Fifteenth Summer (16 page)

“This is a galley of her book that’s about to come out,” Josh said. “She’s coming here in August and I’m doing the poster, so I thought I’d re—”

“Oh my God!” I said. I sat down across from him and grabbed the table. “Why didn’t you tell me you had the new Allison Katzinger? And she’s coming here? To Bluepointe?”

“Yeah,” Josh said with a shrug. “My mom arranged it.
That’s
her favorite part of having a bookstore.”

“So, is it good?” I asked Josh. “What am I saying? Of course it’s good. But is it devastatingly good? I mean, is it one of her funny ones or one of her tragic ones? I can never decide which kind I love more—”

“Listen,” Josh offered, “I’ll need it back, but if you want to read it, you could bor—”

Before he could finish his sentence, I’d reached across the table and snatched the book out of his hand.

“Really?” I blurted. “You know I’ll read it
so
fast. I can’t believe I have to wait six hours to start. I’m sooooo excited.”

“I’m beginning to think you just like me for my books,” Josh said.

“Just like you like me for my pie,” I said. I passed the book back to him and let my fingertips touch his for a quick, thrilling moment before I stood up. “Hold that for me? I’ll be right back.”

When I returned, I presented him with a slice of lemon meringue.

“Is this what you normally do?” Josh said, giving me a confused smile. “Choose pie flavors for your customers?”

“I know what you were going to order,” I said.

At the same time we both said, “Cherry.”

“But trust me on this?” I whispered, glancing over my shoulder to make sure neither of the Mels was within earshot. “You want to go with graham cracker crust for the next couple days. Melanie’s, erm, tinkering with the fruit pie crust.”

“Don’t tell me . . . ,” Josh groaned.

“Yup,” I whispered, “mayonnaise. I’m afraid to try it.”

Josh grinned as he took a big bite of his lemon pie.

“Mmm, good choice,” he said.

I felt a little zing. I loved that I knew Josh’s favorite pie flavor, just like he knew that I took my coffee with five creamers and two sugars (even if he did make fun of me for it).

He’d told me that he loathed his dictator-like high school art teacher and had learned most of his drawing techniques on YouTube.

And I’d told him that I read
Little Women
at least once a year, but still cried every time Beth died.

Sharing things like that with Josh made kissing him even better. Knowing what was going on
inside
his head was what was really making me swoon. This was the part of having a boyfriend I’d never imagined—the best friend part. I’d dreamed about the kissing and the hand-holding. But I’d had no idea that the most mind-blowing part of dating could be the
talking
. Looking into a boy’s eyes and understanding what you saw in them. And each day learning a few more of the little quirks and details that made him
him
.

It made me feel different. Changed. Sometimes when I looked in the mirror, I expected to see someone else there. Someone older, with a knowing glint in her eye (and maybe fewer freckles).

As Josh took another bite of pie, I leaned against the table and wondered, “How far do you think she can take this mayo-in-everything scheme? Can you think of anything grosser than mayo pie? I think all the egg fumes are starting to scramble her brain.”

“I heard that!”

I gasped and spun around to see Melissa glaring at me with her fists on her hips. Where had she come from?

“Oh, Melissa,” I gasped. “I didn’t mean—”

“Listen, Melanie’s
always
been that crazy,” Melissa whispered. “It’s not the mayo’s fault. And besides, it seems like you’ve got mayo on the brain too!”

She tipped her head toward the specials board, where I’d scribbled a little paragraph in the empty black space beneath the list of pie flavors.

B. hoped nobody could see the shiny new horns beneath her bangs as she held out the platter. “Deviled egg?” she offered.

I shrugged and laughed.

Melissa grinned back at me.

“Do you know, since you put that up there the other day,” she said, “our deviled egg order has tripled? We had to send Andrea to the market for more eggs and paprika! Where’d you get such an idea, honey?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said with a smile and a shrug. “I was just serving someone deviled eggs, and the name struck me as funny. Do you want me to erase it?”

“Are you kidding?” Melissa said. “Don’t you dare.
And
stop mooning over that boy and go give menus to that four-top over there. They want two blacks, two decafs.”

“You’re the best, Melissa,” I breathed.

When Josh left, he wrote on his check,
Your Tip
→ with the arrow pointing at the Allison Katzinger book.

Of course, I
had
to stop by Dog Ear after my shift to say thank you.

And there just happened to be a wine-and-cheese happening for a local poet when I got there. Josh was working the cash register, so I stayed to chat with him during lulls. We debated Allison Katzinger’s funny books versus her tragic ones. I fetched Josh a plateful of artichoke dip and little endive leaves squirted with blue cheese and olives, and we agreed that they were as delicious as they were gross-looking. We had absolutely no privacy all night except for one brief moment, when the tipsy poet knocked over a stack of books with a sweep of her bangled arm, and Josh and I crept under the table to pick them all up.

But somehow it all felt romantic. More romantic than going to a movie or eating dinner in a restaurant with candles on the tables.

I didn’t know if this was because I had a warped sense of romance—or because anything I did with Josh seemed romantic, even gathering books off the floor, our fingertips touching as we reached for the same one.

But finally one afternoon a few days after the Fourth of July fireworks got rained out, Josh shook his head.

“Chelsea, look at us,” he said.

“What?” I replied. We were at the Pop Guy’s cart with E.B., scarfing down frozen treats during a ten-minute break. Josh was wearing shorts and one of his cute plaid shirts. He had a wad of
plastic bags poking out of his pocket (kind of a must when you’re taking an overweight Labrador for a walk). I was still wearing my waitress apron. My fingers had ballpoint pen and neon marker (and probably mayonnaise) on them.

“You know, people sometimes see each other for longer than ten minutes,” Josh said. “Or without a cash register sitting between them. They might even get a little dressed up. It’s called a date.”

If only I hadn’t just taken a big, cold bite of my melting pop just as he’d said that. Then I could have given him a flirty pout and said something clever like, “What took ya so long?”

The truth was, though, that despite all the hanging out we’d been doing—the quick meetings, the texts, and, of course, the kissing—the idea of going on a date had never occurred to me. It seemed so old-fashioned, so formal.

“What, are you going to come pick me up at seven and shake my dad’s hand and pin a corsage on my dress?” I laughed.

“Um, that was kind of what I was thinking,” Josh said, looking sheepish. “I mean, except for the corsage part. Maybe a sparkler, though? It’d be a better fit for the DFJ.”

DFJ meant “Deferred Fourth of July.” The rained-out fireworks had been rescheduled, and the town had posted flyers about the event all over Main Street.

“That’s datey, right?” Josh said. “A picnic, fireworks, marching band music?”

“I’ve always found marching band music to be very romantic,” I said, laughing.

“Hey, it’s better than our usual sound track,” Josh said. “The little bell on the cash register.”

He reached out with the hand that wasn’t sticky with pop drips and brushed my cheek with his fingertips. It sent a jolt through me. I imagined being alone with Josh for an entire evening. “Dreamy” didn’t begin to cover it, which was why I thought there must be a catch.

“Aren’t your school friends going to be having a party or something?” I said.

“Maybe,” Josh said with a shrug. “I’d rather be with you.”

“Oh,” I whispered. Josh’s habit of bluntly saying what was on his mind still made me reel. But in a good way now.

“So . . .”

“So . . . ,” I said. I smiled at him, shyly at first, then with giddy excitement. “So, pick me up at seven, I guess!”

B
y the time I woke up the next morning, there were only a couple hours
left
in the morning. I smiled lazily and stretched.

After our first frenetic weeks in Bluepointe, with all the educational outings and sporty field trips, our family’s pendulum seemed to have swung in the other direction. Life had seriously slowed down. And all that togetherness? That had tapered off too. Abbie had decided to train for a triathlon—because that was her warped idea of leisure—so her ninety-minute swim workout had expanded to include a couple hours of running and biking, too.

Each day, Hannah commandeered the swing on the screened-in porch so she could check another line off her to-read list. (I’m pretty sure she snuck in some naps on the porch swing too. It was impossible not to.)

My dad holed up for a few hours in the makeshift office he’d set up in Granly’s bedroom. And I did my afternoon shift at the Mels or hung out at Dog Ear or the beach.

My mom’s to-do list was to go through Granly’s things—her clothes, her mementos, her artwork and wedding china and egg cups . . . the whole life she’d suddenly left behind here.

But somehow something else always seemed to come up.

There was the afternoon of antiquing she’d scheduled with an old high school friend.

“I
have
to see her. It’s been years,” Mom said as she put on makeup for the first time since we’d arrived in Bluepointe. Abbie and I sat on the bed watching her get ready, the way we used to do when we were little. “It’s been years!”

“
Who
is she again?” Abbie said.

“ZiZi Rosbottom,” my mom said. “From high school.”

“Never heard of her,” Abbie said. She turned to me. “You?”

“Nope.” I shook my head.

“Yes, you have,” my mom protested. “We edited the yearbook together. ZiZi!”

“I think we would remember a name like
ZiZi Rosbottom
,” Abbie said.

“Yeah, because Abbie would have made all sorts of disgusting jokes about the fact that her name had the word ‘bottom’ in it,” I agreed.

“Well,” Mom said lightly as she breezed out of the bedroom, “maybe that’s why I never mentioned her.”

She made other excuses to flee the house too. She had to go to three different stores to get the right jars for making blueberry
jam—even though blueberries wouldn’t be in season until the end of July.

Or she passed a field full of sunflowers en route to the grocery store and had to go back and capture it with the tripod and the good camera.

This morning she was sitting on the living room floor surrounded by mounds of clothing. Most of the items looked so small, they couldn’t possibly have been Granly’s.

“What is that stuff, Mom?” I asked. I stood in the doorway between the living room and the hallway. I wasn’t sure yet if I wanted to go in.

“Your baby clothes!” Mom said. She held up a tiny pink onesie with a duck on the front. “Well, yours and Abbie’s and Hannah’s. I’d forgotten they were here.”

“Why
are
they here?” I asked.

“Oh, Granly and I used to say we were going to make a quilt out of them,” Mom said, picking up a fuzzy little blanket and rubbing it between her fingers. “But it seemed like there was always something else to do.”

“Oh,” I said quietly.

Even as my hands gripped the door frame, I realized my body was tilting backward, poised for flight. I didn’t want to think about yet another thing Granly wouldn’t get to do. Or see.

Mom didn’t seem to want to think about Granly either. She was lost in our pink, ruffly past.

“Oh!” she said, reaching for a hot-pink dress with a ribbon of orange tulle around the hem. “You and Abbie both wore this at your second birthday parties.”

“Oh, yeah!” I said. “I remember the pictures.”

“This would make the perfect center square for the quilt,” Mom said, pawing through the tiny outfits. “And then the colors could get lighter and lighter as I move toward the edges. I can just see it!”

The thing was, I couldn’t. Of course, I understood why my mom was nostalgic over baby clothes. She got all misty-eyed every time she thought about our babyhood, to the point that I sometimes felt kind of rotten about having grown up.

“You know, I should just do it,” Mom announced. She began laying little dresses and sun hats and bodysuits out on the rug, organizing them in their full range of color, from powder pink to bubble gum pink to shocking pink.

“Ooh,” Mom crooned. “I remember bringing you home from the hospital in this . . . .”

She was technically talking to me, but in reality I think she forgot I was even there;
she
might remember me as a baby with no teeth and chubby thighs and a little orange afro, but I didn’t.

When I turned to go, she barely noticed.

I stalked through the laundry room and into the backyard. The sun was directly overhead, and the cicadas were grinding away from their invisible perches in the treetops. That sound, combined with too-long grass and the empty, dried-up garden plot, made the yard feel overheated and oppressive.

I found myself pacing back and forth along the stepping stones, my arms folded over my chest.

I should have been glad Mom had decided to do this quilt
thing. I hadn’t seen her this happy and excited since we’d arrived in Bluepointe.

But . . . it just felt weird. This summer was supposed to be about Granly, not about
baby
clothes. She was walking down the wrong memory lane!

Not that I should have been complaining. I hated the thought of moving Granly’s stuff. I wanted her sewing box and photo albums to stay in the hutch forever.

So I should have been happy that Mom was leaving everything untouched, right?