular.
I went to the back of the house and looked at the backyard and the family cemetery. It had been there before the house, when the first Barrington Father bought land by the river and died before he’d amassed enough wealth to build on it.
When I was a girl, the plot had been lined with beautiful rosebushes. After our father died, we’d let them grow over the headstones that Harper had defaced when she was angry, and as the years went on, we’d let it grow into a bed of thorns. Sometimes, in the spring, they bloomed. But the bushes were too thick to be penetrated by a gardener, so they were wild and unpredictable. We just trimmed the edges so the thorns didn’t go past the short white fence around the plots.
Would Chris even care?
Would he laugh or be disappointed?
I didn’t know him or who he’d become, except that he was rich and lived a beautiful life. I lived with a dense thorn bush in my yard because my sister hated our father. The weight of shame I carried got denser and heavier. I could bear it inside Barrington, but in front of Chris, it would crush me.
The note crinkled in my pocket. For the first time since getting it, I thought I should tell him I wouldn’t see him.
Chapter 8
catherine - SIXTEENTH SUMMER
On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays in the summer, Mom went into Doverton to ride horses with the Princes. She showered there, and often got home smelling of soap and perfume. Otherwise, she hovered over us like a hummingbird. She had a staff of nannies and sitters assigned to watch us during the moments she turned her back, but they were no more than moments.
Behind the rose cemetery stood a narrow band of untouched forest, then high grasses, then the river. Daddy had built a bridge over the river. He walked across it to the bottling factory six days a week and stayed there fourteen hours a day.
Soon after Chris and I met at the club, he got a job with Garden Haven. He told me later that getting a job with the company who did our landscaping was part of his plan to see me.
He rode his bike to us on Fridays to prune and water. It had a trailer with his tools. Mom had seen him caring for the roses at the club and put him in charge of the bushe
s in the little cemetery. She didn’t like being inside the fence herself, because it reminded her that she was destined to lie there for eternity.
“He’s taking a while back there,” Harper said.
We were on the screened-in back porch, under ceiling fans. It was still muggy and thick. My thighs slid against each other as I watched Chris’s body bend and straighten as he worked on the roses.
Harper turned her attention back to her Complete Works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. She was reading well past her grade level. It was the only respite from her painful social awkwardness. “Twenty-two percent longer, at this point.”
“It’s the heat.”
Our meeting in the back of the pro shop was a week old. I’d seen him twice since then. His lips tasted of salt and cola, and the young body felt tight and hard under his shirt.
Watching Chris, I wasn’t completely sure if it was all sweat greasing the insides of my thighs. He’d led me behind a secret fence at the back of the club. He laid a towel over a tree stump so I wouldn’t get grass or dirt stains on my white clothes, and he kneeled in front of me. When he kissed me, I wanted to spend the rest of my life attached to his lips, tasting his tongue. He’d bought me a soda, and we took turns transferring a chip of ice between our mouths.
That night, I’d run my fingers over my lips to see if I could reproduce the feeling, then between my legs for the same reason. Fear stopped me from continuing to the end. What if someone saw? What if my mother’s voice in my head wasn’t just a voice? What if—when it burst in saying “how could you?”—it summoned her attention by some as-yet-undisclosed telepathic transference and she could see me?
When Chris stood and wiped his brow, I imagined how his cola lips would taste with a hint of rose on them. He turned away as if something was moving in the trees and waved. A second later, Johnny came through the forest, holding a banker’s box. His son, ten-year-old Joe, was at his side.
Johnny worked at the factory as a chemical engineer. His wife, Pat, owned the grocery store by Barrington Burgers.