Wynn in Doubt (5 page)

So I put those dreams away. But “next year” never came, because there was always something else, some other reason to stay. How do I tell him I’ve allowed guilt and fear to keep me from having my own life?

“Hey.”

I look up and into his eyes, which appear dark gray in the low light. They’re full of sympathy. It’s the last thing I want. Oliver Reeves pitying me. “I need to go.” I say as I slide off the stool and onto my feet. “Can you close up on your own?” I turn away and dab at the wetness collecting beneath my eyes.

“Wynn, I’m sorry.” He sounds sincere, which makes it worse.

I wave him off as I walk the length of the bar toward the back office. “It’s fine, I’m fine.”

“Wait.” He jogs along the counter, staying parallel across from me. “I just wanted to catch up. I didn’t mean to make you feel—”

“What?” My heart pumps erratically in my chest. “Like a loser? Like a nobody that’s done nothing with her life?” I take a shaky breath, embarrassed and angry at him, myself, and the delusion that I’ve been living under the past fourteen years. Hope that I could ever be interesting enough for someone like Oliver. The memory of my résumé lying limp and pathetically short on Mr. Sharland’s desk comes to mind. I can’t even make myself sound good on paper. “We’re not all you, Oliver. We’re not all cut out to have remarkable lives.”

He opens his mouth, but I cut him off. “I’m the support person.” I place my hands over my heart, willing my voice not to crack. “I stay behind to make sure everyone is taken care of. It may not be exciting or seem important to you, but it’s my place.”

He looks crestfallen and sorry. It breaks something inside of me.

“I have to go.” I rush into the office and grab my things from the metal locker by Lucky’s desk.

The late-July air is thick with humidity as I walk to my car. I gulp it down, glad to be away from Oliver and his sympathetic eyes.

four

“I’m not saying this to hurt your feelings, but you should burn that dress.” Tabby smiles and elbows me out of the way.

I turn from the reflection in my full-length mirror. “It’s not that bad.”

She tosses hanger after hanger of my clothes onto the bed. “It looks like you bought it at the thrift store downstairs.”

I stop twirling. I did buy it at the thrift store downstairs.

“God, how do you stand that smell?” she asks, her nose wrinkled. “Everything you own smells like an estate sale.”

When I leased my sweet little studio apartment three years ago, I intended it to be a transition home. I’d been dating Matt Beale for eight months, and things had taken a turn for the serious. We bought a fish and named him Major Sirna. But it turns out most betta fish live only about two years. Major Sirna lived one, which was three months longer than my relationship with Matt.

The apartment is a steal at $750 per month, but I didn’t anticipate the strength of the mothball odor.

It. Is. Potent.

“Ugh. This is useless.” Tabby throws another armful of clothes across the room. They land in a tangled mass on the floor. “Why don’t you have any nice things?” she complains.

“I’m poor?”

“You’ll just borrow something of mine. C’mon.” She yanks me forward, grabbing my purse from the petite kitchen table as we go.

“Wait.” I struggle out of her grip. “Why can’t I just wear what I had on when you came over?” I look longingly at the jeans and white T-shirt that have become my daily uniform.

“Because Oliver’s going to be there tonight, dummy, and we need you looking your best. Or . . .” She cocks her head to the side. “Maybe
my
best.”

Spend the evening with old classmates and come face-to-face with Oliver after our argument?
Sign me up!
At least it’s been busy at work. The place was so full yesterday, the only words I exchanged with him were “Another round, please,” and “Pass the peanut bucket.”

I tried coming up with an excuse not to go to tonight’s party, but Tabby’s my sister—she knows I don’t have a life. In the end I caved.

I slide my feet into my favorite aqua-colored flip-flops.

“Uh-uh. No way.”

“It’s, like, ninety degrees outside.” I fall dramatically against the plush cushions of the purple love seat.

Tabby grabs her hips and glares at me. “Two years I had to share a room with you and listen to ‘Oliver this’ and ‘Oliver that.’” Her imitation of my voice is horrifying. “Now you want to just give up and die?”

“I don’t want to
die
,” I mumble. “I just want to wear sandals.”

“You can wear sandals when you start getting pedicures.” She kicks a pair of black heels at me, the ones I wore to the job interview.

I make a halfhearted attempt to shove my feet inside. I don’t know why I’m bothering. I ruined my chances with Oliver when I unloaded on him at the bar. I didn’t have the nerve to tell Tabby about it when she mentioned he’d be there tonight. Anyway, she’d just tell me I’m being stupid. She’s never understood what it feels like to be trapped between what you have and what you want. She wants something, she gets it. End of story. I envy her for that.

The shoe refuses to give entrance to my foot. I give up and fling it across the small room. “I’m drawing the line at heels.”

Tabby blows out a huff of air, probably exasperated that I’m not a life-sized doll with thin feet and no opinions. “Fine. But no tennis shoes and no sandals.” She gets on her hands and knees and digs through the bottom of my closet. “Are you excited?” She resurfaces with a pair of tan ballet flats.

Am I excited?
It’s like there’s a flock of hummingbirds in my stomach, and every person I’ve seen today has looked like Oliver, who probably thinks I’m the saddest sack to have ever walked the earth. “Eh.”

“You’ll be fine. A ton of people from both our classes will be there, so you can, you know, mingle until you’ve built up some confidence.”

“Tell me again who’s throwing this party and why?”

Tabby stands and dusts herself off. “Luke Manning. He wanted to throw a welcome-home party for Oliver.”

“Luke the Puke?” Gag. Luke Manning was the class clown and a world-class jerk.

“He’s not so bad anymore. He owns a real estate firm. Weren’t you in chess club with his wife?”

Jenny Burton. My old friend and fellow yearbook committee member married Luke the Puke a few years ago, to my utter astonishment. We saw each other here and there for a while, but the friendship didn’t survive college. I guess most don’t. I wasn’t even invited to their wedding. Not that I would’ve gone . . . “We were in band together.”

“What’s the difference? The dork club.”

“I resent your use of the word ‘dork.’”

“Okay. Nerd.”

I throw a flip-flop at her head and try not to smile when she catches it.

“Alright, get up. We’ll go raid my closet.”

My good mood lasts five whole seconds. “I don’t want to go to Luke’s house. I don’t like Luke. He’s mean.”

Tabby falls onto the love seat beside me, resigned for the moment. “He’s not going to give you a wedgie, Wynn. Besides, Dex and I will be there. We’ll protect you if he tries.” She wraps her arm around me.

“Alright, I’ll go. But I have one condition.”

“I’m listening.”

“If at any point in the evening Oliver tries to talk to me, you need to intervene. I sort of made an ass of myself the other night. I don’t want it happening again.”

She squeezes my shoulders. “Getting me to agree on the flip-flops would’ve been easier.”

“Oh my God, you look like a hooker.” Franny eyes me from the doorway of Tabby’s bedroom. Tabby and Dex’s place looks like a Restoration Hardware showroom. Everything is heavy, soft, and in various hues of cream and gray. Franny’s house looks like a day care center. Watching us try on dresses for the party tonight must feel like an afternoon at the spa by comparison.

“She does not.” Tabby dismisses our older sister with a wave, then smiles at me in the mirror. The black halter dress hugs every meager curve of my body. “You look hot.”

“Like a hot hooker. Like you’re working the streets of Miami in August,” Franny insists.

“Franny, that’s my dress she’s got on.” Tabby holds up two different earrings on either side of my face.

“I know.”

Tabby huffs. “So you think I dress like a hooker?”

Franny moves into the room and lies down across the white bedspread. “Well, yeah. But a really high-class one. Like the kind that sleeps with actors.”

Tabby rolls her eyes, tossing a pair of pink chandelier earrings onto the vanity. She seems momentarily pacified. She holds a pair of blue teardrop earrings over my shoulder. “These,” she commands.

I recognize them. “These were Grams’s.” Blue glass catches the light as I place them in my palm.

“She wanted me to have them. Because of my long neck.”

Franny groans. “Not this again. You just take all the good stuff and leave us with the crap.”

“Hey, I resent—”

“Did you guys know Grams’s mother didn’t really die?”

Puzzled stares meet my interruption.

“What?” Franny pulls herself to a sitting position.

“Yeah,” I say, facing them. “She didn’t die like we always thought. Well, I mean, she died, obviously, because she’d be well over a hundred and ten by now, but—”

“I think your ADHD just kicked in,” Franny says, picking at her nails.

I smile, embarrassed. “Sorry. Anyway, I talked to Mom, and she confirmed Grams knew her mother left her. She just didn’t want us knowing.”

Tabby sits atop the clothes piled on the bench at the end of her bed. “How’d you find out?”

“About Lola?” The name is familiar by now. “I found this.” I reach for my purse, unearth the article, and hand it to Franny.

She reads it aloud, not pausing for dramatic effect as I did when I read it for our mother. “Wow. So she was a bootlegger?”

“Yeah, I guess. See here.” I reach over the top of the paper and point to the woman in the photograph. “That must be her.”

My sisters regard the picture intently for a few moments, then Franny hands it back. “What an asshole,” she says.

I balk at her choice of word. “We don’t know that.”

“Don’t we? The woman left her husband and kid and was never seen or heard from again. Sounds like an asshole to me.”

“But what if . . . I don’t know.” Actually, I do know. I’ve done almost nothing but think of Lola’s disappearance for nearly a week now. She’s even taken precedence over Oliver in my thoughts at times. That’s quite a feat. “What if she had to leave, and we just don’t know why?”

Franny stands and unsettles a red scarf from the pile on the bed. I watch it fall to the carpet. “You’ve always been a romantic, little sister.”

“Me? Tabby’s the romantic one.”

Tabby nods her agreement.

“Her?” Franny points at the blonde on the bed. “There’s a sizeable difference between being romantic and being easy.”

“Hey!”

“But what if we could find out what happened?” I ask.

“What do you mean, find out? We know already. She had a kid and a husband, and she up and vanished like a fart in the wind. Grams must’ve been ashamed if she felt compelled to lie about it. So, like I said, the woman must’ve been an asshole. We don’t need to know any more than that.”

“You sound like Mom.” I toss the earrings onto the table, no longer in the mood to play dress-up.

“Good. At least someone’s making sense.” At the doorway, she turns to face me, shaking her head. “When you were four, you were obsessed with Indiana Jones. Do you remember?”

I’m really not interested in another lecture about letting go of the past.

“Dad thought it was adorable. He got you a little Indiana hat and round glasses with the lenses removed. And then he brought home that big bullwhip. It was heavier than you I think.”

I remember.

“First day, first minute you got that thing, you gave me this.” She rolls back the sleeve of her blouse, revealing a thin white scar on her bicep. “You wanted to outrun boulders and chase bad guys. Lola”—she spits out the name—“obviously wanted a different life, too. When you refuse to live in the real world with everyone else, you put the people you love at risk to get hurt. Don’t upset Mom. This lady, whoever she was, doesn’t deserve to be resurrected.”

“Dude, you got hot!”

I clutch my purse to my stomach and try smiling at Luke as Tabby, Dex, and I pass through his front door. A large curved staircase dominates the foyer. I’m shocked to see actual artwork hanging on the walls. Jenny’s doing, no doubt.

“Tabby.” Luke takes my sister’s hand, bends over, and places a dramatic kiss on the back of it. “You’re still super hot, too.”

Tabby curtsies as Dex nudges me. I roll my eyes toward Luke, and he smiles. Dex is a good one. How’d my little sister get so lucky? Six four, blond haired, blue eyed, and rich. He’s like a twenty-first-century Viking, with good teeth.

“C’mon, you guys. Come see the pool. It’s fucking awesome.”

Luke leads us through the main level, his hand on my back. I nod at old classmates whose names I can’t remember. Time has given everyone a fun house appearance. Slightly distorted but still recognizable. Luke is the same way. A little older, a little fatter around the middle, but with the same abrasive, untamed charisma he possessed in high school.

He’d see me overloaded with books in the hallway and call me “brain.” And I was a brain. But I wanted people to see me as more than just the girl who studied too much.

“Jen-Bean,” Luke gestures wildly at his wife.

Jenny Burton glides toward us on thin, tan legs. She’s not the clarinet player with cystic acne anymore. She’s a full-blown goddess, and the guy belching in my right ear is her Zeus.

“Wynn. Oh, it’s so nice to see you.” She smells heavenly as she wraps me in a fierce hug. She looks . . . rich. Like gold bullion dipped in rubies and covered in rose petals.

“Jenny,” I squeak out. “Wow. Great house.”

“It’s Jen now.” Her smile is perfectly symmetrical. Another new addition. “And I know, right? It’s the biggest one on the street. Did you see the fountain as you walked in?”

The fountain is seven feet tall with stone swans carved into either side. You’d have to be blind
not
to see it. “Yeah, I did. It’s . . . really great.”