“I came by to see if the girl is okay. The one you were trying to get over the bridge last night?”
“How did you . . . ?” she started to ask, thinking that this was indeed a small place if he’d already heard. Then the events of the night before came rushing back to her sleep-addled brain. “Oh, never mind. We talked. I kind of forgot with everything that went on. Sorry.” She held up her hands and shook her head. “Obviously I need some caffeine.”
He took it the way she feared. “There’s a great coffee shop just over the bridge. Near the Food Lion? I could take you . . .”
Feeling foolish for putting him on the spot with her stupid caffeine comment, she waved her hand in the air. “Oh, uh, that’s okay, I can just make some coffee here.”
Did he look disappointed? Was she hoping he was? She missed being married, missed having all of this . . . uncertainty off the table. She never wanted to be here again. And yet here she was. And here he was. She forced herself to look past him, just over his shoulder. He was just too good-looking and sometimes the reality of who he was sunk in all over again, filling her with that giddy fan-girl euphoria. She needed to get a grip.
“So is she okay? I wanted to apologize for turning you all away. But I could lose my job for messing with scheduled maintenance. If it had been an emergency vehicle I could’ve done something but . . .” He looked at her and she forced herself to look right back.
“She’s fine. We got over the bridge as soon as it opened back up and it was no big deal.”
“I should’ve offered to get you a boat,” he said regretfully.
“Really. It was fine to wait. She wouldn’t have liked all that effort anyway.”
And yet something still nagged at her about it, the sentiments of those proposing a more reliable bridge echoing. She understood what they were saying. While the old bridge was sentimental and romantic, it wasn’t always safe. Thankfully her emergency hadn’t been that urgent, but what if it had been? What if seconds had counted? She hated to think of what would happen if that were the case. She was thankful that all was well with Amber, but what if the delay had cost her the baby? While she wanted to be on Kyle and Claire’s side, the practical part of her said that replacing the bridge was the smarter way to go. Of course, she thought as she leaned against the doorjamb, she wasn’t going to tell him that.
“Did you want to come in? I could make that coffee,” she asked, attempting to look nonchalant, as if she invited the star of one of her favorite movies of all time inside every day. When he said yes, her heart did a little leap and she internally scolded herself for being ridiculous.
He followed her into the kitchen and surveyed the rest of the house as she busied herself with dumping grounds into a filter and putting water in the coffee maker. “Need any help?” he asked.
She shook her head. “No thanks.”
“You haven’t done much with the place,” he observed, then chuckled. “It looks like Ada’s going to walk back in here any minute.”
“Well, she left me a lot of her things. I haven’t really had the heart to get rid of any of it.” She looked around. It really did look like an elderly person’s house. Maybe it was time to purge.
He shrugged. “If you want to start, I’d be willing to help you haul stuff away. A buddy of mine’s got a truck we could use.”
“Thank you, that’s a very nice offer. Maybe someday I’ll take you up on it.”
He let out a dramatic sigh and leaned forward. “Is there a reason why you keep turning me down?” He gave her that grin of his.
Her heart racing, she cast about for the right thing to say in response. There was a reason, but she didn’t want to get into it with him. Actually, there were a lot of reasons. “I didn’t know I was turning you down,” she finally offered weakly.
He laughed. “I offer to take you to get coffee, you say no. I offer to help you out around here, you say no. I come by here and it takes you, like, five minutes to invite me in. I thought you were going to shut the door in my face!”
“I’m sorry,” she said and gave him a rueful smile. “I didn’t see it that way.” The coffeemaker burbled and she pulled mugs from the cabinet and cream from the refrigerator. She gestured to the sugar sitting beside the coffeemaker and handed Kyle a spoon.
He took it and with his back to her continued talking. “You sure you’re not just playing hard to get? Or maybe you’re mad about the bridge thing.” He carried his coffee to the table and she focused on hers, trying not to think of how surreal it was to have him sitting at her kitchen table sipping coffee.
“I’m not mad! I promise.” She smiled as she doused her coffee with cream and then added a packet of sweetener.
“So you’re playing hard to get then.”
She carried her coffee over to the table and sat across from him. Was he seriously hitting on her? “No! I’m not . . . I just . . . I don’t really know what I’m doing,” she confessed. “I’m not exactly . . . experienced in this type of thing.”
He held up his finger and made quotation marks in the air. “This type of thing,” he said. “So it’s like that?” His grin told her he was teasing her, and enjoying it. She couldn’t help but think that Ryan would like this guy, ex-movie star or not. They would’ve been friends. The thought warmed her like the summer sun beginning its descent in the sky. She’d missed a gorgeous beach day, slept it away. The nice part of living at Sunset was that there were always other days ahead.
His face lost all traces of teasing as he braced his elbows on his knees and tried to catch her eye. “I’d like to take you out. So if not for coffee or to the junkyard”—he smiled—“then for dinner?”
She took a sip of coffee and stared down into her mug. In Just This Once, her favorite scene was when Brady asked the awkward girl out over the phone. The girl thought it was a joke, a prank he’d been put up to. Emily had always savored the moment on film when she realized he was totally serious, that he actually liked her. As a teenage girl watching that movie, she had become that girl, her heart had soared as if she were the one being asked out by this gorgeous guy who should’ve never noticed her. It was her dream come true on film. And now her dream was coming true in real life. She realized she’d stopped breathing and exhaled loudly, knowing all attempts at playing it cool were lost.
“Sure,” she said. “I could do that. I mean, if you want.” She put the mug back down.
One corner of his mouth turned up. “Now we’re getting somewhere.” He took another drink from his mug.
The back door opened and their heads turned in unison. He looked from Amber to Emily, then back again, addressing Emily. “So you brought her . . . here?”
Emily nodded once, then looked at Amber as she gestured in Kyle’s direction. “This is Kyle Baker. He’s one of the bridge tenders and was on duty when the bridge was closed. He came by to check on you.”
Amber waved at Kyle. “I know Kyle,” she said dully, unimpressed. No one here seemed to be all that enthused about Kyle and Emily couldn’t figure out why. Granted, he’d starred in a hit movie years ago and not everyone felt about it the way she did, but still. He had been a movie star, if however brief his stardom lasted. That was worthy of more than the banal response he seemed to garner from the other residents of the island.
“I’m fine,” Amber continued. “So you can tell my dad to stop checking up on me.”
Kyle blinked and looked over at Emily before addressing Amber. “I didn’t come by because of your dad. Really!”
Amber let out a little sarcastic sputter. “Sure,” she said. Turning to Emily she said, “I’ll be in my room,” and slipped away. Emily cringed a little at how cozy she already sounded and questioned her offer to let her stay. But the last thing Amber needed was to feel that she didn’t have a safe place.
He waited until Amber closed the door to speak. “Her room?”
Emily shrugged as if the phrase meant nothing, but it had taken her aback slightly, how easily the girl had laid claim to E
mily’s home. “She’s staying here. Temporarily.”
“You sure she knows that it’s temporary?”
“I’m not sure about anything. I kind of offered and now . . . she’s here.” She spoke in a hushed tone, not wanting Amber to hear. “It’s kind of a mess but I want to help her.”
He drained his mug and carried it to the sink, washing it out and placing it in the dishwasher. She couldn’t decide what was odder—that Brady Rutledge just had coffee at her kitchen table or that he did his own dishes. Without being asked.
“Thank you,” she said, an incredulous tone creeping into her voice.
“No problem.” He shrugged. “Just be careful. Her father can be a pretty intimidating guy. And he’s not really into outsiders.”
“Yeah, he sounds like an . . . odd guy.”
Kyle shook his head. “You don’t know the half of it. Look, thanks for the coffee. I’ll let you take care of things with Amber. I’m sure things’ll work out.” Looking at his face, she could tell he wasn’t sure at all. “Maybe on our date you can tell me how you got involved with her . . . and why she’s here. How’s tomorrow night?” He took a few steps in the direction of the front door.
She should say she was busy, that she needed more warning, play hard to get. And yet after the last twenty-four hours she just didn’t have the energy for games or manipulation. She took a few steps toward him, her bare feet suddenly cold on the wood floor. “Sure,” she said, rubbing one foot up and down her calf to ward off the chill. She would grab her favorite pair of Ryan’s socks as soon as he was gone. She followed him the rest of the way to the door.
He opened the door, held it there for a moment, studying her. “Don’t worry so much. It’ll all work out.” He winked and was gone, leaving her to stand, blinking and trying to take his advice long after he left.
Eighteen
That night she logged onto her computer and went straight to Google. Now that she had accepted the date with Kyle she wanted to learn whatever she could about his story. Why did people seem hesitant around him? And what was with the tragedy Marta had found when she Googled him? Claire treated him with outright disdain, and he seemed to accept it. And why had he abandoned Hollywood for this beach hamlet? They had oceans in LA. If memory served, he’d even had a pretty hot and heavy romance with his costar. Emily remembered because she’d felt jealous at the time. She had to laugh. If she’d been able to tell her former self what her future self would be doing one day, her former self would’ve never believed it.
There was surprisingly little on Kyle—or Brady, as he was known then. A search of his real name turned up some old records from his high school years and a small article in the local paper about his being discovered at a casting call in Atlanta he had attended on a lark. At the time of the article he was filming the movie. He called the whole experience “a whirlwind” and said he missed his girlfriend back home. Emily knit her brows together over that. Girlfriend back home? She wondered who that could be. Soon she would pin Claire down, insist she tell her the whole story. Of course, to do that she’d have to admit that she was going out with him and she wasn’t exactly ready to discuss that with anyone.
Dissatisfied with her findings, she erased the search bar of Google and sat staring at the empty space, knowing there was one more thing she had to do, something that had nothing to do with Kyle and everything to do with what she felt about the bridge debate. It had been nagging at her ever since she’d found the bridge closed as a frightened teenage girl whimpered beside her in the dark of night. She couldn’t pretend that hadn’t happened and—while it had all turned out okay—there was no guarantee that someday it wouldn’t. The threat of harm coming to someone was too real to avoid. At the meeting the state representatives had urged citizens to leave comments, expressing why they were for or against the bridge. “We will read every comment and take it under advisement,” the guy who seemed to be in charge had said.
“And then do just what you were going to do anyway,” Claire had muttered beside her.
But whether it made a difference or not, Emily wanted to register her thoughts, to try to relay the danger she had felt in being closed off on the island with no way to cross. Sometimes it was really important for someone to be able to get to the other side and for nothing to hinder that from happening. She stared at the picture of the proposed new bridge that came up on the state site, the sturdy structure rising into the sky. That bridge, she could see, would not keep people from crossing. She scrolled down to the comment section, took a deep breath, and began to type, silently apologizing to Kyle—and Claire—as she did.
She finished her comment, revising and amending it so many times she finally gave up and just hit Send, feeling a little sick as it went flying into the Internet Neverland, irretrievable and, even worse, bearing her actual name that the state had required for submission. Emily supposed this was to deter hacks and prohibit people from using the site to incite arguments on the topic. People hid behind anonymous commenting opportunities, grew bolder and more outrageous if they didn’t have to own up to what they’d said. She guessed the state was trying to avoid that, especially on this hot-button issue.
Emily had felt the undercurrent of people’s emotions running through the meeting room that night and recognized the bridge debate was potentially charged. There were those who were powerfully attached to that bridge, and she suspected they all had reasons of their own, memories and feelings conjured by the past. She knew what that was like better than most. And yet in this case, she couldn’t go along with the desire to hold on to what was, not after she felt the danger that night in the car.
She looked up and saw Amber sitting on the couch, staring at her. She had no idea when the girl had entered the room. “Hi,” she said. “You okay?” She seemed to be asking Amber that a lot.
Amber nodded. “I just got up. I fell asleep for a while. Then when I came out here you seemed pretty absorbed in whatever you were doing.” She gestured at Emily’s laptop. Emily was glad it was turned at an angle that prohibited Amber from seeing what she’d been doing. She didn’t want to explain or leave Amber to draw her own conclusions why she was on the state’s site devoted to the bridge debate. She closed the laptop.
“What would you like to do tonight?” she asked. “You hungry?”
Amber thought about it for a minute. “Not especially. I mean maybe, like, a snack?”
“What if I made popcorn?” Emily stood up, stowed the computer on the shelf where she typically kept it. “And not that microwave kind either. The old-fashioned kind, on the stove. My—” She stopped short of saying, “My husband taught me how.” She didn’t want to bring Ryan up to Amber, not when she’d just seen Kyle there. It was all too much to get into for now.
Amber shrugged. “Sure, I guess.” She got up and followed Emily into the kitchen, watching attentively, as if she would be quizzed later on the process, as she took out butter and oil and popcorn and got out the big pot Ada had left behind that was just tall and heavy enough for the task. Emily found herself talking about each step as she did, trying hard not to think about the night Ryan had taught her when it was clear he wasn’t going to beat the cancer. Though he hadn’t spelled it out for her, she knew he knew he had to pass it along to her, seeing as how she loved his popcorn so much. She had to learn to make it on her own. She’d cried her way through the first batches she made after he died, but the sight of popcorn kernels no longer brought automatic tears to her eyes.
Moments later she was finished with a huge batch. She dumped the popcorn into a large stainless steel bowl and carried it into the den, plopping it between the two of them. “We’ll never eat all that,” Amber remarked as she saw the bowl. She had already turned on the television and was flipping through the channels at lightning speed. “There’s nothing on,” she informed Emily in a monotone.
She landed on a sitcom and left it there after turning to see if Emily objected. “Nothing else better,” Emily said as shoulder to shoulder
they took in the activity and the canned laughter on the screen, robotically popping pieces of popcorn into their mouths. Not paying attention to the storyline at all, Emily wondered what to say to this unexpected roommate of hers. She wanted to dole out some wise advice but could think of nothing at all.
During a commercial Amber spoke up. “He was a guest at the hotel,” she said as if in answer to a question Emily hadn’t asked. But in truth, she’d asked it internally many times, never brave enough to come out and say it. Amber must’ve sensed her curiosity. Amber swallowed hard. “He was cute. Older, but not so much older that it was gross, ya know?”
Emily barely nodded. She was afraid any sudden movements might scare Amber off, put her back into closed-off, secretive mode.
“He would flirt with me whenever he checked in or out. Tease me about how our motel wasn’t exactly five star or whatever, but that he couldn’t afford more.” A look of pride crossed her face and she sat up a little straighter. “He’s starting his own business: T-shirts that say really funny things on them that he sells at the different beach stores.” She quieted for a moment, thinking. “He just graduated from college and had made T-shirts for his fraternity. He got the seed money for this business from doing that.” She smiled. “He’s really smart.
“He calls me ‘Cheerleader’ because he said that he knew I was a cheerleader, even though no way was I a cheerleader. For one I’m uncoordinated and for another I work too much to do that.” She made a face. “Anyway, when he says it, he always makes me feel pretty, you know?” She searched Emily’s face, willing her, Emily knew, to understand. And she did understand. Emily imagined there wasn’t a woman alive who didn’t understand that part.
“So one day he called down from his room and said there weren’t any towels and could I bring some up?” She looked down at her lap, studying her hands, folded there, her fingers shiny from the buttered popcorn. “I knew there were towels up there because I had put them there myself. And I knew if I went up there everything would change. Between us. For me.” She sat motionless for a moment, then turned to look at Emily. “I just didn’t know how much.”
The Bridge Tender Page 15
