Just Friends(58)
His eyes flit up to the dash. “Me neither,” he replies.
Declan looks at me again, and this time, it’s different from how he looked at me when we first got in the car. It’s unhurried, lingering.
“I’m going to drive you home now, Blair,” he says softly before putting his seat belt on and putting my car in reverse. “You’ve had a long day.”
My mind berates itself as I buckle myself in and face forward.
Friends. That horrible feeling of free-falling in my stomach was precisely why hope was so dangerous. You couldn’t allow it in. Not even a little bit. Because I’d spent four and a half years getting rid of hope, trying to make the reality of his rejection sting less, only for one conversation to let hope seep in through the cracks and tear everything wide open again.
Chapter 18
My fictional characters are seconds away from leaning in for their first kiss when my mom comes scurrying into the back room of the convenience store. I’m sitting on an upside-down crate, laptop open to the manuscript I’ve been writing since the funeral, with zero sense of how long I’ve been lost in my fictional world. Long enough to feel my butt bones tingle with numbness from digging into the plastic-waffle gridding of the crate.
“Honey.” She shuffles toward me with a smile on her face, and I slam my laptop shut. “Look what I just found.” She stretches out her hand, revealing a film photo small enough to fit in your back pocket.
I hold it up for inspection. It’s a grainy image of Lottie, twenty years younger, and a small girl standing by her side in front of a house. My mom circles behind me, peeking over my shoulder at the photo.
“Recognize anything?” she questions, with the obvious implication that I should.
“Is it…” I bring the photo up for closer investigation. “Oh, that’s me! And… is that the cottage?” I point to the terra-cotta pot that’s taller than I am in the photo.
“Yep! You have been to the house. Even if you don’t remember it,” my mom practically squeals.
The cream-colored arched doorway was difficult to recognize in its pristine condition. Now, it was almost completely overtaken by the lavender bushes that seemed larger than the house itself.
It didn’t seem possible, but perhaps the wave of déjà vu I felt entering the house for what I thought was the first time, was my body’s memory of it.
“Well, anyways,” my mom sings, “just thought you’d like to have that. What a full-circle moment now that it’s yours, huh?”
“Yeah, no, definitely, that’s… that’s wild.” I try to sound cheerful despite the agonizing swirl of “should I live there, should I not” stirring in my stomach. “So full circle.”
A phone starts ringing on the desk that used to be Lottie’s. She scurries over to it, platform sandals squeaking as she goes. I notice the way her face shrinks in consternation the way it always has.
“Hello,” she says, voice wary.
She listens to the person on the other end, eyebrows crunching and lips thinning into a hard line. I could cross-stitch that expression on her face from memory.
“Yes, I hear you. Okay, yes, um,” she says, fumbling to put the phone between her ear and shoulder while she searches for her pocketbook calendar. “I’m so sorry. It looks like I got one of the locations mixed up and…” She pauses to listen. “Yes, once again, I am so sorry. It won’t happen again. Okay, bye.”
She sets the phone down slowly, like she’s in a daze, and starts picking at her hair. It’s a stress response I’ve watched her resort to my entire life. As if her thoughts were connected to the strands of her hair, tugging at them like the movement might bypass her skull and untangle her thoughts.
“Mom?” I call. “Everything alright?”
“Yes! Oh, yes, all good!” she says in her fake peppy voice, turning her back to me to avoid meeting my eyes.
Okay, so… definitely not “all good.”
“Do you need help with anything? I don’t have overtime hours tonight.”
She pauses for a long moment with her hands on the desk. I expect my efforts to offer help to be brushed past like they have been my entire life, but all of a sudden, her silence is interrupted by a stiff gasp for air. Like she can’t breathe. Oh, gosh. Something is happening to her. My first instinct is to wonder how she’s choking when she wasn’t eating anything. But then her shoulders erupt into tiny spasms as she covers her mouth, and I realize she’s crying. And trying with all her power not to. It was such an unprecedented event, I thought choking more probable than tears.
“Mom?” I ask, rushing to her side.
“Sorry,” she mumbles through a sob, keeping her head bowed.
“Are you okay?”
She manages a nod, but her eyebrows crumple beneath another wave of tears.
“Mom, come here.”
Her head is buried in her hands, but I pull her tiny frame to my body regardless.
My mom is crying, my brain narrates to itself, unable to believe it. I’ve never seen my mother cry. And I discover that she does so very silently, other than the jolt of an inhale punctuating the space every now and then.
“Don’t resist the tears, Mom. It’ll be worse if you’re all tense. Just let it out.”