Chapter 15 Are Zambonis Significant to Your Relationship? #2
Ethan lets the s’more fall to the ground and presses my thumb between his palms. “Are you okay?” he asks. The rest of the group reacts all at once in voices that meld together.
“What happened?”
“Did you burn yourself?”
“Jesus, Char.”
“Don’t worry, Charleston. I’ve got an ice pack somewhere.”
The last one was definitely Petey, because he runs up to me with one of those first aid snap ice packs. At the sound of its hard crack, Ethan releases my hand. The cold hurts and soothes in equal measure.
Jonah hands me a fresh s’more, which I accept with my left hand. “We still don’t know how you two got engaged,” he says to the couple. Now that it’s looking like I’ll get to keep my thumb, the crowd is back to shining on Petey and Laurel.
“I ran onto an ice rink in combat boots and cutoffs and accosted him on a Zamboni.”
The marshmallow in my mouth almost clogs my windpipe. Laurel eyes me with concern, but returns her gaze to Petey when I give her a thumbs-up.
“Cough it out.” Ethan’s gallantly trying not to laugh at my expense, my indignity a momentary détente in our awkwardness.
“Are Zambonis significant to your relationship?” Harlow asks as she pulls her long black braids into a topknot, her face affectionate yet confused.
Laurel eyes Petey in a way that says they’ve definitely banged on a Zamboni before, which probably should shock me but doesn’t.
“Only in that it’s where he was when I showed up to grovel for being such an idiot for so long.”
Petey looks at my sister like the sun might literally shine out her ass. “Don’t call my future wife an idiot, babe.”
She beams back at him and rubs her hand on his knee. “See, the four of us met as kids—” Laurel starts.
“But I was immediately in love with her,” Petey finishes.
She shakes her head. “Shut up. You were not.”
“I was,” he argues.
“But I wouldn’t give you the time of day.”
“But I kept trying.” He smashes a kiss to the top of her head.
She looks up at him, this moment just between the two of them. “I think I told you I’d only kiss you if you did a flip into the lake where we all used to swim.”
He nods. “It was a back flip, actually, and I spent the entire summer perfecting it.”
“Is that why we went to the waterfall every day?” I interject.
Petey looks momentarily startled that we haven’t all disappeared into the mist. “One thousand percent,” he answers. “I’m sure Ethan would’ve tried to serenade you in a treehouse all summer, but I needed to perfect my move.”
Ethan squirms next to me.
Laurel beams at Petey. “But then he did it, and it was spectacular.”
“And she kissed me,” he says, eyes alight.
“But then he left for boarding school.”
“And she moved all over the place. But then she followed me to college, obviously.”
“No,” she protests, but there’s absolutely no fight behind it. “I followed my sister to college. My sister was following that one.” She points at Ethan, and I want to disappear into the forest.
“No one believes that for a second, Lo,” Ethan chimes in.
But his eyes trail all over my face, his brows trapped in the V of someone performing complex mental math. Now it’s my turn to squirm.
“Semantics,” Petey cuts in. “You were there—”
“But I was a twenty-year-old idiot who wasn’t even sure what love or commitment looked like. I didn’t…” Her tone downshifts into something serious—sad—and she grabs Petey’s hand. “I was so afraid of…everything.”
She breathes in deep, looking into the eyes of the man beside her like he’s the one who makes air, then turns back to her audience.
“He never gave up on me. He made me work for it—he needed to see I’d grown before he’d risk his heart again—but he never gave up on me.
” I can’t tell if she’s so high on her lovesick feelings for Petey that these intimate details are spilling out of her like a club kid on Molly, or if this is one of those romantic performances our parents used to put on for dinner party guests.
I’m not sure which I would find more terrifying.
The way Petey’s eyes shimmer with emotion, I’m leaning toward the former, which the pit in my stomach tells me is much worse. “You don’t give up on a woman like Laurel,” he tells us.
“And I’ve never stopped loving Peter. Even when we were apart. It was always him. It always will be.” The look on her face, like she’s slipping into another world apart from the rest of us, makes my muscles tense up.
“It was always us,” he agrees. “You can’t fall out of a love like that. Even when we couldn’t be what the other needed, it was there. Like a current under the ice.”
She snorts. “Of course you have an ice metaphor for love. You’re such a hockey coach.”
“And you’re marrying him,” I interrupt, because listening to this story feels like ants crawling over my chest and I can no longer stay quiet.
“It’s just so funny because up until a few days ago, you didn’t even believe in marriage.
” I laugh, as though it actually is funny, but beneath my lightness is a serrated edge.
It’s undetectable to everyone else—a Beekman family frequency.
Her shoulders tense, but she doesn’t look at me right away, the absence of her shine a gust of cold air.
Have I fallen into an alternate timeline where the two of them didn’t break up getting on a chairlift at Lutsen?
The four of us had to ride up the rest of the mountain together, suspended in air with our snowboards strapped to our feet and Petey fogging up his goggles with hot tears.
Am I the only person who remembers this?
Now I know I need to talk to her before she slips away from me and falls headfirst into disaster.
No one else seems to notice my shift in energy—apart from Ethan, judging by the way he’s staring at me with renewed intensity—but internally, I’m crawling out of my skin. I can’t keep sitting around wasting time.
I stand. “Laurel, can we take a walk?”
This isn’t what she’s ever wanted, and if I can only get her away from the camp bubble, her Petey fog, I might be able to get through to her.
But at the exact moment I stand, Ethan’s facing me to say, “We should talk.”
“Why?” Laurel asks me, just as I say to Ethan, “Can it wait?”
Ethan doesn’t respond. He stares meaningfully like it should be obvious that it simply cannot wait . Apparently when you light a fifteen-year friendship on fire, people prefer a more immediate forensic evaluation of the crime scene.
My eyes dart between the two of them. I don’t want to say something incriminating to either of them, but since Laurel is my immediate concern, I direct my attention to her.
“Because I want to talk to you. About wedding stuff. Like flowers or whatever.” Sure, it’s a lie, but it’s a necessary one—a fib—like when you hide your dog’s arthritis medication in crunchy Jif.
Laurel narrows her eyes. “Harlow already made flower crowns. Which I know is a little Coachella-y, but my dress doesn’t have a back, so we’re leaning into that whole vibe.”
Ethan tugs my hand, shooting a pitiful echo of seismic activity up my arm. “It’ll just take a minute, Charley.”
“Stop calling me Charley. You make it sound like I’m in trouble.” I pull my arm away. “Laurel, are you ready?”
“Why are you being more neurotic than usual?” she asks.
A buzzing in the front zipper pocket of my bag interrupts our deadlock. “Crap,” I murmur, reaching to silence it, but Bob’s name lights up my screen like a threat as the top left corner flickers between a single tiny bar and the words No Service .
“It’s my boss. I should really take this. If you can give me—”
“Who had under an hour?” Laurel asks the group.
Walter lights up. “Oh, me!”
“Pay the man,” Petey commands over my ringing palm.
Everyone besides me and Ethan stands to search through their belongings.
“The service is horrible here, by the way. You have to keep walking east in the direction of the Lake Haslett RV park until you get another bar or you won’t be able to hear anything. ”
My eyes bounce around the group. “Did you guys bet on when my phone would ring?”
Laurel tilts her head side to side. “Specifically a work call,” she clarifies, followed by a chorus of “Yes,” “No,” and Petey’s “It was more of a friendly wager.”
“To be fair, we don’t know you,” Walter assures me. “But I do know what it’s like being on that hamster wheel.”
“My money’s in my boot, but it’s stuck,” Jonah pipes up, sweating profusely from his spot on the log. “I think my foot is swollen.”
Laurel ignores the hubbub, arching her brow at me. “Are you gonna get that?”
Then the phone stops ringing, answering her challenge for me.
“Walter technically doesn’t win if she lets it go to voicemail,” Petey interjects.
“Laurel, walk?” I ask, but it rings again, louder this time. It’s not actually louder but it feels louder with a rush of texts between rings pinging one after another like a buzz saw fighting a tennis ball launcher.
“Just take it,” she urges.
I look between Laurel, Ethan, and the rest of the group, feeling the seconds ticking down on Bob’s call.
“Gimme two minutes,” I beg. “I need two minutes and then we’ll talk, yeah?”
I run straight east to the sound of a single cheer and a chorus of groans.
—
“You better be dead in a ditch somewhere,” Bob says without a greeting, though he generously waited for me to get a solid ninety yards into the woods with little more than a warbly, “Hold, please! Hold, please!” as reassurance.
“Good to hear from you, Bob,” I reply through clenched teeth. “Hope you’re enjoying your weekend.”
“AgriTech called you twice, and you didn’t answer.”
“Sorry. My cell service is…unreliable. Did they call you ?”
“I don’t know what to say to them!”
My free hand forms a fist. I don’t suggest he examine why it is he has no idea what’s going on with one of his biggest clients, though I really want to.
“I sent you detailed notes from my call with them Friday. It’s attached to my email from yesterday—the one with a rundown of all your clients and what needs to be done while I’m out of touch.”
“This isn’t like you, Charlotte. You’re usually one of the responsible ones. Focused.”
His “praise” has a way of clenching my insides.
“Sorry. My sister’s getting married.” The number of times I’ve apologized to this man over the years for merely existing as a human is truly astounding. “I’ll only be away until tomorrow. Tuesday at the latest.”
“It’s hard to justify your inattention when Paul is taking calls during his wife’s C-section right now.”
“That’s crazy, Bob,” I snap, because apparently I have more respect for my literal nemesis than myself.
Sure, I can’t stomach Paul, but I know he’s obsessed with his wife and it has to be killing him that he’s putting out minor administrative legal fires while she’s giving actual birth .
“You hear how that sounds, right? That shouldn’t be expected of him, and he shouldn’t feel like he needs to do that to earn your respect. ”
I brace myself for impact. I’ve never spoken this way to Bob before.
Ever. I’ve fantasized about it. I’ve imagined the shade of red he would turn if challenged—vermillion—but I’ve never once been anyone to him besides Corporate Shill Charlotte Beekman, Attorney at Law.
I accept his abuse with a decisive nod and then I beg for seconds.
Bob knows that Ballbuster Charley exists somewhere deep, deep down—he relies on her—but I suppose he assumed I was too much of a kiss-ass to ever unleash her on him.
All these years I’ve worked for him, I’ve never taken a true sick day where I wasn’t sniffling through conference calls.
On my honeymoon, I was so available remotely that, to this day, no one at A & G even knows I had a honeymoon.
Still, Bob is ready to lambaste me for taking a three-day weekend for my own sister’s wedding.
I’m not sure I’ll ever be enough for the Bobs and Pamelas of the world, and for the first time, I’m questioning whether I want to be. My best-case scenario is that in five years, I’m the person dressing down a twentysomething for daring to take a day off.
Bob’s pause is interminable. My pulse trips on each of his hard breaths.
If he’s playing pickleball right now, I swear to god…
“We’ll discuss whatever’s going on with you and your attitude the second you’re back in the office, Ms. Beekman. For now, I need you to do your job and pick up your—”
“You’re cutting out, Bob,” I interrupt.
“Charlotte?”
“Are you there, Bob? It’s the service out here. I can’t hear anything,” I lie. I can hear his nose whistling with each incensed inhalation.
“Charlotte!”
“Good luck with AgriTech.” And then I end the call.
A week ago, Bob’s weaponized incompetence would’ve sent me straight back to the office, wedding be damned.
But now my blood is surging through my veins.
Hanging up on a boss must rank somewhere between a jolt of adrenaline and a radioactive spider bite.
I feel…good. Really good. Powerful even!
Until my phone starts ringing again…so I do the unthinkable: I turn my phone off.
A text from Stacy pops up on my home screen as I power my phone down: Found Rich’s Zola website. It’s a January wedding at the Como Park conservatory. BLEH.
My first thought as I watch the screen turn black is, I bet that’ll be nice .
After the years I’ve spent diligently following five-year plan after five-year plan, so preoccupied with the direction I’m headed in, I’ve earned this detour.
One weekend of uncomplicated fun with someone I know will drive off into the sunset.
So long as I’m out here, in the woods and off the grid, I need to just… be.
I stuff my phone into my pocket and practically sprint back to the campsite, wanting only to be near Ethan and, for once, not caring about all the reasons it could never be us.
I want him to hug me like he did when we were kids and the world was moving too fast. When it felt like he was the only one who could hold my feet to the ground.
I want him to kiss me and touch me for no reason other than that it feels good.
But he’s not there when I get back. I see only Harlow and Laurel.
“Charley!” Laurel calls out first. Then her tear-streaked face emerges from between the trees.
I run to her without a second thought. “What’s wrong?” My voice shakes.
“I can’t get married today!” She grabs me by the shoulders.
Equal parts heartache and relief war in my belly as I pull her into my arms.
“I’ve got you,” I promise her. “Whatever you need.”