“Sunflowers,” Wilson observes.
“My mom’s studying to get her real estate license,” I say. “She’s kind of stressed, so—” I hold up the flowers. I want to tell Wilson that the sunflowers remind my mom of summers at her grandmother’s house, and ask if he knows about the link between smell and memory in the brain. He’ll call me “smarty-pants” like he did when I was a kid.
“I’m here for tulips,” he says with a smile. His eyes are the same color as Wil’s: turquoise with flecks of gold. His beard has reached epic, inscrutable proportions, and his hair has gone silver at the temples.
“It’s our anniversary. Henney and me,” he says. “Twenty-five years. I brought her tulips on our first date. And doughnuts from Anastasia’s.”
“Oh, wow,” I say. “That’s—congratulations. Tell her—congratulations.”
“I will.” He nods. We’re quiet for a moment, and I imagine what it’d be like to have a dad that’d stuck with my mom for twenty-five years. What Wil doesn’t realize is that when he cut me out of his life, I didn’t just lose him. I lost apple wedges and peanut butter served on a paper plate and bodysurfing contests and forts made of old sails and couch pillows. Dad things.
“I should get home,” I say, taking a small step backward.
“You two gonna fix whatever happened between you?” Wilson asks, pressing pause on my heart. It’s one of the things I admire about Wilson—the words in his head are the words on his tongue.
I try to swallow, but my throat is tight. “He’s with Ana now—”
“My son has a lot of my good qualities,” Wilson interrupts, “but he’s got some of the bad, too. He’s stubborn. Can’t let things go.”
“We’ve both changed a lot over the last year,” I mumble. The words are greeting-card generic. They don’t belong to Wil and me. “We drifted apart.”
Wilson shakes his head.
I study the floor. “It’s up to Wil. He’s the one who’s pissed at me. So.”
“Fix it, Brooklyn,” Wilson says sternly. “Whatever happened, happened. It’s never too late to fix your screwups. Trust me.” He reaches into the fridge for a bouquet of tulips. Yellow. Then he claps me on the back with his free hand.
“But Ana—”
“Ana, what?” he says roughly. “I’m talking about the friendship. I’m not talking about dating or whatever. You don’t think about painting the boat if the hull is rotted, do you?”
“No,” I whisper.
“I think we got everything.” Wil emerges from the produce section, his arm looped around Ana’s waist. I want to hate her, but she’s not the kind of girl that elicits emotions of that magnitude. She’s pretty, even under grocery store lights, and somehow isn’t a jerk about it. She’s our senior class president, and I heard she tutors kids downtown twice a week and didn’t quit once she got into college. She makes good grades. She probably flosses. She’s good. Wil deserves a good girl.
“Oh,” Wil says when he sees me. “Hey.” He studies my ear. He hasn’t looked directly at me in a year.
“Hey, guys.” I accidentally snap a sunflower neck.
“Bridge.” Ana smiles a little too big and reaches for Wil’s free hand. Her hair is dark and shiny. Her eyes are the color of a ring Wil bought me at a museum gift shop during a fifth-grade school trip—an amber oval with a scorpion frozen inside.
“Anniversary party?” I ask. Someone has to say something.
“Oh. Yeah.” Wil holds out his basket. I pretend to be interested in the three different brands of crackers and four hunks of cheese. “We’re doing a family thing, the four of us.”
“Fun.” I don’t mean to sound hurt, but I can see my pain register in Wil’s pursed lips.
“It’s not a big deal,” Wil murmurs. He doesn’t like to hurt people. Even people who deserve it.
“Speak for yourself,” Wilson says gruffly. “Twenty-five years of marriage feels like a pretty big deal to me.”
“So!” Ana chirps. “We’re going to the bonfire after. Are you going, Bridge?”
I shake my head. “I don’t really go to those things anymore.”
She claps her hand over her mouth. “Oh my God,” she says.
“It’s okay,” I say, feeling suddenly exhausted.
“No. I think it’s, like, really mature, how you’ve turned things around.”
“Ana.” Wil rubs the back of his neck.
“I should get home,” I say.
“Hey. Think about what I said, missy.” Wilson shakes his tulips at me.
“Yeah.” Face burning, I wave good-bye and push my cart down the aisle with entirely too much speed and purpose for the balloon aisle. I can feel Wil and his dad and Ana watching me, and I wish I were oceans away from all of them. Wilson was wrong: There is no way to fix what I did to Wil and me. I didn’t damage us. I incinerated us. Whatever I felt earlier—that sudden, strange burst of nostalgia—has evaporated. I want to be gone again, more than ever.
WIL
Winter, Junior Year
BRIDGE has been gone too long. She’s not coming back tonight. I can feel it.
I’m standing in the workshop doorway, staring into the December dusk, waiting for the rattle of her pickup. The longer the silence stretches, the more charged I get. By the time it’s too dark to tell the sky from the ground, I’m pacing.
I’ve only felt this way once before, when we were little kids at the beach and still brand-new to each other. Without warning, Bridge leaned her pink salt lips close to my ear and said, Do you ever think about swimming toward the horizon and not stopping till you get there? Just to see? Then she jumped up and ran into the surf, and the panic turned my veins to live wires. She didn’t understand the ocean yet. I yelled after her to Wait, hold up, but she didn’t stop until I screamed, I can swim out farther than you! Bet you! Twenty bucks! Bridge has always had a way of shaking me up. Most of the time, it’s a damn good thing.
Not tonight.
I knew it the second she left for the party: I should have swallowed my pride and gone with her. It didn’t matter that I had something else planned for us. I should have gone. But not for her reasons (Leigh’s parents never go out of town! We have to celebrate the end of midterms! Blow off some steam!). For mine. Even though I kind of hate high-school parties, which I know amounts to teenage sacrilege, I should’ve gone just because she wanted me to and the clock is ticking on our time together.
Junior year will be gone before we know it, and soon after that, she’ll pick a college. She hasn’t said it, but I know it won’t be here. Bridge is not the kind of girl who stays in one place. She belongs everywhere.