Chapter Five
Ivy was surprised. Coeur-de-Lac had actually changed. Not a lot, but any change felt massive in the small community.
Her dad took the scenic route through town to get to the general store.
Some storefronts remained the same, some were different, and a few had leasing signs in the windows.
The movie theater, in all her antique glory, was still operating, though a few lights on the marquee needed to be replaced.
She should see a movie while she was home, especially if this was going to be the last time Coeur-de-Lac was her home.
Say a fond hello and farewell to the place and Mr. Donaldson, the owner.
There were a few cars in the general store parking lot, and her dad chose a spot next to the cart return. Considering what they were stopping for, it felt like a bad omen.
“Do you want to come in or wait in the car? I won’t be long,” her dad said as he unbuckled his seat belt.
In an uncharacteristic move, her mother had run out of sugar while baking for the faculty cookie exchange.
While she worked in administration for the history department, she couldn’t tolerate the idea of Paul’s colleagues going without, so she baked for two departments.
This cookie bonanza was the prelude to the annual Cookie Palooza, when she made six different varieties, plus fudge, to give out to friends and neighbors.
“I’ll come in. If you go home with Oreos and ice cream but no sugar, it’ll be my fault for not supervising you.”
“I’m not even going to get a cart,” Paul promised.
Those were famous last words in the Weaver house.
Any time he said he didn’t need a cart, Paul ended up with his arms so full, he had to use his chin to keep the stack of items from falling over—usually with a produce bag twisted in his fingers.
Someone always took pity on him and got him a cart, so he never learned his lesson.
According to Paul, there was always something they needed or a sale too good to pass up.
Like the condensed soups. Paul made his telltale “oooh” noise when he saw the endcap.
“Dad, we don’t need any cream-of-whatever soup.” Ivy linked their arms together and tugged.
“You don’t know that. And they’re on sale. Ninety-nine cents a can. Oh! There’s a coupon for ten dollars off fifty. If I grabbed ten, they could be free.”
His PhD definitely wasn’t in math.
“They’re not free if you’re spending forty dollars you weren’t planning on spending. Then they’re forty-dollar cans. We came for sugar.”
“I might get a cart. You never know…”
“I do know. We’re getting sugar and going home.”
Paul finally allowed himself to be tugged along to the aisle with baking essentials.
He leaned forward so he could read the small print that listed the price per ounce for sugar.
Even if the biggest bag was the most expensive, her dad would argue it was the cheapest if the price per ounce was low enough.
“I should call your mom to see if she needs anything else.”
Ivy looked up at the fluorescent lights and pushed back a frustrated sigh deep into her chest, where it had come from.
“I’ll go get a cart,” she muttered, and did the walk of shame to the front of the store.
The automatic doors let in a blast of arctic air as Ivy fought to free a shopping cart clinging to the one behind it like she was trying to drag it into hell.
“Here, let me help you with that,” came a voice that had filled so many silences in Ivy’s life.
Starr Moore had been named Most Talkative by their senior class for a reason.
Since kindergarten, teachers had sat the two girls next to each other, hoping Ivy would be a calming—and most important, quietening—presence for Starr.
It never worked. When all their desks eventually became islands, Starr talked to herself.
By high school, the girls were stratospheres apart in popularity, but Starr had always been kind to Ivy and made a point to include her when she was nearby.
A wiggle, a jiggle, and a firm tug, and Starr had the cart loose.
“Geesh, that sucker was stuck,” she marveled, shaking her head in disbelief.
“You know, sometimes I— Ivy?” Her jaw dropped.
“Is that you? I thought you died. Oh my god, your hair. I love it! So happy you’re finally letting it be curly.
” Starr grasped Ivy’s upper arms and held her at a distance.
“Let me take a look at you.” She nodded approvingly, while Ivy took her in right back.
Starr still towered over Ivy at what must be nearly six feet tall, and her eyes still sparkled a green that would have made a gemstone jealous.
She was somehow exactly the same as Ivy remembered and entirely different.
Ivy couldn’t help the smile that spread across her face under her old friend’s gentle scrutiny.
“You look fantastic. Oh my god, I can’t believe this! How long has it been?”
“Uh…”
Starr gasped, the light bulb above her head turning on. “You should come to the bar! I work there now. You could drink for free!”
“The bar?”
“Curly’s! My family owns it. I’m a manager,” she said proudly, though that pride dimmed a little as she added, “with Vince and Brett. That’s actually where I’m headed right now.
Vince has diarrhea so I’m getting him some Pepto and sending him home before he shits his pants.
” Starr pulled Ivy into a rib-crushing hug.
“It’s so good to see you. Come to the bar. I mean it!”
Ivy stared, stunned, as Starr walked away.
“What the actual fuck…” she breathed, her head spinning from the whirlwind encounter.
Her dad was still in the baking aisle, his arms piled high with flour, sugar, chocolate chips, and condensed milk.
She helped him unload his arms into the cart. “Did Mom need all that?”
“It can’t hurt to have it. She’s doing Cookie Palooza soon.”
Ivy groaned. “Dad, you’re supposed to be packing up the house to sell, not loading it with more stuff. Declutter is the name of the game, not stockpile for the apocalypse.”
“It’ll get used,” he promised, another set of famous last words in the Weaver house.
Once he got hold of the shopping cart, Paul was determined to meet the fifty-dollar threshold. But it wasn’t enough for him to hit the mark: he needed to beat it in the most efficient way possible. They zigzagged all over the store until her dad was sure he’d spent enough.
He blew past the required total by twenty dollars.
“But the soup was free,” he reminded her as they loaded the bags into the back of his car next to Ivy’s luggage.
The Christmas lights in her childhood neighborhood made the streetlights superfluous. Every house was lit up like a Christmas card.
Except, oddly enough, for Mrs. Karnacki’s house. Her trademark blue-and-white lights weren’t lit.
“Did Mrs. Karnacki die? Or move?” Ivy asked as her dad parked on the right-hand side of the driveway like he had for her entire life. Her mom got the left side of the garage.
“No. Why would you think that?”
“Because she doesn’t have her Hanukkah lights up. She always has Hanukkah lights.”
As the words came out of her mouth, it dawned on Ivy that she didn’t know if that was true anymore. Mrs. Karnacki could have stopped hanging her lights years ago and Ivy wouldn’t know, because she hadn’t been home. The familiar tingle of guilt spread through her body.
Her dad frowned. “Huh. That’s weird. They were working the other day.”
Ivy resolved to go ask Mrs. Karnacki if she needed any help tomorrow. She’d always been so kind to the neighborhood kids, even handing out full-size candy bars on Halloween.
Then her attention slipped to the Underwood house, fully festooned in Christmas cheer. In high school, Austin would rearrange the reindeer into compromising positions—Dasher mounting Dancer—until Mrs. Karnacki caught him in the act. She didn’t rat him out, but it never happened again.
Ivy grabbed a few bags of groceries and followed Paul inside. The house smelled fantastic. Warm chocolate, ginger, and sugar. She inhaled as deeply as her lungs would let her.
“Are you finally home?” her mother shouted from the kitchen.
“We brought sugar!” Paul called back.
“And half the grocery store,” Ivy added. “I tried to stop him!”
She wouldn’t go down for his crimes if she could help it.
“Come in the kitchen! I’m stirring fudge!”
Ivy moved through her house like a stranger. She’d expected a rush of sentimentality and comfort, but instead it felt like…a house. Her height was marked on the doorframe of her bathroom upstairs, but her connection to the place where she’d learned to walk and built blanket forts was missing.
This was…good. It was good. If she kept telling herself that, maybe it would eventually feel true. Helping her parents get the house ready to sell would be so much easier if it was just a house and not her home.
She stepped into the kitchen, and all her melancholy was pushed aside by the overwhelming number of cookies covering every available surface.
And…Mom. The rush of joy at seeing Sophie Weaver was always powerful, but seeing her here?
On her home turf? Partaking in one of the holiday rituals that had defined each of Ivy’s first eighteen years of life?
That was like riding a unicorn through a sky full of rainbows.
Ivy didn’t know if it was good to be home, but it was fucking amazing to be right here, in this kitchen.
“Paul, can you grab me that pan? No, the square one. Yes, thank you.”
Her dad held a square pan while hot fudge oozed from the pot her mom was holding. After she smoothed it out, pushing claylike chocolate into the corners with her spatula, she wrapped Ivy in a tight hug. Immediately, her flour-covered apron smeared the evidence of her labors all over Ivy’s clothes.
“There’s my girl,” Sophie said into her hair. Ivy felt her mother’s chest move as she inhaled deeply. “God, I missed you.”
“I saw you over the summer,” Ivy mumbled, struggling to balance the dual weights of her mother’s affection and uncomfortable, pervasive guilt.
“It’s never enough,” Sophie insisted, smoothing Ivy’s hair back and then cradling her face. “You could live under my bed and it wouldn’t be enough.”
The kitchen timer beeped, and Sophie released Ivy to retrieve a cookie sheet from the oven, replacing it in a fluid motion with another that was already prepared.
“Do you need help?” Ivy asked, automatically pushing up her sleeves.
“No.” Without looking, Sophie smacked Paul’s hand away from the cooling cookies. He was a notorious cookie thief. “Are you tired? Hungry?”
“We got Culver’s,” Ivy admitted sheepishly.
“Oh, really?” There was a hint of a smile at the corners of her mouth. Sophie’s eyes fell on the grocery bags. “And then you got lost in the grocery store trying to find sugar? Dad had to buy his way out?”
“There was a coupon,” Paul said around a mouthful of cookie he’d managed to sneak in the half second Sophie had let her guard down.
“There’s always a coupon.” She kissed his cheek and wiped the crumbs from his lip. “If the apocalypse happens, we could feed the neighborhood.”
Paul’s chest puffed up. “I’m altruistic and economical.”
“Oh, you’re something.” Sophie shared a conspiratorial look with Ivy. “Since your dad has done his fun activity for the week, do you have any exciting plans? Meeting up with any friends?”
Cold panic prickled through Ivy’s body, freezing her in place. Her parents being concerned about her lack of social life in high school was 97 percent of the reason she’d gotten a job at the movie theater.
“Ivy, it’s Friday night. Got any wild plans?”
“Going to work. Another day, another dollar.”
They never said it, but she always suspected her parents would have been thrilled if she’d gone to a house party or bonfire, broken curfew, or even snuck out of the house once.
“I, um—” Think, Ivy, think!
A very kind, extremely chatty face floated to the top of her mind.
“I ran into Starr Moore at the store. She invited me to her family’s bar. Curly’s, I think? Or maybe Moe’s…definitely one of the Three Stooges.”
“That sounds like fun!”
It was hard not to cringe at her mother’s excitement, but Ivy managed.
“I don’t know if I’ll go. I mean, I just got here, and you’ve missed me, and—”
“No, no, don’t worry about me. Go. Go. You’re young. And we’ve got so many nights to watch Antiques Roadshow.”
Now she had to go, because she couldn’t crush the earnest light in her mother’s eyes.
And she definitely couldn’t explain that Starr had only invited her because it was the nice, polite thing to do, and Starr’s bones were made out of kindness and consideration.
Ivy would spend a few lonely hours at the end of the bar nursing a free drink, once again on the periphery of life.
She pulled her voice through the bars that made up the cage in her throat to squeak, “Can I borrow the car?”