Chapter 6
My phone buzzes from inside my pants pocket as I unlock the door to my apartment, the smell of the pizzeria downstairs mingling with the leftover dining room pot roast in the Ziploc container balancing precariously on the top of my knee.
With the skills of a woman who has spent most of her life in a juggling act, I manage to slide my key out, pull my phone from my scrubs, and press it to the space between my collarbone and cheek without spilling a single drop of gravy.
“Hello?”
“Hi, baby.”
My mom’s voice is low and husky. I always thought it was from the pack-a-day habit she’s had since she was sixteen, but Gigi used to say she came out of the womb sounding like a lounge singer.
“Mom. Hi. How are you?”
As the question leaves my lips, I inhale involuntarily and my jaw opens wide in a yawn.
“You sound tired,” she says.
I nod even though she can’t see me. “Yeah, long day.”
I fit my key into the lock and push open the door. My apartment is dark but otherwise unchanged from how I left it this morning. “And a late night last night,” I add, suddenly craving the weight of my down duvet.
“Late night, eh?” her voice teases, and it causes a knee-jerk reaction in me to shut down her thought pattern before it takes flight.
“No, I was just…Zoe and I went to a funeral at the Legion.”
At the word Legion, my mom snorts.
“God. That town. Turning funerals into a reason to party. Nothing ever changes, does it?”
I don’t have the mental capacity for this particular fight tonight.
Especially when I know it will end the same way it always does, with her telling me how green the grass is wherever she is living and me biting my tongue to not remind her that my credit paid to water that particular patch of grass.
“What’s new with you?” I attempt to change the subject.
She sighs long and hard, and I immediately realize I’ve made a grave mistake.
“Do you remember how Kirk and I broke up this past spring?” She doesn’t pause for me to answer.
“Well, he finally kicked me out of the condo. I don’t know why I stayed with him as long as I did.
The man was a narcissist. Anyway, I’ve found a new apartment.
I had to move back to Keady. You would not believe the prices in Owen Sound these days. It’s highway robbery.”
Her voice begins to blur. This is how every one of our conversations goes. Her complaints. The woe-is-me attitude that eventually leads to the—
“It’s only a grand this time, and I’ll be able to pay you back as soon as I do my first survey.”
Ah.
There it is.
The real reason for her call.
“I don’t have a grand, Mom.”
I’m still paying off the last time, when instead of asking, she just opened up a credit card using my name and social insurance number.
“Five hundred then?” my mother continues. “If you do their prep course, you get jobs faster. If I could make more money, I could get a bigger place, and maybe we could—”
“I’m sorry,” I cut her off. “Mom, I can’t.”
The rest of our conversation lasts less than a minute. Once it’s clear I’m not budging, the pleasantries fade away, and she makes an excuse to hang up.
It doesn’t sting the way it used to. When I finally stopped expecting her to be something more, I made peace with what she was—a person who always put herself first.
I plug my phone into its charger, feeling almost validated. See, Universe? I am not the kind of girl to fall heir to a mysterious inheritance; I am the kind of girl who is in debt because her mom woke up one morning and decided she needed a waterbed.
That feeling comes over me. I start to replay all the ways in which life has handed me lemons and I have just accepted them, piled them into my proverbial fruit bowl and left them to rot.
But I don’t want to go there tonight.
Instead, I pour myself a very generous glass of cheap Chardonnay and do the second worst thing—I google.
Two years ago, I found Reeve’s Instagram profile.
It was Zoe’s actual birthday. We celebrated by hopping all the beach bars from Fourth Street to Main. It had been two weeks since Reeve and I hooked up, and I had finally accepted that he would never call.
I had ducked out of the festivities early after one too many lemon drops. But instead of heading to bed like a responsible adult, I decided to self-inflict maximum rejection heartache by googling the one who got away.
Reeve Baldwin was easy enough to find. We didn’t have any mutual friends, but I had met him at Megh Sharma’s party.
I found Megh, searched his followers for Reeve, and in less than ten minutes of stalking, I was staring at a pic of Reeve on the deck of a sailboat—shirtless—that golden tan looking every bit as beautiful as I remembered.
Then, I continued to click.
Deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole. He hadn’t lied about the all-boys school, but he had omitted that it was private and elite.
He was well traveled, and not in the drive-twenty-four-hours-in-a-station-wagon-to-Daytona-Beach kind of way.
Europe, Asia, tiny remote islands with exotic-sounding names.
He had the type of life I never let myself dream about.
Tonight, as I lie in bed and begin to scroll, I’m creeping for something different. A petite blonde or curvy brunette who appears in one too many pictures or stands a little too close.
I tell myself I will check only a few of his recent posts. Ha! Without thinking, I’m scrolling back a few weeks, then a few months, then to a picture I think was taken the same night we met.
It must have been earlier in the evening. The sky is still light enough that you wouldn’t need a flash. It’s a candid of him in that same red Muskoka chair. His eyes closed, head thrown back as if he were laughing.
Jesus, Jules.
Why are you doing this?
This form of torture is too much, even for me.
I move to swipe up with my thumb and close the whole app, but it slips, and instead, I tap a spot on the far left of my screen. A red heart flashes over the picture.
Shit.
No, no, no, no, noooooooo.
In a panic, I click again. Unliking what I liked.
But in no way reversing the clusterfuck I’ve just created.
You are an idiot, Jules. A first-class, grade-A asshole.
Somewhere in Cyberland, a notification is flying innocently toward Reeve’s phone.
JuJuBee likes your photo.
It doesn’t matter that following it is an immediate Just kidding. Slip of the thumb. Please disregard.
I take a single slow, cleansing breath. Then a second. And a third.
Rationalizing to myself that he might not know it’s me.
My photo is of a bumblebee. And my nickname is one only Zoe uses.
For the first time in my life, I am grateful for my mom’s MLM schemes.
A few years ago, when my mom started mining my social media contacts looking for followers to help her sell herbal diet pills, I privatized all my accounts, changing my usernames to JuJuBee, hoping a little bit of anonymity online would bring me a tiny sliver of peace.
Tonight, it definitely does.
By the time I polish off my wine and climb into bed, I’ve convinced myself Reeve Baldwin is probably the kind of guy who doesn’t even turn on social media notifications.
I turn off the light, pull up my covers, and lie there, trying to will my body to fall asleep, but the feeling of falling doesn’t come.
One hundred…
Ninety-nine…
Ninety-eight…
Ninety-seven…
I give up counting sheep somewhere in the upper sixties, conceding to the fact that this sleep hack is not going to work for me tonight, and move to my next idea, which is distracting my brain by reading about gruesome unsolved murders until I’m tired enough to pass out.
Rolling over, I turn my light back on, swing my body out of bed, and tiptoe over to my purse, ignoring the cold apartment floor beneath my bare feet.
I left the thriller I’ve been reading inside. But when I pull the hardcover from my purse, I realize it isn’t my library book in my hand. It’s Kitty’s diary.
I pause for a moment, debating. Then my feet get too cold, and I sprint back to bed, jumping into it and pulling the blankets up to my chin. I flip the diary open and begin to read the first page.
May 21, 1949
Dear Diary,
Today is going to be the best day. I just know it!
I have been waiting all year for the West Lake Dance Hall to open up for the summer season, and today is that day!
Mama still doesn’t want me to go, even though I’m eighteen now—a grown woman!
However, I have devised the most perfect plan.
I know what you are thinking, Dearest Diary.
How wicked I am to disobey my mama and run off to the dance hall.
But what you may not understand is that Beau St. Clair is going to be there.
His family has come to the lake for the summer season, just as they always do, and I am absolutely gone on Beau. Head over heels, Dear Diary.
All last summer, I had to stay home every Saturday night while Beau would go to the dance hall without me.
It drove me absolutely mad with jealousy imagining him with his arms around other girls.
I told Mama I would die if I had to do it again for another summer.
Mama said that I would most certainly not die and that I should forget about a city boy like Beau and find a nice boy from West Lake.
However, Daddy and I were in Wiarton last week, and I found the most perfect dress in a church donation bin.
It’s white with the prettiest skirt that flutters every time I spin.
I knew in my heart that I was meant to have that dress and the moment Beau saw me in it, he wouldn’t want to dance with another girl for the rest of the summer.
All I needed was a plan to sneak out and have Mama not find out.
So, yesterday, I got a new partner in my domestic education class.
Her name is Dotty O’Brien. Her mama is dead, and her daddy works over at the foundry at night, and Dot sleeps at her home all alone.
She told me she gets scared of being in that dark house sometimes, so I told her I would come and stay with her on Saturday, and we could go to the dance hall and then I’d sleep over so she wouldn’t be alone.
Isn’t that simply perfect? I know tonight is going to be the start of the rest of my life. I can feel it, Diary!
xoxo
Kitty
I close the diary and set it on my nightstand with a sigh. I’m not entirely sure what answers I thought I would find, but now I’m quite certain this book does not contain them.
Flipping the light off for a second time tonight, I pull the covers to my chin and roll over onto my side. The diary may have been a bust, but by the time I count down to my eighty-second sheep, I’m already halfway to sinking into a deep and delicious sleep.