Fifteen
Fifteen
Tuesday
Ellie opens her eyes the next morning and sees drips of sunlight through her bedroom window. She barely moves at first, too unsure of what to expect from this new day. For a few minutes, she lies as still as a corpse and listens. So far, she hears no movement from elsewhere in the house. No sound of Bunny banging the kitchen cabinets. No noise from Frank shuffling around in the downstairs hallway.
Slowly, Ellie slides away the blankets and pulls herself upright. She presses her back ( Does it still hurt? ) against the upholstered headboard and sees that the room looks as it should. She exhales deeply, a soft smile settling on her face. She’d read in several books that the trauma from divorce can instigate all kinds of unpleasant things in one’s body. Upset stomach. Irritability. Change in appetite. Elevated blood pressure. Loss of sleep.
She quietly laughs at herself. Finally, in the light of a new day, she recognizes that the whole thing—her parents, the accident, the airport, her ID—only exists in that wild, incomprehensible part of her brain, the place that manufactures her fears and her dreams and—
Pound. Pound. Pound.
Or not.
“Oh, come on!” Ellie exclaims and instantly sinks back into her bed.
“Ellie!” Bunny shouts from downstairs, like she did when her daughter was in high school and running late. “Your friend is here!”
Ellie grabs the pillow and shoves it over her face in case she needs to scream, but then quickly removes it.
Wait.
“My ... friend?” Ellie repeats back to herself.
The truth is Ellie doesn’t have many close friends. Acquaintances, sure. Her fellow book club members. Mothers of Maggie’s friends whom she still sometimes meets for coffee. Familiar faces from her childhood whom she socializes with from time to time. But real friends? The type who show up unannounced on her doorstep? Ellie was a girl—just a few years shy of Maggie’s current age—the last time she shared that sort of intimacy with other women.
Ellie has two friends from childhood who also settled back in town. They’ve known each other for years. Middle school slumber parties. Friday-night football games under the lights. As adults, they live a few miles from each other, though to Ellie it sometimes feels like they live a universe apart. At their monthly dinners (or at least the months when they can make their schedules miraculously align), the evening always starts with lots of laughs. Comical motherhood anecdotes. A few funny childhood memories sprinkled in for good measure. But by the time they finish their entrées, the conversation almost always pivots to the other women’s careers (important meetings, business travel, the nightmare of childcare, even when your children are grown), leaving Ellie feeling like the third wheel.
Back in her bed, Ellie still holds the pillow.
“Ellie!” Bunny calls out once more.
Great, she thinks. Here we go again.
Ellie shoves away the comforter—though not without a generous, annoyed huff—and drops her feet to the floor. She slides on her slippers, twists her bed hair back into a low bun, and marches into the hallway, past Maggie’s still-closed bedroom door, and down the stairs, all as if through one giant, sweeping, overly annoyed step.
“What now ?” Ellie moans when she arrives in the entryway. Her parents—both dressed in heavy-looking flannel pajama sets, as if it’s the middle of December—are positioned in the front doorway, blocking any view of the porch. Ellie adjusts her floral-patterned pajama shorts set, as if to compose herself, but there’s no point. She feels like a contestant on a game show, waiting to see what terrible thing awaits her behind door number two.
“I told you your friend is here,” Bunny says as she and Frank slowly part like curtains on a stage. “What did you say your name is again, sweetheart?”
“Gabby,” a vaguely familiar female voice announces.
“Nope!” Ellie exclaims before she’s even seen her, instantly swiveling back in the direction of the stairs. “No frickin’ way! Not in this life or in any other one!”
“Eleanor Adams, get back over here!” Bunny demands, making Ellie feel like a teenager all over again, and then lets out a hard, dry cough. She lifts her fist to her mouth and coughs a second time. “See?” Bunny adds and places a hand on her wheezy chest, her light hair still sleep matted. “I told you that ER would make me sick!”
Even with her back turned, Ellie hears through the open front door the muted hum of the generator still running, a sign that nothing inside this house has yet been fixed.
If yesterday was any indicator, she knows even if she walks back upstairs—tries to hide, tries to sleep, tries to run away—this day and all its absurdities will still find her. Understanding she does not have much of a choice, especially not with her parents staying in her house, Ellie slowly pivots back around. When she does, the movement triggers her stubborn back muscle yet again.
Frank shakes his head as Bunny continues to cough. “See what I mean, Ellie?” Her father arches his thick, gray brows in a knowing way, like they’re trying to make contact with the ceiling. “It’s good I was here,” he reminds her, and he pats the neckline of his pajamas for his reading glasses—not that he needs them, but more for the security of knowing they are there. “Your mother was up sick half the night.”
It’s not that Ellie doesn’t care about this detail. Of course she does. Her mother is getting older, and so sickness—even a simple cold—doesn’t hit her body the same way. Still, she can’t focus on it right now. Her gaze has panned over to the porch like a film camera. There’s a person here, yes, but Ellie can only focus on singular details, as if she’s looking at a work of abstract art but doesn’t yet see how all the disjointed shapes add up. Those giant blue eyes, the ones that look like a child’s drawing brought to life. The wild strands of kinked golden hair, which always made her seem part mermaid. That messy heap of wooden necklaces, the sheer quantity of them making her look like a preschool teacher or camp counselor gone mad.
“Dare I ask why you’re here this morning?” Ellie asks, feeling like her life (Ha! Is this her life?) these last twenty-four hours is the world’s worst dating show. “Or what ridiculous world I’ve woken up in that would warrant you being on my porch?”
“Well, good morning to you, too, Ellie.” An entertained look lights up Gabby’s heart-shaped face like light bulbs on a marquee. “Sounds like your mother is right.” She offers Bunny a playful wink. “You really are a mess from this breakup, huh?” She readjusts the macramé bag that hangs from her shoulder, a tangle of knotted rope. “Now go get dressed.” She waves a hand—her fingernails painted with bright-purple polish—toward the staircase. “We can talk about the whole thing on our way to work.”
It’s as if someone has plunged Ellie into a hot bath. Drips of sweat run down her back beneath her cotton pajamas. “Work?” Ellie gasps, realizing Gabby may still be just as much of a loose cannon as she remembers.
“Correct.” Gabby exchanges an inquisitive glance with Ellie’s parents. “You know, the bookstore you own.” She puckers her lips, which are painted with a dramatic iridescent-pink gloss. “Remember it?”
Ellie feels like someone has put glue in her eyes. They’re stuck wide open.
“The bookstore?” Ellie repeats back. On second thought, she has no clue who the unbalanced person is in this current scene. “The one I ... own?”
“Are you sure you want to drive us this morning?” Gabby wears what appears to be a thrift-store T-shirt, a pale-yellow ringer with the words Ray of Sunshine stamped (perhaps ironically, perhaps not) across the chest, paired with baggy ripped jeans. She looks like a late-forties woman dressed in costume as an art student, except it’s not a costume. It’s just her. “Because I can walk back up the block to my apartment and get my car if—”
“I—I’m fine,” Ellie stammers, which, of course, is a lie.
In the kitchen, the coffee machine beeps. Frank shuffles down the hallway.
“Frank!” Bunny coughs and starts to follow him. “I forgot to ask. When you walk back to the condo this morning to get more of our things, make sure you pack up my VapoRub!” She coughs again. “I want to put some on my chest before I go to church this afternoon to talk to Father Donovan about this situation! I won’t move forward with another step in this process until my priest knows!” She dabs her nose with a crumpled tissue. Behind her, Frank stops moving. “Come to think of it, maybe you ought to talk to those younger boys who work at the deli, see if one of them will carry my reading chair over here for me.” Bunny looks back at Ellie and Gabby over her shoulder. “I can’t be expected to live here forever without my reading chair.”
Frank turns, moves back toward them from the hallway. “Where did you say you’re going this afternoon?” he asks, his words slowly pouring out of him.
“To church! To tell Father Donovan!” Bunny restates. “Open your ears, Frank!”
Frank pushes away his readers, as if for once he hopes not to see what’s in front of him. “You wouldn’t do that.” He shakes his head. “You wouldn’t tell Father Donovan something like that unless you really meant it.”
Gabby glances around at the three of them, takes a backward step. “Maybe I should—”
“You think I’m kidding, Frank,” Bunny states, a straightened finger pointed toward the ceiling. “But I’m not! I can’t live this way anymore! We both want different things!”
Ellie massages her eyebrows and tries to wrap her head around whatever is unfolding before her. She turns to Gabby while her parents begin to bicker uncharacteristically. “Give me ten minutes to get dressed,” she tells her. “I’ll meet you outside.”
“Sure.” Gabby’s shimmering pink mouth settles into a straight line. “Sounds like we have a lot to catch up on at the moment.”
“Gabby.” Ellie puffs out her cheeks. “You have no idea.”
“Here.” Ellie tosses Gabby her car keys. “I—um—I have a terrible headache.” What else is she supposed to say? I don’t know what life I’m living and so I’m not sure of the directions to get us to where we’re going ? “I changed my mind. I think I do need you to drive, after all.”
“Huh.” Gabby ponders this news for a second. “Oh, and for the record, you know that in the years I’ve worked at the shop, I’ve met your mother, like, probably two dozen times, right?”
“Yes?” Ellie queries, her response framed out as a question. “That—um, that seems right.” She gives Gabby a shrug. “Her, uh—her memory is a bit distorted this week. As is mine, I think,” she mumbles.
“Sweet,” Gabby says, like some kind of grown-up teenager. “So what’s the deal with your parents?”
Ellie rubs her eyes. “I think they’re getting divorced, but also both inexplicably living with me.”
“This breakup really got to you, huh?” Gabby playfully rolls her eyes, then gives Ellie a fast once-over. “Also, yeah, no chance you’re driving,” she confirms. “You look like you woke up on another planet.”
Ellie gives one firm nod. “That is the most accurate thing I’ve heard all morning.”
Back in her twenties, after her short stint working at the art book publisher in the city, Ellie moved into her own apartment in town. She worked at the bookstore full-time, which it turned out she enjoyed. She liked to be surrounded by stories, to make recommendations, to unpack new books and neatly arrange all their spines in clean lines on the shelves. Even so, she couldn’t deny it was not the most lucrative gig.
Jack had been the one to suggest that Ellie put an ad for a sublet on Craigslist, which came as a disappointment. Deep down, she’d hoped Jack, who lived alone in an apartment funded by his parents while he worked to complete his medical residency, might ask her to move in with him. It was an unrealistic fantasy. They’d been dating only a few months. Plus, her parents—especially her mother—would have killed her if she moved in with a boyfriend out of wedlock. Bunny and Frank didn’t even know Jack. They’d met him once, maybe? They weren’t at that level in their relationship yet. It turned out, they never would be.
The day Gabby came to view the apartment, Ellie had put out a platter of store-bought cookies, which she could hardly afford, on her IKEA coffee table. She’d hated having roommates in college and did not look forward to living with a stranger again. She wanted this Gabby person to know Ellie’s apartment was a cozy, undebauched, grown-up space.
Gabby, who grew up several towns away, had initially seemed normal—a touch artsy, though that wasn’t bad—as they nibbled cookies and viewed the closet-size second bedroom Ellie had advertised. Gabby had been a library science major, she explained, and currently worked at the town library, a fact that pleased Ellie. After all, how bad could a librarian be?
It turned out terrible, actually.
The first week Gabby lived there, Ellie came home to find her and three strangers taking bong hits in the living room, their ridiculous weed apparatus, which apparently had a name ( Thor! ), leaving a giant water ring on Ellie’s Allen wrench–assembled table. Things went downhill—fast—from there.
Now, back in Ellie’s driveway, Gabby walks around the back of the vehicle, making her way to the driver’s side door. “Also, what happened to your car?” Gabby asks right as the power company truck pulls up and parks alongside the curbside. “Your bumper is all banged up and scratched.”
Ellie—outfitted in her comfortable jeans, a clean T-shirt, and her old tennis shoes (regardless of which lifetime she is in, at least some things, it seems, don’t change)—opens the passenger-side door. She slides off her book bag, the one she’s carried around with her for days, and gets into the car.
“It’s a long story.” Ellie pulls her seat belt across her body, as if this thin fabric strap can protect her from whatever this new day will bring. In front of them, Bunny, still dressed in her winter pajamas, steps onto the porch and waves her crumpled tissue. Behind her, Frank—wearing his street clothes and a livid expression—opens the door, suddenly looking like he has some other place to be. Ellie pulls her tortoiseshell sunglasses from her bag, slips them on. “Now let’s get out of here before my mother—or either of my parents, for that matter—sees it.”
“Everyone on their best behavior!” Gabby shouts not ten minutes later when they step into the bookshop, a delicate set of bells jingling on the glass door. Two twentysomething girls—both dressed casually in jeans and cute, comfortable shirts—are seated on the floor, unpacking boxes of books. They glance up and wave. “Boss lady is back from her one-day detour on the heartbreak highway!” Gabby’s bag—which looks like something college-Maggie might wear—slaps against her side as she comfortably breezes through the space. “No one give her a hard time!”
Ellie pauses and looks around, her mouth agape, like she’s on a mission to catch flies. She has stood right here in this exact spot numerous times in her life—as a young girl out shopping with Bunny, as an employee here in her twenties, as a mother on the hunt for good picture books with her own daughter at her side. But right now, her feet planted on the charming white penny tile that makes up the small shop’s entryway, it all feels different. This store and everything in it is no longer someone else’s story. Today, for the first time ever, it is hers.
Magnolia Books.
At least, this is what’s painted on the front window, the one Ellie walked past on her way inside. Magnolia. Ellie’s favorite flower. The one that, in a different life, serves as the namesake for something—someone—else.
Maggie.
“So, are you going to tell me what happened?” Gabby asks. Her vintage T-shirt rides up a touch as she speaks, revealing an inch-wide sliver of her flat stomach.
Ellie watches her old roommate (Dear God, is she really friends with Gabby—the one who twice nearly burned down their apartment—in this bizarre, altered version of her life?) as she steps behind the store’s front counter—pretty, rounded, white, and accented with a few small potted plants. It is exactly the sort of thing Ellie herself would have picked (and apparently has), something to replace the store’s old dark wood that was inside this space when Ellie was last here several weeks ago to buy another round of sad self-help titles ( Flying Solo: A Guide for a Happy Empty Nest ; Uncoupling Your Heart: A Road Map to Healing ).
But this is not the only change. Outside, the shop’s redbrick exterior has also been painted in a fresh coat of white, two classic potted topiaries on either side of the door, like Ellie always felt the longtime owners—a couple who had earned their AARP cards years earlier—ought to do. How, she privately wonders, did she not register these changes when she drove down this block yesterday?
Gabby opens and shuts some counter drawers, then drums a computer keyboard, its screen illuminating with life. She looks up at Ellie. Her clunky, presumably handcrafted necklaces, which look just a step above the macaroni jewelry Maggie once made, bang into each other when she moves.
“So?” Gabby asks.
But Ellie hardly hears her. She slides off her book bag, drops it in a heap beside her, and glides toward the walls of bookshelves, where the titles are arranged not by genre but by the mood the texts evoke (Dreamy, Hopeful, Sentimental, Uneasy, Safe), just as young Ellie, unpacking boxes of new shipments much like her two employees are doing (Does Ellie actually have employees?), used to imagine would be a fun way to organize things.
“Yoo-hoo?” Gabby arranges some papers on the counter into neat piles. “Earth to Ellie!”
“Huh?” Ellie turns, a subtle smile creeping across her face as she takes it all in.
Gabby tugs a strand of her long, crimped-looking hair. “Based on the dumbfounded face you’re currently wearing,” she says with a laugh, “it seems like I’m going to need to guess.”
Ellie blinks, not sure what to say. How could she ever possibly explain the unexplainable turn her week has taken?
“Anyway, honestly, you’re better off without him,” Gabby narrates, thankfully starting to fill in some gaps. She picks up a spray bottle and spritzes water on the neatly potted plants, just one of the many small gestures of care she’s exhibited for this space since they’ve arrived.
Nearby, the two young girls (Ellie probably should find a clever way to learn their names) are still busy unpacking new titles on the shop’s wood floor—stylishly outfitted with pale-blue-and-white area rugs. They perk up, ready for a taste of gossip.
“I mean, didn’t you tell me he’s a professional scuba diver?” Gabby uses her arms to mock-swim. “What were you going to do? Live with him on a boat?” she questions as she repositions the plants in a new, neat arrangement. “Granted, I never met him. You only dated for what, like, a month?” She turns back to the computer, types something. “Based on everything you told me, the only things he seemed capable of talking about were oyster shells and neoprene.” She smiles through her pearlescent lips. “Trust me, Ellie. I know you’re sad, but in the long run,” she adds and then briefly offers her best backstroke, “this is a very good thing.”
“I dated a scuba diver?” Ellie asks. She thinks of Maggie and their conversation this past weekend at Bunny and Frank’s pool. I’m ... dating? “Really?” The corners of her eyes crinkle right before she laughs. “We live an hour from an ocean. That’s ... weird. I think.”
“Tell me about it.” Gabby breezily walks away from the counter. She stops beside a display marked “Farcical.” With a light tap, she pushes aside one of the white library ladders that accent the floor-to-ceiling shelves. “Whoever thought you’d top the unintelligible chef who swore he’d worked at a five-star restaurant, yet always managed to burn your toast, right?”
Nearby, the store’s glass door opens. The bundle of bells gently rings, the sound as delicate as angels’ wings. A middle-aged woman with a canvas tote bag thrown over her shoulder takes one step inside and then stops.
“Oh—oh, I’m sorry.” She quickly looks from left to right, then glances at her wristwatch. “Are you—am I too early? Are you open yet?”
Gabby smiles, and when she does, a shallow dimple (Ellie had forgotten this small detail about her) forms in one of her cheeks. “What do you say, boss lady?” she asks, and she glances at a simple black clock that hangs on the wall. “It’s ten minutes before ten.” She playfully tilts her head, her cascade of hair swaying from one side to the other. “Are we open yet?”
Ellie takes another quick look around her current setting. Through the window, she sees the shop’s hand-painted sign— Magnolia Books —staring back at her in reverse.
“Um—yes.” Ellie exhales. For an instant, all the messes of these last few days—everything that unraveled in Florida, and everything that has continued to disentangle since she’s been home—temporarily melt away. “Yes.” She takes a step forward. “We’re open.”