“Mmmm. I’m so hungry. And look at this delicious lunch!” I pretended to take a bite of her belly.
My mother never pretended Danielle was a burrito. If she had, it would have had to be a whole-wheat one, with no sour cream because that adds too much fat and dairy. I loved giving Danielle these moments she never got from Mom. That I never got from Mom. It was like I was giving them to both of us.
I heard a noise on the diving board, a loud whoop, and looked up to see Camden backflipping into the water.
As if the last year had never happened. As if someone had rewound the tape, and here we were, in the exact places we’d been exactly twelve months before.
But I’d become a different person since last May, and a switch inside me flicked on. There was a blinking YES in neon lights.
Oh God those green eyes and those shoulders and the shaggy straight hair, and oh God.
And that thing that took place in the restroom, that ridiculous and horrifying thing we shall not talk about ever again, did that count as a conversation?
They say, there are no do-overs in life.
I say, anything is Possible.
3
“What are you thinking about, ducky?” asked Richard the next day.
I was kneeling in Aisle 2 of Millie’s Art Supply, staring off into space.
“I’m thinking there are way, way too many colors of craft sand in the world,” I said.
My stepdad didn’t bat an eye. “Yes, I agree. War, poverty, climate change, and craft sand. Times are bleak.”
I really loved him a lot.
“Look,” I said, pointing to the bottom shelf and the bags I’d already arranged in official rainbow order. “I went all ROY G. BIV, and then I opened the last box and found this. Turquoise!”
Richard sighed. “I’ll help you make a space between the green and the blue,” he simply said, and sat down beside me on the linoleum floor.
Working together like that, stacking bags of craft sand in swift, efficient movements, it was easy to feel that what we were doing was important. Like an aesthetically perfect shelf display could change someone’s life. (And who says it couldn’t? It totally could.) It was these microscopic here-and-now moments that had helped me the most. I had a lot of them in my job at Millie’s, which Richard owned. Three afternoons a week and all day on Sundays.
Which of course was going to make it that much harder to quit.
Finally, we got down to the last two bags of turquoise. “If there’s a box we don’t know about,” said Richard as he balanced them on the pile, “and it’s filled with, say, eggplant-colored sand, I may have to kill someone.”
It was almost six o’clock and closing time. He patted my back and stood up slowly, stretched, then walked over to lock the front door. He took a moment to carefully smooth down the lost-dog notice someone had posted inside the vestibule. FIND VERA! it shouted at us all day.
“Come on,” said Richard. “Mom and Dani are waiting.” We were supposed to meet them at the restaurant next door for our regular Sunday session of “all of us sitting down in the same place at the same time,” occasionally known as dinner.
“Will you do me a favor in there?” I asked as we headed out the back. “When the moment’s right, can you ask me if I’m excited about summer?”
We all had our things at Moose McIntyre’s.
My mother liked to line up the scalloped edge of the paper place mat with the edge of the table, as if she could get this one thing to be perfect, everything else in life would follow.
Richard always studied the menu intently, right thumb stroking his right eyebrow, even though he ordered the same exact thing every time.
Danielle did the maze on the kids’ menu, then the word search, then colored the turtle who was named Shelly and wore a sailor suit for reasons nobody ever understood.
I sat next to the window, counting every familiar face that walked by outside. My record for a single meal was forty-eight.
After we got our food, but before everyone was done, Richard gave me a look and I nodded.
“So, Ari,” he said. “You’ve got what, two more weeks of school? Excited about summer?”
He was good. Convincing. We’d done this little show before. It was Mom Management Vaudeville.
“I am. In fact, I have an idea I want to run by you, if you’ll promise to keep an open mind.”
Mom put down her grilled chicken wrap and rested both hands on her place mat. “We always keep an open mind,” she said, in a way that would never convince anyone she had an open mind.
I glanced at Dani, who was snugly in her own little world, focused on her turtle. I took a deep breath, then looked squarely at Mom. The only way out was through.
“There’s a morning-shift housekeeper job available at the River’s Edge B&B, and I’d like to apply.”
Mom and Richard didn’t react, like they were waiting for the punch line.