I smiled. “That sounds like Margo. Not only a realtor, but a force of nature.”
“Not unlike another woman from the same family I know,” he said, taking a sip from his mug.
“Mom can be hard to deal with,” I agreed, pulling my legs up to my chest. “I can attest to that personally. Especially today.”
“Mom?” He looked confused. “I was talking about you, actually.”
“Me?” I said. He nodded. “Oh. Sorry. I—”
“Emily as a force of nature,” he said slowly, as if trying out not only the words but the very concept. “Can’t say that’s the first thing that comes to mind when I think of her.”
I had a feeling I knew what that first thing was. Sitting here in front of him, eighteen years later. I didn’t say this, though. I’d start really talking when I was ready.
“Of course, she was young when I knew her. We both were. Just about your age, I guess. Wow.” He sighed, was quiet for a moment. Then, suddenly, he smiled apologetically, as if just remembering I was there. “I’m sorry. You caught me in an entirely too introspective moment. All too common lately, I’m afraid.”
“It’s okay,” I told him. “Seems to be going around.”
He picked up his cup again. “Honestly, I thought I’d be thrilled to get an early offer on this place. But now that it might really happen, the thought of leaving it behind, for good … it’s more bittersweet than I expected.”
“You got an offer already?”
He looked at me, nodding. “Just yesterday. It’s only been on the market three weeks. So much for the bust, huh?”
“Are you going to take it?”
“We very well might.” He sat back, taking another sip. “It would really be ideal. We could get the paperwork going, then head back to the city. Benji would have time to get adjusted to me moving out before school starts …”
“He thinks he’s here for a while longer, though,” I said.
“I know. And he’ll be disappointed. But we have to leave eventually. A few weeks one way or the other won’t make that much of a difference.”
I wasn’t so sure about that. There may have only been a certain number of days before I left myself for school—not that I had counted them out to the one—but if they were suddenly taken, I knew I’d feel cheated. And maybe a little scared. “I’m really …” I said. I swallowed. “I’ll miss him.”
He looked at me. “I know. And he’ll miss you. You’ve been the one bright spot in what was otherwise a pretty hard summer for him. I appreciate all you’ve done.”
“Of course,” I said. “He’s my brother.”
At this, he smiled. Then, we just sat there for a moment, in silence. If they were really leaving, it was all the more reason to handle this one last piece of our unfinished business. Maybe this, right here, was fate giving me that in. Now I just had to be accountable for what I did with it.
“I’m really glad you guys came down here this summer,” I began. “Even if the reason wasn’t, you know, so ideal.”
He smiled wryly, taking a sip of his coffee. “That’s a kind understatement.”
I took a deep breath. Here goes, I thought. “Truthfully, until that day you called, I was thinking I might never hear from you again.”
Again, it was instant, how he reacted to this last sentence: his entire body tensed, from his face to his shoulders, directly into fight-or-flight mode. “I told you, we don’t need to talk about all that,” he said, his voice stiff. “It’s in the past.”
“Maybe,” I replied. “But it was still really … hurtful to me. And confusing. I didn’t understand why—”
“Because I was getting a divorce,” he finished for me, his voice sharp. “Because I thought I would have the money, and then I didn’t. That’s why.”
It took me a minute, but finally I spoke. “Money? You think that’s what this is about?”
“I think,” he said, “that it’s bad enough that you’re having to go to a state school after all the work we did to get you into Columbia. The only thing worse is that you continue to feel the need to berate me about it.”
“Berate you?” I said. “You won’t even talk about it.”
He threw up his hands. “What are we doing right now, then?”
“This,” I said, circling my own hands in the air between us, “is only because I came here and forced the conversation. If it was up to you, I’d just suck it up, all that hurt and confusion, all because you don’t like feeling uncomfortable.”
“What I don’t like,” he shot back, “is rehashing my failures. I tried to help you, I failed. There. Is that what you want? Happy now?”
For a moment, I was speechless. Finally I managed, “I got a full ride at a good school. That’s not failing.”
“It’s not Columbia.” He sighed, rubbing his face.
“Wait, so that’s just it?” I asked. He looked at me, his expression weary. “Just because things aren’t exactly what you wanted, they’re nothing?”
“I was disappointed,” he said.
“Disappointment,” I reminded him, “is part of life. Just like change. You told me Benji should already understand that. Why can’t you?”
“You don’t understand!” he said, his voice rising. I’d never seen him upset, didn’t know this side of him, and I felt my skin flush, my own fight or flight. But I stayed put. After all that silence, for so long, I was ready for some noise. “Columbia was my chance to fix everything for you. To get you out of here, give you a life not like your mother’s, or grandmother’s. And I couldn’t do it.”
I swallowed, making myself take a breath. I felt eerily calm as I said, “I was never broken. I didn’t need you to fix me.”
He shook his head. “That’s the whole point, Emaline. You don’t know what you need.”
“What I needed,” I said, picking my words and tone carefully, “was for you to reply to my graduation invitation. To come watch me walk. To be proud of me no matter where I went to school.”
“I wanted the best for you,” he said, his voice clenched. “Only the best.”
“Well, too bad,” I said. “When you have a kid, you sign on for the whole package: good, bad, everything in between. You can’t just dip in and out, picking and choosing the parts you want and quitting when it’s not perfect.”
“I was going to get you out of this place,” he shot back.
“I’m still going!”
“Two hours away.”
“Yes, at first,” I said. “But from there, I can go anywhere. It’s supposed to be a start, not a finish.”
“You’re so young,” he groaned, slapping a hand onto his forehead. “You have no idea how one bad choice, one stupid mistake, can change everything for you. And once it’s done, believe me: it’s done. But the sick part is, you’ll still spend your whole life trying to fix it.”
One bad choice. One big mistake. One summer. One girl. One Emaline.
“You say it,” I said softly. “But you mean me. Right?”
He bit his lip, but didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. Because right then, suddenly, irrevocably, I understood. All this time, from the day at Igor’s when he’d first brought up the subject of college, I’d thought this was about what he wanted for my life, my future. But it was never about me.
My mom had taught me a lot of things. But one of the big ones was that if you made a mistake, you owned up to it, learned from it. My father, I saw now, wasn’t able to do this; he couldn’t even get past trying to fix it. That was his problem, though. No matter what he thought, I wasn’t a problem or mistake. I was his daughter. And despite all of this, and him, I was going to be just fine.
For a moment, we just sat there, staring at each other. Like the next word would tip the balance, for good, forever. So it was a fortunate thing, maybe, that it was neither of us who said it.
“Hellooo!” A loud, cheerful voice came through the screen door. “Anybody home?”
It was Margo. My father held my gaze ano
ther moment, then turned. “We’re in here. Come on in.”
She did, the screen door squeaking loudly. “Have to get that greased before the next walk-through,” I heard her say as she approached, heels clacking. “Among a thousand other things. But first, I have great news. The interested buyers want to—”
Whether she stopped talking and walking because she saw me or hit the wall of tension was hard to say. Either way, just like that, she, too, was silent. For about two seconds.
“Emaline,” she said. “What are you doing here so early?”
I swallowed, trying to calm myself. “I was in the neighborhood.”
“Oh.” She looked more closely at my face, which I knew was flushed, then at my father. “Well, great. Then you’ll hear it here first: the buyers are ready to sign a letter of intention!”
She was so excited and proud about this, she reminded me of Theo. Clearly, it was a moment for pomp and celebration. Which, unfortunately, was a bit harder to come by when you’ve just walked into a war zone. Still, I tried. “That’s great, Margo.”
“Isn’t it?” She looked at my father. “At this rate, we can go ahead and get all the inspections started, then begin working up a contract and the other paperwork.”
“Perfect,” my father said, pushing himself to his feet. “Let’s do it. It’s time for us to get home.”
“Oh, of course,” Margo gushed, “and really, you won’t want to be living here during all of this anyway, if you can help it. Now, I just realized I left my folder in the car—of course!—but let me just grab it, and we’ll go over some preliminary details.”
“Fine,” he said, cutting her off. “I’ll be in the kitchen.”
And with that, he walked away. Down the hall, out of sight, gone once more. This time, though, unlike so many others, I didn’t feel confused or wrong or angry. Just sad and disappointed. Like I was finally catching up to some Big Event of my own I’d been chasing, only to find it was over and done long ago.
I got to my feet and walked to the door. Margo followed me. “Are you okay? You seem—”
“I’m fine,” I said, starting down the front walk.
“Were you arguing with him?”
“I have to go, Margo.”
“Hey.” She reached out and touched my shoulder. “Look at me.”
I turned to face her. “Please. I’m really late for work, okay?”
“What happened, Emaline?”
“Nothing.”
She cocked her head to the side, clearly doubting this, as I got into my car. But the thing was, it was the truth. Nothing. It had been what always happened when it came to my father, save for a few months where I mistook his ego for something else. That was the problem, though. When you’ve never gotten love from someone, you don’t know what it might look like if it ever does appear. You look for it in everything: any bright light overhead could be a star.
All the way back to Colby, all I could think was that I’d lost something I never really had. And yet, the sadness in finally letting it go was as real as the tears filling and blurring my eyes. Worse, I had no idea where to go, or anyone who could understand. Not Theo, with whom this was already a loaded issue, or even Morris and Daisy, who had heard enough about my father to last us all the rest of our lifetimes.
If the light outside the realty office hadn’t turned red, I was sure I would have driven right past and on, over the bridge, maybe even farther. But when it slipped to yellow, I eased on the brakes, wiping at my eyes. I’d only sat there a second when I looked over to the parking lot and saw my mother.
She was standing on the front porch of the office, scanning the approaching traffic. Clearly, Margo had called her. I waited; one beat, then another. Finally, she spotted my car. When our eyes met, she bit her lip, then came down the steps into the lot, crossing her arms over her chest. The light changed, and I put on my blinker and turned in, now sobbing. I’d disappointed her too that day, and an awful lot lately. But still, when I got out of the car, she was waiting for me.
18
IT WASN’T A cocktail maker. It was a monstrosity.
“You know,” my mom said, from the open conference room door, “you don’t have to do this today.”
“It’s been on the requested-items list for over a week now,” I pointed out, climbing up on a chair with the box cutter and looking for a good angle to start in on the carton.
“Requested by the owner, not the tenant. They don’t even know it’s coming.”
I looked at her. “Wouldn’t you want this, if you knew it was available?”
She studied the picture on the front again, the sight of which, when UPS had dropped it off moments earlier, had left us all speechless. We’d seen it all. But never something like the Slusher Pro.
It was, at its basic core, a margarita machine. But this was like saying Mount Everest was a steep hill. It was huge, with one megablender, which, according to the box, held up to four gallons of mix, liquor, and ice. That alone was impressive. But it also had five different receptacles on its movable base so you could always have a fresh batch with the push of a button. No more constantly rinsing out the blender and refilling the alcohol to keep your guests adequately inebriated. Do it once, and the Slusher Pro did the rest.
“I still think,” my mother said now, as I wrestled the box open, “that we need to have some kind of waiver involved with this. No good can come of that much tequila consumption.”
“I don’t know. Last time I saw Ivy, she sounded like she might need it.”
It seemed both appropriate and ironic that it was the owners of Sand Dollars who had bought this mega-appliance, which had been on back order so long that both they and we had forgotten all about it. Once we looked at the paperwork, however, I remembered there being specific owner notes about leaving the space above the bar area open for “cocktail accessories.” Which I’d assumed meant maybe a nice rack holding shakers and strainers. Silly me.
“Nobody needs this.” She picked up a pack of shrink-wrapped papers. “Is this the manual? Good Lord, it’s thicker than the one for the copy machine.”
“You’re not helping,” I told her, freeing the huge engine-like base. “Can you make some room on the table there?’
She did, pushing aside the leftover biscuits and drinks from Roy’s, which, as I expected, had been there when we came inside an hour earlier. Sausage had again been all I could smell as she’d led me to a chair, and made me sit, then fetching one of Benji’s supercold Cokes and a box of tissues. I worked my way through both as I told her what had happened with my father, getting a headache from either a brain freeze or the copious amount of tears. Either way, by the time I finally stopped talking, I was a sniffling, caffeinated mess.
“That’s it,” she’d said, when I was done, reaching for her phone. “I’m calling him right now.”
“Don’t,” I said. “This isn’t your problem.”
“How can you even say that?” She leaned forward, so we were knee to knee, her hands covering mine. “The one thing I’ve always prided myself on is that I always did my best to keep him from hurting you. And it keeps happening anyway.”
“I’m a big girl,” I told her. “I need to deal with him like one. Which means not having my mom fight my battles for me.”
She’d done enough of that to last us both our lifetimes. And in truth, what she’d said in our fight earlier was still resonating with me, even if she’d forgotten. Eighteen years earlier, she’d given up her future for mine. That she’d ever think for a moment this might have been a mistake was enough to make me want to spend every day of it proving otherwise.
“He shouldn’t be battling you, period,” she said, clearly not convinced. “I can’t believe he still acts like such a spoiled brat. I swear, it’s like he never grew up at all.”
“I’m okay, Mom,” I told her.
“This is you okay?” she said, nodding at the pile of crumpled tissues on the table beside me.
“Yeah,” I said. “It is
.”
I knew it sounded weird. But beneath the tears and the sobs, there’d been this sense of relief, a feeling that something long nagging at me was finally closed and finished. For months now I’d carried around all this hurt and confusion, not letting myself truly feel it. But in that drive from North Reddemane, I finally got it. We wouldn’t have some big bonding moment, a sudden shift where he became everything I needed him to be. He wasn’t a problem for me to fix, either. Instead, he was a truth to accept, just like the fact that he’d always be on that line of my family tree. There was a peace in that, just as there was in knowing that whether he became anything else would, in the end, be up to only me.
Now, as I pulled out the rest of the pieces of the Slusher Pro, I felt my phone buzz in my pocket. I pulled it out to find a message from Theo.
Phase one of Best Future Job Ever begins: now. Going to talk to Clyde.
Clearly, I was not the only one in a life-changing mode. I texted him back, wishing him luck, then climbed down from the chair. “Theo,” I explained to my mom.
“Right,” she said.
We were both quiet a minute as, channeling my dad—known at our house as the Great Assembler—I spread out all the parts neatly before opening the manual. Finally I said, “He’s a really nice guy, you know.”
“I’m sure he is,” she replied. “But I still don’t want you at the campground.”
“How am I supposed to see him?”
“There’s the entire rest of town,” she said drily. “I’m sure you’ll figure out something.”
“So we can hang out in my room, then? I promise to lock the door.”
She narrowed her eyes at me. “Not funny.”
Still I laughed, and then she was leaving, sighing loudly as she went. I took a trip to the storeroom, where I dug around for the screwdrivers I needed, then got to work. Despite the Slusher Pro’s size and paperwork—half of which turned out to be drink recipes—it went quickly, and within about forty minutes it was done. Which brought me to my next problem.