Chapter 12 #2
“Thanks for the support.”
“Anytime.” He stands, then looks at Rex, who has given up on finding food and is now sprawled dramatically across the kitchen floor. “Hey, can you watch him for a few hours? Jo’s got some wedding vendor meeting, and Rex gets weird when he’s alone too long.”
“Define weird.”
“Last time I left him, he ate a throw pillow and hid the evidence under the couch cushions. I didn’t find it for three days.”
“And you want me to take him?”
“You need a distraction.” Dean grins. “Take him for a walk. Tire him out. It’ll kill some time before tonight.”
I look at Rex. Rex looks at me. His tail thumps once against the floor, an offer of solidarity.
“Fine,” I say. “But if he eats anything, you’re paying for it.”
“Deal.” Dean’s already heading for the door. “Seven o’clock. Don’t be late.”
He waves without looking back. “Good luck tonight. Try not to overthink it.”
The door closes behind him.
I look at Rex.
Rex sighs heavily, like the weight of my emotional turmoil is exhausting him personally.
“Come on,” I say. “Let’s go for a walk.”
His ears perk up. Finally, something he understands.
The walk is supposed to clear my head.
It does not clear my head.
Rex and I make it about half a mile down the beach before disaster strikes.
One minute he’s trotting along beside me, perfectly behaved, the picture of canine obedience. The next minute his nose twitches, his entire body goes rigid, and he takes off running toward something half-buried in the sand near the tide line.
“Rex. Rex, no. Rex—”
Too late.
By the time I catch up to him, he’s already found his prize: a dead crab, sun-baked and pungent, clearly washed up days ago.
And he’s rolling in it.
Full body rolls. Enthusiastic, joyful rolls. The rolls of a dog who has found his calling in life and that calling is smelling like deceased marine life.
“Rex! Stop! Get up!”
He ignores me completely. His legs kick in the air. His tongue lolls out in pure bliss. He has never been happier.
I grab his collar and try to drag him away. He goes limp, becoming approximately eight hundred pounds of dead weight.
“We are not doing this.” I’m using my stern voice. The voice that has negotiated record contracts and handled difficult producers. “Get up. Now.”
Rex looks at me with utter betrayal. I was having the time of my life and you ruined it.
I manage to haul him to his feet. He’s covered in...I don’t even want to identify what he’s covered in. The smell is aggressive, like it has a physical presence.
“You’re getting a bath.”
His ears flatten. Not the B word.
“I don’t care how you feel about it. You smell like a crime scene.”
I half-drag, half-carry him back toward my rental. It takes twice as long as the walk out because Rex has apparently forgotten how legs work. By the time we reach the outdoor shower on the back deck, I’m sweating, he’s pouting, and we both smell like regret.
“In,” I say, pointing at the shower.
Rex sits down. He’s not getting in the shower. The shower is for traitors.
“Rex.”
Nothing.
“There are treats inside.”
His ear twitches. I’m listening.
“After you shower.”
He considers this. Weighs his options. Finally, with the dramatic resignation of a prisoner walking to the gallows, he slinks into the shower.
I turn on the water.
What follows is twenty minutes of chaos.
Rex twists. He shakes, spraying water and crab residue everywhere.
He tries to escape no fewer than seven times.
I end up wetter than he is, and at one point I’m pretty sure he looks me dead in the eyes and sighs with disappointment, like I’m the one who’s failed him.
By the time he’s finally clean—or at least clean enough that Dean won’t disown me—I’m exhausted, soaked, and covered in dog hair.
Rex shakes himself off, walks inside like nothing happened, and falls asleep on my couch.
I check the time. 2:45.
Four hours and thirteen minutes to go.
I’m going to lose my mind.
By 6:30, I’ve changed my shirt four times.
The first one was too casual. The second was trying too hard. The third had a mysterious stain I didn’t notice until I was already wearing it. The fourth is fine. Normal. A regular shirt that a regular person would wear to listen to a twenty-year-old cassette tape with the love of his life.
No pressure.
I show up at Eleanor’s house at exactly 6:58, because showing up at 7:00 on the dot feels too precise and showing up early feels too eager.
The house is warm and welcoming, with flowers in the window boxes and a porch light glowing against the fading evening. I can see the backyard from here—the old pecan tree spreading its branches against the sky, the Adirondack chairs arranged around a fire pit that’s already crackling with flames.
Eleanor opens the door before I can knock.
“Levi.” She smiles, and it’s warm. Genuine. Not the suspicious look she used to give me when I was seventeen. “Come in. Delilah’s out back getting things set up.”
“Thank you for...” I gesture vaguely. “All of this.”
“I’ve been waiting twenty years for you two to figure this out. A fire pit and some hot chocolate is the least I can do.” She presses a mug into my hands—warm ceramic, the smell of chocolate and something spicy. “Go on. She’s nervous. You being there will help.”
I walk through the house, past the kitchen where Ruffy is sleeping in a patch of lamplight, past the table where Delilah must have read those letters last night, and out the back door into the cool evening air.
She’s sitting by the fire pit, the old boom box on the small table between the chairs, the metal time capsule on her lap. The firelight catches her hair, her face, the nervous way she’s turning the cassette tape over and over in her hands.
She looks up when she hears me.
“Hey,” she says.
“Hey.”
I sit down in the Adirondack chair beside her. The fire crackles between us and the night. Somewhere in the distance, the ocean murmurs against the shore.
“Mom made hot chocolate,” Delilah says.
“I noticed.” I hold up my mug. “Cinnamon?”
“Her secret ingredient. Don’t tell anyone.”
“Who would I tell?”
“In this town? Everyone, eventually.”
We laugh and some of the tension bleeds out of the air.
“So,” I say, looking at the tape in her hands. “That’s it?”
“That’s it.” She holds it up. The label is faded but still legible: For Delilah. My seventeen-year-old handwriting, cramped and earnest. “I’ve been staring at it all day. Part of me wants to listen, and part of me is terrified.”
“Why terrified?”
“Because it’s the real you. Before everything went wrong and I ruined it.” She traces the edge of the label with her finger. “What if it makes me realize how much we lost?”
“What if it makes you realize we can get it back?”
She looks at me. The firelight dances in her eyes.
“Only one way to find out,” she says.
She puts the tape in the boom box. Her finger hovers over the play button.
“Ready?” she asks.
No. Not even close. I recorded that tape in my bedroom closet with the door shut so Dad wouldn’t hear.
I remember the carpet under my knees, the way my voice kept cracking, the three false starts before I got through the first verse without stopping.
I was so sure she’d laugh. So sure the words were too big for a kid who still couldn’t parallel park.
I poured every honest thing I had into that tape and then buried it in the ground because handing it to her directly felt like handing her a loaded weapon.
And now she’s about to press play, and I’m going to hear who I was before the industry taught me to polish everything until the fingerprints disappeared.
Before I learned that vulnerability is a brand and not just a risk.
Before twenty years of practice made me better at hiding the exact thing that tape has no idea how to hide.
I’m not ready. I’m not sure I’ll ever be ready to sit next to her and listen to the version of me that loved her without any armor on.
“I’m ready,” I say.
She presses play.
Static. A crackle. Then my voice—young and rough and so nervous it makes my chest ache.
“Okay. So. This is probably stupid.”
Delilah’s breath catches.
“But you’re leaving tomorrow, and I wanted to give you something to remember me by.
I’m not good at talking about feelings—shocker, I know—so I figured I’d try singing them instead.
Don’t laugh. I’m serious. If you laugh, I’ll know, and I’ll be humiliated across whatever distance ends up between us. ”
She’s smiling now. A real smile, even though her eyes are wet.
“Anyway. Here goes nothing.”
A guitar starts. Clumsy chords, uncertain rhythm. I was still learning to play properly back then, and it shows. But the melody is there. The bones of something real.
And then seventeen-year-old me starts to sing.
I’ve been writing songs since before I could drive
But I never found the words
For the way you make me feel
Like summer stretched out forever
Like every stupid love song I’d ever heard
Was secretly, somehow, real
I wince internally. Delilah doesn’t seem to notice. She’s staring at the boom box like it’s showing her a window into the past.
You showed up in my summer
Smelling like your mama’s flowers
And I know I’m just a kid with a guitar
And more dreams than sense
But here’s what I know about dreamers—
We don’t know when to quit
So I’ll keep on writing you love songs
’Til one of them finally fits
The chorus comes, and I remember now why I’d been so proud of it. Simple. Maybe too simple. But true.
You’re the song I can’t stop singing
The melody stuck in my head
Every lyric I’ll ever write
Every word I’ve left unsaid
I don’t know where we’ll be tomorrow
Or who we’ll become when we’re grown
But you’re the song I can’t stop singing
And I’ll sing you all the way home
Delilah makes a sound. Half laugh, half sob.
The second verse stumbles a little—I’d clearly gotten emotional recording this and had to restart—but seventeen-year-old me pushes through.
They say summer love won’t last