Chapter 16
Alyssa ordered the furniture for Nick’s space—living room, dining area, and bedroom. She’d left his spare bedroom alone as he’d instructed, but she wasn’t happy about it. If he ever gave her the go-ahead, she knew just what to do with it.
He had a road trip coming up and would be gone for three days, so she was going to paint his walls during that time. All of the furniture could be delivered next week, partly because she’d chosen a number of antique pieces from local stores and partly because of dumb luck.
Which might not be so lucky because it meant the project wouldn’t go on forever.
Alyssa poked around online and in shops in town, finally found the right bedding, and took Nick’s bedroom wall color from it. She was going with a soft butter-yellow that accented the yellow-and-blue antique star quilt she would fold over the bottom of his bed. The bedspread itself would be plain—a balance between homey and masculine. The bed frame was made from wood that glowed with the warmth only an antique could bring, and his bedside table was large and solid. She was giving him a table lamp with two lights—a traditional task light in case he read in bed, with an ivory-look inlay around the base that emitted a soft light and made the switch for the task light easy to find. He could turn it off if he wanted, but it would function as a miniature night-light, right there at hand. The kind a six foot two guy with a rock-hard body could use without looking like he had a night-light.
She found a desk with clean lines, made of salvaged wood, that had the top modified so it could tilt up if he wanted to use it as a drawing table. She’d bought an easel for the desktop that would hold a small painting, but he could move it and put his own canvas on it if he wanted to paint. It wouldn’t hold a large canvas, but that was his own fault for being too dense to see that he should use his second bedroom as a studio. Maybe she’d hang a duck on its door as punishment.
Or a tiger. She’d texted with him briefly about a table but hadn’t heard how things went with Ryan. She presumed it had been a disaster. Anticipatory mortification was her specialty, but in fairness this was Ryan. He had absolutely no sense of decorum. She’d texted her brother the previous day and asked how it had gone, and had gotten a thumbs-up emoji. She followed up, asking for details, and he sent a photo of a tiger painted on a cafeteria wall. It was remarkable—Nick had captured the cat’s energy as well as its lines. She was impressed, but she didn’t want to see the mural. She wanted to know how badly Ryan had embarrassed her. But how did you ask that?
She checked in on the sewer department job and was back at the office when her phone buzzed with an incoming text.
Vanessa: Hey, I have great news! I called your agency and asked if I could hire you for a consultation on the homeless shelter.
Vanessa: Stacey said yes! She was nice about it too.
Alyssa stared at her phone. Frick.
Alyssa: You talked to Stacey??
Vanessa: Yes! Can we set up a time to meet? I’ll send directions.
That won’t be necessary.
Alyssa: Great. I’m swamped right now. Is it possible to push it to next week?
Vanessa: Sure. Will be in touch!
Vanessa ended with a string of emojis, starting with heart-eyes and ending with the red-dressed dancer. Most of the flowers were in between. Alyssa stared at her phone for almost a minute, then at the ceiling. She didn’t want to bring Nick into this, but she trusted him. She finally gave in and texted.
Alyssa: Just curious. Do you happen to have any time today?
Alyssa: It’s not important! Just if you do.
Nick responded immediately.
Nick: I’m at a coffeeshop in Midtown. Practice will be long today because apparently we’re supposed to hold onto the puck.
Nick: If you need to meet, earlier’s better.
Alyssa: How long will you be at the coffeeshop?
Nick: Until I’m caffeinated. I’m a big guy, so if you leave now, you can catch me.
Nick: Joe’s Grounds
Alyssa pulled up the address on her phone and slipped out of the agency, sliding the marker by her name to indicate that she was out of the building. She didn’t know the coffeeshop, but it was easy to find. It had a red and white all-caps sign, and when she opened the door, instead of a chime it played birds chirping wildly. She stared at the door, then slid her eyes over to Nick, sitting in a corner nursing a coffee. He had a second cup waiting opposite him, so she skipped ordering and sat down.
“This place seems … rudimentary,” she said, then took a sip. “You noticed how I take my coffee when we were at the museum?”
He nodded. “This place may be rudimentary, but it beats my coffeemaker.” He grinned.
She laughed. “Arizona could beat your coffeemaker.” He raised his eyebrows, and she rubbed her nails on her shoulder. “That’s right—Ryan fed me some hockey information.”
“Hey, did he show you the tiger we did?”
“He did!” She took another sip. I’m picking up his habit: sip to delay. “Um, I actually wanted to ask you about that. Did that all … go okay?”
“Sure.” They drank coffee in silence, looking at each other over the top of their cups. “There’s something else going on here, but I don’t know what it is. Pretend I’m dumb and just explain it.”
“No! I …” She sighed and scored the cup with her fingernail. “So, Ryan sometimes … He has a history of … How do I say this?”
“He can’t hold a line on cinderblock?” He raised an eyebrow. “You can hit me with the brutal truth.”
“The brutal truth is that he embarrasses people. He just doesn’t … think.”
“And you’re afraid that us running naked through the halls shouting ‘Down with the principal!’ would somehow be a problem?”
She smiled ruefully. “See, he would actually do that.” She took a deep breath. “I just want to know how much he embarrassed me.”
“You’re serious.” He took that in. “Well, he drove too fast, but that was my only complaint.” He shrugged.
“Huh. Okay.” She blew on her coffee. They sat in companionable silence.
“I’m a little disappointed in Ryan,” Nick finally said. “He must have great prank capacity if you came all the way down here just to find out what happened at the school. And yet he was well-behaved.”
“Can we walk with these?” Alyssa asked.
He shot her a curious look but said, “Sure,” and they grabbed their cups and headed out. It was a sunny, crisp day, and several businesses had yellow and rust mums in planters out front, as if they’d coordinated for a few storefronts and then given up.
“I find myself in an embarrassing situation and I don’t know what to do.” He stayed silent, waiting. “Vanessa wants me to work on a charity project with her.”
“Oh.” Clearly this wasn’t where he’d thought she was going. “Oh! And she wants you to donate your time, but you can’t afford to?”
“Not exactly.” She exhaled and trailed a finger over the last yellow mum as they passed. “At the museum you asked about my favorite painting.”
“Monet’s water lilies,” he recalled.
She nodded. “I discovered them when I was in junior high. It was … a bad time. Ryan and I used to go to the public library after school every day. They had this Monet book that I’d slowly thumb through until our mom came to pick us up.”
“Yeah?”
“One day I went in, and it wasn’t on the shelf. The art books didn’t get checked out that much, so I kind of panicked. And this old librarian—well, she seemed old then; she had long white hair and blue cat-eye glasses—she came over and said the book I always looked at had been withdrawn from the collection because it hadn’t been checked out in so long.”
“Hey, why didn’t you ever check it out?” Nick asked. “Why not just take it home?”
“We didn’t have library cards right then. We, uh, didn’t meet the residence requirement.” She moved aside as a kid on a bike went past. “I was always afraid the librarian would run us out of the library.”
“Why? Did Ryan act up or something?”
“No, he mostly played games on a computer. I was worried that she’d figure out that …” Her voice trailed off. “Anyway, she held the book out and said there wasn’t space to store it until the next book sale, so did I want to take it off their hands?”
Nick smiled. “Hey, that was lucky!”
Alyssa shook her head. “She stole the book for me. She withdrew it from the collection so she could give it to me.”
“Ohh. Those librarians are shifty.”
“Right?” She smiled back. “It’s my most treasured possession.”
They paused at a corner, waiting for traffic to pass. “Why did it mean so much? That book?”
She slid a toe over the curb, caressing its curve. “It was so beautiful, and things weren’t beautiful at home.”
“Is that when your parents got divorced? Were they fighting?”
“No, they actually never got divorced.” His eyebrows shot up. “My dad had gambling debts he couldn’t pay, so he left. A couple of years later, he died. Mom had tried to serve him to demand child support, but she couldn’t find him.”
“Ouch.”
“Anyway,” she said breezily, “money was tight, and our living situation wasn’t ideal.”
“Not a lot of art on the walls?”
“No.” She paused. “But there was a steering wheel.”
“Alyssa.” He reached out and rubbed her arm. “You lived in a car?”
She leaned into him and rested her forehead on his shoulder. She spoke into his jacket. “During middle school. When kids tend to be at their most sensitive.”
“Aw, geez.” He gave her a one-arm hug, then dropped his arm as she shifted to look up at him.
“I try to avoid telling people.”
He gave her an appraising look. “You know there’s nothing wrong with that, right? Having lived through hard times.”
“There was a lot wrong with it,” she snapped, then whispered, “Sorry.”
He waved his fingers, dismissing any insult. “I didn’t mean it was okay that it happened. Just that there’s no shame there.”
“Except that there is,” she said. “I’m always afraid someone will find out.” The light turned green but just for the turn lanes. They still had to wait on the corner.
He looked at her. “Why?”
She stared at him. “Why?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“Because …” she spluttered. “When things went bad, people took advantage of us. Mom had to sell a lot of things for less than they were worth because people knew she needed the money. She felt like she shouldn’t have let them know.” She shrugged helplessly. “I was just always ashamed.” She swiped at her eyes.
He reached out and touched her pinky with his. “I feel a profound sense of shame just for being alive,” he whispered. “So there’s zero judgment here.” Alyssa slipped her hand into his, just for a moment, and gave it a squeeze. The light finally turned green, and they crossed the street.
Nick brought the conversation back to Vanessa’s request for design help. “So you don’t want to do a charity project because it reminds you of bad times?” he asked.
“No, because it’s for a church that helped us.” He looked confused. “It has a food pantry in its parking lot. It’s painted white and filled with nonperishable food. They planted herbs around it, and there’s a little pair of scissors on a string and baggies so you can snip some basil or dill and take it home. Which is a fantastic idea for people who aren’t living in a car.”
“And you used to get cans of … something … there?” He clearly had no idea what was wrong, but he was trying.
“Mom parked overnight in a park across the street. She’d take us to school in the morning and then drive to her job.” She glanced up at him. “She didn’t want us using the food pantry because someone might see us, and she was still pretending everything was fine. And she said we had enough money for food, which we didn’t, really.”
“I’m sorry.”
Alyssa shook that off. “Mom worked as a waitress and she was always exhausted. When she fell asleep, I’d slip out and check the pantry for food that Ryan and I could sneak eat in the back seat. Pop-Tarts were the best, but I had to open them outside because they crinkled.”
He gave her a sad smile. There was a bench there, and he sat and pulled her down beside him.
“But Ryan left crumbs all over. I would carefully pick them off the seat and floor, but I could never get him clean. In the morning Mom would find those clingy fruit-filling crumbs on his mouth or under his fingernails.”
“She checked your fingernails?”
“Mom has a deep commitment to not being embarrassed.” She sighed. “Anyway, she told me to stop taking food from the pantry, and I said I would, but instead I just waited until Ryan fell asleep too, and I’d sneak out and eat them myself and not share.” A fat tear hurtled down her cheek and hung off her chin. He lifted it off with his forefinger.
She looked at him searchingly. “Am I telling you too much?”
“Hell no. I like knowing what makes you tick.”
She gave him a shy smile. “Janet and our florist friend Emma know. I try not to tell other people.”
“Why not?” He looked genuinely curious.
She stood up straighter and inhaled audibly. “It’s just not relevant to anything,” she said breezily. “Going forward, I mean. It has nothing to do with my life now.”
“Jesus,” Nick said. “Now I know what I sound like when I refuse to talk about the crash.”
She gave him an almost apologetic look. “That’s why I thought you might understand,” she whispered. “Because you’re pretending everything’s fine.”
He cleared his throat and Alyssa hurried on.
“Anyway, at that food pantry one night, a creepy guy stepped out from behind the herbs they’d planted—they get tall. I turned back for the car, but I was afraid to scream because Mom would be so mad. But Ryan hurtled out of the car in Spider-Man pajama pants that hit him mid-calf. He charged the guy and just bounced off him—he was only nine. But it startled the guy enough to give me a chance to grab Ryan, and we made it back to the car.”
“Your mom didn’t wake up?”
“She did, but we just said we’d let a bug out. It explained the doors closing.”
Nick put his hand over hers for a second, then folded his hands around his cup, as though to keep them there.
“The worst part wasn’t the guy—it was that Ryan knew I was going without him. He’d been watching to make sure I was safe. He knew.” She opened her eyes wide, hoping the tears would evaporate off her eyeballs before they fell, but she didn’t have any luck there either. “I was a terrible sister.”
He unwrapped the napkin from around his coffee cup, shook it out, and gently patted her face. Then he rubbed under her eyes, cleaning up the mascara. “It’s waterproof,” she mumbled.
“It’s really not,” he said, smiling gently. He folded the handkerchief again and they sat in silence, watching people walk past. “You were a kid. You did the best you could under the circumstances. And feeding him wasn’t your responsibility.”
“Maybe not. But sharing with him was.”
An elderly woman with thick ankles approached and looked pointedly at the bench. They rose, and Nick took Alyssa’s arm, threading it through the crook of his elbow. He raised his eyebrows and looked at it and she nodded. Okay. They headed back the way they had come.
“Were we going anywhere?” Alyssa asked, throwing her empty coffee cup in a trash can buzzed by one energetic fly.
“Nope. But I want to hear how this ended.”
“So I joined a club that met before school. They served breakfast.”
“Ah.”
“And I’d take an extra biscuit to keep in my bag and give to Ryan after school, before Mom picked us up. But Krystelle Rohrbach saw me, and later when she saw our car just parked—you know, nobody getting in or out—she told everyone I was living in it.”
“Krystelle Rohrbach was a little shit.” He made mock-strangle hands.
She gave a half laugh, acknowledging the sentiment, then shrugged. “It was a juicy scoop, and we were in eighth grade. I told her it was French camping, the way they did on the ?le de Navet.”
Nick pulled his head back and squinted at her. “That means ‘turnip.’”
“Yes, but none of us knew that, and it sounded fancy. Anyway, it shut them up until French class, when someone asked Madame about ‘French camping.’” Nick grimaced, but Alyssa smiled softly. “She backed up my story, then quietly got us help.”
“Yay for Madame!”
She gave him a sober look. “She ratted us out to social services. And then Mom made us switch schools to get away from her.”
“The hell? She helped you.”
“That doesn’t make up for the knowing.”
He raked his hand through his hair and tossed his cup in a trash bin on the street. “So you don’t want to do this thing for Vanessa because it brings back bad memories?”
“No … well, not exactly. It’s more that Vanessa’s a friend now. I don’t want it to change the relationship.”
He squinted at her. “Vanessa wouldn’t—”
“I can’t take that chance!” Her voice was rising, and she could hear it but couldn’t stop it. “You have to keep appearances up, or people will use it against you.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Is that something your mother said?”
They were back at Joe’s Grounds. Alyssa shrugged heavily. “She was right, though. One time, she had a date and the guy didn’t know about us, and of course he couldn’t pick her up. She said she’d meet him at the restaurant. And we were supposed to stay down.”
“For like three hours?”
“Ryan had to pee and went in in his pajamas, walked right up to her, and asked to use the potty. She was mortified.”
Nick raised a brow. “You know, all this bad stuff Ryan did to get a reputation doesn’t sound that bad to me.”
“Yeah.” She sighed heavily. “The guy fled. But the next day she told a friend at the restaurant about it, and Bill overheard. My future stepdad.”
“He was a customer?”
“Yeah. And he thought it was funny and asked her out. We got McDonald’s and went to a Disney movie—it was a family date.” She smiled at the memory. “He asked if we wanted something from the snack bar, and Mom said we didn’t, but I said we wanted popcorn and Ryan said he wanted candy. Bill bought us both, and then a popcorn for him and Mom to share. He said later he wanted an excuse to bump her hand.” She gave him a wan smile. “It wasn’t the food so much as the … care.” She looked at him, and there were tears in her eyes. “Ryan hadn’t had something special in a long time. It was the candy—but also the choice.”
“Bill sounds like a stand-up guy.”
“Yep. I used to wonder what he saw in Mom. I know that’s terrible.” She looked up at him, then gave a little shrug. “His first wife left him. I think he realized Mom was a woman who would never walk out.” She blew air out, then whispered, “I don’t want to go to that church—I’m afraid someone will recognize me. They put us up in a hotel for a couple of nights back then while social services straightened things out.”
When Nick spoke again, he seemed to be choosing his words carefully. “And you’re afraid to go back because of two nights fifteen years ago?”
“Not quite fifteen.” She sniffed.
He grunted. “Okay, it’s official. You’re not as messed up as me, but you’re a strong runner-up.” He bumped her shoulder gently, and she gave him the stink eye, but then smiled. “Why don’t you give Vanessa a chance to be a Bill, not the other guy? You know, the first one.” Her face twisted, but she didn’t say anything. “Okay. Well, they could get somebody else to do it. Alright if I talk to Vanessa?”
She gave him a small nod. “That’s why I told you all this. Can you finesse it? Slide it by her without making it awkward?”
“Sure.” He pulled out his phone and scrolled down his contacts list to place the call. “Vanessa? Nick. Listen, Alyssa needs to not do that church job and doesn’t want to talk about it. That good?” He listened for a moment. “Thanks.” He clicked off.
She stared at him. “That was finesse?”
“Hockey players are known for their subtlety,” he said, shrugging.