A Measure of Happiness (7 page)

Sometimes she liked it a little bit rough, a little bit intense. Sometimes Justin called her bossy. At some point, she told Justin she found it funny that she was more into sex than he was. Then he'd called her a sex-crazed slut.

Then everything had gone to hell.

At least with Justin she remembered doing everything he claimed she'd done. But she'd only done those things with him.

Celeste slipped a hand beneath the shower spray. The water had heated, warming her hand but causing the rest of her body to shake. She took off her underwear and held it up to the medicine cabinet light. A tiny drop of dried blood stained the crotch, as though she'd been recently deflowered. And when she stood under the showerhead, the spray stung between her legs. She gritted her teeth, forced herself to endure the pain. Even when her chest convulsed, she squeezed her eyes shut and told herself to get over herself. She told herself to deal with it. Because she'd acted like a sex-crazed slut.

Because she'd remembered who she was.

C
HAPTER
4

B
y quarter of five, Celeste had progressed from the worry she wouldn't be able to fall asleep to the certainty nothing could prevent another fall.

Energy jittered beneath her skin. She needed to sleep, she had to sleep. She was sick with the need for sleep. But she had the weird feeling that she also needed to stay wide awake, stand vigil over her sleeping self, and guard the door.

She'd locked the door. She'd checked the lock twice. She'd had thoughts like this before and learned to ignore them.

She tucked her blankets beneath her chin and hugged the straw-yellow, love-worn relics, buried her nose in the fluff. She'd slept with the blankets since she was two years old, the year she'd upgraded from crib to big-girl bed. One blanket comforted, two kept her warm. Tonight, she needed both. Lights out, shades drawn against the last hour of daylight, the walls of the unfamiliar bedroom seemed to throb with a pulse. But, of course, it was only her heart beating in her ears, her thoughts keeping her from sleep.

Her wrong thoughts.

Above her, the gray ceiling twirled, sleep deprivation masquerading as a hangover. For a few moments she drifted up there and spun in the murky light. Then her covers took on weight, as though a downed tree trunk were pinning her limbs.

A male voice breathed her name in her ear. A light flashed from her peripheral vision. And then came the knocking. Hard and sharp and insistent and reverberating in her throat.

Her eyes snapped open to the nearly empty room, the blank walls, a kind of reverse nightmare. The digital clock on the dresser read 5:03 p.m.

“Shit,” Celeste said, all too aware she'd made the same proclamation half an hour ago, the last time she'd awoken with a start, her own personal
Groundhog Day
. When would she get it—life—right?

The rapping, she knew, wasn't even real, just an overtired hallucination. Hypnagogia. Lincoln, the brother closest in age to Celeste and with all the answers, had explained it to her. Another life lesson from the year of hell. Yet the sound tricked her every freaking time.

Would she never learn?

“What the—?” Celeste sat up, eyes wide. Her gaze shifted to the side. She was reasonably sure she was awake, so—

She zipped up her hoodie till the slide nicked the skin at the base of her neck, and walked to the front door, stepping through the living room as though the furniture might reach out and take her out at the ankles. She angled her left eye to the peephole.

Nothing out there but the front step and the curve of a wrought-iron railing leading to three more concrete steps just like it.

This time, she could tell the knock echoed from the rental office next door.

Was one of the tenants locked out from their place? Hurt? In need of assistance? When her brother Lincoln had been a volunteer firefighter, he'd responded to countless kitchen fires. The most popular culprit was usually a grilled cheese sandwich laid bare across the oven racks and a careless home cook who'd opened the oven door, feeding oxygen to the flames. People were their own worst enemies.

Did she smell smoke?

Celeste cracked open the door, slowly, slowly. But the stupid door creaked, igniting a heated tingle in her throat.

The guy standing on the rental office's artificial turf welcome mat, with his flannel shirt rattling in the wind, said exactly what Celeste was thinking. “No way!”

Zach Fitzgerald—Lamontagne's most recent, most curious employee—somehow managed to look both self-assured and sheepish, reminding Celeste of a stray cat she'd long ago found haunting her family's doorstop. To her family's credit, no one, not even her father—whose eyes swelled shut at the mention of
cat
—complained when they ran out of cream for their morning coffee or tuna for their brown-bag lunches.

After Zach's attempts to flirt with her that seemed more habit than heartfelt, he'd settled down. Celeste and Katherine had spent the rest of the morning and better part of the afternoon training Zach. Katherine showing Zach where to find the baker's yeast, Zach piping up to ask Celeste where Katherine kept the toilet cleaner, and Celeste making sure Zach didn't mistake one for the other.

Unlike the first time Celeste had laid eyes on Zach, she grinned, as though returning a guy's smile was her default reaction. Another one of her really bad habits. Or maybe she was relieved the knocking sound had come from someone real. She wrapped her arms around her waist, but the wind slipped like cold hands beneath her sweatshirt and T-shirt and across her belly. “Looking for anything special?”

“That depends.” Zach clambered down the rental office steps and bounded up the steps to her front door, his stray-cat look having morphed into a lost pup. Easily encouraged by a cheerful tone, too close, and with too much energy. “How much does a special apartment go for around here?”

“Five hundred a month. Unfurnished.”

“That's not too bad.”

“That doesn't include utilities.”

“Oh.” His lips twisted to the side, considering. “Hmm.”

“You have to fork over first month, last month, and a security deposit. And sign a year lease.”

“Geesh! What about your firstborn kid?”

“That would be illegal.”

“Good point.” He gazed across the parking lot. “Looks like it's another night in Matilda. Know a campground around here I can park her?”

Celeste followed Zach's gaze across the lot. An old lunch bag–brown four-door Volvo sedan was parked right next to Old Yeller. Celeste half-expected to see a woman stepping from Zach's vehicle.
Matilda
sounded like a long-legged skinny blonde who could eat anything she wanted without gaining an ounce.

Even Celeste knew that sort of person didn't exist.

“You named your car Matilda?”

“You got a problem with that?”

“Yeah, I've got a problem. She looks more like an Agnes to me. How old is she?”

“My girl's an '86. Bought her from the sweetest little old lady you'd ever want to know. Matilda's dependable and, believe it or not, good on gas, so think before you start trash-talking my girl.”

Celeste waited for Zach to crack a grin. He didn't.

She made sure her door was unlocked and stepped outside. The wind carried the aroma of damp leaves and a hint of a far-off wood fire, the smell she'd mistaken for a kitchen fire fiasco. The doormat's plastic grass spiked beneath her bare insteps. “You got your car when her first owner was done with her,” Celeste said. “No one expected anything of her anymore, right? So you give her the name Agnes. Old-fashioned but nothing showy. Then, when she surpasses expectations, everyone's surprised.” Celeste made jazz hands around her head, widened her eyes, made her mouth into a lowercase
o
.

She was joking, sort of, but the silly face made her think of Katherine. Celeste had hoped to return to Hidden Harbor with a degree from Culinary America and enough experience to convince Katherine to sell. Celeste had never really wanted to open a bakery in New York. That threat, promise, whatever you wanted to call it, had been posturing. A test to see whether Katherine really knew Celeste at all.

Katherine had failed.

Zach folded his arms and squinted at Celeste. “First off, who's
everyone?
” he asked. “Second, who cares what hypothetical people think?”

Sadly, Celeste did give half a shit about what
real
people thought of her. And she was totally embarrassed about the shit she gave.

But of course Zach was only talking about his car, nothing deeper.

“I named my car after the movie to please myself,” Zach said. “
Matilda
suits me just fine.”

“Wait a minute. Matilda from the movie?” A girl born to crappy parents turns out to have magical powers. A car deemed unsuitable turns out to run well enough to convey Zach to Hidden Harbor. “I can get onboard with that. Now, when I got Old Yeller—”

“You named your car Old Yeller?”

“Yeah. What's wrong with that?”

“You know that story doesn't end well, right? You know the dog—car—”

“See? You've only just met him, and he's already surpassed your expectations.”

“
Ha,
” Zach said, more an exhalation than a word, air rushing out of him in surprise.

Expression neutral, Celeste made a second show of jazz hands.

As though taking her point to heart, Zach sat down on the cement step below Celeste. “And yet I still need an inexpensive place to park Matilda for the night.”

“Holiday Inn in Bath?” Celeste asked.

“I hate hotels.”

“Yeah, me too.” Celeste sat down on the step beside Zach, making sure to leave a space between them. A space large enough to fit an average-sized guy. A space large enough to fit Matt the Rat. She tucked the hems of her sweatpants beneath her toes, rubbed them to encourage circulation. “Just for the night?”

Zach shrugged. “Until I find an apartment without a year lease.”

“I don't mean to pry—”

“Exactly what you say if you're about to—”

“I know Katherine's probably not paying you much and all. But, well, consider your training an investment in your future.”

“My future cleaning toilets?”

“Your future running a bakery. Or any business, really. You've got to understand how all the parts of the machine work before you can, you know, see it as a whole.” Celeste made a broad, sweeping motion, as if she were gathering ingredients and hugging them to her chest.

And with that, Celeste had resurrected Katherine's phrasing from a long-ago tutorial. The day Katherine had graduated Celeste to inventory and ordering, Celeste had walked from the shop with her head held high, a bounce, an actual bounce, in her step. The only managerial duty Katherine didn't share with Celeste was closing the shop and taking end-of-day profits to the bank. After she had been working at Lamontagne's for a year, Katherine had given Celeste a key to the shop. But the combination to the safe, Katherine shared with no one.

“Katherine told me you've worked for her for the past six years.”

“Yup, with the exception of two months at culinary school in New York.” Celeste's stomach dropped, a lesser cousin to the falling sensation of hypnagogia. She shook her head. “I've been nowhere else.”

“So why are you still working for Katherine?”

The events of the last two days rushed through Celeste's chest and backed up in her throat.

“I mean you can bake,” Zach said. “You obviously know what you're doing in the kitchen. And I saw how you and Katherine butt heads. . . .”

Celeste had gone to Culinary America to get more varied experience, not just with baking but also with bakery management. She needed to see the world outside of Hidden Harbor. Wasn't that what Katherine had told her months ago? “I'm doing this for your own good,” she'd said, as though Katherine were her mother, and she the baby bird reluctant to leave the nest.

Yet here she was, nesting once again in Hidden Harbor.

“I didn't finish my degree at Culinary America. I barely started. I wanted to, but then stuff happened,” she said, hating the defeated tone of her voice. She wasn't a quitter. And yet she'd quit.

Zach slid his hand a few inches along the concrete toward Celeste, and then he pulled it back, as though his instinct were to touch her hand in solidarity, rub her back in sympathy.

Early in their friendship, Matt had done that, the lightly placed touch, but without the retreat. Never a retreat. God freaking forbid he should retreat.

She'd seen Matt scorch the top of a crème brûlée and then, rather than start over, peel off the leathered skin and marry two ramekins. He'd undercooked German chocolate cake and tried passing the raw batter off as filling. Concealed a sunken in the middle vanilla cake beneath two extra bowls of buttercream. Instead of owing up to and learning from his mistakes, he covered them up, a master of the effed-up follow-through.

The cement step numbed her flesh, but not enough. Hardly enough. She still felt raw, roughed. Her heartbeat pulsed like a ragged thing between her legs, evidence of the mistake she couldn't ignore. She shifted a couple of inches farther from Zach.

She hadn't signed up for Matt's bullshit bragging. Whatever had happened between them should've remained private.

“I didn't finish my degrees, either. Stuff has a way of happening,” Zach said, his voice world-weary. Then, “Who am I kidding? I didn't finish because I didn't see the point.”

Celeste turned her gaze from Zach to the parking lot. Zach's car, Matilda, looked as forlorn as her owner, in need of a good night's sleep.

Or maybe Celeste was projecting.

“So, Celeste,” Zach said. “Is there a campground around here?”

“Hermit Island's down the road. Too bad it closed Labor Day.”

“Story of my life. A day late and a dollar short.” Zach got up and brushed off the back of his jeans. “Well, it's been real, Celeste Barnes. I'd better find a place for me and Matilda.”

If Zach managed to find a bed-and-breakfast vacancy in Phippsburg, he'd need to turn out his pockets before turning in for the night. Unless he happened upon an apartment in Hidden Harbor or Phippsburg where the building manager kept long hours, Zach would end up driving all the way to Bath and staying at the dreaded Holiday Inn.