“Say whatever you want, but I’m not going against his wishes,” I said. “And neither should you.”
There was that muffled noise again, and then suddenly his voice was lower, closer to the receiver. “Look, I’m not trying to hassle you, okay? She’s just angling, it’s what she does. I’m sorry. I’m so grateful to you for everything this morning.”
“Theo.”
“Not the kiss,” he said quickly. “I mean, that was great, too, don’t get me wrong. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. Even though I know we’re, um, not talking about it. Until tomorrow.” Now I was blushing, right there in the hallway. “But introducing me to Clyde, finessing that connection … that was amazing. I can’t thank you enough.”
“You don’t have to,” I replied. “Just don’t let her ruin it. Okay?”
“Okay.” He cleared his throat. “So, um … I am still going to see you, though, tomorrow, right? In a non-work-related way?”
I looked at Benji, scooting past me in the narrow hallway, toting a bunch of washcloths. He’d already cleared half the table, making twice as many trips as I had. Clearly, all that pre-teen energy, properly channeled, could be a serious resource.
“Yeah,” I said to Theo. “I’ll be in touch, on both counts, soon. All right?”
“Sounds good,” he replied. “Bye, Emaline.”
I smiled, then hung up, pushing my phone back into my pocket. Then I turned around, to the storeroom, only to find Luke standing there, his eyes level with mine over the towering pile in my arms. I jumped, startled, and the towels collapsed between us in a blur of white.
“Oh my God,” I said, putting a hand to my chest as one last washcloth fluttered past in my side vision. “You scared the crap out of me.”
“Sorry.”
I dropped down to collect the towels and he joined me on the floor, grabbing a few that were closer to him.
“What’s going on here? Some kind of spa day or something?”
“Margo’s got a new system,” I told him. “What are you doing here?”
He ran a hand through his hair. “Well, actually, I was hoping to—”
“Luke!” I heard Benji yelp, and then he was running towards us, footsteps thumping across the carpet. “I didn’t know you were here!”
“Just walked in, bud.” Luke held up his hand for a high five, which Benji delivered with a loud slap. “She’s got you working, huh?”
“Inventory,” Benji explained. “It’s a lot of towels.”
“I can see that.” Luke looked at me, grinning. I almost smiled back at him out of habit, until I remembered what had happened only a matter of hours ago. “Hey, give me a quick sec to talk to Emaline, okay?”
“Sure,” Benji said. “I still have a lot of stuff to move. See ya!”
And with that, he was gone, back into the conference room. Luke looked at me. “Can we—”
“I’m actually really busy,” I told him.
“Ten minutes.” He lowered his voice. “It’s important.”
I glanced across the office where, sure enough, both Margo and my mother were watching us. “Five. And not here.”
He nodded, then followed me as I dropped my pile back in the conference room and walked out to the front porch of the office. Once the door swung shut behind us, I hopped up on a newspaper box. “All right,” I said, crossing my arms. “Talk.”
Luke glanced away, at the traffic passing, then back at me. “Look, so, this morning … it didn’t go the way I planned. None of this has. I made a mistake.”
“When?” I said. “Meeting that girl at Tallyho? Or dumping me this morning?”
Instead of answering, he ran a hand over his face again, something he always did when he was stressed out. I knew this, like so many of his tells, as well as I did my own. “I didn’t dump you,” he said. “I said we might need a break.”
“So why are you here?” I asked.
“Because,” he replied, “because ever since I walked out of the diner away from you, I’ve felt sick. Like something’s really wrong and I need to fix it.”
I bit my lip, not saying anything.
“I’m not saying things have been perfect between us for the last few months,” he continued. “But I want to be with you.”
“You didn’t feel that way when you decided to go to Tallyho.”
“Are you ever going to stop with the Tallyho thing? I was trying to be honest with you!” he replied, his voice rising. “I told you the truth. That I was tempted, and acted on it, but not in a way you thought. Now I’m telling you I regret everything. You’ve got to give me something for that.”
“Like what?”
Instead of answering, he stepped forward to stand between my open knees, sliding his hands up my neck in that way that was familiar and thrilling, all at once. As he put his lips on mine, I turned my face up and just a bit to the right, so we fit perfectly, a skill honed from a million kisses over the years. When he finally drew back, he moved his mouth to my ear. “I love you, Emaline.”
My head was swimming. All I wanted, all I ever wanted in moments like this, was to keep kissing him. But somehow, I managed to put my hands on his chest and pushed him back. “I … I can’t.”
“Why not?” he asked.
“Things have changed,” I said.
“I told you I was sorry, I made a mistake.” He moved in closer, again. “I’ll fix it. And the other problems we’ve had, we’ll work on them, too.”
I shook my head, looking down at my hands. “It’s not just about all that.”
“Then what?”
I didn’t say anything. All I could think about was toasters.
“Something you did?” he asked. Long, awkward pause. Where was that waitress to interrupt when I really needed her? “Emaline, I just saw you, like, four hours ago. What could possibly have happened since then?”
It’s always very pure, that last moment before an ugly, unsettling truth hits someone. The most stark of before-and-afters. I sat there and watched Luke’s face change, right before me. “Oh my God,” he said, stepping back. “It’s that guy, isn’t it? Theo. Did you—”
“Luke,” I said quietly.
“What the hell? You went running to him the minute you left the diner?”
“Hey.” I pointed a finger at him. “You walked out on me, remember? As far as I knew, you were gone for good.”
“Which must have been so convenient,” he shot back. “You could finally jump into bed with Girl Jeans without even having to feel bad about it.”
“I didn’t jump into bed with anyone,” I replied. “God. What are you even saying?”
“What are you saying?” he replied. “The minute our three-year relationship hit a rough patch, you hooked up with someone else?”
“At least I waited until it was over.”
The look on his face as he heard this—hurt, surprised, vulnerable—made me feel sick. I tried to reach out for him, to blunt it somehow, but he stepped farther away, leaving me flailing.
For a moment, we just stood there, this huge space between us. “You said it yourself,” I said finally. “Things haven’t been great in a while. If they had been, neither one of us would have done anything. It means something was wrong.”
Judging by the pained look on his face, though, it was easier to say this than to hear it. “I just can’t …” He trailed off. “I can’t believe this.”
“I know,” I said. “Me neither.”
We were both silent for a minute, the only sound cars passing on the road. I thought again of what I’d said to Daisy: nothing changes for three years, and then suddenly everything does, all at once. Maybe those other people’s summers I’d envied weren’t all fun either. You never really know anything until it’s happening to you.
“Well,” he said finally. “I guess … that’s that.”
Breaking up earlier had been hard enough. Doing it again, and this time because of me, was like torture. “I didn’t plan any of this,” I said softly. “It ju
st happened.”
“Yeah. Well.” He couldn’t even look at me. “I should … I’m leaving.”
And then, for the second time since sunrise, I sat and watched the only love of my life walk away from me. As he did, oddly enough, I kept thinking of Benji, running up the stairs to the outskirts of my father’s earshot earlier, these same words repeated like a spell.
I’m leaving.
I’m leaving.
I’m leaving.
It wasn’t really necessary to say, especially if you were already walking away. Almost redundant. And yet, there was a comfort in there being no question, no room for doubt. I’d assumed I had that earlier from Luke. But I was sure of it now.
11
“OKAY, SO, UM … I guess first, maybe just say and spell your name?”
Clyde looked at me, then back at the camera. “You don’t know who I am?”
“No, no,” Theo said quickly, “I do, of course. This is just a device to mark frame, have identification. It’s—”
“Completely unnecessary right now,” Ivy finished for him. “My apologies, Clyde. He’s an intern and a novice. Let’s just get started.”
Glancing at Theo, who was squinting through the camera lens, I saw the tips of his ears and much of his face were now red. Maybe you didn’t need to know someone forever to be able to read them from a distance after all. Nervous myself, I stuck another piece of gum in my mouth.
Meanwhile, Clyde was still studying Ivy with the same flat, unreadable expression he’d had since meeting her about a half hour earlier. Finally, he looked back at Theo. “My name is Clyde Conaway. C-L-Y-D-E C-O-N-A-W-A-Y.”
I smiled, then glanced across the Washroom, the Laundromat/café Clyde owned, to check on Benji, who was eating a piece of pie. Theo and Ivy had been so gung ho to get going on the interview that we’d come straight from the office, so I’d arranged for my father to pick him up from here. Until then, I was plying him with Clyde’s homemade sweets and hoping for the best.
In the end, I had not had to hunt Clyde down; he called me. Or the office, actually, where he was at first just a single line blinking on the phone that Rebecca pushed across the desk. I’d just come back with Benji from a late lunch at Casa Sandbar on the boardwalk and was still chewing my complimentary mint.
“For me?” I said, and she nodded. “Who is it?”
“Didn’t say,” she replied. “Just that it was important.”
I was expecting Theo, since I knew he and Ivy were going nuts over at Sand Castles, wishing I’d go ahead and jump now that they’d told me how high. So it was with some trepidation, to say the least, that I pushed the button and said hello.
“Emaline,” a voice said in response. “It’s Clyde. Got a minute?”
I did. And it took not much longer than that to set up this very interview. Quick and dirty, as my dad would say. He named the time and place, I assured him they’d find it, now here we were. What happened from this point on, however, was anybody’s guess. Which was why I was glad I’d found a fresh pack of Big Red in my purse.
“I’d like to begin,” Ivy was saying now, “with summarizing your personal details. Where were you born?”
“North Reddemane. November twenty-first, nineteen sixty-eight.”
“And your parents were farmers, yes?”
“My father kept dairy cows,” Clyde replied. “Holsteins. My mother taught third grade at Sacred Heart Catholic School in Cape Frost.”
“Which is where?”
Again, Clyde looked at me. It had been clear since I arrived that, as far as he was concerned, there was a clear division here between Us and Them. It made me wonder, yet again, why he’d agreed to do this. Then again, it had been me who told Theo that nothing Clyde did made any sense. At least he was consistent.
“Cape Frost is about twenty-five miles east of here,” he was saying now. “Closest thing to a city we had then. And now, really.”
“And Sacred Heart, was that the school you attended?” Ivy asked.
Clyde snorted. “Nobody from North Reddemane went there. Except the Guadaleris. Right, Emaline?”
“The who?” Ivy asked.
I smiled. “The Guadaleris. Rich and super-Catholic. They could afford the tuition and gas.”
Ivy turned, looking at me. “It would be best if we kept this conversation between ourselves. We’re fine with you observing, but—”
“Hey,” Clyde said, cutting her off. “I asked her something. She was answering.”
She blinked at him. “I understand that. But in a documentary setup, we need the subject to have a relationship only with the camera, not people off screen.”
“Well, maybe she should be on screen,” Clyde said.
Ivy’s expression darkened. Ever since she’d arrived to find Clyde and the situation not exactly to her specifications, she’d been simmering, close to a boil. I would have enjoyed it more had I not been so worried about all of this collapsing for Theo.
“Actually,” I said, holding up my phone. “I need to step out anyway.”
I got up and slid behind the camera setup and out the back door. I could hear Ivy as she took a deep breath, then said, “All right. So you attended school here in town. Was that for all twelve grades?”
Outside, where it was considerably less tense, I returned a text from Daisy (You OK? Call me!), then looked around to see if my father had shown up yet. There was no sign of the Subaru, though, just Clyde’s beat-up truck, my car, and Ivy and Theo’s van, from which they’d earlier unloaded what seemed like an awful lot of equipment for just a single interview.
“Looks like they’re moving in for the duration,” Clyde had said to me then, as we stood in the café watching them run cords around the dryers in the next room. He’d just given Benji the pie menu, which he was studying with such focus it was like he expected to be quizzed on it later.
“They didn’t say how long it would take,” I’d told him. “I think, though, they’ll talk to you as long as you’re willing.”
“Huh,” he said in response, cryptic as always.
“Seriously, though,” I said. “Thanks for doing this. You pretty much made Theo’s life when you agreed to it.”
“Theo?”
I leaned my head towards the dryers. “My friend, from the Big Club this morning. Ivy’s not, um, the easiest boss to impress.”
“Oh.” He nodded. “Right.”
“Razzleberry,” Benji had said, putting down the menu. “Although it was not an easy choice.”
“Good pick,” Clyde told him. “Made it fresh last night.”
As Clyde reached into the glass case behind him, I looked back at Theo, who was now adjusting a large light he’d set up behind a folding station. After a second, he glanced up and, seeing me, smiled. Behind him, Ivy, clad in black jeans and a black fitted T-shirt, was flipping through some notes on a clipboard. She looked at him, then at me, her eyes narrowing. I turned back around.
Now, I heard gravel crunching and looked up, expecting to see my father pulling into the lot. Instead, it was my dad. He parked beside my car, then opened the truck door and eased himself out with a familiar end-of-a-long-workday groan.
“Hey,” I said. “What are you doing here?”
“I was about to ask you the same thing,” he replied. “Aren’t you supposed to be at the office?”
“Got an early reprieve.”
“Really.” I nodded. “From what I heard, sounds like you might have earned it, though.”
“Mom told you about Margo being on the warpath about the towel thing?” I shook my head. “I swear, you have no idea how hard she is to work for. Or even with. It’s craziness.”
“Margo?” he repeated.
“Yeah. Isn’t that what you meant?”
Before he could answer, Clyde stuck his head out the door of the Laundromat. “Rob,” he called out squinting at us. “Give me a sec and I’ll show you that ceiling.”
My dad nodded, waving at him, and Clyde disappeared back inside
. Just beyond him, I could see Ivy and Theo huddled together. She was talking quickly, gesturing with one hand, while he just nodded. I saw my dad take them in, too, as well as the cords, lights, and equipment.
“They’re shooting a documentary,” I explained.
“Who is?”
I nodded at them. “My friend Theo and his boss, Ivy. It’s about Clyde. They just started interviewing him today.”
“They’re making a movie about Clyde?”
“And his art career. Did you know he was a big deal in New York at one time?”
He looked back inside. “I vaguely remember hearing something about it. Long time ago, though.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I guess it was.”
A car was pulling in behind us now, slowly navigating the small and somewhat crowded lot. Sure enough, it was the Subaru. When my father saw me, he lifted a hand in greeting.
“Is that Joel?” my dad asked.
“Yeah. I’ve been hanging out with Benji. He’s here to pick him up.”
There was a definite awkwardness, standing there with him as my father got out of the car and approached us. It was the same feeling I remembered from those childhood lunches at Shrimpboats, years ago, with me and my mom and dad on one side of a booth and my father, Leah, and Benji on the other. Us and Them, again.
“Robert,” my father said as he walked up. He stuck out his hand. “Good to see you.”
“You too,” my dad said, shaking it. “How’s Leah?”
“Good,” my father replied, then glanced at me. “What’d you do with your brother?”
“He’s eating pie inside.”
“Pie?” He glanced at his watch. “For dinner?”
Whoops. “It’s berry pie,” I said, like that made a difference.
“Sorry about that.” Clyde came walking up, joining the confab. “Your daughter got me into this documentary thing. Did she tell you?”
They both looked at him, then back at me. And here I thought this couldn’t get more awkward. “She did not,” my father said finally. “Is this the Ivy Mendelson project?”
Clyde, clearly confused, looked at my dad, who explained, “This is Joel. Emaline’s father. Joel, Clyde Conaway.”