Chapter 25
— Chapter 25 —
Sam calls Monday to say one of his bartenders quit and he needs me to work doubles until he finds someone new. He sounds desperate. “I can’t get my dad back for lunches. Now that he’s a hundred percent retired, he swears he’ll only come by the bar if he can stay on the drinking side.”
I don’t have any idea if I’m up for that much time on my feet. My incision still gets red and hot by the end of the day, and it’s itchy the rest of the time. I haven’t gone back to Dr. Singh to get my stitches out, and worry they’re becoming their own problem. But those shifts might pay my insurance bill, so I tell Sam I will take all the time he needs to fill.
On Tuesday when I get in my car, I realize I barely have enough fuel in my tank to make it to the gas station and not enough cash to pay, so I’m stuck taking Step’s car to work. I drive with my ancient down jacket zipped all the way up and the windows rolled all the way down so I don’t hyperventilate trying to decide if Step’s car actually smells like bananas. Feathers escape from the hole at my left elbow, and I can see them in the driver’s side mirror, flying away a few puffs at a time.
When I get to The Aster, Sam lets me in. “It’s meatloaf day,” he says, rolling his eyes. The hearty scent of Enzo’s recipe is thick in the air, and I’m sideswiped by longing, like a low-pressure system in my chest. I don’t even like meatloaf, but I like being reminded of the times I felt safe and Enzo always looked out for me.
“Gus and Shorty will be so happy,” I tell Sam, trying to sell him on the kindness of his concession. “Tomorrow too, if there’s leftovers. Shorty loves a good slab of meatloaf on a hard roll.”
“Don’t I know it,” Sam says, with the melancholy of a man pursued by a rain cloud. I wonder what kind of life affords a person the room to be so upset about what other people want to eat.
The lunch shift is light, the regulars are happy, and the other specials are three-bean salad made with “curated heirloom-variety beans” and the Italian wedding soup Carlos made from marrow bones, so I don’t have to stand around answering a bunch of questions about Sam’s strange ingredients.
“Hey, Freya,” Shorty says, slipping me an extra five after he settles up. “Save me a slice for a meatloaf sandwich tomorrow, will ya?”
The next time I go in the kitchen, I clip the five to Carlos’s order line. “That’s for making Shorty a meatloaf sandwich tomorrow.”
Carlos laughs. When he pulls the five from the line, he does an exaggerated look around and whispers, “Tell him I’ve got one with his name on it.”
After lunch, Sam gives me an hour and a half break before dinner prep. “Stretch your legs or whatever,” he says, which is extremely kind. When I worked doubles for anyone else, I had to fill gap time with side work. There’s a never-ending chore list behind the bar: everything from cutting lemons to changing the filters on the ice machine.
The work will build up anyway, and judging by the amount of gunk I had to clean out of the soda gun on my first shift, I doubt Sam has a handle on the necessary maintenance. But I decide to take my break this time and see if I can remember where Dr. Singh’s condo is.
I spend twenty minutes driving around Heritage Hills, where every building is beige and every road seems to be named West Hill Drive. I can’t remember which turns Aubrey took to get to Dr. Singh, so I’m just burning time and gas. I give up and head to Gristedes.
I don’t know if Aubrey is working, but it’s the only place I know to look for her, the only time I have to look, and I don’t want to leave things the way we did.
I circle the parking lot, scanning for Steena’s Range Rover, assessing the risk of going inside. But when I drive around the back of the store, Aubrey is out by the loading dock. She’s sitting on top of a row of broken grocery carts. They’re all pushed together in a chain and she’s cross-legged, smack in the middle, staring off into the mess of porcelain-berry vines beyond the asphalt. The hood of her enormous black sweatshirt is slipping from her head, and I can see her black-lined eyes and purple lips, a paper lollipop stick poking out of the side of her mouth. She seems effortlessly cool, although I can’t help but think it must be painful to sit like that, ankles pressed against the cold metal carts.
I park by the dumpster and get out of the car.
She flinches when she sees me.
“Thanks for the cupcakes,” I say.
“Yeah, well…” She shrugs, takes the lollipop from her mouth, and looks at it, assessing how much green-apple candy is left on the gum. I wait for her to say more, but she shoves the lollipop back in her mouth and looks at her watch.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“Don’t worry about it.” Her voice is flat, like it was the day I found her at the house, and I’m scared I’ve ruined everything we’ve built since.
“You can still come hang out if you want to.” I’m trying to sound casual, but I hear the intonations of neediness in my voice.
She stares me down. The eyeliner at her waterline is wearing away, leaving black gunk at her tear ducts. “I don’t want to.” She pushes her hands against the grocery carts, lifting her body enough to uncross her legs and jump down. “Why would I want to?”
I turn away, stare into the brush, trying to see through the vines to the trees they’re choking. Because I want you to. Because I miss you. Because I love you. Those reasons are all about me, and they were never enough for anyone else. How am I supposed to stand here and tell her I’m good for her, that she should want to spend time with me, when I’m not sure I’m good for anyone? “I don’t know,” I say. “Just if you did… if you needed to—”
“Why did you leave?” Her voice is throaty and desperate. When I turn back, she’s wiping her eyes with her sleeve, smearing wet mascara down her cheek. “Fuck,” she says, sniffing through her stuffy nose, looking up to the sky.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
She shakes her head. “If you were sorry, you wouldn’t have gone. You would have come back.”
“That’s not true.”
“Then what is?”
“It was a lot of things.”
Aubrey snorts. “Yeah, whatever. No one tells me the truth. Why would you?”
“Aubrey…” I lose my words. Truth does not shine the same way from every angle. Even though Aubrey can’t see how knowing would be worse, I can.
“What?” She looks at me, chin crumpling. Tears spill down her face. “What are you going to say? Nothing!” She wipes her eyes again. “I used to pretend you’d come back for me. All the time. Like some kids dress up and pretend they’re princesses. I would pretend I had to get ready because my aunt was coming back.” Her shoulders shake. She’s crying like a little kid. I’m scared she might choke on her lollipop.
“I wanted to come back for you,” I say, wiping tears from my cheeks. I step forward to hug her, but she backs away.
“Why didn’t you?” She flaps her hands, then clenches them into fists as her face slips from sadness to anger. “My mom told Kelly O’Leary’s mom that you threw yourself at my dad, and when he didn’t want you, you ran away and left us.”
The shock hits like a cold flash in my chest. “That’s not how it happened!”
Aubrey’s eyes flare. “Wow. Okay.” she says, as if I’ve confessed to the sin Steena assigned me.
“That’s not what happened,” I say.
“Then what did?” she asks, eyes wide, daring me to change her mind.
I feel like I’m falling. My brain floods with images of everything that happened. But when I look at Aubrey swimming in her sweatshirt, clutching her lollipop, there is no way to forget that she’s still a kid who lives under her father’s roof. I shake my head. No matter how much I want to stop carrying secrets, I can’t throw tinder at a child who is already burning.
Aubrey pushes past me. “Don’t bother. I wouldn’t believe you anyway.” She stomps up the steps to the loading dock, and I think I can hear her crunching her lollipop on the way into the store.
I imagine my sister, well into her third glass of merlot, perched at the marble island in her cavernous kitchen, sharing horrible stories with Mika O’Leary, knowing full well Aubrey was in earshot. Steena’s voice would take on an echoing brightness when she wanted to assert her version of events as absolute truth, but no one else ever seemed to recognize her tell.