I’M WEARING AN APRON and a baseball cap that says JACKIE’S on it, in case people stumble in and suddenly forget where they are. My ponytail sticks out through the hole in the back of my hat, making me look like some tragic softball team reject.
Jackie had the brilliant idea that I should work part-time at the shop, but I know it’s only a way to keep tabs on me, to make sure I’m not sleeping until noon every day.
I’ve been assembling pink cardboard pastry boxes for the last forty-three minutes.
Fold, bend, tuck, close. Repeat. Fold, bend, tuck, close. Repeat.
We haven’t had a customer in one hour and fifty-eight minutes.
Time is not warping, not jumping back and forth, not stalling, then speeding up. It’s standing still, like every clock in the world has broken simultaneously. Maybe standing still is simply what happens to time in a coffee shop/bakery in the middle of a weeklong streak of summer thunderstorms.
I don’t think we’ve spoken a word to each other in hours.
“Jackie,” I hear myself say, “can I ask you something?”
“Yes, of course,” she answers, holding her finger at a spot on the inventory sheet, pushing her glasses to the top of her head as she raises her eyes to look at me.
I try to frame the question in my mind first. “Where were you? I mean, why did you disappear? If you and Mom were really so close, why weren’t you around? We’ve lived, like, five minutes away this whole time.”
She lets her finger slide from its spot, tears suddenly flooding her eyes.
“I’m sorry,” I admit, looking down at my hands in my lap. “I’m just trying to understand. I keep thinking, what if—”
“I know,” she interrupts. “I keep thinking What if too. What if we hadn’t lost touch? Could I have helped her get away from him sooner? I ask myself that every day.” She leans forward, propping herself up with her elbows on the counter. “You know, we were all best friends in high school. We grew up together—your mother, your father, me, my high school boyfriend—we were inseparable. Ally practically lived at my house when we were your age.”
“What happened, then?” I ask.
“They both had it rough, Brooke. I remember Paul would come to school with black eyes, cuts, scrapes, bruises, a broken nose once. Really bad stuff.” She inhales deeply and shakes her head.
“I never knew that,” I tell her.
“I guess I’m not surprised.” She comes out from behind the counter and sits on one of the stools opposite me. “Well, your mother could relate. Her father used to beat up on her mother right in front of her. And her mother, Caroline”—she says her name like it’s a bad word, and I wonder if she realizes that she’s also just described my mother—“she was a nightmare. Really. Pills, alcohol, basically criminally negligent, in my opinion.” Jackie looks up at me then and exhales before she continues. “I probably shouldn’t have been so hard on her at the funeral. She is still your grandmother, after all. I’m guessing you never heard any of this, either?”
I shake my head, wanting her to tell me more, but also afraid of knowing the real story of where I come from, for once not sure I want the whole truth, if there even is such a thing.
“Well, it can’t hurt to tell you now, I suppose. Now that it seems everything’s out in the open.” She chokes out a small, nervous laugh. “They both had a lot of pain in their lives. I think they thought they’d be different from their parents—they were madly in love at one time, believe it or not. It’s almost like their pain took on a life of its own after so long. Until it was all they had left.”
She pulls a paper towel from the dispenser on the wall and dabs her eyes with it. I try to think of something to say but come up with nothing.
“Don’t think I didn’t try, Brooke. I promise you, I did. I told her to move in with me when Aaron was a baby. She told me I couldn’t understand. She forgave him somehow, made every excuse for him. It only started happening more and more, getting worse and worse. The more I tried to help, the more she pushed me away.”
“So you just gave up?” I ask, feeling the words beginning to collapse in my throat.
“No, of course not. I never gave up. She did. It got to the point where I would call, she wouldn’t answer. I would stop by, she’d pretend not to be there. Finally I told her I would back off, only because I thought maybe it was making it worse for her, but I let her know that I would always be here, that I would always be her best friend, and I would help her whenever she was ready. Except it was ten years before she ever called. And, well, here we are.”
“Here we are,” I repeat, looking around at the empty tables, so far away from everything I’ve ever known, far from all the things about my life I always hated, the things I only ever wanted to escape. I have the strongest urge to stand up and race for the door, to run through the rain, across the park, and down the block and up the stairs to home.
“Brooke,” she says more firmly, regaining her composure. “We can ask ourselves What if all day long, every day, for the rest of our lives, but I couldn’t help her because she couldn’t deal with the fact that she needed help. I’ve managed to stop blaming myself over the years. I hope someday you can too.”
I want to ask if she means that she hopes I can stop blaming her someday or stop blaming myself. But the tiny cowbell tied to the door with Christmas ribbon dings, interrupting us. A man walks in, shaking his umbrella off in the doorway.
“Hi there, I’ll be right with you,” Jackie calls out to him as she blots her eyes one last time.
I clear my throat and swallow hard, pushing those goddamn tears back down into the pit of my stomach—I imagine them being boiled away by acids and enzymes and chemicals. I refocus, with all my might, on the ever-important box assembly project.
I can’t sleep at all that night. The silver moonlight shining in through the window is keeping me up. “Callie?” I whisper. “Are you awake?”
I climb out of bed and tiptoe across the room to where Callie is lying on her side with her back facing me. I crawl in next to her and tap three times on her shoulder. She turns her head to squint at me for a second, then rolls back over. With my index finger I draw a big heart on her back, like she did to me that day at the pool. I wait for her to say something. But she doesn’t. She squirms and inches away from me, pulling the covers around her tighter.
As I lie here, staring at the ceiling, too tired to sleep, an old memory creeps in. It was sixth grade. I was at a sleepover. Cindy Irving’s birthday party. I was only invited because her mother invited all the girls in our class; everyone knew that. But somehow I managed to have a little bit of fun anyway. We made our own personal pizzas and watched movies and ate lots of junk food, and I got to play with her dog, which I liked.
When it got late, we scattered throughout Cindy’s living room. They had one of those foldout couch-beds, and so Cindy and three of her real friends slept there. There was a cluster of three more girls on an air mattress Cindy’s father had inflated earlier. They were all involved in their own conversations, so I rolled out my sleeping bag on the other side of the room, where I could get some sleep, away from their voices and the light emanating from their phones as they compared the selfies they’d been taking all night long. To my surprise, Monica B.—there were two Monicas in our class that year—came and laid her sleeping bag on the floor next to mine. She was kind of quiet like me, did well in school like me, and, I thought, maybe like me, wasn’t really invited. We hadn’t ever talked much in school, but I’d always liked her, always noticed her.
As an icebreaker, I told her that I liked her hair—she had it in one of those fishtail braids that I could never seem to figure out. She had me turn around and she explained the steps as her fingers worked through my hair. Back then, whenever I found myself with those crushing feelings I sometimes got, I figured it was because I wanted to be like those other girls, not be with them. At least, that’s what I always told myself. Until that moment—that small, innocent, sweet moment with Monica B.—that’s when I first knew it had to be something more. Maybe it was the way her fingers felt in my hair, or the way her smile seemed a little too tender, the way it lasted a little too long.
When we lay down, I showed her how Callie and I would write out messages to each other on our backs. I spelled out HI, then a smiley face, then THANKS.
But then she giggled. I’m not sure why, I guess it must’ve tickled her. The light flipped on and suddenly Cindy was standing over us, hands on her hips, this evil grin on her face. “What are you doing? Oh my God,” she snorted, “are you guys lesbos together?”
Monica B. looked at me, and for a moment I thought we were going to stick together, tell those little assholes off, and agree to form our own lunch table at school on Monday. But that’s not what happened. Monica jumped up and, taking on the same exact tone as Cindy, said, “Oh my God! Ew, no—gross.” And everyone started laughing before I could say anything, not that I would’ve known what to say had I been given the chance.
I called home. I told Mom that I didn’t feel good, I begged her to ask Dad to pick me up, risking any argument that conversation might cause between them. I had never wanted to go home so badly in my entire life. I stood outside on the front steps by myself and I ran my fingers through the braid, unraveling it strand by strand while I waited for Dad to pick me up.
When he arrived in the patrol car, having just gotten off duty, all he said was, “Hi.”
I said “Hi” back.
He said, “Buckle up,” and that was the end of it. I was grateful he didn’t make a big deal about it or demand to know what had happened. Maybe he knew somehow that it was too humiliating to discuss, that there was nothing to be done about it anyway.
By Monday I’d gone from invisible geek to the rumor mill, and Monica B. was suddenly one of Cindy’s minions. Needless to say, I was never invited to another slumber party.
I jerk awake, my body half falling out of Callie’s bed. It’s darker now, the moon having shifted its position in the sky. I make my way over to the other side of the room and lie down in my bed again, though I know it will never really be my bed. As I close my eyes, I vow never to think about braids, or Dad, or that night I missed home so bad I would’ve done anything to get back there, again.