Tomorrow's Sun (24 page)

And you’d better be gone when I get back
.

Emily stepped out of the shower in her own bathroom. She’d showered at the Bradens’ early this morning, but if she was going to do anything with her hair for the barbeque, washing it again was a necessity.

Head wrapped in a giant terry-cloth turban, she stared at her reflection with a more critical eye than she had since before the accident. Her skin looked dry and blotchy from eighteen months without moisturizer. Skin that had once been accustomed to monthly facials had done a poor job offending for itself while she’d been preoccupied with deciding if life was worth living. The split ends hidden by the towel had fared much worse. She wrote “hot oil treatment” on a Post-It note on the mirror, right under “moisturizer”. Looking up at the burned-out bulbs, she thought back to a matter of days ago when none of this mattered.

Jake was right. Someday the new, freed Emily Foster would actually want to be part of the real world. She’d want friends, maybe even dates. Until then, she needed to polish her rusty social skills and relearn confidence.

She needed life practice. Not “kiss and run,” but maybe “have fun and run.” So there it was—a new, rhyming life philosophy.

And what better place to start than here, where everyone knew she wasn’t staying and relationships were temporary. Like Post-It notes. Not too sticky.

She glanced at the time on her phone. She had two and a half hours before Blaze would pick her up. Enough time to replace the makeup and nail polish expiring in bins in her basement, pick up salad ingredients and a tub of peanut butter cookie dough, and do something drastic with her hair.

As she picked up her keys from the kitchen counter, an idea took shape. Lexi could use some cheering up. She pulled out her phone and stared at it. She didn’t have Blaze’s number.

She
did
have Jake’s.

Walking into what had once been the dining room, she nodded with approval. The wall the room had shared with the front parlor was gone. The openness was freeing. It confirmed what she’d known all along—she was right, and Renaissance Man, the guy with the biceps of a contractor but the heart of a poet, was wrong. She smiled, her gaze drifting to the dust-coated card table. Two imprints in the plaster dust marked the places he’d rested his arms.
“Your eyes are the stars of the midnight sky. Tell me your name, fair princess.”

She’d overreacted, let her baggage get in the way again. His reaction had startled her.
“What are your chains, Emily?”
She needed to explain. But how much? How many links of her chain could he handle? Would he even answer her call? She walked to the window and stared out at her spruce tree. Karen twittered on a high branch. Cardinal Bob was nowhere to be seen or heard. For once, the song of the red-brown bird didn’t sound scolding or commanding. She sounded lonely. “Sure, you chase him away and miss him when he’s gone.”

Emily leaned her forehead against the window frame and dialed.

It rang four times then went to voice mail. “Hi, this is Jake with Braden Improvements. We’re here to make your space a better place. Leave a message and I’ll return your call ASAP. God bless.”

Had the last two words always been part of his message? She had no idea.
“God bless
.” His smile came through in the soft benediction. It caught her off guard. When the tone sounded, she scrambled to remember why she’d called.

“Jake. This is Emily. I was just heading to Walmart and thought maybe Lexi would like to ride along, but I don’t have your mom’s number. If you could give me a call and—”

Chimes announced an incoming call. “Hello?”

“Emily? It’s Jake. Sorry I missed your call.” No disgust or condemnation colored his greeting.

She explained why she’d called.

A long pause followed. She was about to say maybe it wasn’t such a good idea, when he cleared his throat. “That would be so good for her. Thank you.” He gave her the number. She wrote it in the plaster dust next to his arm prints. “I’ll warn you, though, she gets pretty silly when she’s happy.”

“I could use some silly about now.” She turned back to the window, back to Karen and her lonely song. “I’m sorry I didn’t respond the way I should have earlier. Sometimes I—”

“These apologies are going to have to stop, Miss Foster. Let’s make a deal. When you do something that genuinely offends me, I’ll let you know, okay?”

Cardinal Bob swooped onto a low branch. Emily smiled. “I think you’re far too ni—polite to do that.”

His laugh widened her smile. “I heard that. You almost called me nice.”

“I did no such thing.”

“So you don’t think I’m nice?”

Her mouth opened. Nothing came out.

Jake laughed again. “I’ll expect an answer to that question tonight. Have fun with my niece.” The connection ended—before she could tell him she wasn’t going to read the letters without him.

Lexi threw her brush at her dresser. “Without asking me? Why would you do that?”

The brush smacked the pen Emily had left there and projected it into the waste basket. “I don’t need a haircut.”

“That’s just an option, Lexi.” Her grandmother’s hands left her hips. She fished the pen out of the basket. “Emily’s getting her hair cut and she said if you wanted a trim at the same time…” A heavy sigh puffed her cheeks. “She thought it would be fun if you picked out nail polish together.”

“I don’t wear nail polish.”

“Lex. Emily just wants—”

“I know what she wants!” Every muscle in her body turned to steel like the strings on her guitar. Pressure built in her chest, demanding to be screamed out. “We don’t even know her. You let some stranger sleep in my bed and use my things and now you want me to go off with her to who knows where!”

“Walmart.” Grandma Blaze swooped her gaze to the ceiling and back to the floor. “Just Walmart, Lex, not Timbuktu.”

“What if she’s a kidnapper? What if she’s going to run off with me and send you ransom notes?”

The hands went back on the hips. “Then I’ll gladly give her every one of the three hundred and forty-two dollars in my checking account just to get you back.” Eyebrows lifted the same distance as the corners of her mouth.

“Sure, laugh.” Lexi shoved her feet into yellow flip-flops. “You probably wouldn’t pay anything to get me back.”

Her grandmother stepped toward the door. “You’re right, we probably wouldn’t. Funny, though, that such hard-hearted people are willing to shell out eight hundred and fourteen dollars to put a pin in a cat’s leg. Especially a cat that makes me sneeze.”

The doorbell rang. Grandma Blaze walked out.

Lexi crumpled on her bed in tears.

Who was the hateful girl taking over her body? Was she possessed? She’d heard that demons couldn’t take over your body if you believed in Jesus. Maybe that wasn’t true. Or maybe she just thought she believed but she really didn’t.
Lord, what’s happening to me?

No answer came. Not even God wanted to spend time with a girl who hissed like an angry cat.

Her mouth jarred open. She looked down at her right hand, at the three red stripes she’d hidden from Jake and her grandma. Pansy had scratched because she was in pain and scared.

Just like her.

She hurt because Pansy hurt and because she missed her mom. She hurt because Adam thought it would be cool if Jake and Emily fell in love and got married and because her grandma laughed with Emily the way she used to laugh with Mom.

And that’s why she was scared. Life wasn’t good the way it used to be. Life would never be good for her again. But what if everyone around her got happy because Emily was there to make them laugh?

And make them forget.

Think
. Nobody else was making sense. It was up to her. She took a deep breath, dried her tears, and went to the bathroom and washed her face. With a smile brighter than anyone had ever smiled, she walked into the living room.

“Hi, Emily. Thank you for thinking of me. This sounds like so much fun.”

Without a twinge of sadness Emily watched the faded ends—the last vestiges of her former self—drift to the floor. At the stylist station perpendicular to hers, Lexi leafed through a hair magazine.

Sophia, a short, round Italian with purple highlights in her black hair, held a chunk of Emily’s tarnished platinum over her head. “Say good-bye to the old you.”

Was the woman eavesdropping on her thoughts? “Good riddance.”

“I think you should do something really dramatic.” Lexi smiled at her in the mirror. “A wedge. You’d look pretty in really short hair.”

“You think so?” Strange that the opinion of a twelve-year-old actually mattered. “Okay, Sophia, you heard the boss. Let’s go shorter.”

Sophia’s scissors slid an inch closer to her scalp.

“What are you going to have done, Lexi?”

“I want bangs. And layers.” She pointed to a picture and handed the magazine to a tall, skinny redhead in a maroon smock.

The redhead nodded. “You two are going to a barbeque tonight?”

“Yep.” A purple cape settled over Lexi’s shoulders. “It’s in a barn where they’ve had dances every year since before the Civil War.”

The tingle scooting along Emily’s spine was becoming familiar. It was the visceral equivalent of the
Twilight Zone
theme. Would she dance tonight on the same floorboards as the writers of the letters? “I didn’t know that.”

“You didn’t know it was a dance, or you didn’t know they started doing them so long ago?”

“Neither. I thought we were going to eat.”

“We are. But there’s a band, too. Can you line dance?”

Could she line dance?
Oh yeah
. And, for some strange reason, none of the boxes and bags she’d donated to Goodwill before leaving Michigan had contained her gold-toed black boots. Also amazing was the fact that she knew which Rubbermaid bin they’d retired to. “Yeah. Pretty fair.”

“Jake hates dancing.” Lexi’s expression faded to blank.

What did that mean? It was more than just conversation, Emily was sure of it. There was meaning hidden somewhere in the comment.

Maybe she could blame it on the antibiotics, but the truth dawned embarrassingly slowly. She remembered being Lexi’s age—one foot in childhood, the other flailing around in the scary abyss of grown-up land. Fairy tales still seemed possible in that in-between age. And Emily had more than a hunch that Lexi was dreaming of an impossible happily-ever-after.