“Mclean,” my dad repeated. “Stop.”
“No,” I said. “You stop. Don’t do this.”
“I’m not,” he replied.
I just stood there, not sure what to say. I could see Opal out of the corner of my eye, watching me carefully, but I kept my eyes on my dad. At least, for a moment. Then, I shifted my gaze, suddenly noticing the kitchen behind him. There were grocery bags piled on the countertops, and a couple of cabinets were open, revealing cans and a few boxes of food inside. Some noodles and a couple of tomatoes sat piled by a cutting board, and there was a new glass pan, sitting rinsed on the dish rack, waiting to be used.
“What’s going on here?” I asked, turning my gaze back to him.
He smiled at me, then looked at Opal. “Come sit down,” he said. “We’ll fill you in.”
Seventeen
“Oh, no,” Deb said. “What happened to my STOW sheet? Has anyone seen it?”
“Nope,” Heather, who was bent over a corner of the model, sticking on bushes in a local arboretum, replied. “Maybe you lost it.”
“Heather, stop,” Riley told her. “Deb, it’s got to be around here someplac. Where was the last place you had it?”
“If I knew that, it wouldn’t be lost,” Deb said, walking to the table and pushing some papers around. “This is crazy! I can’t finish this tonight without the STOW!”
“Uh-oh,” Ellis, on the other side of the model, said. “Get ready for a FODF.”
I looked up from where I was adding some sidewalk tiles. “FODF? ”
“Full-On Deb Freak-out,” Heather explained.
“I heard that!” Deb called out. “And FYI, that is not even a good acronym. It’s supposed to be a real word, not a made-up one.”
“FODF isn’t a real word?” Ellis asked. “Since when?”
“Time?” Deb asked, bustling past. “Anyone?”
“You have a watch on,” Heather told her.
“It’s nine thirty-two,” Riley said. “Which means—”
“Twenty-eight minutes!” Deb shrieked. “Twenty-eight minutes before we absolutely have to be out of here. Opal’s orders.”
“I thought Opal didn’t even work at Luna Blu anymore,” Riley said.
“She doesn’t,” Deb said. “But she owns the building. So she makes the rules.”
I picked up another bush, carefully adding it on. “She doesn’t own it yet,” I said. “And even when she does, it’ll just be a percentage. The Melmans and some other partners will own the rest.”
“The Melmans?” Riley asked.
“Previous owners,” I told her. “They started this place, way back when.”
I looked around the room, remembering when Opal had told me about the restaurant’s history, that day I’d first been up here. In the last two weeks, a lot had happened as far as Luna Blu was concerned. First, my dad had officially been reassigned to the next project, in Hawaii, while Opal had submitted her resignation, leaving her free and clear to work on purchasing the building once Chuckles put it on the market. Which he was doing at a very reasonable price, in exchange for two things: a hefty percentage, and a return of rolls to the menu. This agreement was hashed out over a very long meal at our house, punctuated by Hawaiian Kobe beef and two bottles of very good red wine. As for the Melmans, Opal’s old bosses, they’d come on shortly afterward, after she flew down to Florida with a business plan and an offer they didn’t want to refuse. Turned out retirement life was a bit dull for their taste: they missed the excitement of having a piece of a daily business. Between their money, a start-up loan from the bank, and Chuckles’s bargain price, Opal was getting her own restaurant. But first, Luna Blu had to close.
No one was happy about it. For the last week, as we’d been upstairs working away, the restaurant had been crazy busy, packed with locals who’d heard the news and wanted to have one last meal. I’d personally expected the entire place to implode with my dad and Opal gone, but surprisingly, under the dual leadership of Jason and Tracey, things had actually been running pretty smoothly. My dad had marveled more than once that he’d always pegged Tracey as the type to jump ship first. But as it turned out, she’d probably bailed herself into a manager poson at Opal’s new place, if she wanted it.
“Here it is!” Deb said, grabbing a pad of paper from the floor by the landing and holding it up. “Thank God. Okay, let me see what else we have to do.... Final landscaping is in progress, traffic signs are—oh, crap, where are the traffic signs?”
“I’m doing them right now,” Ellis told her. “Take a breath, would you?”
“Then that just leaves the final population details,” Deb said, not breathing at all. She looked around. “There was one final bag I saw here yesterday that hadn’t been put on yet. What happened to it?”
“I cannot deal with these trees and questions at the same time,” Heather said.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Ellis said. “Learn to multitask.”
“Where are those people?” Deb demanded. “I swear they were right—”
“Dave probably put them on,” Riley told her. “He was here last night again.”
Deb turned, looking at her. “He was?”
Riley nodded. “When I left at six, he was just getting here. Said he had a few last touches to add.”
“I texted him at seven and he was still here,” Ellis added.
I watched as Deb walked over to the model, scanning it slowly from side to side. “I don’t see any huge differences, though,” she said. “Not anything that would take a few hours, at any rate.”
“Maybe he just works very slowly,” Heather said.
“No, that’s you,” Ellis told her.
“Eighteen minutes!” Deb said, clapping her hands. “People, this is serious. If you have more than you can do in eighteen minutes, speak your piece now. Because this is crunch time. Anyone? Anyone?”
I shook my head: I only had a handful of bushes left to add on. Everyone got quiet, though, as we worked away, the minutes ticking by. Downstairs, we knew they were counting down, as well: as of ten o’clock, they’d be finished, too. It seemed like that was all these last weeks had been about, change and endings. The beginnings were yet to come.
Once again, my dad and I had been packing up the house and our things into boxes. This time, though, they’d be going to storage, not in the U-Haul. As for Hawaii, all my dad needed was a suitcase. The plan was for him to stay the summer, helping Chuckles’s restaurant get its footing, before returning in time to help my mom get me settled at whatever school I ended up deciding to attend. Then he’d come to Lakeview, where he’d fill in as chef at Opal’s place until he decided what he wanted to do next. Their relationship—which, apparently, had begun the night he’d told her about the restaurant closing, and ended up following her back to her house to talk about it—was new. They’d already had to deal with the awkwardness of my dad breaking up with Lindsay Baker (Opal had given up spinning, for now) and were about to face a separation. Neither one of them was naïve enough to think they would absolutely make it. But just knowing he had someone to come back to besides me was a comfort to me. I, for one, was pulling for them.
As for me, I was packed up as well, my stuff folded away into my same boxes, ready to m the trip back to Tyler. It wasn’t easy leaving, especially with so little left of the year to go. Everyone was talking about final plans: the end of the model, graduation, the Austin road trip, even though Ellis, Riley, and Heather were less excited than they had been since Dave was staying behind. As for Dave, he’d been pulling back as well, mostly because he had to. He went to work, school, his U classes, and home. His car was off-limits, parked in the driveway under the basketball goal, so any free time he was allowed was spent working on the model. Now though, for his own reasons, he preferred to do that alone, coming for an hour here and there when the rest of us were already gone.
He might have been absent, but his work was evident, as over the last week people had slowly begun to appear on the model,
here and there. He didn’t put them on using the sector system, or pinwheel, or anything else. Instead, their numbers just seemed to grow, day by day, as if they were populating all by themselves. Each figure—men, women, children, people walking dogs, cyclists, policemen—was added meticulously, and clearly with great care. More than once, I’d stood at my front window, looking at the back windows of Luna Blu, and wondered if he was up there, bent over the little world, adding to it, one person at a time. I’d often thought about going to join him, but it was like something sacred he was doing, that he had to do alone. And so I let him.
“Five minutes!” Deb called out, moving quickly behind me, the STOW checklist in her hand. I looked across the model at Riley, who was adjusting an intersection, her brow furrowed, then at Heather, who was sitting back on her heels, admiring her trees. Ellis, off to my left, was clicking a stop sign into place.
“One minute!” I heard Deb say, and I pushed myself back, taking a breath as I looked over the entire model and the faces of my friends gathered around it. As the time ticked away, we all sat there, silent, and then we heard the staff counting down below us. A chorus of voices, marking the end of one thing, the beginning of another.
“Five!” I looked at the last bush I’d put on, touching my finger to it.
“Four!” I looked at Riley, who smiled at me.
“Three!” Deb came and stood beside me, biting her lip.
“Two!” Already, downstairs, someone was applauding.
And in that second, right before the very end, I looked around the model again, wanting to see one final thing. When I spotted it, I noticed something else. But by then, everyone was already cheering, in motion. One.
“Where are you going?” my dad called after me as I turned the corner. “You’ll miss the party.”
“I’ll be back in a second,” I told him.
He nodded, then turned back to the bar, where all the employees and some devout regulars of Luna Blu, as well as Deb, Riley, Heather, and Ellis were gathered, eating up all the leftover stock of fried pickles. Opal was there as well, serving up beers, her face flushed and happy.
As I climbed up the steps to the attic, I could still hear everyone talking and laughing, their voices rising up behind me. Once on the landing, though, it was quiet, almost peaceful, the model stretched out before me. In all the excitement earlier, I hadn’t been able to look as closely as I wanted to. I wanted to be alone, like now, when I had all the time in the world.
I bent down over my neighborhood, taking in the people there. At first, they’d just seemed arranged the same way they were everywhere else: in random formations, some in groups, some alone. Then, though, I saw the single figure at the back of my house, walking away from the back door. And another person, a girl, running through the side yard, where the hedge would have been, while someone else, with a badge and flashlight, followed. There were three people under the basketball goal, one lying prone on the ground.
I took a breath, then moved in closer. Two people were seated on the curb between Dave’s and my houses: a few inches away, two more walked up the narrow alley to Luna Blu’s back door. A couple stood in the driveway, facing each other. And in that empty building, the old hotel, a tiny set of cellar doors had been added, flung open, a figure standing before them. Whether they were about to go down, or just coming up, was unclear, and the cellar itself was a dark square. But I knew what was down below.
He’d put me everywhere. Every single place I’d been, with him or without, from the first time we’d met to the last conversation. It was all there, laid out as carefully, as real as the buildings and streets around it. I swallowed, hard, then reached forward, touching the girl running through the hedge. Not Liz Sweet. Not anyone, at that moment, not yet. But on her way to someone. To me.
I stood up, then turned and went back down the stairs, into the bar area. Everyone was talking, the noise deafening, the smell of fried pickles hanging in the air as I cut through toward the back door. I heard Riley call my name, but I didn’t turn around. Outside, I pulled my sweater more tightly around me and started to jog down the alley to my street.
The lights were on in Dave’s house as I came up the driveway, his Volvo parked where it had been for the full week, right under the basketball goal. I stood looking at it for a moment, remembering my dad and me pulling into the adjacent spot that first day. I looked up at the basket, its shadow an elongated circle, stretched across the windshield and driver’s seat. A Frazier Bakery cup, empty, sat in the holder, a couple of CD cases stacked on the seat. And on the center console, there was a Gert.
What? Impossible, I thought, moving closer and peering into the window. Same weird braiding, same dangling shells. Just to be sure, though, I opened the door, reaching in to grab it, and turned it over. A tiny GS, in Sharpie marker, was on the back.
“Freeze!”
A flashlight popped on, brightness filling my field of vision. I put up my hand, seeing stars as I heard footsteps, coming closer. A moment later, the light clicked off, and there was Dave. He looked at me, then at the Gert.
“You know,” he said, “if you’re looking for cars to break into, I think you can do better.”
“You came,” I said softly, looking at the Gert again. I turned, facing him. “You were there, at the Poseidon, that night. All this time I thought ...”
He slid the flashlight into his back pocket, not saying anything.
“Why didn’t you let me know?” I asked him. “I don’t understand.”
He sighed, glancing at his housethen started walking down the driveway, toward the street. I fell in beside him, the Gert still in my hand. “I saw your dad when I was leaving. He was panicked ... so I told him what I knew. Then I went back inside. But I kept thinking about how you’d called me, how it was so unlike you, or the you I’d seen on the Ume.com page that day.”
I winced in the dark. We were coming up to the alley now.
“So I went anyway, to make sure you were okay. Drove down, found the hotel, parked. But when I went up to knock on the door, I saw you through the window. You were lying on the bed, with your mom and your dad, and it just ... You were with who you needed right then. Your family.”
My family. What a concept. “So you left,” I said.
“Only after I stopped for a souvenir at the only place open,” he said, nodding at my closed hand. “I couldn’t resist. I can’t believe you recognized it, though.”
I smiled. “It’s a Gert. My mom and I used to get them every time we were down there.”
“A Gert. I like that.” We turned the corner, to Luna Blu. “Anyway, so I drove back. And my parents were waiting for me. You know the rest of the story.”
I swallowed, feeling my throat get tight. As we walked down the hallway, I could hear the noise and laughter getting louder, the air warm as Dave pushed the door open and we went inside the restaurant proper.
“There he is!” Ellis called out. “How’d you get sprung?”
“Good behavior,” Dave told him. “What’d I miss?”
“Only the end of everything,” Tracey said, from the other side of the bar. I was surprised to see her, cynical as she was, dabbing at her red eyes with a bar towel, while Leo, true to form, chewed a mouthful of pickles beside her.
“It’s not just an end,” Opal told her. “It’s a beginning, too.”
“I hate beginnings,” Tracey replied, sniffling. “They’re too new.”
I looked at Dave, sitting beside Ellis at the end of the bar. Riley was next to him, then Heather and Deb, their chairs forming a triangle, heads together as they talked over the noise, while Opal hugged Tracey on the opposite side of the taps. I looked at all of them, then down at my dad, who was at the very end of the bar, taking it all in as well. When he saw me, he smiled, and I thought of all the places we’d been, how he was my only constant, my guiding star. I didn’t want to leave him, or here. But I had no other options.
I stepped away from the bar, quickly turning the corner a
nd heading back upstairs to the model. I walked over and stood there, looking down at it, trying to center myself. After a moment, I heard footsteps behind me, and even before I turned I knew it was Dave. He was standing at the top of the stairs, looking at me, as the noise from the party downstairs drifted up behind him.
“This is amazing,” I said to him. “I can’t believe you did it.”
“We all did it,” he said.
“Not the model.” I swallowed. “The people.”
He smiled. “Well, model trains really teach you aot of good skills.”
I shook my head. “I know you’re joking ... but this, it’s like the nicest thing anyone’s ever done for me. Seriously.”
Dave walked closer, sliding his hands in his pockets. In the bright light, he looked clean, clear. Real. “You did all of these things,” he said after a moment. “All I did was document it.”
I felt tears prick my eyes as I looked down at the model again, looking at that girl and boy on the curb. Forever in that place, together.
“You should get back downstairs,” he said. “Your dad sent me up here for you. They’re about to do a toast or something.”
I nodded, then turned to follow him. “So I guess this is what you meant, huh?”
“About what?”
“Looking more closely,” I replied as he started down the stairs.
“Pretty much,” he said. “Hey, hit the lights on your way out, okay?”
I stopped, taking one last look at the model, stretched out and complete, before I reached for the switch, turning it off. At first, in the darkness, I could see only a bit of streetlight coming in the far window, illuminating the floor. Then, though, I spotted something else. Something small and glowing, in the exact spot I’d been studying before. I walked over, my eyes scanning Luna Blu, my house, and Dave’s. But it was the building behind them, that empty hotel, that had the tiniest light, provided by one word, written in fluorescent paint. Maybe it wasn’t what was once there, in real life. But in this one, it said it all: STAY.