Chapter 21
21
Wednesday, July 9
54 Days Left at the Lake
Nan and I make curtains for the bathroom and covers for the throw pillows in the living room. We pillage Stedmans for more fabric. But unless Charlie’s around, Nan is often melancholy or biting. She gripes through her physio exercises, even though they’re clearly helping. She’s moving more confidently with the cane, and we take careful strolls together along Bare Rock Lane. Each day we go a little farther. I try talking to her about why she and John aren’t speaking, but she’s deemed the subject a “private matter.”
Thankfully, Charlie shows up every afternoon after he and Sam are done working on the tree house. I don’t mind the hammering anymore. There’s something wholesome about the sound of two brothers working together, even when I hear them bicker across the bay. Charlie does odd jobs around the cottage—raking fallen pine needles and fixing a loose step. He spends so much time here that I wonder if he’s avoiding Percy and Sam. I can’t get the way he looked at them out of my head.
On Wednesday, he escorts Nan to her first Stationkeeper Singers choir practice, and she returns with plans to team up with him for the community euchre night. On Thursday, he arrives in Sam’s red pickup, the back full of lumber. He’s going to build a proper railing for the stairs that lead to the lake so Nan can get down to swim. He sets up a table saw on the deck. His T-shirt lies in a heap beside it. He’s wearing a black bathing suit and a pair of steel-toed boots. It really works for me.
We’ll go for a swim when he’s done, just like we did yesterday and the day before. I inflated the moose for Charlie, but he’s claimed ownership of the Pegasus-unicorn. I swim along the shore while he floats, and then I join him, laying out on the moose. Yesterday we ended up talking for well over an hour, about our jobs and our condos and our favorite spots in the city. We discussed our families and our university years, the music we listen to, where we’ve traveled, the books we love best. I learned that Sam is a cardiologist and that Percy’s working on a novel in her spare time. I found out that Charlie’s last relationship ended after Christmas—he and Genevieve were together for a few months, and he was the one to break it off. I changed the subject when he asked about my ex—I don’t want to bring Trevor to the lake. And Charlie gave me a vague answer when I asked what he and Sam had been arguing about the other day. Clearly he doesn’t want to bring that to the lake, either.
I watch him now from the sewing table, my gaze drifting to his shoulders as he uses the saw, his bronzed skin glistening under the sun. Nan tells me I’m drooling.
“I am not.” Salivating, maybe. I can’t help it if Charlie insists on waltzing around without a shirt. So what if I sneak a few glances? I’m only human.
She looks at me over her glasses from her spot in the armchair, a queen on her throne. “I don’t blame you. If I were a younger woman, I’d let him put his shoes at the end of my bed.”
“There’ll be no leaving of shoes. He doesn’t see me that way.”
“Oh please.”
“He doesn’t.”
“He does,” Nan says. “When you aren’t staring at him, he’s staring at you. It’s like watching a tennis match.”
“We’re friends,” I tell her.
Just friends , I remind myself.
“It’s hard to work when you’re staring at me like that,” Charlie says when I bring him a glass of water.
“It’s hard not to stare when you’re sweating like that.” Perspiration runs in rivulets down his chest. I follow it down the flat expanse of skin to his belly button and the line of hair that dips below. He’s breathing heavily.
Charlie does a double take when he stops working to accept the glass from my hand. “That’s new.”
I’m wearing a yellow bikini that I bought at Stedmans earlier this week, after Willa got back to me about the swimwear photos. The email was two letters.
Ok.
No greeting. No salutation. I stared at the screen, a hand covering my mouth. And then I started to laugh. I might not work for Swish again, but I’d held my ground. No one is going to give me permission to be the kind of photographer I want to be except for me. I needed to do something to celebrate, so I drove into town and purchased a thirty-four-dollar string bikini (number two). It shows a lot more everything than I’m used to, but it’s sweltering, and I feel emboldened.
“It’s new,” I tell Charlie.
“Make sure you stay in the shade,” he says. His face is flushed. He rests his hands on his knees and bends over, panting.
“Are you all right?”
“Just out of shape.”
“The state of your abdominals says otherwise.” I put my hand on his shoulder. “I think it’s time to quit. You’ve been in the sun all day.”
I lead him inside, past Nan, who’s snoozing on the screened porch sofa despite Charlie’s ruckus. He pauses in the entryway to the living room, laying a hand on the wall to steady himself.
“Charlie?”
He stares at me, wide-eyed.
“It’s just the heat,” I tell him, and he gives me a look that says he doesn’t believe me. He seems genuinely frightened.
“Here, sit.” I take his arm and guide him to the couch, then leave him to get a cool facecloth. His head is in his hands when I return. I sit next to him and dab the cloth on the back of his neck.
“That feels nice.”
Charlie closes his eyes, and I move the cloth to his forehead, then his temple, and his breathing begins to slow.
“This is embarrassing,” he says after a moment, head still dropped.
“This is nothing. You read my bucket list. You’ve got to do a lot worse than mild heatstroke before you reach that level of mortification.”
He turns his cheek toward me. His eyes meet mine, searching and serious. “Tell me why you wrote it?”
I hum. “Nostalgia?”
Charlie slowly sits up, leaning all the way back on the couch, his head resting on the cushion, slanted my way. Waiting.
I chew on my cheek, thinking. “It’s been a rough year. Being here made me think about the summer I was seventeen—and how I’d go back and redo it if I had the chance. I know when September rolls around, I’ll have to face everything that’s waiting for me in the city. But I want to leave it behind while I’m here—do all the silly things I’d do if I were seventeen again.”
“And you love a list,” Charlie says, voice gentle.
“Precisely.”
For a moment, I slip into the pools of green in his gaze.
I crinkle my nose. “It’s silly, right?”
He shakes his head. “I think I get it. If I could go back, knowing what I know now, I probably would.”
“Really?”
“Sure. There are things I’d like to do differently. That feeling of being invincible. All of life stretching before you. Not to mention no sixty-hour workweeks.”
“No bills. Or real responsibilities. No exes with fiancées named Astilbe.”
Charlie smiles. “Specific.”
“No compromising my integrity.”
“No serious consequences,” Charlie says.
“Exactly.”
“Can I see that list again?”
My smile falters. “Didn’t you get a good enough look at it?”
He makes a wishy-washy movement with his hand.
“Come on, Alice. I’m not going to laugh at you,” he says, the twinkle returning to his eyes.
“You might.”
“Okay, I might. But I won’t think less of you.”
And I believe him. I blow out a breath and fetch my notebook. Charlie reads it as I stand over his shoulder, arms crossed in front of me.
He glances up. “?‘Low-key drugs, question mark, question mark, question mark’?”
“I was the kind of girl people assumed wouldn’t touch a joint. I was literally passed over more than once.”
“What would you have done if you’d been offered a toke?”
“I would have declined,” I say.
Charlie beams up at me. “You were a good girl.”
“The goodest. What about you?”
“The opposite. I was reckless. Cocky. Jealous. Competitive. I was a little shit.” There’s no humor in his smile. “I guess not much has changed.”
Hearing Charlie talk about himself like this pulls at something in me. I sit beside him.
“Charlie, I don’t think there’s enough room in an airplane hangar for your ego. But you’re not a shit. I doubt you were back then, either.”
“I was. It’s probably a good thing we didn’t meet when we were kids. I did a lot of stupid stuff to distract myself from how I was really feeling. You wouldn’t have liked me.”
“You lost your father when you were fourteen. I can’t imagine how hard that was.”
Charlie pins me with the full force of his stare. “Don’t go soft on me now, Alice.”
So I stare back. “If you want to talk about it, I’m here. I’m an excellent listener and a vault when it comes to secrets.”
“I’m sure you are.” His chest rises and falls. I can tell he’s making a decision about me, weighing how much he can confide. I get the sense that he doesn’t confide in many people, that he doesn’t sit with his feelings very often as an adult, either.
“I had great parents,” he says slowly. “My dad was a steadfast, serious guy, but he was also kind and thoughtful. He had this dry sense of humor. Sam is a lot like him. My mom was full of energy, always laughing. Everyone loved her. You just felt good being with her, you know?”
“Yeah,” I say, looking at him. “I know.”
“From a young age, I could tell they were so in love. Being around them felt safe.” He scrubs a hand over his jaw. “They grew up together. They were friends first. And even though they worked their asses off at the restaurant, they made our time together count. My mom would cook these epic breakfasts…” His voice catches, and he clears his throat. “We were like one of those TV families. Almost perfect.” My heart squeezes even before he says the words: “And then my dad died.”
Charlie stares down at his hands. “I was fourteen, but Sam was only twelve. Our mom was a wreck. My grandfather gave me this talk about being the man of the house, and it scared the fuck out of me. I didn’t know what that meant or what I was supposed to do or how to fix things.”
“Of course not. You were a child.”
He makes a sound like he doesn’t quite agree. “I did everything I could think of. I helped at the restaurant and tried to make our mom smile and made sure I didn’t fall apart in front of Sam. If you were the turtle of your family, I was the joker. The guy who didn’t take anything too seriously, who didn’t let anything bother him. It felt like, if I was normal, then they would be normal, too.”
“And did that work?”
“Sort of. Sam curled up inside himself after Dad died, and Mom worried about him. I didn’t give her reason to worry about me.” His smile is so profoundly sad. “That’s not to say I didn’t piss her off.”
“What teenager didn’t piss off their parents?”
“I bet Alice Everly didn’t.”
“Busted. Heather was the rebel; I was the easy one. Although.” I lean closer and lower my voice to a whisper. “In second grade, I stole a library book.”
Charlie’s dimples appear, and I’m overwhelmed with the need to keep them there, adorning his cheeks, to be the person who makes the joker smile.
“It was a children’s encyclopedia of birds,” I say. Charlie chuckles, and I feel exhilarated, like I’m jumping from a cliff into the lake. “It had all these colorful toucans and lorikeets on the cover, and I wanted to keep it forever. I ripped out the library card envelope, thinking I was brilliant. When my mom found it in my room, she made me return it to the librarian, tell her exactly what I’d done, and apologize. It was so humiliating, I never wanted to get in trouble like that again.”
“And you didn’t, I’m guessing.”
“Nope. I was determined, even then.”
“My brother was like that. Very by the book. The year after Dad died, Percy’s parents bought the cottage next door to us. Sam and Percy became instant best friends. She talked nonstop and somehow pulled him out of his shell, helped him have fun again. They took care of each other.”
I study him. “Who took care of you?”
He looks at me from the corner of his eye. “Our mom did her best, which was pretty damn good. And the chef at the Tavern, Julien, was always keeping an eye out. But I still managed to do a bunch of boneheaded stuff.”
“Like what?”
“Partying.” He pauses, and then adds, “Girls.”
I think of what the women in the salon said last week. I think of what I heard Sam say, and what it implied.
You know how he is.
“I didn’t have my first kiss until I was nineteen,” I tell Charlie.
“I hope it was worth the wait.” The look on his face is hysterical.
I laugh. “It was kind of a letdown. It was just a random guy during frosh week. But to be fair, my expectations were extremely high at that point.”
His thigh bumps against mine. “I would have kissed you.”
It knocks the air out of me. “What?”
“Back then,” Charlie says, eyes glued to me. “When you were here that summer. I definitely would have kissed you.”
“And what makes you think I would have wanted to kiss you ?” I press my thigh into his leg.
His smile is treacherous. “Everyone wanted to kiss me.”
I hit him on his concrete block of a shoulder, and he laughs. I love seeing him like this. Unburdened.
“We should do it together,” I find myself saying.
He looks taken aback. “Kiss?”
“The list.” I laugh. “You should have a seventeen-year-old summer with me.”
Charlie’s eyes brighten. “Yeah?”
He reads my list over again, lips moving silently. Then he digs his phone out of his pocket and snaps a photo.
“No problem,” he announces.
“No problem?”
“Nope,” he says. “You’ve already done a bunch of it. You jumped off the rock, threw yourself a birthday party.” He arches an eyebrow. “And that is a very skimpy bathing suit. We can do this.”
“We?” I say, smiling.
His eyes spark. They’re aurora borealis green.
“You and me, Alice Everly.”