Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter
thirty-four
“I’M READY, FINLEY.” GRANDMA STOOD in my doorway dressed in a colorful dress with one of her wigs on. It looked like she’d put some makeup on as well.
“Ready for what, Grandma?” I was in bed. It was Sunday, well past noon. I’d begged out of the diner with my friends again. I wasn’t ready to see anyone. I just wanted to lie in bed all day. Maybe my brain would figure out my life for me if I let it think about things long enough.
“For my interview.” She didn’t wait for my answer, just sat at my desk where I’d been recording podcasts with her. I hadn’t asked her to come in today, but it was possible she was remembering another day where I had.
“Can we do it tomorrow? I’m not feeling my best today.”
She tapped her slippered foot on the ground several times, then pointed to her wig. “I’m ready now.”
I closed my eyes and hugged my pillow to my chest.
“What’s wrong, my sweet girl?”
“Everyone is disappointed in me.”
“I’m not.”
I wanted to tell her she had been yesterday. But what was the point of that? “Thank you.”
“What about you? Are you disappointed in you?”
“I am,” I said. Because I was.
“How are you going to fix it?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
She patted the chair next to her. “Come tell me about it, dear.”
And so I did. I pulled myself out of bed and sat next to her. She handed me the headphones on the desk, and I chuckled but slid them onto my head. She put hers on as well. She’d seen me do this so much that she even knew how to connect them and start the recording. I wanted to turn it off, but it didn’t matter. It’s not like I had to do anything with the audio. I could be the subject today.
“Tell me what happened?” Grandma said.
“I let anger take over my judgment. I thought I’d feel better if I took something away from someone who took something from me, but I feel worse. And now I have something that I don’t want.”
“You’re speaking in riddles,” she said.
“I know.” I didn’t want my grandma to be disappointed in me. It didn’t feel good yesterday, and I wasn’t sure I could handle her reaction all over again today. I didn’t want her to say that I was too good to do bad things sometimes.
But she surprised me by saying, “We all make mistakes. It’s how we deal with our mistakes that really define our character.”
“Can mistakes be purposeful, though? I did this very much on purpose. I knew what I was doing.”
“You thought it would help you?”
I breathed in. “I did.”
“But it didn’t.”
I shook my head, a podcast error. People couldn’t hear body movements. So I held the mic closer to my mouth and said, “It didn’t help at all.”
“What are you going to do about it?”
“I think I need to start over. I need to hit the reset button. I need to forget the last month even happened. Maybe even the lastyear.”
“Now, now, honey. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.”
“What does that mean?”
“I’m sure some good things happened in the last month, the last year. Mistakes aren’t all-encompassing. Things aren’t only black or white.”
She was right. I was reverting to what I always did: quit. I wasn’t going to do that. I didn’t want to do that. “You’re very smart, Grandma. Do you know that?”
“Of course I do, dear.”
“So I need to keep the baby and throw out the bathwater?” I asked.
“Exactly.”
I tried to think about the good parts of the last month or so. They were definitely the things that didn’t involve Jensen. Like interviewing my grandma and searching for her surfboard. Even though I still hadn’t found it, the process had been fun and interesting.
“Do you remember telling me about the boy who painted a surfboard for you, Grandma?”
“Andrew,” she said.
“Yes, Andrew. I tried to find that surfboard, but the owner of his old house ran us off. I wanted to find it for you.”
“That’s sweet, honey. But I can’t surf anymore.”
I laughed. “I know, Grandma. I thought you might want to seeit.”
“You are very thoughtful.”
“Sometimes.” For some reason Theo’s smile flashed through my mind, igniting a new spark of sadness. “You broke up with Andrew when he made a big mistake. But you said you got back together. How did you forgive him? Why did you forgive him?”
“Well, for one, nobody is perfect. For two, his mistake injured my ego more than it injured me.”
“Oh…” I thought about that. I wondered if that was why I felt mostly anger when I thought about Jensen and mainly sadness when I thought about Theo. Because Jensen had injured me, taken something important from me, and Theo had injured my ego. Still wrong, but perhaps my pride was also involved in the equation, was part of the reason I couldn’t get past it.
“Thirdly, there was the grand gesture,” she said.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“He did something big to prove that he cared about me. Something that meant he saw me.”
“What?” I asked.
“It was a couple weeks after he lent my board to Cheryl. I was walking the beach, like I did most mornings. But instead of watching the surfers, my eyes were on the ground so I could throw stranded sand dollars back into the water before the sun dried them up. I heard shouting up ahead and looked up to see a group of lifeguards surrounding someone by one of their towers. Everyone was speaking in loud, angry voices.”
“Why?” I asked.
“At first, I couldn’t tell. But as I drew closer, I saw the person in the middle of the group was Andrew. He held a paintbrush, his arms streaked multicolored.”
“What was he painting?”
“The tower,” she said with a smile.
“The tower?”
“The lifeguard tower where we first met.”
My mouth fell open. The lifeguard tower. Was that the one I had seen in the rock thrower’s backyard? “What was on it?”
“Surfing scenes, waves, a sun, and when I walked around the back, there was us. Well, not detailed versions of us, but our silhouettes, representing the first time we met. The lifeguards were angry that he had defaced their property.”
“What did they do?”
“The police came, drove their truck right across the sand. Andrew had seen me at that point, and he was saying things like I’m sorry I was so stupid and I shouldn’t have lent her the board. You mean everything to me. I miss you. By this time, the cops were pulling him toward their truck and he was yelling, I love you, Charlotte! Please forgive me. ”
“And what were you doing?”
“I was running after him, saying, I forgive you! The tower is beautiful! ”
“Did they really arrest him?”
“They took him down to the station and gave him a serious talking-to. And in order to get the charges dropped, he had to repaint the tower back to its normal, boring blue.”
My heart sank. “He repainted it?”
“He did.”
That meant the lifeguard tower we’d found probably wasn’t the real one. Had someone made a replica? “And then you guys got back together?” I asked.
“I showed up on the beach with a paintbrush early the next day because my dad told me that was the day he was scheduled to repaint it. And there he was, blue paint and a mopey expression on. He’d already painted over the front half, like he was saving the back, saving us, for last. Need help? I asked him. He turned and looked at me in surprise, scooping me up and twirling me around. Then he carried me up the stairs and inside, where my surfboard was leaning up against the back wall. I was so happy to see it, so happy to be with him that I pulled him into a kiss.”
“Of course you did,” I said. “You missed kissing the best kisser.”
She chuckled.
“Wait,” I said. “You got your surfboard back?”
She tilted her head, as if she had forgotten that part of the story until now. And maybe she had. Maybe the more traumatic part of the story, when Cheryl borrowed it, was what had stuck in her memory originally. “I guess I did.”
Did that mean she really did lose that surfboard in the house fire? Or that it was unfindable now? “How did he even know you were going to show up that morning?”
“He didn’t. He hoped.”
“Hope,” I said. “That’s a good feeling.”
“It is.”
MY PARENTS WERE IN THE kitchen when I walked in that evening, talking quietly to each other. They stopped when they saw me.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “For lying to you for the past month. And that you went out to Pismo yesterday and wasted your morning searching for me with your costumes and your signs. I didn’t mean to make you worry. I wish I had been there. Your support would’ve meant a lot.” I brushed at an escaped tear. I told myself I wasn’t going to cry. “The universe has helped me learn some pretty big lessons, but if you feel like you want to pile on some parent-specific punishments for my actions, scrubbing toilets or weeding flowerbeds or whatever, I understand.”
My mom pulled out the chair next to her, and I sank into it.
“We’re not horrible parents, are we?” she asked. “Pretty understanding and reasonable.”
“Very understanding and very reasonable.”
“Then why didn’t you feel like you could tell us everything that was going on?” Dad asked.
“Probably because in the back of my mind, I always knew what I was doing was wrong, and I didn’t want you to talk me out of it. I was angry.”
Mom nodded and then placed her hand over mine on the table. “If the universe has taken care of the lesson portion of your actions, we’ll forgo any further punishments.”
Dad met her eyes like that was not what they had previously discussed, but he didn’t say anything, just joined Mom in patting my hand.
“I’ll do some extra chores this week for good measure,” I said.
Mom pulled me into a hug. “I know you’re hurting and I’m not entirely sure why, but when you want to talk, we’re here.”
“It’s mainly stupid boys,” I said. “Being stupid.”
She squeezed me tighter. “I’m sorry.”