Monday afternoon, Bay sat outside on the beige stone steps of the main academic building at school and did her homework, waiting for the late buses, the ones that took the Wide Open Spaces kids home. They were the kids from the farthest edges of the city school district. They were a quieter crowd than the rest of the kids. Their lives weren’t filled every minute with something. Most of their lives, it seemed, were actually spent on the bus. Bay was usually the first one off, at Pendland Street, which she could easily walk to when she felt like it. It wasn’t that far away. But she needed the excuse to be here, because that’s what she’d told Josh she’d do in her note. And giving up would mean conceding that she was wrong, even though at this point she knew she was.
She was just waiting for her heart to catch up.
Everyone loved an October afternoon. Even the Wide Open Spaces kids were more lively than usual on the sidewalk. It was the kind of day everyone thought of as a quintessential fall school day—crisp air, letter jackets, plaid skirts. Something everyone says they once read in a book.
She finished her homework, then brought out her copy of Romeo and Juliet. She’d read it hundreds of times. Now she just liked to turn the pages to words she enjoyed, rolling them over in her mind: solemnity and pernicious, jocund and caitiff.
Doff.
Rote.
Fray.
She heard someone clear his throat behind her, so she automatically scooted aside and moved her backpack, thinking she was in the way of someone walking down the stone steps.
Someone did move by her, but then took a seat next to her.
She looked over, a little irritated because there were thirty-three steps from the sidewalk up to the rotunda, and this person still wanted her personal space.
But then she realized who it was.
“Hi,” Josh said.
Every day she’d been sitting on these steps, waiting for him. And now that he was finally here, she had no idea what to say. She wasn’t sure she wanted to say anything now. She couldn’t help that she belonged with him, that every time he was near, she felt a pull in her stomach, as if something inside her was pointing to him and saying, Home. Home. Home. But she didn’t have to try so hard. It wasn’t changing anything but herself, changing herself into someone miserable and insecure, someone so not her.
“You left your phone in my car Saturday night,” Josh said. He had his elbows on his knees, one hand casually holding her cell phone out to her.
“Oh. Thanks,” she said, taking the phone and stuffing it in her backpack. So that’s where it had been. She couldn’t find it anywhere when her mother had demanded custody of it as part of her being grounded, as if Bay used it all the time and would feel its absence mightily.
She fumbled around in her backpack, thinking he was just going to get up and leave. But the longer she dug through her backpack, needlessly rearranging her books, the more she realized that he wasn’t going anywhere.
She finally turned again to him. Josh was staring at her, sunglasses covering his eyes. He was wearing jeans and a rugby-striped sweater. She stared back, silent, raising her eyebrows. If this was going to be a conversation, he was going to have to make the effort.
“I’m sorry I was rude to you,” Josh finally said. “I was having a bad night, but that was no reason to take it out on you.” He looked at his hands, clasped together between his wide-splayed knees. “I’m glad you were there. I thought about it a lot this weekend. I realized I didn’t even thank you. So, thank you.”
“Okay,” she said.
“Okay?”
“I accept your apology.”
He smiled. “Very magnanimous of you.”
“That’s me. Magnanimous.” Several minutes passed in silence. Bay finally said to him, “You’re still here.” It wasn’t said rudely, but curiously, as if he might have forgotten.
“Yes,” he said, nodding.
“Is this,” she circled her finger in his general direction, referring to his presence, “a part of the apology?”
“No. But I understand why you would ask that. And, again, I’m sorry.”
“Why were you fighting with that guy?” Bay asked, something she’d been dying to know, but figured she would never have the answer. Now that he was here, and wasn’t going anywhere, apparently, she might as well take the opportunity to find out.
Josh shrugged. “He made a joke about how my dad couldn’t buy my way into the state championships. We’re a good team. My dad has nothing to do with it. Literally. He hates soccer.”
“You’re a great player. I’ve seen you play. I mean, we all have,” she quickly added.
“There was a part of me that hoped I’d get caught. Someone even posted a video of the fight. I thought my mom and dad were going to be called back from vacation and I would get a lecture and they would tell me how disappointed they were in me. But the principal didn’t so much as look at me today, even with this,” he said, taking off his sunglasses and pointing to his black eye. It was purple and yellow today, melancholy colors. “They’ll never know, unless I tell them.”
“Why would you tell them?”
He shook his head. “Sometimes I just want them to know I’m not who they think I am.”
It was such a strange thing to say that she automatically asked, “Who are you?” And it finally occurred to her that she really didn’t know. She knew as little about him as he knew about her. She simply had the benefit of knowing, knowing, where she needed to end up.
“I’m Josh Matteson, nice to meet you,” he said, putting on a big fake smile and holding out his hand as if he wanted her to shake it. She didn’t. His smile faded and he put his sunglasses back on. “I don’t want to go to Notre Dame, like my grandfather did. I don’t want to go into business with my dad.”
“That’s not who you are. That’s who you aren’t,” she pointed out. “What do you want?”
He seemed flummoxed by her response. “I don’t know,” he said. “I get cold sweats when I sit in my car in the mornings, trying to make myself go to school. I go to sleep at nine at night because I’m so exhausted. Sometimes my cheeks hurt from smiling, from pretending I’m okay with where my life is heading.”
The answer was so obvious that she thought he was playing with her at first. Then she realized he wasn’t. “Then stop pretending,” she said.
He gave her a look, like she’d said something cute. “I bet you’ve never pretended a day in your life,” he said.
“You say that like it’s easy.”
He shrugged. “Sometimes I daydream of mowing,” he said. “I love watching when the soccer fields are mowed. It seems so soothing, to ride on a lawn mower, back and forth, for hours.”
The late buses pulled in, and the Wide Open Spaces kids grabbed their backpacks and band instrument cases and started lining up.
Bay stood. “You could get a job at the soccer arena in Hickory. I bet they do a lot of mowing there. And playing. And teaching,” she said.
Josh watched her as she shouldered her backpack. He looked a little bewildered, as if he had steeled himself for something unpleasant. Bay did a mental eye-roll. Did he really think just talking to her would be so awful?
“Would you like a ride home?” he asked.
“As thrilling as it was the first time, no, thanks. The buses are already here.” She didn’t mention she was grounded.
Josh stayed seated as she descended the steps.
“Will you be out here tomorrow?” he called.
“I’m here every day,” she said as she got in line.
Just before she stepped onto the bus, Josh called, “Bay!”
She turned to him. He stood up, wincing a little, his hand on his side, favoring his rib cage. “Tell your friend Phin I said thanks.”
“For what?”
“Watch the video,” he said, then slowly walked up the steps and disappeared.
* * *
She tried to watch the video on her phone on the bus ride to her aunt Claire’s, but her battery was dead and she needed to recharge it. It didn’t matter anyway, because she had to give her phone to her mom when she got home.
The initial terms of Bay’s inaugural grounding were as follows:
1) Sydney would take Bay to school in the mornings and pick her up at her aunt Claire’s in the evenings.
2) Bay would surrender her phone, as soon as she found it.
Sydney said there might be more items to add to the list, she just hadn’t thought of them yet. Bay had gone over the terms in her head, finding all sorts of loopholes. Like, there was nothing that said she couldn’t actually sit on the steps of the school and talk to Josh, though the likelihood of such a thing happening was so astronomically slim that her mother probably thought it wasn’t worth mentioning at the time.
Another loophole: Her mom didn’t actually say she couldn’t leave the house for specific purposes, although that was what a grounding implied.
Her mother seemed to be playing this by ear. This surprise grounding, which happened a full twenty-four hours after the alleged crime, was supposedly because Bay didn’t ask permission for someone other than Phin’s mother to take her home. At least, that’s what Bay’s obviously confused father told her, trying to make her mother’s decision make sense.
But Bay knew there had to be more to it than that.
Because as many times as Sydney had encouraged Bay to get out and meet people and date, the moment Bay told her she liked someone, she reacted like this. Which led Bay to the conclusion that it wasn’t the crime her mother had a problem with. It was the boy.
Bay’s mother didn’t like Josh Matteson. And Bay had no idea why.
* * *
“Claire, you need a website,” Buster said as Bay entered the kitchen in the Waverley house a half hour later.
Claire smiled at Bay. Bay gave her a faraway look in return, perhaps a little too content for someone who had just been grounded for the first time.
“Who doesn’t have a website?” Buster continued. “I can’t believe you still fax.”
“I don’t know how to make a website,” Claire said as she stirred the large copper pot of sugar and water and corn syrup, waiting for the mixture to boil. Once it boiled, she would watch the food thermometer rise until it was time to add the flavoring and coloring. Lemon verbena again today.
The labels on all the lemon verbena candy jars read:
Lemon verbena essence is to soothe,
producing a comforting quiet.
Wise is a voice with nothing to prove.
Everyone should try it.
Buster looked around furtively, then whispered, “Okay, don’t tell anyone this, but there’s a top-secret profession called web designers who will do it all for you. I’ll hook you up, but you have to swear to secrecy.”
Claire shook her head at him. She’d met him last summer at one of her catering jobs, where he’d been a waiter. Later, out of all the applicants from Orion’s cooking school looking for part-time work, she’d chosen him. Sometimes she doubted this decision. He never shut up.
“Okay, forget the website,” Buster said. “You need to accept the offer from Dickory Foods. That business advisor you consulted said you should sell within a year, before you lose momentum. So, you sell the business, but still stay in charge of it. Think of it: expansion, advertising, the plant in Hickory. Can you imagine? Not having to stir every day? Not having to put labels on jars? Not having to assemble mailing boxes? No more of those biodegradable packing peanuts stuck to my butt with static when I leave this house?”
“You like when the packing peanuts stick to your butt,” Claire pointed out.
“I do enjoy the attention.”
“Just crack those molds and get to work.”
The doorbell rang and Bay went to get it. She hadn’t said a word since she’d arrived.
“What’s with her?” Buster asked.
Claire just shrugged.
“You have some visitors,” Bay said, smiling as she walked back into the kitchen with Evanelle Franklin and her companion Fred. Evanelle was eighty-nine now, tethered to oxygen and wearing thick glasses that made her rheumy eyes look huge. Fred, calm and pressed, was always beside her, carrying her portable oxygen container like a purse. He let her do all the talking, content to be her straight man.
Fred had lived with Evanelle for years, and Claire knew he loved the tiny old woman as much as Claire did. He’d become a fixture in their family over the past ten years. He’d been shy and uncertain when he’d first moved in with Evanelle, coming to parties in the Waverley garden with some trepidation, as if worried he might be asked to leave.
Evanelle and Fred went everywhere together now, and most people referred to them as a single entity, EvanelleandFred, which tickled Evanelle.
“Evanelle, I didn’t know you were coming by!” Claire couldn’t leave the pot, but she wanted to go hug her. Evanelle was like a favorite story she didn’t want to end. She’d known Evanelle, a distant Waverley cousin, most all her life. Her childhood memories were full of strange gifts Evanelle would give her that Claire would always need later, and of how Evanelle and Grandmother Mary would sit in the kitchen and share stories and laugh. It was the only time Grandmother Mary ever laughed, with Evanelle.
Evanelle’s health had been declining lately, and every time Claire saw her she seemed smaller, like she was slowly burning away and soon Claire would hug her and step back with only ash in her hands.
“I have something to give you,” Evanelle said, holding up a paper bag. “It came to me the other night.”
“Would you like some coffee?” Claire asked Evanelle and Fred. “I can get Bay to make some. I don’t think her mind’s on candy today, anyway.” Bay had been staring at her shoes, a slight smile on her lips, but looked up, blushing, when Claire said that.
“No, that’s okay,” Evanelle said. “We were just on a drive and thought we’d stop by. Fred said I needed to get out of the house for a little while, that I needed airing out.”
“I never said that,” Fred said.
“Okay, I added the airing-out part,” Evanelle amended.
“How was your doctor’s appointment last week?” Claire asked.
“He gave me some bad news. I’m old.”
That made Buster laugh. He walked over to Claire and took the spoon from her. “I’ll take care of this. You visit with Evanelle.”
Claire lifted off her apron, then took the bag from Evanelle, finally getting to hug her. She smelled like Fred’s cologne, which always amused Claire. Evanelle said it was just because she spent so much time with him, but Fred and Claire had a theory that she would dab some on her neck when Fred wasn’t looking. She always said she liked the way men smelled. “Come to the sitting room with me, Evanelle. Bay, you come, too.”
“Stay here and talk with Buster,” Evanelle told Fred when he started to follow them. She took her portable oxygen purse from him and stage-whispered, “He’s a cute one. You should flirt with him.”
“Evanelle!” Fred said. “He works for me at my market!”
“I’m just saying it can’t hurt. You’re a little rusty.”
“I’m currently in a short-term relationship with someone in my bread class, but you can practice on me,” Buster said. “I don’t mind.”
Fred clasped his hands behind his back awkwardly, not looking at all happy. “So this is what you do before you come to work at the market in the evenings,” Fred said, eyeing Buster warily. “You said you couldn’t work afternoons for religious reasons.”
“Candy is my religion.”
Claire led Evanelle out of the kitchen. Once in the sitting room, Bay went to the window and stared out as Claire sat beside Evanelle on the couch. As small as Evanelle was becoming, her large tote bag containing things like paper clips and plastic flowers and red ribbon and vinegar, all things she might feel the need to give someone, seemed huge now in comparison, like it was now carrying her. She set her tote bag and portable oxygen on the floor with a sigh.
It seemed like just yesterday the old woman was energetically walking around the college track every morning, ogling fine male posteriors, then stopping by for coffee and cake here at the Waverley house. That was before the Year Everything Changed, when Claire met Tyler, when Sydney came home, when Fred moved in with Evanelle. Claire wouldn’t trade her life now for anything, but sometimes she thought fondly of that time before. Things had been so much simpler, clearer, than they were these days.
“Go on,” Evanelle said, pointing to the paper bag. “Open it.”
Claire opened it and pulled out an old wooden-handled spatula.
“That belonged to your grandmother Mary,” Evanelle said. “She gave it to me one of the times she tried to show me how to cook. When she was younger, she didn’t want anyone to compete with her in the kitchen, even though she was so talented no one could compare. She was mesmerizing, wasn’t she? The way she would pour and stir and chop. It was like music. She even danced to it, remember?”
Claire smiled, staring at the spatula. “I remember.”
“In her later years, she didn’t mind so much, sharing what she knew. I think it was a little vanity on her side. She wanted to pass her gift along, so she would be remembered. But I didn’t care for cooking, so she liked having you in the kitchen with her, to teach. I had a dream about Mary the other night. I knew I had to give that spatula to you.”
“Thank you, Evanelle. I’m sure it will come in handy,” Claire said, though she knew it wouldn’t, not right now, with all this candy. Maybe later, when everything calmed down. “You know, I was thinking recently, why didn’t Grandmother Mary ever do anything big with her talent? Why did she keep it at the back door?”
“Mary didn’t do big because it would have been too much work,” Evanelle said with a smile. “She just wasn’t motivated. She liked when things were easy.”
“So she never thought she needed to prove anything?” Claire asked. Like me.
Evanelle’s eyes, magnified by her glasses, blinked twice, as if a memory had suddenly come to her. “I wouldn’t say that. She had her share of insecurities, especially after her husband left.”
“But she never cared what people thought of her,” Claire said. “She was confident in what she could do, right?”
Evanelle shook her head. “She thought too much about what other people thought. That’s why she became such a homebody.”
Claire was skirting around what she really wanted to ask: But her gift was real, wasn’t it? Not some hoodoo she used to trick locals into thinking she could affect their emotions by using flowers from her garden? Not something she kept small, because her secret could stay small that way?
But she didn’t ask. It would sound ludicrous, and it might even offend Evanelle and Bay, two of the most clearly gifted people she knew. Of course Waverley gifts were real. At least, theirs were.
Evanelle looked over at Bay, silhouetted in the window. “How’s your mama, Bay? I need to make an appointment with her to get a perm.” Evanelle patted her frizzy gray hair.
Bay turned and smiled at Evanelle. “She’s fine.”
“Bay went to her first Halloween dance on Saturday night,” Claire told Evanelle. “She dressed as Grandmother Mary. She wore one of the old dresses from Grandmother Mary’s fairy picnics. We found some old photos. Why don’t you go get them, Bay?”
Bay left the room and went upstairs.
“What’s wrong with her?” Evanelle leaned over and whispered in her loud nonwhisper.
Claire turned to make sure Bay was already up the stairs before she said, “She’s in love, and her mother isn’t happy about it.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s Josh Matteson.”
“Hoo-boy,” Evanelle said. “He’s a cute one. But that’s tough luck for her. Mattesons and Waverleys have never been a good combination.”
“I know,” Claire said unhappily as Bay brought the shoe box downstairs and handed it to Claire, then went back to the window.
“I remember these,” Evanelle said as she and Claire went through the box. “Your grandmother was so pretty. All these men loved her. They were her boarders. She had a waiting list a mile long.” Evanelle hesitated when she saw one photo. She took it out of the box and held it up. “There’s Karl. Never thought I’d see him again.”
“Who is he?”
Evanelle made a clicking sound with her false teeth. “He’s your grandfather. Didn’t you know that? Mary got rid of him when she was pregnant with your mama. Cheating son of a gun. She was never the same after that. He changed her.”
“Changed her? How?” Claire took the photo from her and looked at it. Karl was standing outside the garden gate. There were apples at his feet, as if the apple tree had been throwing them at him. He was smiling, his hands in the pockets of his striped suit. He looked jaunty and a little smug. As many times as she’d seen this photo over the years, finding the box of photos always when looking for something else, she’d never known.
“People like us will never really understand,” Evanelle said. “We fell in love with the men we were supposed to be with right off the bat. But women with broken hearts, they change.”
Evanelle took a few deep breaths through the tubing at her nose. A slightly alarmed expression came over her face, the way she always looked these days when she thought she’d been out too long and might run out of oxygen.
“I should go home. Fred?” Evanelle called in an airy voice.
In a few steps he was there, as if he’d been waiting close by. “I’m here.”
“Did that boy teach you a thing or two?” Evanelle asked as she stood.
Fred took the portable oxygen tank from her. “Evanelle, I’m forty years older than he is.”
“I’m just saying you need practice.”
Claire set the photos and the spatula aside, then she and Fred walked Evanelle to the front door. The air was as sharp and cool as lime ice when they stepped onto the porch, and they all stopped with the invigorating shock of it.
“It’s getting colder,” Evanelle said, pulling her fuzzy black coat up around her neck. “First frost should be here soon.”
“On Saturday, according to the almanac,” Claire said. “Halloween. I’ve been going out to check the tree every day. I think it’s almost ready.”
“Are you going to have a party?” Evanelle asked.
“Of course.”
“I can’t wait. You know, I’m a little antsy this year.” Evanelle shivered. “I don’t know why. Have you had any unexpected visitors?”
“No,” Claire said. “Why?”
“Autumn winds bring strangers. That’s what my daddy used to say. He wasn’t a Waverley. He was a Nuguet. Nuguets know their weather,” Evanelle said as Claire and Fred helped her down the front steps and into Fred’s Buick, parked at the sidewalk.
“I worry about her,” Fred said, once they’d gotten her inside the car and closed the door.
“I know you do,” Claire said, folding her arms across her chest against the chill. “She’s getting a little off track. But still doing great for eighty-nine.”
“I don’t know what I’ll do without her,” Fred said pensively. “It’s like I miss her already.”
Claire waved good-bye and waited until the car was out of sight before finally going back inside. Bay was still at the window and followed her to the kitchen.
“It’s about a boy,” Buster announced when they entered.
Claire looked at Bay, who had just washed her hands and was putting on clear plastic disposable gloves to funnel the hard candies into jars. “You told him?” Claire asked with surprise.
“She didn’t have to,” Buster said, shaking his head. “I always know when it’s about a boy.”
“You know that old man in the gray suit I saw a few days ago?” Bay said, changing the subject quickly. “I just saw him again when I was standing at the window.”