Track 10

“I Second That Emotion”

Present Day

“Know what you’re ordering?” Dad asks while reading a laminated breakfast menu at Goldie’s Diner. Given the menu hasn’t changed since God was in kindergarten, I don’t know why he’s reading it. But the lack of progress here is part of the charm. It’s comforting.

We’re sitting in our usual booth in the corner. The window curves right around, giving us a panoramic view of comings and goings. Newspaper-print wallpaper spans the length of the long, narrow diner.

“Chicken-fried lamb’s brains,” I say. “What else?”

He grins. I’m pretty sure we’re both thinking about our family vacation to Sumatra, when I was eleven. He’d proudly taken us there so we could see where he lived as a boy, in a village of fifty people and twice that many cows.

My late great-grandmother Gigi, who was all of four-foot-ten, cooked for days before our arrival. She prepared an Indonesian banquet fit for royalty on a two-burner stove in her modest cottage. Spring rolls, sticky rice sprinkled with toasted coconut, tender beef rendang. For her, cooking was an expression of love. One dish I couldn’t get enough of was her specialty “popcorn”—soft and silky morsels coated in a spicy batter that danced with my taste buds.

“I love this popcorn tofu,” I said at the time, licking the juices off my fingers. Mom’s lips quivered uncertainly as she watched me eat.

“Um, it’s not tofu, Cass,” Dad replied as he reached for another helping. My great-grandmother chortled and gave a detailed, animated explanation in Indonesian. Which Dad translated as, “It’s, um, lamb’s brains. Everything tastes better when it’s deep fried.”

My brain, once it had an official name to the morsels, decided it couldn’t deal, much to my family’s amusement.

I miss my sweet great-grandmother. I’m grateful for that one trip to meet her and explore our heritage. The brain-corn? Not so much, but the thought of it and Gigi’s giggling still makes me smile. There aren’t any Asian restaurants in this town—Panda Express excluded—let alone an Indonesian one. I’m not likely to taste lamb’s brains again, even if I wanted to.

A waitress fills our coffees and takes our orders—innocuous peach crepes drowning in maple syrup for me, not chicken-fried offal.

Dad stirs fake sugar into his mug and neatly folds the empty paper packet into quarters. I peek at his upright posture through the steam wafting over my coffee. My father doesn’t do casual. His wardrobe consists of long-sleeved business shirts—never short-sleeved, even in summer—sharply tailored suits and ties. On Saturdays, like today, he’ll skip the ties and maybe wear leather loafers to replace lace-up brogues.

When he’s outside of a courtroom, he’s a man of few words. Sometimes it’s hard to know what’s going on behind those dark eyes. I do know from experience that he likes to get to the point, so I take a breath and plunge right into the touchiest of subjects.

“I went to see Mom yesterday.”

As soon as I said Mom, a range of conflicting yet indefinable emotions crossed Dad’s face. But now, he holds them back. “Oh?”

“We need to get her out of there. It looks like a place where linoleum goes to die.”

Now confusion is clear in his eyes. “Eden Estate? Charlie said it was the finest…” He trails off, unable to call it what it is—an institution.

“Has Charlie ever actually been there? Have you?”

With his finger, he traces the patterns on the ancient Formica table. I guess, since the divorce was final before she checked herself in for treatment, he feels like it’s no longer his place to look after her affairs. Then again, aside from me, my mother has no one else. Her ancestors moved here from the Netherlands during the gold rush. My maternal grandparents passed before I was born, but I’m told I inherited Oma Josephine’s sterke nose and jaw, and sturdy long legs. Poor Opa Henk apparently had a permanent hunch in his back thanks to laboring in the mines. Knowing that, I’m always conscious of my posture.

“No, I haven’t been there.” He shifts in his seat and brushes grains of fake sugar into a pile with his fingers. “How was she?”

“She looked…awful.” Picturing the dark circles under her eyes now, stark against her pale skin, and the blankness in her eyes makes me shudder. “Her clothes were hanging off her like she was nothing more than a coat hanger.”

“And emotionally? Does she seem better?”

“The doctor said he sedated her. She was really out of it.” I try to shake the image of depressed Mom from my head. “Isn’t there a better place for her to get treatment? Somewhere not so isolated, where they let people visit? She doesn’t deserve this.”

“It’s where she needs to be. More importantly, where she wants to be,” he insists. But his words don’t match his miserable expression. He still cares about Mom. Enough to do anything for her, though?

I reach for his hand across the table, squeezing so hard my knuckles whiten. “Promise me you’ll call.”

Releasing himself from my grip, he says, “She’s not going to be happy if I interfere.”

“She’s not happy now.”

Dad winces like I stabbed him with my fork and poured the contents of the saltshaker into the wound. “It’s just that… I can’t go into every detail about why your mom and I split up. Especially in the middle of a crowded diner. It’s between the two of us. But I have to say she was clear on one thing—I had to butt out of her life.”

The look of bewilderment and torment on his face makes me want to sob all over the table. Discreetly, I turn to the side and stop a tear with my napkin. Once I get a grip on myself, I ask, “But you still have power of attorney over her, don’t you? You can have her removed if you think there’s a better option.”

“No, she revoked it.” He leans back as our server returns with the food. When she leaves, he continues in a low voice. “I’ll call her before I leave for Copenhagen. See if she’ll allow me to help. How does that sound?”

My dad’s due to give a keynote speech on environmental law at a conference soon. He’d never tell me as much, but I know he’s nervous as hell about it. And now I’ve heaped more pressure on him. I’m passionate about conservation, too, and proud of what he does in his work, but Mom’s happiness and future are just as important.

“Sounds good, Dad.” Well, under the circumstances, anyway. What else could be done apart from snatching her from Eden in the middle of the night? I reach for my phone. “I’ll email you a list of clinics I Googled last night. Some of them are out of state, but could be worth checking out.”

He squeezes my hand gently. “Okay. I’ll get on it.”

The glass entrance door swings open, and a bunch of jocks surge into the diner. At the tail end is a flush-faced Hayden wearing a tight white polo shirt. As if by instinct, he turns his head and immediately manages to lock onto my gaze.

Then just as fast, he disengages. His face turns an even deeper red, the flush extending down his neck and—I’m sure—right down to his toes. Hayden sends me a half wave before pointing and shrugging as his jock friends take a booth at the opposite end of the diner.

It’s not surprising that he seems less than eager to talk to me. Despite my witty invitation, he didn’t turn up to last night’s party.

I admit I spent some of the time looking out for him at the lake, perking up every time I spied a new group of kids spilling onto the pebbled shore. And I also can’t lie about the odd pang that hit my chest every time I realized Hayden wasn’t among them. But I promised myself I wouldn’t send him desperate “Where are you?” texts. For most of the night, Lisa Cannon and I were busy consoling Angie because Jacob bailed on her. And apparently it wasn’t the first time.

I stare at the brunch sitting before me. The peaches are bright orange islands in a lake of melted ice cream. I’m no longer hungry. Not sure I ever was. My gaze drifts to the newsprint wallpaper. I never paid it much attention before because, well, it’s wallpaper. It’s meant to fade into the background. The articles are from different eras of the Dawson Gazette. I study one piece about a fundraising picnic for miners’ children, dated February 1948. Scintillating stuff.

A burst of laughter echoes across the diner. I swivel my head and find Kevin Williams “entertaining” the track team girls and guys by sticking napkins up both nostrils. Such a charmer. He’s a junior, but his maturity level is stuck in middle school.

Hayden’s perched on the outer edge of a banquette. He’s smiling, but the amusement doesn’t reach his deep brown eyes. He doesn’t seem impressed by Kevin’s antics. I mentally put a checkmark of approval by his name for good judgment.

He catches my eye again. I know it sounds silly, but that connection makes my heart do a little jump. No, a somersault. Thinking rationally, though, it’s probably the effect of a second cup of black coffee.

“Aunt Carole says you’ve been doing a great job in the office.” Dad jabs at his poached egg. Gooey yolk slides onto the sourdough toast like lava. But he can’t bring himself to actually eat his food, either. He pushes the meal around his plate, creating a bright yellow mess that reminds me of a Jackson Pollock painting.

“Thanks, I’m trying.” I dig into my crepes, unappealing as they look now. It’s sinful to let food go to waste, as Gigi would’ve said. “There’s a lot of old files to digitize.”

This past summer, not long after Mom went into treatment, Dad bought out his elderly partner, Charlie Hobart. His first order of business in this new era? To bring the office into the twenty-first century—decades after it started. Part of that means sorting and scanning reams of crusty old papers, and releasing them like doves to the sky. Sounds cushy, but it’s labor-intensive as hell. Plus, I have so many paper-cut scars crisscrossing my palms that they’d confuse even the most skilled fortune-teller.

“I know. Which is why I hired you to take care of it.” Dad winks.

“Well, I’ve done the math. Four-hour after-school shifts, two times a week? I figure I’ll be out of college—no, grad school—by the time every scrap of paper has been scanned and archived.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I pick Hayden out of the brunch crowd again. It’s almost as if I have internal radar tracking his every move. He’s frowning into his open wallet.

“Are you saying you want more shifts?” Dad asks. He jerks his head. Slick black hair, streaked with fine strands of silver, barely moves. “As much as I love having you in the office, I don’t want to distract you from schoolwork. Especially since this is an important year for you. So the answer to that is no.”

“I wasn’t asking for extra hours.”

His issue with my extracurricular activities is something we’ve gone over again and again. Which is why I haven’t told him yet about my decision to single-handedly solve the Jane Flanagan case on Mom’s behalf. A) He’d berate me for my ceaseless multitasking. And B) part of me feels like he’d say I don’t have the skills to investigate a missing person case. Particularly when that case landed my mother where she is now.

Hayden’s making his way to the entry foyer. His eyes are glazed. Upset, even. In an instant, I remember he mentioned he was job-hunting when we crossed paths outside Eden yesterday. If this isn’t kismet, I don’t know what is.

“Dad, Dad,” I say, interrupting him mid-chew. “What about hiring someone to help me? For just a few hours a week?”

“You want an assistant?” He puts his fork down and smiles wryly.

“Not an assistant, a partner. Based on what you just said, I need one. And you want everything digitized yesterday so you never have to trawl through papers ever again, right?”

Dad sighs. “Guess I can’t argue with that. Okay, we can look at hiring.”

“Great!” I slide out of the booth. “I know just the right person for the job. Wait here.”

“Who?” Dad asks on an exasperated sigh.

I duck and weave around busboys. Waving, I call out, “Hayden!”

Eyes to the checkerboard linoleum, he walks faster. But not toward me. Away from me. I almost crash with a server as I bound between tables. She glares at my swift apology and continues to the kitchen.

I get to the front door just as Hayden presses down on its handle.

“Hayden!”

“Hi, Cassidy,” he says, gaze darting. “Hey, I’m really sorry I couldn’t make it to the lake.”

I wave his words away and accidentally touch his wrist. He eyes my hand like it’s a serpent. “I’m sorry, too. For touching you. With sticky fingers. Gross.”

Hayden chuckles. “Apology accepted.”

A young family on the other side of the glass door gestures for us to get out of the way. I open it for them and beckon Hayden to the side.

“I see you’re in a hurry, so I’ll be quick.” I squirt hand sanitizer into my palm from a pump in the foyer. “You need a job, right?”

“Um, yeah.” He checks his phone. “I’m heading out to see—”

“Great! Come with me. I’ve lined up a job interview for you.”

“Now?” Hayden smooths his shirt down. It’s hard not to notice the shape of his ab muscles against the cotton fabric. “What’s the job?”

“You’ll be an assistant at my dad’s law firm downtown,” I say, like he’s already accepted the role. Because why on earth would he say no? “Great conditions. Decent pay. And you’ll be working with the other assistant—me.” I flash a grin. “Sound good?”

Hayden just gapes at me.

“I’ll take that as a yes.”