Chapter 18 Jack
“H EY ! R EPEAT OFFENDER!”
I don’t know where the enthusiasm comes from as I point my finger at the email on the screen. Clara’s laugh shakes her, vibrating her body against mine in all the warm spots where we’re touching.
“Good eye, Kelly. I’ll hit them with a Please accept this email as a confirmation of receipt. Please see our response to your original email for answers to your query. Okay?”
“Sure.” I obviously made my anxiety about letting Clara help out clear, because she’s been checking I’m happy before sending anything. She sends the email and crosses off repeat offender from the board.
“Just need one email sent from an email address clearly picked in middle school to get a full house. Only ten emails left, you think we can do it?”
“I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life.” There’s something about gamifying a task I hate that’s working for me. It might also be doing it with Clara that’s helping.
“Oh my God,” Clara squeals. “This lady is asking you out. She said she met you when she came into the store and wants to know if you’re single. She’s forty-two, soon to be divorced, and a mom to two eight-year-old twin girls. Why isn’t score a date on the bingo board?”
“Very funny.”
Clara holds the laptop up in front of my face, where I see she’s not joking.
“I’m not trying to be anyone’s stepdad right now.”
“God, you don’t have to adopt the kids to date their mom.” She grimaces at herself. “I’ve spent too much time in the tavern recently listening to drunken men talk. My point is, you could date her if you wanted to.”
I pinch the bridge of my nose. “I don’t want to so you can delete it. Next.”
Clara clicks the trash can icon without saying another word and moves on. It’s a disappointingly normal email address and she boos at the screen. Another two emails get responded to without giving us the chance to cross off our final bingo box.
“When did everyone suddenly get so professional? Where are all the ‘hotchick one-two-threes’?” Clara says, clicking into the next email. Another dud. “There’s no individuality anymore.”
Clara responds to the second-to-last email while I dig my cell phone out from under my leg. I make sure she can’t see my screen and bring up my inbox. The whooshing sound happens a split second before the dinging noise my laptop makes.
She eyes me. When she clicks my name and opens the email her hand flies to her mouth. “?‘Jack is the coolest zero-five-one-zero at Hotmail dot com’ wants to know if I want a fresh drink. I should email back and say no thank you.”
I rub my temple, pushing through the minor embarrassment. “I think you can probably just ignore it. Sounds spammy. Can I cross the square?”
Clara hands me the laptop. “You’ve earned it. Incredible, incredible email address creativity from baby Jack.”
I strike a line through our final bingo square and hand her back the laptop. “Full house.”
“And last actual email. Come on, Jacqueline Stewart, don’t be an asshole… oh my God.”
“What?” My eyes dart to the screen as Clara bursts out laughing.
“?‘Cutie-pie Jacky zero-seven’ wants to know if it’s possible to change the design she picked on the table she ordered from you two weeks ago.”
“So you’re telling me if I’d just waited one more email I could have kept ‘Jack is the coolest’ all to myself?”
“But don’t you feel so much freer now that he’s out?”
Clara rubs between my shoulder blades in a bid to comfort me. Her hand stops and rests on the shoulder closest to her for a beat, then returns to the laptop. Every touch ends quicker than I want it to. “Don’t respond to that one. I’ll call her tomorrow to talk about it. Are we done?”
“We’re done. Wasn’t that bad, right?” She hands me the laptop and shuffles off the couch.
“You made it not that bad. It would’ve been bad if you weren’t here to help,” I tell her honestly. “I probably would’ve given up from frustration.”
Clara stretches her arms and legs. She groans as she brings each knee up to her stomach and rolls her shoulders. “Do you have any other tasks for me?”
“Do you know how to make an oak table?”
I watch as she continues to move around, like she’s got too much energy all of a sudden.
Elf jumps off the couch to sit near her feet, equally unsure what’s happening.
“I’m one of those annoying people who were born believing that they can actually do anything.
So while the answer is technically no, let me watch a few YouTube tutorials first.”
“You’re ridiculous,” I tell her, smiling when she dips her head to hide her smile. “Are you okay? You look like you’re warming up to go for a run.”
She looks over to the window, where snow has compacted on the external windowsill. “I’m fine. I just sat in one spot for too long and I suddenly have energy because I’m happy I was able to help you. I’m morally against running.”
“So I won’t get to race you at the Santa run?”
She sits back down beside me, cross-legged, facing me this time. I make sure she has enough of the blanket covering her. Elf can’t find a route to sitting next to her so he opts to lie in his bed next to the radiator.
She rests her chin on her hand, propped up by her knee. “I’m undecided. Why do you even have a Santa run?”
I tuck a strand of hair that falls into her eyes behind her ear. “It’s to raise money for the toy drive.”
Clara bolts up straight like she’s been hit with a stun gun. “That’s it. That’s it! That’s it! Oh, I need my laptop!”
“What just happened?” I murmur to myself as Clara sprints across my living room into her bedroom. “What happened to being morally against running?” I yell.
“It’s for a good cause!” she yells back.
She reappears, laptop in hand and the biggest smile on her face. “Are you going to fill me in on what I’m missing here?”
The couch creaks as she launches herself at the cushion’s end.
“I have press connections because of my job, right? And I’ve been trying to get a news station to do a segment or story about the toy drive.
Everyone only wants to talk about Flo’s video but a friend of a friend of a friend said if I could find a better hook then they could maybe do something. ”
“And you’ve found a better hook?” I ask, feeling clueless.
“The Santa run to raise money is the perfect introduction to everything you’re achieving with the toy drive. People all dressed up ready to run in the cold to make sure kids have something to open at Christmas? It’s perfect.” Clara is practically humming with excitement.
“You’ve really thought this through, huh?”
It feels like an obvious thing to say when, if I’m honest with myself, she’s been a whirlwind since she got here. The frustration I felt about constantly seeing her has subsided, leaving behind the truth that she’s been trying hard for all of us since she arrived.
“If I can get you on the news, then people will know about Fraser Falls. If people know how great it is here, then people will visit. When people visit, they’ll spend money here, and money makes the world go round.
” She doesn’t look up at me while she explains her thought process.
Her teeth are digging into her bottom lip while she concentrates on typing. “Almost done.”
“Take your time,” I say gently.
When she eventually closes her laptop she beams at me. “Who knew running could make me this happy?”
“You really care, don’t you?”
“About running? No.”
I roll my eyes. “About Fraser Falls, Clara.”
“Of course I do.” She wraps her arms around her legs, rests her chin on her knees. “I haven’t lied to you once, Jack.”
I hesitate. “So when you said you had nothing to do with the doll or the contract, you meant it?”
“I meant it. I started the small business program because I needed to pad out my résumé to climb the ladder. My grandpa would’ve loved it. He started as a small, independent business and remembering our roots was important to him. It’s literally written on the wall of our reception area.
“Then the opportunity came up to cover someone on long-term sick leave in a higher position than mine in a different division, so I took it to get the experience. I didn’t know about the Evie doll until I got back a couple of weeks before Flo’s video. I haven’t even seen the contract, Jack.”
“Do you want to?” I ask.
The conflicted look on her face makes me want to wrap my arms around her. “Yeah.”
She nibbles on the corner of her thumb while I find the emails from the start of the year that include the contract.
“Holly went viral when a reality TV lady shared her with a link to the store. Everything blew up from there and the town was busier than we’d ever seen it. Flo was thrilled, obviously.”
“Obviously,” Clara adds.
“Few weeks into the New Year, a guy from Davenport shows up asking if I’d be interested in scaling up my operation with the help of an experienced backer. He explained about the small business program and gave me the names of some other companies who participated. Encouraged me to look them up.”
“They’re the ones I onboarded before I left.”
“It sounded great. The others were excited, so I said I’d be interested, then they sent over the paperwork.” I pass the laptop to Clara. She balances it on her knees and tilts the screen back. Her eyes bounce from left to right rapidly but her breathing slows.
When I was a kid, my parents tasked me with teaching my sister how to ride a bike.
I’d picked it up much quicker than she had and they thought she liked their attention too much to try.
One Sunday I spent hours showing her what to do, and right after she started to get the hang of it, Mom and Dad came out to watch.
She got so distracted by their cheering that she stopped looking where she was going and was heading straight for a tree.
Their cheers of pride turned into screaming at her to brake.
I knew she was going to hurt herself and I couldn’t do anything to stop it.
My gut twisted in the worst way, voice stuck in my throat when I should have been telling her to stop.
It’s how I feel right now watching Clara read the contract that’s the antithesis of everything she says she stands for.
When she reaches the last page, she takes a shaky breath that feels like it sucks all the oxygen from the room. The kind you get between sobs. A noise that is so revealing that it doesn’t need her to explain how she’s feeling.
I feel it in the center of my chest, that ache of knowing someone is hurting and you can’t do anything about it. I hate seeing her deflate, not when she’s so loyal to what she thinks Davenport should be about. It makes me hate them even more.
“I failed you,” she says, voice hardly above a whisper. “I’m so sorry.”
When Clara turned up to resolve things full of fire and determination, she said she hadn’t read the contract. If I’d shown her then and there, and she’d reacted like this, I don’t think I would have been suspicious of her intentions.
You can’t fake this kind of devastation.
“Hey,” I say gently, getting her attention.
Her bottom lip quivers. I pull her to my chest, cradling the back of her head while she fights away the urge to cry.
She wraps her arms around my torso as I rest my chin on her hair, her body melting into mine as she takes big, unsteady breaths.
“You’re okay. You didn’t fail me. They failed both of us. ”
“This isn’t what it’s supposed to be like.
We’re not supposed to be this kind of business.
I promise you, the program is about a partnership.
I didn’t want this. I don’t even know what this is.
” She lifts her body from mine and points a finger to the contract still on the screen.
“This isn’t what we do. They let me believe you were lying and being dramatic for attention. ”
I don’t know how it happened, but I find myself wanting to apologize to her. A few weeks ago, I’d have taken great pleasure in proving I’m right, but there’s no joy to be taken from shaking the foundation of the only thing someone’s ever known.
“This isn’t what Davenport is supposed to be about,” she says quietly, possibly to herself.
There’s a large tear rolling down the side of her face. I catch it with my thumb; her face turns into my palm and I cup her cheek for a short moment. “I’m sorry this is hurting you. I know how important your family business is to you.”
It’s a punch to the gut—no, worse—to see Clara cry. She looks so vulnerable when she’s upset, a stark contrast to every version I’ve seen of her. I’m stuck between regretting showing her and being relieved she finally knows. She deserves better and I want her to believe that for herself.
Clara lets me hold her while soft sobs wet my shirt. I stay quiet, alternating between rubbing her back and stroking her hair until she untangles herself from me and wipes both eyes with the back of her hand. “This is just… a lot to process. I think I’m going to go to bed. Is that okay?”
“Of course. G’night, Clara.”
“Night, Jack.”