by Sarah Dessen
“I wish,” he scoffed. “We were just down surfing and got offered a hundred each to unload this stuff.”
“Oh,” I said, as they passed me, moving down to the open van. “Right. What’s in the boxes?”
“No idea,” he replied, lifting one of the bins out and handing it to Trent. “Could be drugs or firearms. I don’t care as long as I get my money.”
This was exactly the kind of sentiment that had made Rick such a lousy class president. Then again, his only competition had been a girl who’d recently moved from California whom everyone hated, so it wasn’t like we had a lot of options.
Inside the open front door, another guy was moving around in the huge living room, organizing the stuff that had already been brought in. He, however, was not from here, something I discerned with one glance. First, he had on Oyster jeans—dark wash, with the signature O on the back pockets—which I hadn’t even known they made for guys. Second, he had a knit cap pulled down over his ears, even though it was early June. It was like pulling teeth to get Luke or any of his friends to wear anything but shorts, regardless of the temperature: beach guys don’t do winter wear, even in winter.
I knocked, but he didn’t hear me, too busy opening up one of the bins. I tried again, this time adding, “Colby Realty? VIP delivery?”
He turned, taking in the wine and the cheese. “Great,” he replied, all business. “Just put it anywhere.”
I walked over to the kitchen, where a couple of weeks ago I had been pulling price tags off spatulas and colanders, and arranged the tray, wine, and my card. I was just turning to leave when I caught a flutter of movement out of the corner of my eye. Then the yelling began.
“I don’t care what time it is, I needed that delivery today! It’s what I arranged and therefore what I expected and I won’t accept anything else!” At first, the source of this was just a blur. A beat later, though, it slowed enough for me to make out a woman wearing black jeans, a short-sleeved black sweater, and ballet flats. She had hair so blonde it was almost white, and a cell phone was clamped to her ear. “I ordered four tables, I want four tables. They should be here in the next hour and my account is to be adjusted accordingly for their lateness. I am spending too much money to put up with this bullshit!”
I looked at the guy in the Oyster jeans, still busy with the bins across the room, who appeared to not even be fazed by this. I, however, was transfixed, the way you are whenever you see crazy people up close. You just can’t look away, even when you know you should.
“No, that’s not going to work for me. No. No. Today, or forget the entire thing.” Now that she was standing still, I noted the set of her jaw, as well as the angular way her cheek and collar bones protruded. She was downright prickly, like one of those predator plants you see in deserts. “Fine. I’ll expect my deposit to be refunded on my card by tomorrow morning or you’ll be hearing from my attorney. Goodbye.”
She jabbed at the phone, turning it off. Then, as I watched, she threw it across the room, where it crashed against the wall that just had just been painted on Memorial Day weekend, leaving a black mark. Holy shit.
“Idiots,” she announced, her voice loud even in this big room. “Prestige Party Rental my ass. I knew the minute we crossed the Mason-Dixon Line it would be like working in the third world.”
Now, the guy looked at her, then at me, which of course made her finally notice me as well. “Who is this?” she snapped.
“From the realty place,” he told her. “VIP something or other.”
She looked mystified, so I pointed at the wine and cheese. “A welcome gift,” I said. “From Colby Realty.”
“It would have been better if you’d brought tables,” she grumbled, walking over to the platter and lifting the wrap. After peering down at it, she ate a grape, then shook her head. “Honestly, Theo, I’m already wondering if this was a mistake. What was I thinking?”
“We’ll find another place to rent tables,” he told her, in a voice that made it clear he was used to these kinds of tirades. He’d already picked up her phone, which he was now checking for damage. The wall, like me, was ignored.
“Where? This place is backwoods. There’s probably not another one for a hundred miles. God, I need a drink.” She picked up the wine I had brought, squinting at the bottle. “Cheap and Australian. Of course.”
I watched her as she started pulling open drawers, obviously looking for a corkscrew. I let her look in all the wrong places, just out of spite, before I finally moved over to the wet bar by the pantry to get it.
“Here.” I handed it to her, then grabbed the pen and paper we always left with the housekeeping card. “Prestige has a habit of screwing up orders. You should call Everything Island. They’re open until eight.”
I wrote down the number, then pushed it towards her. She just looked at it, then at me. She didn’t pick it up.
As I started towards the stairs, where Rick and Trent were banging up with another load, neither of the renters said anything. I was used to that. As far as they were concerned, this was their place now, with me as much scenery as the water. But when I spotted a price tag still on a little wicker basket by the door, I stopped and pulled it off anyway.
2
MY BEDROOM DOOR was open. Again.
“So I’m like,” I heard my sister Amber saying as I got closer, already feeling my blood pressure rising, “‘I understand you want to look like a model. I want to win the lottery so I don’t have to do this job. Let’s just both lower our expectations, okay?’”
“I hope you didn’t really say that,” my mother murmured. I swore I heard pages turning. If she was reading that issue of Hollyworld I haven’t even cracked yet, my head was going to explode.
“I wanted to. But instead I gave her the bangs she insisted on, even though they made her look about thirty-five years old.”
“Watch it.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Do I?”
I slapped my hand on the half-open door, pushing it wide into the room. Sure enough, they were on my bed. My mom was, in fact, reading my Hollyworld, while Amber—sporting yet another new hair color, this time a carrot orange—was in the process of taking a sip of a huge fountain Diet Coke from the Gas/Gro. Between them was an open can of cocktail nuts. “Get out,” I said, my voice low. “Now.”
“Oh, Emaline,” Amber began.
My mom, knowing better, had already put the magazine back in my drawer, and was digging around in my duvet—which I had just washed—for the top to the nuts. When she couldn’t find it, she gave up, getting to her feet with a guilty look on her face.
“You know what it’s like upstairs right now.”
“That has nothing to do with me,” I replied, walking over to my TV, which was showing some rerun of a modeling reality show, and turning it off. “This is my room. My room. You are not allowed to just come down here and trash it.”
“We weren’t trashing it,” my mom said, as she stepped behind me on her way to the door. “Just sitting here having a conversation.”
I ignored this, instead going over to my bed, where my sister was for some reason still sitting. I dug under my pillow until I found the top to the nuts. I held it up, evidence.
My mom sighed. “I was hungry.”
“Then eat in the kitchen.”
“We have no kitchen!” Amber protested. Now she was finally moving, although, as usual, she took her sweet time. “Have you been up there lately, Miss Private Entrance? It’s like a war zone.”
“It’s not a private entrance,” I replied. “It’s the garage.”
“Whatever! Daddy’s torn out everything. There’s no place to sit, no place for the TV …”
As if in support of her point, I heard the pop of a compressor from upstairs, making us all jump. My dad had been doing carpentry for so long big noises no longer affected him. The rest of us, though, were still nervous as cats once he started up with the nail gun.
“What about your room?�
� I asked Amber, as my mom passed behind me, stopping briefly to tuck in the tag of my shirt, which apparently had been sticking out all afternoon. Great.
“It’s too messy,” she replied as she slowly made her way to the door, knocking a pile of folded laundry off the bureau on the way.
“Wonder why,” I said, but she ignored me. Sighing, I bent down to pick it up. A beat later my mom, still silent, joined me. Amber and her traffic-cone hair had left the building, sighing melodramatically as she went. Though older than me, she’d once been the youngest. Now, all these years later, she still acted like a baby, although we now all blamed it on her being the middle child.
“You’re in a mood,” my mom finally said. It was typical of her manner, as well as her approach. Where my sisters and I tended towards loud and bombastic, she was always understated and quiet. It was like raising us just sucked all the fight right out of her.
“I’ve been yelled at too much today,” I told her, getting to my feet. “And you know I hate when you guys come in here.”
“I’m sorry.” She held out the nuts to me, a peace offering. I shook my head, but still couldn’t help but pick an almond out of the mix.
“No strip-mining,” she said, helping herself to a handful. Selecting just the good stuff was one of her biggest pet peeves. “So isn’t that engagement thing tonight?”
The nail gun popped again upstairs, once, twice. “Brooke and Andy’s. Yeah.”
“Maureen must be beside herself.”
“She is. It’s like wedding planning is a drug and she’s always jonesing for a fix.”
“Emaline,” she said, but she was smiling. She and Luke’s mom had both grown up in Colby, although my mom was seven years younger. Still, everyone knew that Mrs. Templeton had been on the pep squad and dated the captain of the football team, while my mom got pregnant the summer after junior year by a tourist boy. People didn’t forget anything in a small town.
“I’m serious,” I told her. “You should hear the stuff they are all saying about me and Luke. It’s like they expect us to announce our engagement at the wedding, or something.”
Her eyes got wide, the nuts in her hand frozen in midair. “Don’t,” she said, in a rare stern tone, “even joke about that.”
“Don’t hang out in my room,” I replied.
“It’s hardly the same offense.” She was still giving me the evil eye. “Take it back.”
“Mom, honestly. Take-backs at your age? Really?”
“Do it.”
She wasn’t kidding. That’s the thing about someone who rarely gets upset: when they do, you notice. I cleared my throat. “I’m sorry. I was just making a stupid joke. Of course Luke and I aren’t getting engaged this summer.”
“Thank you.” She ate a nut.
“We’ll definitely wait until after freshman year,” I continued. “I think I’ll need to be adjusted to college before I start all the planning.”
She just looked at me, chewing. All right, not funny.
“Mom, come on,” I said, but she ignored me, going out into the hallway as there was another pop from upstairs. “I’m sorry. I’m just …”
She was still walking, towards the sound of the nail gun.
“… being stupid. Okay?”
After a beat, she turned around. From this distance, you never would have guessed she was thirty-six. With the same long, brown hair that I had, her body toned from regular workouts, she looked closer to late twenties, if that. It was the reason she was more often taken for Amber and Margo’s sister rather than their stepmother, why when we were kids she always got That Look at supermarkets and bank lines as people tried to do the math. They could never figure it out.
“You know,” she said finally, “I only get upset because I want you to have everything I didn’t.”
“The moon and more,” I said, and she nodded.
This was our thing, from the days before my dad, Amber, and Margo came into the picture, the days I didn’t even really remember. But she’d told me often of a book she read aloud every night when I was a baby, about a mother bear and her little cub who won’t go to sleep.
What if I get hungry? he asks.
I’ll bring you a snack, she tells him.
What if I’m thirsty?
I’ll fetch you water.
What if I get scared?
I’ll order all the monsters away.
Finally he asks, What if that’s not enough? What if I need something else?
And she replies, Whatever you need, I will find a way to get it to you. I will give you the moon, and more.
This, she always said, was how she felt as a teenage single mother, raising me alone. She had nothing, but wanted everything for me. Still did.
Now, she pointed at me with her free hand. “You behave yourself at that party. This is about Brooke and Andy, not you and your opinions.”
“You know,” I said, as she turned around again, “contrary to what you believe, I don’t actually think everything’s about me.”
Her only response was a snort, and then she was gone. The gun continued to pop as she climbed the stairs, but a moment later, it stopped. In the quiet following, I heard her say something, and my dad laughed. Typical. We might make fun of her, but when they were together, the joke was always on us.
“I heard that,” I yelled, even though I didn’t. More laughter.
Back in my room, I surveyed the damage, which was easy because that morning, like always, I’d left the place spotless: bed made, drawers shut, nothing on the floor or bureau tops. Now, I spotted Amber’s keys and sunglasses on my desk, my mom’s flip-flops parked under my bedside table. There was also a crumpled piece of paper on the floor beside my trash can. I sighed, then walked over and picked it up. I was just about to toss it in when I saw my mom’s handwriting and smoothed it out instead.
It was from one of the Colby Realty giveaway notepads, which were all over our house; you’d be hard-pressed to find anything else to write on. In her neat script it said simply, Your father called. 4:15 p.m.
I looked at my watch. It was 6:30, which meant I had less than a half hour before I needed to leave for Luke’s and the party. But this was more important. I took the note and went upstairs.
The first thing I saw when I stepped into the war zone that was currently our kitchen was my dad, shooting a nail into a piece of skirting board by the pantry door. The kitchen itself was empty, as it had been since he’d been refinishing the floors. My mom was watching him from atop our new dishwasher, which was functioning as furniture, island, and catch-all area until it got installed.
Bam! went the nail gun, and I jumped. My mom looked over at me, clearly thinking I’d come up to continue our conversation from earlier. When I held up the note, though, her expression changed.
“I was going to”—Bam!—“tell you,” she replied.
“But you didn’t.”
Bam! “I know. It was a mistake. I just got distracted when you came in all upset about—”
Bam! Bam!
I held up my hand, stopping her. “Dad!” I yelled. Another pop. “Dad!”
Finally, he stopped, then turned around, seeing me. “Well, hey there, Emaline,” he said, smiling. “How was your day?”
“Can you stop that for just one second?”
“Stop working?” he asked.
“Would you mind?”
He glanced at my mom, who stress-ate another handful of nuts. “All right,” he said, as easygoing as always, and put the nail gun down, trading it for a Mountain Dew sitting on the dishwasher. My mom and I were both quiet as he twisted off the top, taking a big sip. He looked at me, at her, then back at me. “Whoa. What’d I miss?”
“Nothing,” my mom replied.
“She didn’t tell me my father called,” I said at the same time.
My dad looked at her, a weary expression on his face. “This again?” he said. “Really?”
“I forgot,” she told us both. “It was a mistake.”
&
nbsp; I looked at him, making my doubt about this clear. He put down the bottle. “But you did get the message. Right?”
“Only because she threw it all crumpled up on my floor.”
He shrugged, as if this actually was the same thing. “What matters is that now you know.”
I exhaled, shaking my head. Thick as thieves, these two were. I had never been right enough for him to take my side on anything. “I just don’t understand why you’re so weird about this,” I said to my mom.
“Yeah, you do,” my dad said.
We were all quiet for a moment. All I could hear was the TV in Amber’s room, which worked just fine, in case you were wondering. “I took the message,” my mom said finally, “then brought it down there to leave it for you. But when I heard you coming, I trashed it, figuring I’d tell you myself. But I … didn’t. I’m sorry.”
The thing is, I knew this was true. She was sorry. In her real life, she was a capable and responsible mom, wife, and daughter. But when it came to my father, it was like she was eighteen all over again, and she always acted like it.
I looked down at the note. “Did he say what he wanted?”
She shook her head. “Just to call him when you get a chance.”
“Okay.” I checked my watch: 6:40. Crap. “I have to go. I’m already late.”
“Have fun,” she called after me as I headed back to my room. It was a peace offering, and a little bit too late, but I nodded and waved anyway, so she knew we were okay. They were quiet as I went down the stairs and started down the hallway to my room. Once there, though, I could hear their voices, muffled overhead, as she gave him the explanation she just couldn’t ever seem to relay to me. Whatever it was, it was short. By the time I was in the shower, the nail gun was popping again.
* * *
There’s a difference between the words father and dad. And it’s more than three letters.
Up until the age of ten, I didn’t know this. I also didn’t know much about where I’d come from, other than my mom had me when she was a senior in high school, which was why she was so much younger than the mothers of all my friends. Then, one day in fifth grade, my teacher Mr. Champion got up in front of the whiteboard and wrote, My Family Tree. And just like that, things got complicated.
