Zoe Brennan, First Crush

Chapter Eleven

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Just as the evening’s twilight settles into a deep, husky violet among the vines, a knock sounds on my cottage door. Jitters wriggle through my insides.

This is not a date. This is not a date! This is, in fact, a wretched family dinner caused by egg-fueled warfare that I am attending with my employee . Who, despite our rocky start, might be my friend now. I can’t mess that up with misplaced horny vibes. I check myself in the mirror and frown.

Is this dress wretched-family-dinner appropriate? It’s black and patterned with tiny white daisies and hangs just past my knees. The neckline approaches my throat, but it’s sleeveless, showing off the subtle definition rolling wine barrels around will give your arms. Let Rachel see that I can throw a punch if need be. I grab a pale denim jacket for the walk over and zip up my stacked combat boots. Now that I’m thirty, I refuse to fuck with laces.

The knock comes again right as I reach for the doorknob. I school my face into something casual and unassuming—something that doesn’t say I’ve been getting ready for the last hour—and open the door.

Sweet Jesus on a biscuit with all the fixins.

It’s a cool evening, and Laine’s leaning into professorial mode hard. She’s wearing a dusky blue wool blazer, its thin lapel one of those that perpetually stands up to kiss the base of her smooth neck. A dove-gray shirt underneath, buttoned to the collar, is tucked into a pair of navy-blue pants, the cuffs rolled high to show off her thick-soled boots. Her flop of golden-brown hair is wavy from the shower, and her thick-rimmed tortoiseshell glasses are back.

God, she looks cool. The town’s star athlete turned studious. Is there anything sexier than a jock with an intellectual bent?

Laine must sense my inner turmoil because a blush blooms high on her cheekbones. She looks at her feet, her hand going to her hair to riffle through it as always, then stops, as though she doesn’t want to mess it up.

“I wasn’t sure what to wear to a painful family experience,” she says, her voice bashful. Bashful! Can you believe it? How am I supposed to refrain from clutching her collar and smothering her with kisses? How?

I clear my throat, then quickly turn to lock the door. “I know, right? I tried to go for Sunday school meets contrition. Ready to walk over?”

“As ready as I’ll ever be.” Laine’s sheepish in the way only women in their thirties who are still terrified of their mother’s wrath can be. It’d be adorable, but I, too, am on the bad side of Molly Woods right now.

Laine laughs and runs her palms down her face. “ Ughhh , I wish we were going literally anywhere else right now.”

I bump her shoulder gently with my own because people who aren’t on dates do that all the time. “Well, at least your mom can’t ground you anymore.”

“You sure about that?” Laine arches an eyebrow at me, and we both smile and drop our gazes.

“Do you think this is going to work? Forcing us all to gather to share a meal? Hash out our differences?”

Laine sighs miserably. “It never has before. Rachel’s hated me for years. I don’t even know why.”

I snort. “Really?”

“You do?”

“Varsity tryouts your senior year!” I laugh somewhat incredulously. Does Laine really not know this? “You kicked her off the field.”

“No, I didn’t!” She looks at me bewildered. “I begged Coach to let her finish the tryout, but after she crushed Ava Sanchez’s nose—”

“Sadie Jenkins’s nose, you mean,” I correct gently. “Ava Sanchez was your girlfriend.”

Laine’s face splits into a bemused smile. “You remember my girlfriends, boss?”

“Well, kind of hard to forget after I caught you in the kitchen with Ava’s boob in your mouth, Beave .”

Laine blinks, another piece of our shared history slotting into place for her. “That was you …”

“Yes, but I never—I didn’t tell anyone what I saw.” It feels important to clarify since a few weeks later, rumors hit the high school. Some dumbasses were snickering about Charlaine as she walked by one day, and she stopped, looked them dead in the eye, and said: “Yeah, I’m a lesbian. Now get over it.”

The craziest part is, they did. Charlaine approached being outed like she did everything back then—she owned it. The snickering stopped. People got on with their lives. Charlaine got on with being gay, this time out and proud. Fucking legend.

“Oh, I know. Pretty sure Shannon McGee told everybody.” Laine clears her throat. “She, uh, saw us in the showers.”

Wow. Ava had a much better high school experience than I did.

Laine shakes her head. “So, that’s why Rachel hates me so much? To this day? Jesus.”

“Well, it’s more than that,” I add, unsure why I feel the need to lay out Rachel’s case. “She was so desperate to be like you, and I think she believed that, if she followed your footsteps exactly, she would be. But that day, when you kicked her off the field—”

“—when she thought I kicked her off the field.”

“Right, sorry. When she thought that, she felt betrayed. Like you were hoarding all your success and popularity for yourself. It didn’t help that people teased her about her own sister cutting her from the team, either.”

“Huh,” Laine says, as if it’s news to her that Rachel has always had severe Ferris Bueller Syndrome. By the time our friendship ended, Rachel had fully become the spiteful Jennifer Grey to Laine’s charismatic Matthew Broderick, though the ages were reversed. Maybe it’s harder that way. The same mix of DNA just slightly altered to produce a fundamentally different outcome, a different person, having a different, better life only three steps in front of you, but the path from your here to their there is unreachable. Despite everything, I feel a pang of sympathy for Rachel for feeling like her own path wasn’t good enough.

“So … why does she hate you , then?” Laine asks. “You didn’t ruin any budding soccer careers, right?”

I blow a long breath out, weighing how much to tell her. The full truth is too embarrassing, so I settle on an approximation. “She realized I had a small, totally normal teenage crush on you, and she freaked out. Hated me ever since.”

“Geez, that’s my fault, too?” Laine frowns. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” I say softly. Losing Rachel’s friendship was one of the most painful experiences of my life, but like her issues with Laine, it’s more complicated than that. When Rachel discovered my teenage crush box of Charlaine relics hidden under my bed, covered in a meaningful hodgepodge of magazine cut-outs, full of pictures of Charlaine, poems describing my longing to know her and be known by her, and god help me, one of her old sports bras—that was the moment our friendship drew its last breath, but it had been sick and gasping for some time.

I can’t say exactly when, but at some point, Rachel became resentful. For most of our childhoods, she was as ambitious as I was, reaching for success with the confidence that one day, she’d achieve everything she set her heart on. Maybe it was when her perfect grades slipped in her AP courses, no matter how hard she studied, or when her face continued to break out, despite her devotion to the fancy Clinique products she begged her mom to buy. When, no matter how much Tommy Hilfiger she wore, or how smoothly she straightened her hair, the popular girls still rolled their eyes every time she tried to sit at their table. But at some point, Rachel became more fixated with the world’s treatment of her than her treatment of the world, and the debt she felt owed pissed her off .

So when her sixteenth birthday arrived, and she ran outside that morning to check the driveway for the new car she’d been promised only to receive her parents’ apology that sorry, we put all our extra money into helping Cosimo reopen Bluebell Vineyards to the public, but maybe by next year, you’ll have enough saved to get a used car … then I, too, became yet another person to wrong her, to take what was rightfully hers. All the rides to school, the meals I ate at their house, the nights I slept in her room, even the care her parents showed me when Dad couldn’t parent me, it all began to feel like tallies on the ledger of what I owed her. A few weeks later, she found my crush box dedicated to Charlaine, and that was officially an injustice too many. The next day, I overheard her blaming my “crazy” father and our “shitty vineyard” for her not getting a car, and I lost it. No blows were exchanged, but they had to pull shy little Zoe Brennan screaming out of her ex-best-friend’s face, and that was that. Our friendship was over, and our rivalry began.

Laine and I are quiet as we crest the hill and take the path through the trees. It’s weedy and narrow these days, with only my dad’s footsteps to walk it into existence, but when I was young, it was wide enough for Rachel and me to race four-wheelers side by side. It feels both strange to walk it now and like traveling a well-worn artery into my past.

That duality follows me all the way to the Woods’s house set at the back of the property, out of the public eye and nestled among the trees. A place I’ve been a thousand times, maybe more. Laine straightens as we climb the front steps, the wood bowed from rain and busy feet. Her hand goes for the doorknob, then stops, slowly rising up to knock instead.

My heart squeezes. Does this place not feel like home to her anymore?

A chorus of voices and the smack of children’s footsteps grows louder until the door’s thrown open by Darla, who’s standing there panting, comically confused. Little kids are so wonderfully expressive before the world teaches them to hide their feelings. She eyes Laine up and down.

“Dad, the lady who kept beating Aunt Rachel at Field Day is here!”

“It’s me, silly. Aunt Laine.” Laine can’t stop herself from nervously riffling through her hair this time.

“Aunt Char laine lives in Cali-fornya,” Darla informs her, and is about to shut the door in her face when she sees me standing behind her. “Oh hi, Zoe!”

Darla runs barefoot onto the porch to hug me, her little arms like a low-slung belt around my hips.

“Hey, Dar-Dar.” I feel a rush of embarrassment at Darla’s enthusiastic greeting. “Chance always brings the kids to our family events,” I say by way of explanation, but Laine just nods, her smile tight. I look down at the dirt-smudged cheeks and bright eyes staring up at me. “This is your aunt Laine, though, Darla. I can vouch for her.”

Darla turns to look at this Aunt Laine again. “If you say so.”

With that, Darla grabs Laine’s hand and pulls her inside. “I found Zoe and somebody named Aunt Laine on the porch,” she announces, as though she’s dug us up like a pair of shiny beetles for all to see.

Chance’s son Benny, Darla’s twin, waves at us from the table, where he’s meticulously laying out silverware beside each place setting. It makes me smile. That was always mine and Rachel’s job.

“There you are,” Mrs. Woods says as she hurries into the dining room with a covered dish. “I was beginning to think y’all weren’t going to come.” She fixes us with a stern look, but that’s as far as the you’re-in-deep-trouble-missy vibes go.

“Mom, it’s not even seven yet.” Laine checks her watch. “We’re early.”

“Charlaine! You didn’t bring your pet goat, did you?” Mr. Woods says gamely, setting a large platter of fried chicken in the middle of the table. He holds out his arms, smiling fondly at his eldest daughter. “Come give your pa a squeeze.”

Laine does, and for the first time since she showed up on my doorstep tonight, her tension seems to melt.

“Zoe Brennan!” Ezra’s eyes light up for me next. “Good to see you, darlin’! Awful sorry to hear about your grandmother. How’s Cosimo holding up?”

“Oh, you know my dad.” I laugh a little. “Same as always, far as I can tell.”

His smile grows wistful because he does know Dad. Molly and Ezra were my parents’ best friends in Blue Ridge. We spent Sunday evenings just like this one together around this table. Mom and Molly would take their wine on the porch and talk late into the evening, while Dad and Ezra cleaned up and then hunkered down in chairs on the lawn where they’d talk crops and philosophy and, I suspect, smoke a joint. The adults left the kids to our own devices, but Charlaine and Chance usually shut themselves off in the living room to watch horror movies because they knew it’d keep us little kids away. That’s how Rachel and I got so close to begin with. Our parents forged bonds between our families, and who were we to fight them?

Rachel slides into the seat across the table from me and plunks a bottle of chilled Into the Woods Chardonnay onto the table. “Sorry, Zoe. We’re out of your spiked Kool-Aid tonight. Hope wine will suffice.”

The nostalgia for our past disappears in an instant. My fingers tighten around my fork, an unchecked impulse away from becoming a murder weapon, when a warm hand rests on mine. I glance up to see Laine taking her seat next to me. Her hand slides off as she gives me a wincing smile. “No homicides at the table, no matter how warranted.” Laine’s eyes flicker to Rachel, turning stony in warning. A small thrill races up my exposed arms, prickling the flesh. I’m not sure if it’s from the feel of her hand on mine or her being mean to Rachel. Both do it for me, I guess.

“That’s right,” says Molly, uncorking the Chardonnay without looking. “It’s my number one rule.” She pours me a healthy glass first, which I want to ignore to spite Rachel, but it’s a crime to waste good wine and besides, how else am I going to get through this dinner?

Rachel glares at me and Laine and rolls her eyes. “Looks like you really listened to my advice, Zoe. Did you bring the money you owe me?”

“You owe her money?” Laine asks me, then understanding pinches her forehead. “For the goat ?”

I arch an eyebrow. “Are you referring to the two dollars and fifty-two cents, Rachel?”

“Sure.” She tosses back a healthy slug of wine. “Before interest.”

Ezra smiles down at me. “Zoe, as our guest tonight, would you please say grace?”

“Uh, sure.” I’ve never understood the hospitality behind making a guest pray for everybody. It’s embarrassing enough to make small talk, let alone religious supplications. “Thank you, Lord, for uh, this food tonight, and for friends, and for, uh—”

Rachel snorts. Snorts! At a prayer! I suck my breath in through my nose, and my voice fills with earnest conviction. “And, dear Lord in heaven, please bless Rachel Woods. She is but a lonely, humble servant of yours, with no friends or lovers of her own, and has made running her entire personality—”

Laine snorts this time, and it only emboldens me further. “We beg of you, dear, sweet Jesus, please deliver this lowly woman from her bitchiness—”

Ezra clears his throat loud enough to dislodge a tonsil, and I deliver a hasty “Amen.”

“ Amen! ” echoes Laine.

“Daddy, what’s a bitchiness?” Benny asks.

Laine leans over before Chance can respond. “Like a disease. Makes you mean.”

“ Come on , y’all,” Chance says, covering his face. “Can you not teach my children cuss words?”

“Oh, Aunt Rachel definitely has that, then,” Darla says thoughtfully, then turns to Rachel, who’s so furious she can’t even speak. “I hope the bitchiness goes away soon, Aunt Rachel.”

“I don’t have the bitchiness!” Rachel finally sputters, then points at me and Laine. “They do!”

“Will I catch it if I sit too close to you?” Darla scoots as far as her chair will go. “Sounds itchy.”

“That is e- nough , y’all!” Molly says, exasperated, but a smile’s pulling at the corners of her mouth. She loves this, I realize. Having all her kids at the table, even if they’re bickering and throwing cheap shots in the name of the lord. I’m beginning to suspect she’s not mad about the field day debacle at all and simply used it to get her quarreling family together. She trades a look with Ezra who, taking her meaning, says loudly, “Can someone pass the biscuits?”

We settle in, comforted by the feast before us. Ezra’s homemade fried chicken, vinegary collards, baked macaroni and cheese, fresh biscuits, and honey still dripping from the honeycomb go a long way in making this evening tolerable, even if every time I lift my eyes, they’re met by Rachel’s icy stare. Benny and Darla are human excavators, shoveling the food into their mouths so quickly, they’re done and excused from the table before I’ve finished my first glass of wine.

Molly sighs happily, leaning her chin on her hand. “It’s so good to have you home, Lainey-belle.”

“Yes, it only took, what … two and a half months before you came over?” Rachel stabs her drumstick with her fork and knifes off a hunk of meat. Who cuts a drumstick? “Great job ‘reconnecting,’ Charlaine.”

“Rachel,” Ezra says, a warning.

Laine’s lips form a thin line as she butters her second biscuit. “It’s been busy. Learning my way around Bluebell, working on some new projects for Zoe. Just hadn’t found the time yet.”

My eyebrows rise, but I direct my surprise to my plate. While I knew Laine sticks mostly to the treehouse in her off hours, I didn’t realize that Laine still hadn’t come over to see her family at all .

“It’s been a real busy decade for you, hasn’t it, Charlaine? You must be plumb tuckered out.” Rachel sits back, arms folded over her chest. “How many times have you come home? How many times have you called Mom or Dad? How many birthdays have you missed, how many weddings ? Not sure we could count them all.”

My mouth drops open as I glance between the twins that were once so tight, they shared clothes. Did Laine miss Chance’s wedding ? It was a small family affair so Dad and I weren’t invited, but I just assumed Laine would come out for her twin brother. What was so important that it kept her away from that?

“Maybe I’d have come home more if I didn’t feel like the enemy in my own damn family.” Laine drops her knife onto her plate with a clang. “You’ve pushed me out every chance you’ve had.”

Rachel rolls her eyes and laughs, but it just sounds mean. “Oh, get over yourself! I never pushed you anywhere because you’ve never been here to push. You’ve missed out on everything, and for what—to embarrass yourself nationally? Yet here you are after ruining your career, still expecting us to kiss your feet. No, thank you.”

“Rachel, stop it this instant.” Molly throws her napkin on the table. “You don’t speak for this family, and you certainly don’t get to pass judgment on how we treat one another.”

Rachel’s jaw clamps shut. Molly breathes deeply before addressing the table. “Now, we can talk about our feelings as a family, with love in our hearts, or we’re not going to talk about them at all. Ezra, you go first.” Molly takes her own glass of wine and throws back a swallow, and Ezra, flustered as a student who got called on unexpectedly, sits up straighter.

“All right.” He clears his throat. “Lainey-belle, your mother and I have missed you so much, and we would love it if you came around more, understanding how it’s not always easy for you to do so.” He pauses and looks meaningfully at Rachel. “And that’s the long and short of it. Chance, son, your turn.”

“I agree with Rachel,” Chance says, his jaw tense. “Until you show us you’re ready to become part of this family again, I’m afraid I don’t buy what you’re selling here, Charlaine.”

“And how exactly am I supposed to do that?” Laine tosses her uneaten biscuit back onto her plate. “Go back in time and be at your wedding? Jesus, Chance, I’ve told you how sorry I was to miss it—when are you going to let it go?”

“Maybe when it stops being the norm for how you treat this family. You’ve been gone so long, and you only come back now because you want something?” He shakes his head and releases a sigh. “It sucks, Charlaine.”

My brow furrows. What does Laine want from them?

“That’s not why I came back.” Laine pushes away from the table with a screech.

“Then prove it.” Chance rises from his seat, too.

“I will !”

They stand there, a table and twelve years of growing apart between them, glaring at each other.

“Rachel, honey, are you ready to kindly share your feelings?” Molly asks over the straining silence.

“Sorry, I’m fresh out of kind feelings for you, Charlaine.” Rachel stands now, too. “Guess you’ll just have to reap what you’ve sown.” With that, she grabs a handful of plates and marches off to the kitchen.

Laine’s eyes close in frustration, and Molly puts her arm around her oldest daughter and brushes a lock of Laine’s wavy hair behind her ear. “I love you, baby, and so does Rachel. She just … doesn’t know it yet.”

That makes Laine huff, though it’s sad. They walk us to the door, and then it’s my turn to get hugged by Molly. I relish it, relaxing into it in a way that would be embarrassing if I thought Molly would mind, but I know she doesn’t. She’s got enough pure mom in her to share.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Woods. I know you wanted us to get past all our issues tonight.”

Mrs. Woods smiles and runs her small hand up my shoulder. “It takes time, Zoe. I’m just happy to see you at my table, though you’re never allowed to say grace again, that’s for damn sure.” She snorts. “The bitchiness. Y’all are too much.”

“Wait, Aunt Laine!” Darla and Benny come running up the hall. “You didn’t say goodbye.”

“I’m sorry, lil bits.” Laine kneels to give Darla and Benny an awkward high five. They miss no less than three times, all of them laughing by the end. Behind Darla, Chance stands with a shoulder pressed against the hallway wall, watching.

“The twins have a soccer game next week,” he says as Laine straightens. “Saturday morning.”

“Awesome. Good luck out there.”

Chance rolls his eyes and starts to leave, and suddenly, I get exactly what’s going on here. But if Laine senses Chance’s displeasure, she doesn’t show it.

“We’ll be there, Chance.” I nudge Laine. “Right?”

For a second, Laine looks like she’s about to argue, but then understanding registers in her eyes. “Oh, um, yeah. Text me where and when?”

Chance hovers in the doorway, then nods. He puts a hand on Darla’s and Benny’s shoulders and ushers them back inside. Laine releases a long breath, looks at me, then adjusts her glasses. Thank you , she mouths, smiling slightly. Then aloud: “Ready to head home?”

The words trickle down my chest, sweet and sticky like Molly’s fresh honey.

Home. With Laine.

And for one impossible second, I wish it were true.