Approaching the table, I pick up a familiar and ragged notebook open to a drawing of a necklace. In the picture, the pieces of sea glass fan out on a delicate, nearly translucent chain. The copper, a rusty red color, encases each piece. I’ve seen this necklace in its final form so many times, and the effect is magical.
I love this necklace. Mom designed it a few years ago, and it’s her most popular item in her Etsy shop. For a long time, she’s been promising to make me one, but most of the time, it takes every bit of initiative in her bones to get her to fulfill an order, so making a necklace for zero profit—?even for her own daughter—?isn’t likely. It even became a sort of running joke. Every time she’d get an order, she’d smile at me and say, “Another call for the Precious.”
“Gollum is so demanding,” I’d say.
“But we needs it, Precious,” she’d say in a freakishly accurate impersonation of Gollum, and we’d laugh and I’d help her get out all her materials, and the world was small and okay and ours.
“Goddammit to hell,” Mom says now, pulling my eyes from the sketch. She’s attempting to edge a sliver of gorgeous blue-green in the soldered copper but keeps smearing it onto the surface of the glass. That stuff is hot, too. Her fingers are red from little burns and flecks of copper.
“Can I help?” I ask, pushing the beer out of her reach.
She startles in her chair. “Oh, baby. I didn’t hear you come in.”
“Alas, I am here.” I look around for an order form to get some idea of how much time we have until it needs to ship, but there’s nothing but the notebook and materials. “Who ordered the Precious this time?”
Not even the hint of a smile. She doesn’t look up, just cleans the glass with some Goo Gone and starts edging again.
“Mom?”
“What?”
“The order? How long do you have to make it?”
“Um . . . there’s no time limit.” She finally gets the edging right and moves on to the next piece.
“Oh.” I fight a smile, finally understanding why she’s acting so weird. I start to back away from the table. “I’ll just pretend I didn’t see all this, then.”
She finally glances up at me. “Why would you do that?”
“Because. The necklace.” I sweep my hand over the table.
Mom frowns at me. “Yes. The necklace. I’m making it for Eva.”
My stomach plunges to my feet. “What?”
“Eva. I told you I thought of some things that might make her feel more at home.”
“And that thing is . . . a necklace.”
She shrugs, her eyes never leaving her task. “You’d be surprised what makes you feel loved when you lose the person you love the most.”
I blink. Over and over again, hoping the scene will change, but it never does. When I don’t move or say anything else, she looks up.
“Ugh. Baby, don’t look at me like that.” She returns her gaze to her noble task. “Can you help me, please?”
I keep staring at her, her too-big tank top hanging off her shoulders, her long fingers growing more and more steady as she works. She always gets better, more confident, the longer she sticks with something, her chronic creative paralysis fading with each motion. I know this about her.
It makes me wonder—?what does she know about me? What would she say if someone asked her my favorite food or what scares me or about a sure way to get me to laugh? Would she have an answer at all?
“Gracie?” she says when I don’t answer. “A little help?”
Closing my eyes, I inhale through my nose and let it out slowly, something Emmy taught me to do a few years ago when I’d get stressed about piano recitals. When I feel a little less violent, I open my eyes and find Jay standing in the doorway to the kitchen. He flicks his eyes from me to my mom to the necklace and back to me. He looks concerned, and I wonder how long he’s been standing there and how much he overheard.
The violence floods back in, but it’s a childlike kind of violence. The kind that wants to stomp my feet and bury my face in my mother’s skirt and ask her—?beg her—?to see me.
But I can’t ask her to do that.
Because if I do, she’ll tilt her head at me and smile, maybe even cup my face in her hands and kiss my forehead.
I do see you, baby.
And that answer is almost worse than nothing at all.
“I have to go to work,” I say flatly.
Mom doesn’t say goodbye as I walk out the door.
Jay stops me when I’m halfway down the driveway. I don’t hear his feet eating at the gravel until he’s right next to me, hooking a hand on my arm and swinging me around. I jerk away from him, nearly losing my grip on my bike, and keep walking, pushing it along next to me.
“Grace.”
“I have to go to work, Jay. Shouldn’t you be asleep or playing Mario Kart or jerking off or something?”
“Nice. And I have work too, you know.”
“No, I don’t. And I don’t care.”
“Jesus, I’m just trying to check on you. Your mom—?”
“What, run out of flirty material to try out on her?”
“You’re impossible.”
I stop, turning to glare at him, my fingers white on my bike handles. His hair is all mussed and his eyes have turned soft. I remember how he used to whisper my name, over and over, while he kissed my eyes, my nose, my ears, my mouth.
Grace. Kiss. Gracie. Kiss.
What a load of shit.
“I’ll be impossible if I want to,” I say. “And you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
His gaze turns hard. “And whose fault is that, huh? But I do know your mom’s a bitch who needs to grow up.”
I shove him. Hard, in the chest with both hands. His eyes pop in surprise, and he stumbles back a few steps. Early-morning sunlight spills over his hair, turning it into gold. I shove him again.
“Shut. Up. You don’t know a damn thing about my mother. Your oaf of a father might be in her life for now, but that doesn’t give you the right to make judgments, to comfort me like we’re some sort of sick family. You don’t have a right to anything, Jay. So butt out.”
He straightens his shirt, his expression an angry cloud. “What the hell, Grace? Look, I’m sorry about the other night, okay? You think I’m happy about this whole act our parents are putting on? I was supposed to be in Chicago with—?”
His expression darkens even more and closes up. He takes a deep breath, hooking his hand on the back of his neck as he stares at the gravel.
“Look,” he goes on, “I knew you moving in here would piss you off, so I went with it, okay? But now I’m just trying to help. Jesus, I’m trying to say you deserve better.”
My next string of words gets stuck in my throat. I hate Jay Lanier. He betrayed me out of spite. Took my right to move on from him and turned it against me. He mocked this situation we’re in, like it was all a big joke. Even when we were together, in those quiet name-whispering moments, he never knew me. Never. And yeah, that was my fault, my choice, but it still stings that he never even realized it. Never knew I was holding back.
“Don’t pretend like you give a shit, Jay. Just don’t.”
And then I toss my leg over my bike’s seat, the knot in my throat thick enough that it pushes hot tears out of my eyes. I pedal away from him and convince myself it’s just the salty wind making them water.
Chapter Thirteen