by Jenn Bennett
“Maybe it’s best that everyone cools off right now,” Kat suggests to my mom as we all drag ourselves across the creaking boards of the boatyard pier. “Everyone’s tired and stressed. We can talk about all of this tomorrow after we’ve had some rest.”
“Agreed,” Mom says.
I glance at Lucky. A few of hours ago, we were blissed out in each other’s arms. Now he looks as if he’s been swimming in the harbor for hours. Bone-weary. Defeated. Lost.
That’s how I feel too. I want to reach out and hold him, tell him everything will be okay—and for him to tell me the same. But all I can do is watch his beleaguered face over my shoulder as my mother escorts me out of the boatyard, away from the Karrases.
Through the dark side alley, past his vintage Superhawk.
Across the bumpy street, setts steaming and slick with the recent rain.
But when we get to our historic building, instead of heading around back to the rickety staircase to our apartment, we both stop in front of the Nook and stare at the front door.
It’s dark inside the bookshop—it’s been closed for a couple of hours. But there’s always a light on Salty Sally the bookish mermaid that can be seen from the street. Right now, it’s also shining on a large poster that’s been plastered over our shop’s door.
A photograph I’d recognize anywhere.
I’m sure Mom does too.
It’s a life-size enlargement of my mother’s nude photo.
My pulse lurches and pounds in my temples.
Mom’s cry is anguished and broken. She slaps a hand over her mouth before quickly looking around the sidewalk. It’s empty now, but a car slows as it passes and the driver gawks.
And that’s what snaps me into action. A little fury rises up in me. I quickly dig out my phone and flick on the camera.
“What are you doing?” Mom says, horrified. “You’re taking a picture of this?”
“We’ll need evidence when we sue.”
She raises her hands then drops them, utterly confused. Raindrops dot her cat-eye lenses. “Josie? Sue who?”
“Adrian Summers. Or maybe his father?” I don’t know how it works.
A strange sound burrs from Mom’s mouth. She just shakes her head in disbelief, ignores me, and races to the Nook’s door to snatch at the damp paper. It’s been plastered on with some kind of thick glue, and the recent rain has made the paper one big sticker. “It’s not coming off!”
I scoot her over and reach for a corner of the poster, using my fingernail to scratch. She’s right. It’s fixed fast. It rips in places, but it’s not coming off in one piece. “It’s like wallpaper,” I tell I her. “Maybe that’s what was used. Wallpaper paste?”
“You might be right.” She’s able to peel off most of her nipples. “That’s a little better. What about the sticker remover gunk in the stockroom?”
“We’re almost out, but there’s a little left in one of the boxes under the counter. There’s a metal scraper, too, I’m pretty sure.” Maybe some of the chemicals I use to develop my photos … “We’ll find something. Come on.”
Her hands are shaking so badly, she drops her store keys, so I pick them up and unlock the door, punching in the security code when we step inside. Then I grab some sticky notes from the register, quickly stick as many of them as I can over the remainder of the poster, and shut off the outside light. A temporary fix, but it buys us some time.
Mom turns on a tiny work lamp near the register; the only other illumination comes from the red EXIT sign above the stockroom and streetlights shining through the windows, along with the occasional car headlights. She pulls out a box and slams it on the counter, then proceeds to rifle through it angrily.
“Why would Adrian Summers have one of my modeling photos from college?” she asks in a tight voice.
“No clue,” I say. “But he had it on his phone at the party that night Lucky and I got taken to the police station. He thinks it’s me.”
“What?”
I nod slowly. “Doesn’t show your full face … only enough of your face that it could be mistaken for mine. And I don’t know where he got it. I don’t know how many people have seen it, but he flashed it around at the party.”
“Oh my God,” she whimpers, abandoning her search inside the box. “That photo is all over town? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I didn’t want you to worry about it,” I say.
“Oh, Josie.”
“Anyway, Adrian’s the one who did this, probably to get back at Evie because she broke up with him again. And …”
And to get back at me.
This is his crowbar through our window.
I didn’t cover my tracks well enough—when I caught him in Evie’s bed, and I slipped up, talking about throwing the rock.
He knows it wasn’t Lucky.
“I can’t believe it,” Mom says, a stunned look on her face as she stands at the counter, taking off her glasses to wipe them on her shirt. “All these years, and those stupid photos are finally coming back to haunt me now. Unbelievable. I’ll tell you who I should sue, and it’s not the Summers family. I should sue Henry Zabka.”
Umm … “Excuse me?”
“They’re his photos. I should sue him for releasing them without my permission. I never signed anything that said he could.”
Now I’m confused. “You never signed a release?”
“Nope.”
“But weren’t they for class or whatever?”
“It was a private session on campus, but after he showed them in class as examples, I later found out that no current students are allowed to model, and definitely no one under twenty-one. He pretended to be ignorant about it, like it was an honest mistake. But he knew all along what he was doing. I wouldn’t be surprised if he distributed the photos online somewhere.”
“Whoa,” I say. “Let’s not go flinging accusations. You don’t know how Adrian got this photo. Maybe Henry donated them to the school?”
“Without my permission?
Yikes. Yeah, even I know that’s not legit. “I’m sure it’s just a mix-up. Maybe they were stolen—off the cloud, or something? That happens all the time.”
“You’re defending him?”
“Someone has to,” I say. “Everyone is always attacking him, and no one here knows him. Maybe give him the benefit of the doubt, okay? He’s a family man now. Why would he suddenly release nude photos of you for revenge?”
She chuckles darkly. “A family man. Oh, you know him so well, do you? Those yearly phone calls that last for all of five minutes? Because he can’t be bothered to come visit you anymore. The last time he saw you in person was for half an hour at Thirtieth Street Station in Philadelphia two years ago when he was waiting for a train. You were fifteen.”
“He’s busy! And we text.”
“Oh really?”
“I send him photos to show him what I’ve been working on.”
“And he comments on those photos?”
“He did once … a few months ago.” He told me to work on my negative space.
“That’s what I thought,” she says, sneering. “He’s a rat, and I’m going to sue him.”
This is ridiculous! Why is she going after my father when Adrian is clearly the enemy here? He’s the bad guy.
Something rises up in my chest, and I think of the invisible wall between me and Lucky. And how Lucky said there’s one between me and Mom, too. Maybe I have more control over it than I thought.
After all, communication doesn’t run one way.
“You want to know the truth?” I ask her in a low voice, feeling the need to divulge bubble up inside me, dark and angry and wanting to be free. “The absolute shocking truth?”
“Babe,” she says in a tight voice, “my naked body is out on the door of my mother’s bookshop for all of Beauty to see. Nothing you can say to me will shock me right now.”
“Are you sure?”
“Positive.”
“Okay …” I warn her one
last time.
She puts her glasses back on angrily. “Just say it, Josie.”
“Fine! I don’t want to move to Florida with you. I’ve been planning to go live with Henry in Los Angeles when I graduate.”
Mom stills. Then she inhales sharply through her nostrils. Like I’ve slugged her in the gut.
“Look,” I tell her, “I think it’s clear that something is broken between us, because you don’t talk to me about anything. The last few years have been hard, and I can’t handle moving around the country with you anymore. I don’t even know if you’ll end up in Florida at this point, and I need stability. On top of that, it’s not fair that you kept me away from an entire side of my family. That’s so selfish, Mom. He’s an award-winning photographer. I could be learning things from him. I could have grandparents who aren’t running around Nepal. I could have a normal life in Los Angeles! And … and …”
I try to plow on with my angry tirade, but everything Mom just told me flashes through my head along with the poster on the shop’s door. It’s muddling things, and I’m getting rattled.
“And now …” I continue, though not as surefooted. “Now it almost sounds like you’re accusing him of things, and I don’t know what to believe, but it’s confusing, because I haven’t heard his side of the story, and … it’s not fair. It’s not fair that you’ve kept me from him all these years.”
“I haven’t kept you from Henry Zabka,” she says, biting out every word as if she’s barely able to control the anger in her voice. “You want to be a part of his family? It’s bigger than you think. Your so-called father has three kids in three states. I wasn’t the first teenage girl to model for Henry Zabka, okay? He was a creep, Josie.”
“What?” I say, blinking away shock.
“He may be a genius, but that doesn’t mean he’s not a goddamn loser. He preyed on me—I didn’t know it until years later that there were others, okay? That’s why he lost his teaching job. Because he was an asshole who had a thing for college students. So he doesn’t want you because he never wanted to be a father.”
“That can’t be true,” I say, tears slipping down my cheeks.
“That’s what I thought too, back then. He didn’t want his name on your birth certificate. He said he’d make my life a living hell if I tried to get child support out of him—because he had nude photos of me, and what kind of mother does that?
“Josie,” she says, eyes glossy with unshed tears. “What do you think your grandmother and I were fighting about when we left Beauty five years ago?”
“I—I …” My breath comes faster. Thinking about that terrible night is the last thing I want to do, but it comes back to me now, unbidden. Waking up in the middle of their argument. Grandma shouting. Mom crying … Red and blue lights flashing outside the window on the street below.
Mom told me to pack as fast as I could. Only my favorite clothes and the stuff I’d need for a week. A short trip, until we figured things out. That’s what she told me. She said not to listen to what I heard—that none of it was true.
She told me to hurry.
Not to bother to get to dressed.
Grandma was having a breakdown.
No one was getting arrested.
Everything was going to be okay.
We’d call Lucky from the road.
We were coming back when things cooled off.
A week.
Two weeks.
A month.
Five years.
Mom stares at me now over the bookshop counter. “Five years ago, Henry Zabka was still working at the university. Your grandmother was trying to pressure me to get child support out of him, and when I refused, she went behind my back and hired a private detective to look into him.”
A private detective … Briefly, my head fills up with the scent of Christmas that always wafts from the hand-dipped colonial candle store down the alley—and the empty door next to it with the bright red FOR RENT sign. Former office of Desmond Banks, private investigator.
“A detective? Like a PI?” I ask.
She nods. “And he uncovered … all kinds of nasty things about Henry Zabka.”
The argument.
The big blowup that sent us fleeing Beauty in the middle of the night.
The argument was a little bit about me, yes.
But it was really about my father.
I shake my head as tears fall. “No, no, no.”
“I tried to keep you away from it,” she says, taking off her glasses again to wipe at her eyes. “I tried so hard. I didn’t want you to hate him like I hated him. I didn’t even want to believe it myself. I thought it was just your grandmother trying to be controlling. She’s done that before with my life. This wasn’t the first time the meddlesome old bat tried to ruin my relationship with someone—”
Her voice breaks.
She swallows and starts again.
“However, I took a second look at what her private detective uncovered, and … it was pretty damning. A few months later, I contacted the university and got him fired. Well. Quietly dismissed—that’s what they called it. They promised he’d never know it was me who came forward, if I agreed not to sue. That’s when he went back to LA and his career really took off. Which was depressing, honestly. It felt like he was being rewarded, and we were … left behind to fend for ourselves.”
“Mom—”
“So screw him. If you’re talented in any way, then I choose to think that you inherited that from me, not from him. Because once upon a time, I was talented too.”
I’m shocked.
Devasted.
I don’t know what to say.
The lines on my mom’s face harden. “So yes, I may be a terrible mother. And I know I haven’t been present. I hate myself for that—I hate being depressed, and I hate that you notice it, because more than anything, I wish I could keep you in a bubble, nice and safe, so you’d never have to know any of these things, and you’d never be hurt or unhappy. If I could have one wish in life, I would spend it on that.”
“I’m not a child, Mom!” I say, exasperated. “I haven’t been for a long time. You could have told me this years ago!”
“Maybe so, but you’re wrong about one thing,” she says, pointing a finger in my direction. “You’ll always be my child, and I’ll always be your parent. And see, that’s the difference between me and Henry Zabka. No matter how badly I’ve screwed up sometimes, I’m here for you, right now, and I’ve always wanted you, every single day you’ve drawn breath. So I’m sorry if that’s disappointing—I’m sorry I’ve dragged you around from town to town, and I’m sorry I wasn’t the parent you wanted. I’m sorry I wasn’t the famous photographer and just plain old cursed Winona Saint-Martin. But for better or worse, you’re stuck with me, aren’t you? Because if you try to leave me, I swear to all things holy, I will chase you down, Josie. You’re not an adult yet, and I’m still your mother, even if you hate my guts.”
Shaking and upset, she tosses the box of supplies back beneath the counter and yanks out another one, plopping it down by the register with a loud thud to angrily search through its motley contents. One of Grandma’s Nepalese postcards falls off its taped anchor and flutters to the floor.
All I can do is watch her in a daze, rocked to my core. Heartbroken. It feels as if she’s taken a rock and smashed all my dreams like I smashed the Summers & Co window. Only, no one can bail me out this time. Not even Lucky.
Funny that I thought once he might be a mirage. The real mirage was Henry Zabka.
I don’t have a father.
I don’t have a mentor.
Los Angeles is just a city, not a utopian place where all my troubles will fall away.
Nothing’s real. I’m stuck here with no exit strategy when the ticking time bomb goes off.
It was all a lie.
Neither of us speaks for a long moment while she tears through the box of supplies, making a racket inside the quiet, dark shop. Then I remember something she said, and
it aligns with a puzzle piece that’s stuck inside the back of my head.
The invisible wall isn’t just down between us, it’s collapsed for good. Might as well put it all out there now. So I ask in a soft voice, “Who’s Drew?”
Her hands still inside the box. But she says nothing.
“I saw his inscription inside your high school yearbook,” I say. “And I’m pretty sure he was in the navy and came back to town. I know Aunt Franny was surprised you were willing to come back to Beauty with him here. Who’s Drew, Mom?” I ask again.
She exhales heavily and rests against the stool behind the counter. It takes her a long time to answer, but she finally says, “Drew was the love of my life. We were going to run away together after we graduated from high school. Your grandmother caught us and put a stop to it. Told his parents. They were furious. Made him enlist in the navy, and he got shipped off to the Persian Gulf almost immediately. That was that. One day he was there, and the next, he was just … gone.”
“Oh my God,” I murmur. Like me and Lucky.
She sighs. “Oh, in retrospect, maybe she was right. Maybe we were too young to get married. I don’t know. I wasn’t sensible like you are. I was ‘Wild Winona,’ who made a lot of mistakes and did a lot of impulsive things. Running off to Florida with no plan seemed like something fun to do, so I’m not even sure if I was in it for the right reason. But then I went to college, where I met your father, and the rest is history.”
Right. Everything went to shit after that. Now I’m starting to see the root of the problems between Mom and Grandma.
“Still, I think about him a lot,” she says, wistful.
“Have you kept in touch with him?”
“Not a peep. I saw him once, at your uncle’s funeral last year. We didn’t speak. I was shocked to see his face again, honestly. I think he was shocked to see me, too. I know he was married to a woman when he was stationed on a naval base in Japan, but they later divorced. I don’t know what’s going on with him now. I’ve made an effort to steer clear of him since we’ve been back in town. The Saint-Martin curse … ,” she says weakly.
A little tingle starts in my fingers and races up my arms. “Mom … what does Drew do now that he’s retired from the navy?”
