What You Leave Behind (6 page)

“Yeah.” The conversation drops into a lull and Harper quietly swings her feet back and forth against the wall as she watches Austin finish his cigarette in her periphery. “Well, she seemed pretty hungry, so I should, uh, I should get inside.” Harper crooks a thumb toward the door of the pub and stands, and Austin immediately gets to his feet to pull the door open for her. “Thanks,” she says quietly, stepping past him into the threshold.

“Wait—do you want to, um, will you grab a drink or—would you meet me for a drink tonight?” he stammers, not knowing where or when he found his nerve and lost his cool. She stares at him blankly for a moment and then bites her bottom lip, deeply contemplative, as if everything in the world is riding on her answer. For Austin, it is. But then he remembers their situation, their mutual heartbreak, how poorly their last meeting ended, and he clears his throat as his shoulders sag in defeat. “I mean, if you don’t want to or can’t or whatever, that’s fine and I understand. No pressure, Harp. I know how—”

“No, no, I’ll—just maybe not here? There’s too much of
him
here, and I’m—I’m done with him. New places, new memories.” Harper stops Austin with her words and her fingers as she barely gripping his forearm. The warmth of his skin startles her. She’s swathed in cotton and thick wool and he’s in an A-shirt and threadbare flannel, yet his skin burns electric beneath her hand. Like the brightness of his eyes, she wonders if he’s always been this way and she just hasn’t noticed. She tries to think of all the other times she’s touched him—years of high fives, friendly half-hugs, brushes of shoulders or elbows or hands in passing—but none of the times stand out to her. She can only think of his hands on hers in the pub so many nights ago, but all she remembers is the not unpleasant roughness of them. Slowly, she pulls away and it’s like watching a candle burn out, a few hesitant flickers, then nothing at all. Tilting her head toward the inside of the pub, she says, “I should go. Meet me behind the shop at close?” Austin nods, his anticipation barely contained behind his broad smile. Harper smiles almost shyly in return and ducks inside, the heavy wooden door thumping closed behind her as Austin releases his hold.

By the time Harper returns with plastic takeout boxes and Styrofoam cups nearly tumbling out of her grasp, the lunch rush has mostly ended, but she and Hilary take turns eating, just in case the crowd picks up again. Though he’s worked there nearly as long as Harper, Kevin still can’t be trusted to handle a full-on rush by himself, and while Hilary would normally stay on the floor with him until the mid-afternoon lull begins, Harper stands in for her so she can eat a meal at a normal hour for what must be the first time in months. She figures it’s the least she can do, and comes out of hiding, giving Kevin a pleasant smile as she pulls on a hairnet and ties on her apron.

“I didn’t know you were here,” he marvels, as if she were an apparition, and she half expects him to lean forward and try to put his hand through her, just in case she’s not really there. He’s always been big into science fiction, and into Harper, as well. Realizing Harper really is standing there, staring at him oddly, he pulls off his hairnet and clutches it to his chest with both hands, akin to how a gentleman removes his hat in the presence of a lady. “What are you doing here?”

“Well, hello to you too, Kevin.”

“Hi,” he stumbles out the word, his pale cheeks flaring red and his brown eyes opening wide behind his glasses. “Welcome back.”

“Thanks.”

As awkward as Kevin is, he’s entirely harmless, and Harper has never minded working with him. He always takes the insufferable customers, like the lady with the five bratty kids who always try to climb the cold case, before Harper even notices they’ve come in, always cuts the liverwurst when someone asks for it, even if it’s her customer. When Hilary comes back from her lunch break, Harper shoos her away with an, “I’ve got this,” and a smile. “Go conquer that mountain of bills on your desk or something. I saw how far behind you are.”

“Are you sure?”

“Absolutely.”

The afternoon goes pretty quickly, despite the lack of customers. Behind the register, Kevin and Harper sit on stepladders nicked from the cooler and he tells her how he got tickets for the Emerald City Comic Con, but she only hears half of it, her mind straying to thoughts of Austin’s eyes at the name. When her attention comes back around, Kevin is talking about the Star Wars Expanded Universe book he’s been reading. To keep herself in the moment, she asks him questions—
So, wait, Luke Skywalker isn’t in it? What about Han? Chewie?
—and she finds herself wishing she had a hobby of her own to talk about in such detail. She played soccer and ran track in high school, but over time, Liam became her only real hobby. Until she finds a new one, she vows to give Kevin’s the respect they deserve, and when he offers to let her borrow some of his EU books, she gently accepts, though she’s pretty sure she won’t read them. Kevin’s whole face turns into a smile at her assent though, and Harper thinks that whatever her hobby might one day be, she wants it to make her feel like that, smile like that.

When five o’clock rolls around, Harper folds up her stepladder and seeks out Hilary. She finds her squinting at the screen of her ancient PC, elbows deep in overdue bills, and when she looks up to find Harper standing in front of her, she has to blink a few times to right her vision. “Everything okay, honey?”

“Yeah. I was just wondering if I could clock out a little early, though.”

“You don’t clock out at all,” Hilary reminds her as she slides her glasses down the bridge of her nose. “The joys of a family owned and operated business. You, my dear, were born into a life of indentured servitude, just like your mama and my mama before me.”

“You know what I mean,” Harper replies dryly, but a smirk plays on her lips. She thinks it’s nice to have the old Hilary back. And she’s sure Hilary feels the same about the old Harper.

“I do. And of course you can. Hell, I wasn’t expecting you to be here anyhow.”

“True,” she laughs. “Thanks.”

“Sure.” Hilary smiles, righting her glasses and turning back to her computer screen. “See you at home, honey.”

“I’m supposed to grab a drink with Austin tonight, so I don’t—”

“Hayward?
That
Austin?”

“Is there another Austin in Ashland that I have a history of social interactions with that I don’t know about?” Harper looks at her mother with an amused sort of suspicion. “Of course,
that
Austin. Why?”

“With everything that happened with Liam, don’t you think—”

“Austin isn’t Liam, and I know you automatically tie the two of them together in your mind, but they’re not the same person.” The words are fierce and firm and Hilary snaps her mouth closed, as if Harper has smacked it shut. “Liam left him too, you know. We’re—we’re grieving two sides of the same loss. He doesn’t—Austin doesn’t have anyone else. He doesn’t have someone like you. I just want to be there for him.”

“Just be careful, Harp.”

“Be careful?” she scoffs. “About what?”

“He’s been arrested, Harper,” Hilary says bluntly. “More than once, I might add. He isn’t—”

“I’ve been friends with him for a decade, Ma. A decade.”

“Well, you were with Liam for a decade—” Harper inhales sharply and Hilary covers her gaping mouth with both hands, horrified at her words. “I’m sorry, Harper. That came out wrong. I’m—”

“It’s fine,” Harper says quickly, a hand held up to stop her mother from making things worse. “But, unless there’s anything else, I’m going to head out.”

When Hilary nods, Harper grabs her purse from the work table and pushes through the swinging door. As the deli counter comes into view, she hears Kevin say, “Hi, Mrs. Barnes, what’ll it be?” and her breath hitches. She’s pinned in place, stuck beside the band saw in the cutting area, halfway between the back room and the floor of the shop, and she knows that Sly has spotted her through the glass that separates the two areas. She hasn’t seen Sly since before—some morning Harper and Liam rolled out of bed and stumbled into the kitchen, and Sly made her coffee with cream and two sugars, while Liam cracked eggs in a pan. Sly’s almond-shaped eyes, the ones that Liam’s blues reflect exactly, soften immeasurably at the sight of her, and Harper feels something well in her chest, her throat.

Her legs decide to run before she’s consciously made the decision to flee. She runs through the back room and past the coolers, runs away from her mother’s concerned voice as it trails after her, and bursts through the back door with a sob. She makes it halfway through the alley before she doubles over, the weight of her sorrow crumbling her to the ground.

When Austin comes to collect Harper, it’s nearly an hour later and as he rounds the corner into the back alley, he lights up a smoke. When he sees her, the cigarette falls from his lips, embers striking his forearm as it drops, and he falls with it, kneeling at Harper’s side on the cold pavement. Without question or hesitation, his arms wrap strongly around her quaking shoulders and pull her to him, but he feels no pleasure in touching her now. There’s only pain there, and as he holds her tighter, she tells him, “I’m not okay,” over and over, and the pain swells.

CHAPTER FOUR

The ticking of the clock that sits atop Austin’s mantle cuts loudly through the silence, but the sound isn’t what Harper notices when she comes to. She focuses on the fact that Austin has a mantle at all, let alone a massive brass clock set on it, and she cannot believe that in all the years she has known him, she has never been inside his house. The week he and Liam moved him into the row home Dan cosigned for on Hersey Street, Harper had the flu and couldn’t help or even oversee them as they hauled boxes and furniture out of the Barnes’ basement and across town. After that, she’d never had a reason to be there. The trio gathered at Rhodes, on the trails in Lithia Park, or at the top of Emigrant Lake’s waterslide, at Noble Coffee and the Varsity, on the floor behind the registers of Barnes Drug and Beauty while Liam worked, or on the SOU campus as Liam navigated his pre-med studies, before he left for OHSU. Harper and Austin may have been longtime friends, but they were also always two-thirds of a whole, and they never purposely spent much time together without their missing piece, even during the four years Liam spent in Portland—until now. She rubs her eyes and takes in the sound, watches briefly as the gears behind the face of the clock turn hypnotically, before her gaze drifts to the photo at the opposite end of the mantle. It’s of the three of them from the summer after she moved to Oregon, no more than a few weeks before her father’s death, and it was one of the last times she can remember being happy that year. It was always one of her favorites, not because of the picture itself, but because of the way it made her feel—loved, happy, blessed—and she needed to be reminded of that often in the months following her father’s passing. It doesn’t make her feel that way anymore, though, and she forces herself to look away as her eyes brim with tears.

In an armchair a few feet away from where she sits, Austin is folded in on himself, legs crossed and arms wrapped around his torso as if he’s holding himself back, and in a way, he is. He’s pictured her here, in this place, over and over. He’s always wondered about the way her hair would spill onto and blend in with the mahogany-colored leather as she lay on the sofa, the way her bare feet would sound against the bone- and ash-colored travertine tile as she led him up the stairs to his bedroom, the way her low, breathy voice might echo against the beige walls as he pleasured her first thing in the morning. He never pictured her hugging her knees to her chest and crying over Liam, though. When her watery gaze wanders over to him, his eyes are trained on her, searing in their intensity.

“Aussie,” her voice cracks around his name and she sniffles through a pause, “why am I on your couch?”

“The alleyway? Do you—” He sees her eyes fill with a semblance of recognition mingled with an ounce of discomfort, and he looks away. “You fell asleep on me and I—I figured this made sense,” he says, his voice soft and hollow. She thinks it’s because he doesn’t care, that she’s inconvenienced him, and that stings more than she thinks it should, but he knows it’s because he cares too much. It is the only reasoning he has for walking a mile in the frigid wind with a broken girl in his arms and his heart kicking in his chest, the beats of it drowning out the sounds of her whimpers.

He needs to be stoic, because she won’t hold him the way he held her. She won’t comfort him if and when he breaks down. And he wants to break down, it kills him to see her like this, but even if she would console him, she’s in no state to do so right now, and he knows it’s selfish to make her try, so he keeps his distance as best he can. “I thought here was safe. I didn’t know where else to take you,” he explains, wanting to pull her against him again, wrap her securely in his arms and show her how safe she can be, but he doesn’t move. He sits stock-still in the chair wringing his hands in his lap, a scowl fixed on his face as he helplessly watches fat tears descend Harper’s cheeks. Her hands wipe them away and then grope wetly at the leather as she repositions herself on the sofa, tucking her legs beneath her.

The damp leather reminds him of tanned skin, what his chest might have looked like if he lived under the unforgiving Arizona sun of his youth. The way her fingers press into the sofa just enough to dent the surface makes a warmth spread through him, as if he were laid out in the brutal desert heat now. If his father had never moved them to Oregon, he never would have known Liam, never would have watched him break Harper’s heart. But why would Austin care for her heart at all, he wonders. He wouldn’t know her either, if he was brought up in Arizona, and that thought saddens him more than anything. He clears his throat and returns to the present, fixates on the wall just above her head, and says, “This just made the most sense to me.”

“I’m so sorry—”

“No,” Austin tells her sternly, “you don’t get to do that. You don’t get to apologize and act like you broke all by yourself. It’s his fault, Harp. His. Not yours.”