Chapter 20
TWENTY
FRANKIE
Now
Owen picked Frankie up at first light, hair mussed, and a sleep crease still cutting diagonally across his cheek.
Frankie hadn’t slept much. Every time she’d closed her eyes, she’d seen endless versions of Estelle as if reflected in one of those trick mirrors at the fair.
One version was real, but there was no telling which one, and the unknowingness followed her into restless dreams where she chased the ghost of her mother.
“Feel free to take a nap,” Owen said after they’d left the town behind like he could tell she needed it. “It’s early, and we have a long way to go.”
But with the road ahead leading toward truth, how could she? Last night, she’d received an email from Orla expressing her excitement for their upcoming rendezvous, as if the woman was homed in on the sore spot.
The endless flat and green landscape rushed past her windows while a country station played at low volume over the speaker. Something mournful and guitar-heavy that was at once nostalgic and modern.
They didn’t speak until they passed Greenville, and Owen suggested they pull off for a coffee. It was eight twenty in the morning, and while Frankie had not been able to doze off during their first two hours in the car, her mind had been blissfully blank.
“Thank you,” she said as he handed her a to-go mug from a coffee chain drive-through. “And thank you for doing this. I’ll pay you back for gas obviously.”
He waved her off, stirring sweetener into his mug on the console between them. “It’s nice to get away. I’ve been stationary for a long time now. First in rehab and now at Grams’.” One of his shoulders lifted in a shrug.
Frankie eyed him over the plastic lid of her cup. “I still appreciate it.”
He nodded once, his hair flopping over his brow. It had grown even longer since she’d first seen him at the library, making her fingers itch to push it back.
“What?” he asked, his blue eyes meeting hers.
She looked away. “Nothing.”
“You want to cut it, don’t you?”
He’d remembered too. His front porch, the sun caressing his bare back while she carefully trimmed his strands into something that would be more befitting his senior year homecoming dance than the mop he’d let it grow into.
She’d done a terrible job, having never cut hair before, but he’d been a good sport about it, and the process itself had been…
intriguing. Enough so that she’d volunteered to do it again multiple times in the year that followed.
A subtle shiver of longing raced up her arms.
“You can,” he said, now facing the windshield again. “It’s just not been a priority.”
She took a moment, subtly tracing his profile. “Can I ask about it?” she asked finally.
He turned toward her. “About my hair?”
“About… what you’ve been through?”
“Oh.” He sipped his coffee, then placed it in the cup holder and started the car back up. “Sure.”
With that go-ahead, the curiosity she’d suppressed bloomed. She weighed her options for where to start as they left the city behind, but eventually she settled on a question that had been on her mind ever since learning of the challenging path his life had taken.
“You said you started drinking in college to feel more like yourself, but what made it hard to stop? Eventually I imagine you must have made friends and found your place, and you never drank when we were dating.”
“It’s an easy thing to put off when you don’t see it as a problem,” he said.
“It took years before it was truly impacting my life, and by then, I was too deep in it.” He sped up, overtaking a rusty hatchback.
“You get to a point where you know it’s a problem, you can see the disappointment on the faces around you, but to someone like me, that easily becomes another reason to drink. Kill the pain, blunt the guilt.”
“That sounds so… sad,” Frankie said, watching him.
The corner of his mouth stretched upward. “Maybe.” He glanced at her, no trace of sadness on his face. “But I obviously wasn’t thinking about it that way at the time. I was just a mess, leaving a bigger mess in my wake.”
It seemed such a contradiction—Owen being messy. He’d been an athletic, white-toothed, polite-to-your-mom kind of guy back in high school. Did his homework, cut the grass, wore a seatbelt in his clean car. The image she had in her mind of someone too drunk to function didn’t fit.
“What are you thinking?” he asked when she’d been silent for a long while.
They had hit the verdant plains of Georgia now, and the sun was climbing higher by the minute.
Blue sky as far as the eye could see. Frankie folded a leg up under her.
“I’m having a hard time picturing you like that,” she said honestly.
“You were so self-assured, so… optimistic. I keep wondering how things could have changed that much.”
“I hadn’t met much of life at that point,” he said with a shrug. “You’re different too.”
“I am?”
He let out a soft laugh. “Frankie, come on. You were dreaming of Berklee, traveling the world, playing on the biggest stages. Aspen Creek in the rearview, remember?”
Unbidden, the recital dress she’d found in the armoire entered her mind. The excitement she’d once felt at what lay ahead. But even though she knew he was right, the memory of herself as that person was indistinct, as if her outlines had been smudged somehow along the way.
“We decided elementary education was a safer bet,” Frankie said. “And besides—you and I had broken up, so it wasn’t like I had a reason to follow you to Boston anymore.”
Owen frowned, his lips parting as if he was about to object, but Frankie wasn’t ready to shift the conversation away from him, so she hurried to ask her next question. “Was this your first time in rehab?”
His mouth closed, and he glanced at her, the deep blue beneath his brow swirling with a knowingness at what she was doing. But he played along.
“My second,” he said. “First time was six years ago. Court ordered. I was working for a construction company and crashed the boss’s car.” He pressed his lips together as if the memory brought with it a bitter taste.
“But it didn’t work?”
“It worked for a while. I met a girl, moved to Nashville, got a good job with a white glove service, bought a small condo.”
“And then?”
He rested his arm against the window well.
Glanced at her. “Arrogance,” he said. “I stopped going to meetings, thought I had it under control. Next I knew, I’d started lying about it again, hiding bottles, that sort of thing.
Showed up to work drunk one too many times, lost my job, and she dumped my ass. ”
“Sorry,” Frankie said.
“Nah. It was my own doing, and it wouldn’t have lasted long-term anyway.”
Frankie wanted to ask why, but something about the topic of old girlfriends made her hold her tongue. It wasn’t her business. “Then what happened?”
He let out a deep sigh. “More bad choices. I had four jobs in one year. I couldn’t hold them down, so I had to get a roommate—who I owe quite a bit of money to, by the way. I just stopped caring about everything, and then… I broke my mom’s heart.”
The dejection in his voice was sudden and cut deep, so before Frankie could overthink it, she placed her hand on his shoulder. “But you’re here now,” she said. “That must mean something.”
He straightened as if shaking off the darkness. “Yeah,” he said. “She’s a bigger person than me.”
“How did you come out of it this time? Was it court ordered again?”
“No.” He chewed on a corner of his lip. “I stole one of Mom’s rings to pawn—for bills, you know.
And right before I went to hand it over to the guy, I noticed an inscription in it.
‘For Life’ it said. It was an anniversary ring her dad had given her mom at one point.
That stopped the world for me. It made me see my life and what I’d become, and I decided then and there this couldn’t be it.
I checked myself into rehab the next day. ”
Goosebumps prickled up Frankie’s arms at his words.
There he was—that decisive, grab-life-by-its-balls guy she’d known.
After all he’d gone through, the core of him hadn’t been lost. Did that mean the girl he’d known her to be still waited somewhere within too?
Not that their pasts were comparable. There’d been no suffering for her, no drama—only hard work.
So what’s your excuse? a small voice whispered, but it didn’t sound like Estelle this time; it sounded like her younger self. And she didn’t have an immediate answer.
“I’m happy you did,” she said, even though that sentiment didn’t come close to what she wanted to express. His decision had been admirable—impressive even—but she knew him. He’d brush off any such adjective.
“Not as happy as I am,” he said. “And it’s going to stick this time. Not because I have some idealized faith in my willpower, but because I’m going to work at it. Every day.”
She nodded. “I believe you.”
He flashed her a grin. “Thank you. That means a lot.”
The miles stretched on, the road a never-ending gray belt through small towns, pastures, rolling hills, and leafy forests.
They stopped on the outskirts of Atlanta to stretch their legs and have a bite to eat, but with Stella-Jane and Greg’s old address burning in Frankie’s pocket, they were soon on the road again.
The farther from Aspen Creek they went, the deeper in thought Frankie fell. She was about to visit a part of her mom’s life that Estelle had never talked about, and with that came a pinch of disloyalty, as if she was going against expressed wishes, despite knowing that wasn’t the case.