“Of course it is. I’m about to take a couple kids on a canoe tour of Smoke.” Jamie dropped his voice. “I missed you, Fernie. I wanted to hear your voice for a sec. It’s been a while.”
My stomach sank. “I know. It was tricky with Whitney here,” I said, though we both knew it had been longer than that. We’d spoken a handful of times since school finished—calls that were little more than sex. I couldn’t let Jamie know how miserable I was about coming home, which made me even more miserable. No matter how I spun it, the underlying message would always be: Hey, babe, I don’t want to come home, even if it means spending the summer with you. No offense! It’s just that the idea of working at the resort for the rest of my life makes me want to tear the skin off my arms. Don’t take it personally, but it’s a little awkward that you love my family business more than I do.
I knew what I really wanted would be a stick of dynamite in our relationship. I hated keeping things from Jamie, so I’d started avoiding him instead.
“Whit told me you seemed off,” Jamie said.
That stung. I thought I’d done a very good job of seeming on. “She did?”
“In a text. You said your visit was weird?”
I watched Will. He was typing something on his phone.
“Yeah, it was weird. I feel like she doesn’t get me sometimes, you know? She thinks I’m going to come home, and everything will be like it was when we were twelve, but we’re different people now.” Whitney never wanted to talk about what happened in high school. She pretended that we never had that massive fight, that we hadn’t begun drifting apart years before that when she started dating Cam. “I feel like she doesn’t trust me.” I saw the way she eyed my drink when I ordered a second at the bar last night, but she didn’t have to worry. I rarely had more than two these days.
“You’re overthinking it, Fernie. Give that brain of yours a rest. Once you get back here, you’ll see—there’s nothing to worry about. You and Whit are going to be buds your whole lives.”
I sighed. “I hope so.”
Will put his phone away and wandered over to a school of fish painted on the side of a three-story building.
“I’ve gotta go,” Jamie said. “Love you.”
“Love you, too.”
I watched Will from a safe distance. His back was turned to me, his hands resting on his head.
Four years had passed without me being interested in anyone but Jamie. I’d flirted a little. I’d danced with guys, but I drew the line at letting them buy me a drink. And I’d withstood constant teasing about being in a long-distance relationship with someone I’d known since childhood.
“You are never going to be hotter,” Ayla lectured me once. We’d met in our first-year macroeconomics class, and she was my closest friend in the city. “You are wasting your prime years.” Then she met Jamie. He won her over within thirty minutes after he suggested a karaoke bar as the evening’s entertainment. When he pulled out his Alanis (a banging “You Oughta Know”), she was a goner. The night ended with Ayla dragging us back to her apartment and the two of them singing Nelly Furtado songs neither could remember the lyrics to.
Jamie was twined around every part of my life. I thought I wanted him to stay that way forever.
“Everything all right?” Will asked when I walked over.
“Fine. It was just a friend.”
I looked at Will’s profile for a long time. I was stoned, I had zero shame, and I had a theory. I let my eyes run across the hard line of his cheek and jaw. I perused his arms and down his torso. When I got back up to his neck, it was pink. This tingly thing I felt for Will, it was purely physical. I was sure of it.
“What’s Fred like?” I asked.
Will’s nose scrunched. “Fred?”
“Yeah.” I moved toward the alley. There was more ground to cover. “Sensitive topic?”
“No,” Will said, following. “Of course not. Fred . . .” He paused. “Fred’s specific. There’s no one like her.” He laughed. “She makes sure of it. If everyone was going through the front door, Fred would be searching for a side entrance. She comes at everything her own way.”
I tipped my head down so I could roll my eyes.
Will told me all about Fred. Fred had a tapestry hanging in a gallery in Gastown. The tapestry was called Curse and wove together the pain, power, and fecundity of menstruation. Fred had committed to an all-red wardrobe while working on the tapestry senior year. Fred’s ideas were bottomless. For example, Fred came up with the theme of “failure” for their newsletter’s graduation issue and helped track down Emily Carr alumni to share their biggest flops.
Fred sounds like she takes herself pretty seriously, I thought. “She sounds fun,” I said. “How long have you been together?”
“About five months.”
That’s it? The words almost left my lips.
“What?” Will said.
“Nothing.”
“No, come on. You’ve got a look on your face.”
“I don’t.”
“You do.” He pointed to my mouth, and we both stopped walking. “You have a smidge of a look.”
“Well, now I do. But only because you said smidge.”
“You weren’t judging the length of my relationship?”
I put my hand on my chest. “Nope, not at all.”
I didn’t love that I was jealous of Fred, but so what if I was? Will was stupid hot. That was it. There wasn’t anything else going on here.
Will arched down to meet my gaze, his eyes shimmering. “Liar.”
9
Now
“What do you mean, you haven’t googled him?” Whitney waves a diaper in the air.
I’ve convinced her to let me babysit Owen while she and Cam have a date night. It’s only dinner at the Brookbanks restaurant, and the plan is for them to leave the baby with me at the house while they enjoy some alone time, but I still haven’t managed to get them out the door.
They’ve set up Owen’s travel crib, explained the ins and outs of bottle feeding, given me a detailed description of his diaper rash, and handed me a printout of Owen FAQs. She’s tried to make it funny—with headings like, Oh shit, he pooped! Now what?—but it still borders on obnoxious. It’s also completely unlike Whitney.
I look at her, kneeling over Owen, who’s wriggling on the couch sans diaper. She’s wearing a magenta wrap dress that has a discreet panel in the front for breastfeeding. Her boobs are huge. There’s a thin band of sweat around her hairline—the strands by her temple are short, wispy bits that she’s been complaining about. Apparently you lose hair after having a baby and that’s what grows back. Parenthood is changing her in ways I hadn’t noticed, probably in ways she hasn’t, either.
“You know how I feel about creeping on people online,” I say, rummaging in the diaper bag for wipes. I haven’t diapered a baby before, but how hard can it be? “Let me do that, Whit. You’re going to be late for your reservation.”
“Quit changing the subject,” Whitney says, looking at the package in my hand. “You don’t need wipes when it’s just a little pee.”
She finishes wrapping Owen’s bottom and gets off the floor, picking him up with the swift competence of someone who’s done it hundreds of times, which she has—Whitney is a mom. I knew it before, but not the way I know it now, in this moment. We haven’t lived in the same place since high school. There’s so much we’ve missed along the way to becoming adults.
“So you’ve never looked him up?” Whitney says. “Not even back then?”
“Not really.” This is completely false.
“You’re going to hand over the future of the resort to him, and you haven’t so much as searched to see if his business is legit?” She looks to Cam for backup, but he shrugs one blocky shoulder. He’s a few inches taller than Whitney and has arms that belong in a firefighter calendar.