The Summer of Lost Wishes (3 page)

“Oh please,” he says. “Call me Blake.”

I really hope he meant that for my mom
because calling a man old enough to be my dad by his first name is
just awkward. He’s Mr. Carter to me.

He explains that he’s worked in carpentry
most of his life – family business and such. I guess he’s watched
this house from next door long enough to feel like it’s a part of
him as well. Or maybe he’s just as curious as everyone else in this
town as to what the inside of the Calloway Cottage really looks
like. If this place has never truly been inhabited, I can only
imagine what people say or think about it.

“My son is staying with me this summer,” Mr.
Carter says, drawing me back into the carpentry conversation. “It’s
not a permanent arrangement, but I’m going to milk him for all the
child labor I can while he’s here.”

He and Mom both laugh, and I feel the humor
of his joke is lost on me. Maybe it’s just a parental thing. I’m
sure Mom has all sorts of ideas of how she’ll work me this summer.
I refuse to paint this house. The last time Mom decided to repaint,
we literally sanded and primed and repainted every door and all new
baseboards for our house. The walls were another disaster in
themselves. She should’ve known a one-week timeline in the July
heat was a recipe for failure. I hardly spoke to her for a month
after that. I’d never been so sunburned and so miserable.

“I was hoping maybe I could drop by here
later with Rooks, just to show him around the place and what we’ll
be working on,” Mr. Carter says.

Can I just say that I totally support this
idea? Bring the boy over. If he’s shirtless and ready to work,
that’s even better. I’ll personally give him the tour. Mom should
have a sign-up sheet for this.

“What a great idea,” Mom says, reaching for
her coffee mug again. After a long sip, she looks up and smiles.
“Whenever you and your son are ready to get to work, just let me
know. I’d love to have this house ready by the end of the summer.
Sooner would be better, but I know it needs a lot of work.”

They discuss the hardwood floors, Mom’s ideas
to redo the bay window, and painting. Upon that word, I bail. I’m
not about to get mixed up in that, especially when Mom has been
obsessing over paint colors.

I grab the air mattress and decide to haul it
upstairs. This may take a while, but it’ll keep me busy enough that
Mom can’t delegate stupid jobs to me. I may actually spend the
entire summer unpacking to avoid actual work. I deserve a summer
off after she uprooted my life. It’s a fair trade. She gets her
dream home and dream career, and I get to hang around doing nothing
other than watching the pretty boy next door pour his sweat into
this construction project.

Two hours later, Mom’s on her fourth cup of
coffee. I snap ‘before photos’ of every room in the house, upon
Mom’s request. She rambles about colors and light fixtures and
where she’s going to place the new couch, but I have no interest. I
wish this house was already finished so we could just live like the
freaks who dared to buy the Calloway Cottage.

My phone makes that crunchy sound that’s
supposed to be a camera flash. I examine the before photo of the
dining area. Mom points to where the table will be. She wants a
sailboat centerpiece and a dark blue tablecloth.

“Maybe with white stripes or white place
settings,” she says more to herself than to me. “Oh no. White place
settings are too easily dirtied. Maybe red. What do you think?
Red?”

She lost me at the word ‘centerpiece.’ When
the doorbell chimes moments later, I rush to answer it, even if
it’s just one of the nosy townsfolk who graduated with Mom and
wants to pretend to catch up while actually scoping the property.
Anything is better than place settings and table cloths.

Mr. Carter stands smiling on our front porch
with his son, a gorgeous boy with a Florida tan and honey-colored
hair. His blue eyes sparkle like a Tennessee spring, the kind you
find deep in the woods and cherish for yourself because it’s too
special to share. Who knew I’d find such beauty on the coast?

“Piper, this is my son, Rooks,” Mr. Carter
says, gesturing to the beautiful boy. “He’s going to help me get
this house whipped into shape.”

Mom rushes over behind me before I can get a
word out of my mouth. She introduces herself, invites them inside,
and offers to give them the grand tour of the house. As she leads
them down the hallway to her bedroom and office, I rush up the
stairs to my bedroom to make sure I didn’t leave a bra or anything
lying around in plain sight.

I linger around in my bedroom for a few
minutes when I hear them come upstairs. Mom goes into great detail
about her plans for the guest room while Mr. Carter mentions
something about replacing the flooring.

“So this is it, huh? The infamous Calloway
Cottage?”

I spin around to see Rooks standing in my
doorway with this unimpressed smirk on his face. My mind races to
find words, but how am I supposed to speak when I have a hot guy in
my bedroom? I’ve never had a hot guy in my bedroom.

“Do you know a lot about this house?” I ask.
I instantly feel like the lamest person on the planet. I should’ve
replied with some unimpressed sarcasm to match his, but it’s too
late now.

Rooks shrugs and steps into the room. He jams
his hands into the pockets of his ripped jeans.

“Not really,” he says, glancing around.
“Everyone’s always kind of acted like this place was sacred or a
myth or something, even though it was in plain sight. It’s just so
weird to actually be
in
here, you know?”

I take a few steps closer and meet him in the
middle of the room. “You don’t think it’s, like, you know, haunted
or anything, do you?” I ask.

He quickly shakes his head. “I think you’re
safe here. Everyone will be in your business for a while because
you dared to move into a landmark, but if you want haunted, I say
go to Shark Island,” he says.

“I’m not searching for haunted,” I say, even
though I’m still uncertain about this house. “But if Shark Island
can give me a bigger closet, I may take that risk.”

He walks over at the pathetic
hole-in-the-wall where I’m supposed to be able to fit my wardrobe.
He sticks his head inside and laughs.

“I guess the Calloway family didn’t plan on
owning many clothes,” he says. “We can tear this wall down
tomorrow. It’ll be an easy fix.”

“You don’t want to discuss that with your dad
first?” I ask. “He may not be up for tearing down a wall.”

He looks back at me. “I wasn’t talking about
my dad. I was referring to you and me.”

“You cannot keep dragging that mattress down
here,” Mom says from the bottom of the stairwell. “I’m serious,
Piper. We’re about to start replacing the flooring, and you won’t
be able to throw that mattress on the floor then.”

I don’t respond as I haul the air mattress up
to the guest room. I would attempt to sleep in my own room, but
Mom’s insisted on replacing most of our furniture – including my
bed – and there’s no point in setting up all of my things when she
wants to shine the floors, repaint the walls, and expand the
closet.

Mom clicks across the hardwood floor
downstairs, and I swear, I can’t comprehend why anyone would wear
heels at eight o’clock in the morning, much less on a day when
she’s supposed to be working on home repairs.

I shove the air mattress into the future
guest room and step down the hallway. The boxes around my bedroom
bulge, like the contents are tired of waiting and want to burst
through the packaging tape. I hate to tell them, but there’s
nothing to see here yet…unless you count Rooks because he’s
definitely worth seeing.

As much as I’d love to throw these boxes back
into a U-haul and go back to life as I knew it, I’m tempted to
unpack simply because I want this room to begin to feel like mine.
Oh, screw it. I’m opening a box, just to see a few of
my
things. I won’t unpack. I just need a glimpse.

I reach into my purse until I find the old
house keys that I never bothered to give to Mom before we moved.
The new owners will change the locks anyway. At least, that’s what
I would do. I slice the tape open with our former back door key and
jerk the cardboard pieces back.

Delilah. Tears creep up, but I blink them
away while I swallow the nostalgic lump in my throat. Mom isn’t
much of a fan of my darling Delilah, but she’s the one thing that
will make this room feel like it belongs to Piper Davenport.

I push away the bubble wrap and Styrofoam
peanuts as I slowly pull her from her wedged position in the box. I
squeeze my arms around her neck and then hold her out to admire her
like she’s a long lost friend.

Delilah was a Christmas gift from my mom
three years ago. She didn’t like the idea of it, but faux taxidermy
deer heads were suddenly trendy, and living in the country, where
everyone had deer heads on their walls – real and faux – she
couldn’t help giving in.

Ms. Maggie made her granddaughter a faux deer
head, lined in the fabric of a chic sweater, and the entire town
went crazy submitting orders for one of their own. Mom refused to
pay “the crazy old sewing lady” for “something so incredibly
tacky.” But on Christmas morning, there she was, wrapped in chevron
wrapping paper with a giant pink bow. Mom had her lined with the
pale blue sweater I’d tossed into her donation box the year before.
My stepdad mounted her to my bedroom wall that night, and I
declared her Delilah.

“Oh, no,” Mom says from the doorway. “You’re
not putting her on the wall here. It was bad enough in Tennessee. I
bit my tongue and let you do your thing, but you’re not being a
hick in Florida.”

I sigh and turn to face her. “What happened
to unique? Feminine? ‘At least it doesn’t have glass eyes’?” I
ask.

Mom crosses her arms over her chest and dips
her head down, eyes still staring through me. “I couldn’t really
win an argument back then,” she says. “How could I tell you ‘no’
when I let
him
mount his kills on the living room walls? I
had to convince myself it wasn’t awful, but that thing is tacky and
homemade. She doesn’t fit with the theme of this home.”

Theme of this home? I mean, yeah, I get that
Mom wants to be all coastal with sand dollars, seashells, and
anchors. I get that she wants to decorate beach houses and local
businesses to give it a coastal, vacation-like feel. I understand.
It’s a career choice. But decorating our house like a show piece?
C’mon. We have to live here. We have to eat and do laundry and
shower – you know, normal people things that normal people do in
their normal homes.

“She’ll match the Iceberg Blue shutters,” I
insist.

“Piper, this isn’t up for discussion,” she
says in her mom-voice. “No deer heads. No mason jars. The cowboy
boots go in the closet, not in plain sight. And we’re repainting
your vanity before we move it up here. That bright teal does not
fit with the theme either.”

She demands that I ‘put that silly thing
away’ before the Carters get here. I would argue any other time,
but seeing as I have on what’s left of yesterday’s makeup, I shove
Delilah back into her box and grab my makeup bag.

Thirty minutes later, the scent of Mom’s
black coffee fills the house as I rip open more boxes looking for
Oliver, just to spite her.

Oliver was part of my fifteenth birthday
celebration. He’s basically Delilah with antlers, but he’s lined
with a blue and black flannel shirt that ‘says redneck worse than a
beer gut does.’ I have to give Mom a little credit. As much as she
detests him, she was specific in her instructions that he was to
have a ten-point rack and be turned facing the opposite direction
so he could look toward Delilah on the wall.

I push another box aside and rip through more
tape. Then someone laughs behind me.

“Someone’s frantic this morning,” Rooks says,
stepping through the doorway. “Are you afraid you left something
behind?”

I shake my head and push this box away from
me. “It’s here,” I say. “I just don’t know where.”

He stands there under the light fixture in an
old faded T-shirt and paint-stained blue jeans. How can someone
still be cute when dressed like a hobo?

“It’s not important,” I say, forcing myself
up from the floor. I’m not sure I’m ready to explain Oliver to
him.

“What in God’s name is that thing?” Rooks
asks, pointing to Delilah sticking out of her box.

Well, so much for that. I retrieve Delilah
from the box, tell Rooks the story of how she came into my life,
and explain how my mom wants her to cease to exist.

“Wow. You’re a strange one,” he says.

That wasn’t the reaction I was hoping for.
Unique? Different? Country? Any of those would’ve been okay. But
strange?

He catches my expression. “I meant that in a
totally non-offensive way,” he says quickly. “You’re just not a
typical Florida girl. You’re more cowboy boots than
flip-flops.”

“Trust me. At the rate my mom is going, I’ll
be doing home renovations in flip-flops and one of those huge sun
hats,” I tell him, physically cringing at the thought. “Anyway,
what’s today’s plan?”

Rooks gets his dad upstairs to check for
studs and framework before we beat the wall down. Even though I’m
sure those safety goggles go against Mom’s professional dress code,
I’m actually excited about putting a sledgehammer through the
wall.

While the Carters grab the tools from next
door, I put on my tennis shoes. Mom leans against the doorframe,
muttering about how this is a man’s job and I need to just come
downstairs and help her pick out cabinets and countertops
anyway.

When I don’t respond, she clicks back down
the stairs. She doesn’t understand that I need this. I need to
break down these walls. I need to vandalize this house, even if
it’s not technically vandalism. I need to destroy part of the
Calloway Cottage. I need to release all of these bottled up
feelings, and demolishing the wall of a landmark house is pretty
much the best way to do that.