Chapter 3
Me
Come over stat. I have an Adam update for you.
Gracie
OOOOH YAY
Me
not a good update ?
Gracie
booo
on my way now
“No! I cannot believe this is the Amazing Adam from Love Local,” Gracie whined as we sat around mine and Olivia’s living room. “I’m so disappointed. I was already stalking his Instagram. He seemed like your perfect match.”
I fought the urge to open my phone and stalk him, too. “No, he’s definitely not Amazing Adam. He’s more like Annoying Adam.”
“Can I be controversial?” Olivia said from her spot curled up on our soft, white couch. Our apartment’s color palette was all the colors. Bright green curtains. An antique pink coffee table. Books and records cluttering the shelves. Old paintings I’d found in flea markets lining the walls. Mix and match throw pillows on the sofa. Tall, vintage lamps on almost every surface.
“No,” I said warily, stroking Stevie as she purred in my lap.
“He has a point,” Olivia continued anyway. “He was saying similar things we were saying the other night. Like how you’re not a professional and you need help planning such a big event.
“You’re one person, Luce. This town has gotten bigger since Grandma started it, plus she always had lots of help. You always want to do things like a one-woman show. Maybe it’s the teacher in you. But this Adam guy will have his staff on it!”
“Yeah, his staff and no Lucy.” I threw my head back onto the armchair morosely. “He kicked me out.”
“Didn’t he say you could still volunteer?” Gracie offered hopefully from her spot lounging on the rug.
“I can’t work with him. He was kind of rude. We were arguing back and forth. He was telling me we didn’t ‘own’ the festival, which isn’t what I was implying. He also had bad phone manners,” I listed off each reason, burrowing deeper into the armchair cushion.
“This is coming from you? You have questionable phone etiquette, yourself.” Olivia pulled a pillow into her lap. “You’ll answer a call right in the middle of a loud dinner or while watching a show. Sometimes I can barely hear you. Do you remember the time you answered the phone at a concert!”
“I have fine phone etiquette. A solid B minus,” I defended myself. “Mainly, I feel like I’d be embarrassed to work with him after everything. I feel like he was only offering me a volunteer spot to pacify me. He doesn’t want me involved.” And why would he? I’d been running the festival into the ground, which wasn’t exactly a glowing endorsement for my work.
“It just doesn’t match the image I had of him from his profile,” Gracie said disappointedly. “He had such good vibes.”
“Guys, I feel like you both could be more supportive of me after this guy basically fired me and then said I ruined the festival the last few years,” I said, swallowing a lump in my throat that appeared every time I thought about the last fact. “I feel like you’re not really on my side.”
“I’m totally on your side!” Gracie jolted up.
“We’re always on your side,” Olivia said. “I guess I’m trying to find the silver lining or make sense of this big mess. I know that probably doesn’t feel helpful. I’m sorry, Luce, I really am.”
“Can we all agree that this Adam guy is a jerk?” I asked, watching Stevie leap from my lap and saunter toward Olivia.
“Oh, definitely!” Gracie said enthusiastically.
“Totally, like you said, he’s Annoying Adam from here on out,” Olivia said, scooping Stevie into her lap.
I tucked into the armchair, pulling a blanket over me even though it was a warm Texas summer night. My sisters mused about how Annoying Adam might change the festival, but I was at war between the grief I felt losing this summer festival, a little piece of my grandma, and regret with how I handled my conversation with Adam.
Had he matched with anyone else on Love Local?A random thought popped into my mind. Good luck to whoever else he matched with.
“What’re you thinking about?” Olivia asked, reaching her feet across the end of the couch to nudge mine.
“Oh, nothing,” I whispered. But I was thinking about Annoying Adam way more than I wanted to be.
“Let’s go get ice cream or something to get your mind off the festival,” Gracie suggested.
“I don’t think Sprinkles is open this late,” I said, referring to our usual go to, a local ice cream shop downtown. “Let’s go grab a few pints from Sweet River Market then.” Gracie stood up, decision already made. “I’ll take ice cream however I can get it.”
Sweet River Market was a grocery store tucked into one of the downtown buildings. It was on the street corner, right between the shoe store and the diner. While it was small, it still offered a little bit of everything from produce to laundry detergent.
When we walked in shiny paper suns and flip-flops dangled from the ceiling along with multicolored streamers to celebrate the summer season.
“This way,” Olivia said, pointing toward the back of the store. Gracie and I followed her. We came for the large ice chest in the back full of ice cream cartons and frozen bars.
“Yum.” Gracie stopped in front of a shelf stocked with different bags of chips. “Do we need a little spice to go with the sugar?”
I stopped to consider, eyeing a bag of Cheetos when I saw a familiar face entering the chip aisle. Adam.
He was humming to himself as he grabbed a bag of Lays, the same button-down on from earlier only more worn in now, which wasn’t an unappealing look.
I froze in place. Gracie gave me a funny look, opening her mouth to speak, and my flight instinct kicked in. I put one hand over her mouth to keep her quiet, then grabbed her arm with the other.
Shhh, I mouthed, crouching down as I pulled her along with me as I ran us into the next aisle.
“What is happening right now?” Gracie grumbled when I dropped my hand. We were hunched down beside the canned goods.
Olivia wandered over oblivious to the fact we were hiding until her eyes landed on us. “What is going on?” She raised an eyebrow.
I grabbed her hand and pulled her down to join our crouched huddle. “He’s over there,” I whispered and pointed behind me to the other aisle.
“He?” Olivia asked. Her eyes widened as she registered who he was. She tiptoed to the end of our aisle and leaned over toward the neighboring aisle to catch a view of him. “He’s not there anymore,” she said, way too loudly for my liking.
“Shhh!” I whispered-shouted, slowly moving out of my crouched hiding position. “I don’t want to face him right now. He cannot know I’m here.” After the awful humiliation of our last encounter, I needed at least 24 hours to recover before I could see him again. Maybe even 48 hours.
An older woman entered the aisle with us, furrowing her brows when she spotted us sneaking glances across the store. “Boy trouble,” Gracie offered by way of explanation to the fellow shopper. She nodded in camaraderie.
Olivia stepped out into the rest of the store, sneakily peering into other aisles. “Oh, I think that’s him over by the cereals!” She and Gracie headed that way.
“Guys, no, no! Let’s go the opposite direction,” I pleaded. “Let’s avoid.”
“We have to see what he looks like in person,” Gracie whispered back to me as my sisters weaved through the store, their feet shuffling against the linoleum floor.
“He won’t even know we’re there,” Olivia assured me. I wanted to hang back and hide, but I also didn’t trust my sisters left to their own devices.
We got closer to where he stood and found a good view of him reading the back of a Cheerios box. The three of us knelt in hiding behind a display of summer fruit.
“So, he’s a Cheerios eater,” Gracie mused critically.
He set the box back on the shelf. “So, he thinks he’s too good for Cheerios.” Olivia shook her head. The smell of melons and stone fruit filled my senses.
He suddenly turned in our direction, glancing behind him as if he could feel us watching him. Olivia squealed and we jerked back behind the fruit stand, knocking over a few peaches and trying to muffle giggles in the process. I hid my head directly behind a watermelon. Adam looked around for a moment, his expression puzzled as he went back to deciding on a cereal.
Gracie slid her phone out of her purse and held it out in the aisle so she could get a shot of Adam.
“Gracie!” I whisper-squealed, reaching out and grabbing her phone from her hands. “Absolutely not!”
“But Mom will want to see what he looks like,” she whined.
“I would cease to exist if he caught us taking pictures of him,” I said each word gravely. I then dropped her phone into my purse, saying, “You can have this back upon departure.” She rolled her eyes.
I turned back to find he’d left the aisle.
“We missed what cereal he decided on,” Olivia pouted as she collected the fallen peaches and placed them back on the display.
Adam checked out shortly after he left the aisle, so we didn’t have to hide for long. I watched him leave the store, holding his paper bags in his arms as he thanked the cashier.
My sisters remained giddy and giggly as we finished our shopping, but I couldn’t shake this sinking feeling that I wouldn’t be able to escape Adam. Adam’s arrival in Sweet River didn’t just change my summer, but changed my life in ways I’d be discovering for a while like aftershocks from an earthquake.
That night I stayed up watching Nora Ephron movies back-to-back. I was halfway through You’ve Got Mail when Olivia shuffled into the living room from her bedroom.
“It is super late. What are you still doing awake?” she asked me, full of maternal concern.
“I have nothing at all on the agenda tomorrow. It’s not like I need to wake up for anything. Why not stay up watching Meg Ryan fall in love?” I was on the couch buried under a blanket.
“This simply means tomorrow can be whatever you want it to be. This summer is a blank page now. Why not paint? You love painting. Or take up running? You thought you knew exactly what this summer held for you, but now Annoying Adam has let you off the hook…What does Lucy want her summer to be?”
I chewed on my lip, thinking through Olivia’s wisdom. I did love painting and making things out of every blank page I found.
“Maybe you and I pick up Gracie and head to the beach tomorrow morning?” I said, my voice peppered with optimism.
“I’m actually booked tomorrow morning.” She winced apologetically. “I was actually coming out here to ask you to turn down the volume because I need sleep. I have my first meeting as a member of the Sweet River Historical Society tomorrow morning at 8:00 a.m.”
Olivia was off joining new societies with her summer while I was disappearing into Nora Ephron’s world and seeing how deep I could sink into the couch. “That sounds really fun, Olivia, and really you.” I picked up the remote and turned down the volume.
She turned toward the TV for a moment, hesitating. “It’s the scene when Kathleen is sick,” she said. “I love this part. Meg Ryan really knows how to make tissues adorable.”
She wound up curling up with me on the couch for the rest of the movie. Whatever came of the summer, at least I had her by my side.