Fifteenth Summer (22 page)

But my feelings for Josh went deeper than the details. I just loved . . . him. The him beneath the surface, the him that maybe only I really knew.

I dashed to find my phone, which was on its way to vibrating off the kitchen counter. It felt a little sticky when I scooped it up. I fumbled as I snapped it open, and grinned when I saw Josh’s number on the screen and knew that I’d been right.

“Hi,” I said, not able to catch my breath somehow. I headed back toward the living room and waited for him to ask what had made me so out of breath.

Would I tell him?
How
do you tell someone something like that?

So, guess what? I just realized that I love you.

I shuddered and shook my head. Then I shrugged and smiled to myself.

The one thing I did know about being with Josh was that there
would
be a time and a way to tell him how I felt, and when it arrived, it would feel natural and sweet and right.

“So, was your mom excited about the jam?” I asked Josh. “Tell her not to put it out in Dog Ear. It’ll get gobbled up in a few hours. We worked too hard for that, right? Kerplink, kerplunk . . .”

My voice trailed off. The silence on Josh’s end of the line was . . . too silent.

Something was wrong.

“Josh?”

When Josh finally spoke, it came in a rush.

“While I was gone,” he said, “my parents were looking at the book delivery schedule. They found my order for the Allison Katzinger books . . . which I never sent out.”

“Oh, um, is that bad?” I asked haltingly. “Her reading is in less than two weeks, right?”

“Yes, it’s bad,” Josh said quickly. “We were supposed to have a hundred of her books here for her signing, and now we probably won’t be able to get any, not in time anyway. And it was my fault. I messed up.”

“Josh,” I began, “you shouldn’t have to—”

“But I do, Chelsea.” I didn’t like the way he cut me off, or the way my name sounded when he said it. “I do have to do these things. My dad’s always in Chicago, and my mom—well, she’s not handling it, is she? She just doesn’t get it. So it’s up to me or the store goes under and everything changes and it’s all because of
me
.”

“Okay, okay,” I said, trying to make my voice soothing. “I think—”

Josh cut me off again.

“Listen, I know you want to make me feel better,” he said. “But me feeling better isn’t going to solve this problem. You know what will? Me doing my job. I need to focus—to
re
focus on what matters. Dog Ear.”

“But . . . ,” I whispered, “don’t I matter too? To you? Because you—”

“You . . . you know you do. But I need to focus.”

“You already said that,” I said, hating that my voice sounded tear-choked. “So what are you saying? You want to see each other less?”

There was an awful silence on the other end of the phone.

“Oh,” I whispered. “We won’t see each other . . . at all.”

Josh sighed deeply.

“I can’t think of another way,” he said.

I tried to make my voice go as cold as his.

“Or you won’t think of another way,” I said.

“Chelsea—”

“No, I get it,” I said. “I’ll let you go.”

“Chelsea, this . . . isn’t what I want,” Josh protested. “It’s what I have to do.”

“Sure, Josh,” I snapped. “You do what you have to do.”

Then I clapped my phone closed. I looked around. I didn’t remember coming back into the living room, but there I was. I stared at my reflection in the mirror hanging above the mantel. My hair was a frizzy, tangled mess, but that wasn’t unusual. It was my face that I didn’t recognize.

Well, actually, I did.

I remembered looking into the bathroom mirror in LA right
after my dad told me about Granly’s stroke, and seeing that same version of me in the mirror—pale, confused, blindsided, and very, very upset.

I’d known I would have to say good-bye to Josh. But it wasn’t supposed to be like this! What had just happened?

The front door swung open, and I jumped.

“Hi, sweetie!” my mom said, her face lighting up at the sight of me. My dad was behind her, holding two large pizza boxes. “We got your favorite—extra mushrooms!”

I don’t know why
that
was what finally made me crumple to the floor and start crying.

“I want to go home,” I sobbed as my mom knelt down next to me, wrapping her arms around my shoulders.

“I don’t understand,” she said, her voice immediately thick with empathetic tears.

I shook my head slowly, closing my eyes and feeling a fresh river of tears roll down my cheeks.

“Neither do I.”

I
t’s strange what will drag you out of bed the morning after your heart’s been broken.

Food won’t do it, even if your dad is making bacon and blueberry pancakes. Even if he has deferred to the fact that his daughter’s soul is crushed and he has promised to skip the mouse ears.

Needing something to read won’t do it. I couldn’t read through the tears in my eyes anyway. The words blurred, or worse—were replaced by images of Josh’s face. Either way the pages got wet and splotchy, and I ended up reading the same sentence about six hundred times.

Having to pee? Okay, that made me get up, but it doesn’t count if you make it quick and jump directly back into bed.

Being scheduled to work also wouldn’t rouse me. If I called in sick that afternoon, I decided, it wouldn’t even be a lie. I
was
sick. Heartsick, headsick, and actually a little queasy and headachy, although maybe that was due to lack of food.

So what
did
make me crawl out of bed at around eleven in the morning?

My garden.

My first impression of this first day of August, other than the fact that it was a dismal, awful, oh-the-humanity kind of day (for
me anyway) was that it was hot. Not cheery, sunshiny, let’s-go-to-the-beach hot. No, this was a ruthless white heat, a wilting, joy-sapping, punishing heat. A garden-destroying heat.

My plants needed me.

Ever since mid-July the garden had required daily watering. If I skipped even one morning, I noticed the plants began to wilt. The stems sagged and the leaves curled inward as if to protect themselves from the sun’s glare. The half-red tomatoes would wrinkle, and the cucumbers would take on a dusty cast.

When that happened, I’d feel as guilty as if I’d neglected a pet.

What’s more, the garden was on the verge of being edible. The tomatoes were looking plumper and redder each day. The cucumbers had outgrown their gherkin infancy and had grown into stout little pre-pickles. And my squash were getting so potbellied, my dad promised to use them the next time he made shish kebabs on the grill.

How lame would it be to let the garden shrivel up now, just because my heart was a raisin?

Maybe it was Granly’s ghost who made me roll out of bed and slump to the backyard to unreel the hose. Maybe it was just stubbornness or force of habit. Either way, I did it. I didn’t bother to change out of my nightshirt or put on flip-flops before I plodded outside.

I felt like I was watching myself from a distance as I uncoiled the hose and started spraying my plants. I got no satisfaction from watching the dry, dusty dirt become wet, squishy, and nourishing. Nor from the spiky yellow-green scent that sprang off the
tomatoes when I watered them. I didn’t even feel happy when my spray uncovered a whole new trove of baby cukes, some of them still wearing their shriveled yellow blossoms.

I cared enough to keep the garden alive, but the daily joy it had given me all month? That was gone.

I was numb.

I finished watering and turned off the spigot. Then I leaned against the house and tried to think of something, anything, I wanted to do for the rest of the day.

Beaching it with my sisters would be awful. They’d be all careful and sweet around me, and it would break my heart further.

If I spent time with either one of my parents, I knew I would just curl up into a ball and cry.

Then I thought about Mel & Mel’s, and the clatter of dishes
whooshing
out of the Hobart, of filter baskets being slammed into the geriatric coffeemaker, and the constant scrape of chairs on the floor and fork tines on china. I realized that
that
was where I wanted to go. It was the only even remotely tolerable place I could imagine spending this awful day.

But what about Josh on the other side of the brick wall?

I was
almost
certain he wouldn’t come into Mel & Mel’s. Even if he’d become a cold workaholic robot, he wouldn’t be
that
cruel, would he?

Or maybe he’d stay away simply for the time it would save. After all, girlfriend drama or, say, eating would cut into his busy schedule.

Now, I knew, Josh would do
anything
to avoid that.

B
y the time I left for work, I
thought
I’d pulled myself together. I’d put on makeup. (Well, except for mascara. The last thing I needed was telltale black streaks trailing down my cheeks.)

I’d pulled my hair into its usual ponytail but refrained from twisting it into an angsty bun.

I even decided against my first impulse outfit—a dour black T-shirt and dull, army green cargo shorts—and forced myself to wear a butter-yellow tank top and some stretchy denim shorts.

I looked almost presentable. Certainly not like someone who’d realized she was giddy-in-love just minutes before being brutally dumped.

I even felt a little hopeful as I walked my roundabout Dog Ear–avoiding route to Mel & Mel’s. Nobody there had to know what had happened. I could immerse myself in the rhythm of greeting/serving/clearing. The white noise of the coffee shop clatter would cancel out the turmoil in my head. My body would propel itself through what had become routine motions, and the exhaustion I felt at the end of the day would be welcome.

Maybe I’d leave work somehow feeling a little better.

Maybe I would even sleep that night.

But I only had to step through Mel & Mel’s door for my whole suffer-in-silence plan to crash down around me.

“Oh, Chelsea!” Andrea cried when she saw me. She’d been en route to the kitchen with a tray full of dishes, but she immediately put it down on a table and rushed over. “What happened?”

“What?” I said, my voice squeaky. “What are you talking about?”

“Well, clearly something’s really wrong,” Andrea said. “It’s all over your face.”

“But I put on makeup!” I protested while Andrea guided me to a stool at the counter. Melissa popped up from behind it like a gopher sniffing for trouble.

“Let me get you a drink, hon,” she said. She made me my favorite—iced tea and lemonade. “Now spill.”

“It’s nothing,” I said, shaking my head and pushing away the icy drink. It was already beading up with condensation in the steamy heat.

“Drink up,” Melissa said in a harsh Big Mama voice. It was so different from the firm sweetness of my own mother’s voice, but somehow it was just as effective.

“Okay,” I said. I took a huge, delicious swallow. It was so cold and sweet, it made my teeth hurt, but it was also delicious. I could have put a straw into a pitcher of it and drunk the whole thing right there. It was the first thing I’d tasted that day that hadn’t made me want to gag.

Finally I plunked my glass back onto the counter, wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, and announced, “Josh broke up with me. He said he needs to focus on the store.”

“What?” Andrea cried, putting both hands to her face in shock.

“Well!” Melissa said. “I can’t believe it! I mean, I can because he’s a
boy
and
they
do crazy things all the time, but . . .
Josh
? That boy is in love with you. We could all see it. Am I right, Al?”

Al Thayer had just walked in and was heading to his usual
table in my section, but when Melissa spoke to him, he wheeled right around and came to join us at the counter. He hopped onto the stool next to mine, which was pretty impressive, considering that Mr. Thayer was pushing eighty. He was also my favorite regular, so it gave me a tiny lift to see him.

“How’s my favorite little waitress?” he said, tweaking my ponytail.

“A, that’s kind of sexist, Mr. Thayer,” Andrea said, crossing her arms over her chest. “And B, I thought
I
was your favorite little waitress.”

“Did I ever say, Andie,” Mr. Thayer said, his white eyebrows crunching into a bushy line over his big nose, “that you weren’t
also
my favorite? You can have more than one, you know.”

“No you can’t,” Andrea and I said at the same time, which made her laugh and made me
almost
smile.

“Well,
I
can,” Mr. Thayer said. “Besides, did
you
ever write me into a serial, Andrea?”

He glanced at the specials board, where the latest installment of
Diablo and the Mels
was still glowing beneath the list of pie flavors.

B. didn’t like Thayer. She of all people (or whatever) didn’t trust a man who ate his eggs with hot sauce. That was
her
thing.

“I expect B. and me to have a grand battle, my dear,” Mr. Thayer said. “Make it happen.”

I tried to laugh, but all that came out was a pathetic little honk.

“So, what’s the problem?” Mr. Thayer asked.

“Josh,” Melissa, Andrea, and I said at once.

“I thought as much,” Mr. Thayer said. “What happened?”

“He’s choosing career over love,” Andrea said dramatically. “Men!”

“I don’t think you can call Dog Ear Josh’s career,” I said wanly. “I mean, he hasn’t even graduated from high school!”

“He’s a good boy,” Mr. Thayer said. I felt my eyes well up. My tongue went so thick in my mouth that I couldn’t talk, but I nodded. Because I couldn’t help agreeing with Mr. Thayer. Even though I was hating Josh for choosing his parents over me, I also loved him for it. He
was
a good boy.

“But,” Mr. Thayer went on, “being good doesn’t mean you’re always right. And being a boy, a young man—well, that’s a trial-by-error time if there ever was one.”