Chapter 11
JAM IS JAMMIN'
IVY
The smell of strawberries has seeped into my nostrils. It is permanently singed in my nose hairs. It is embedded under my fingernails. It will never, ever leave. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to smell anything but strawberries for the rest of my life.
I’m not complaining, though. Delilah always smells like strawberries. As long as I can still detect the scent of her skin, I’m okay with the world’s most okay-est fruit being the one thing my senses can pick up on for eternity.
Delilah and I have been working all day to prepare for tomorrow’s farmer’s market.
Hours of washing, hulling, and crushing whole strawberries, melting them into syrup with sugar, lemon juice and a pinch of cayenne pepper—Delilah’s secret ingredient that gives the jam a kick—then boiling the mixture while stirring constantly, ladling the hot jam into jars and letting it cool before slapping a ‘Delilah’s Famous Strawberry Jam’ label on the front is no joke.
I’ve hunched over clients for eight-hour tattoo sessions that have wreaked less havoc on my lower back.
But the job is done, the jam is being refrigerated and Delilah will have more inventory to sell tomorrow than she ever has before.
She’ll still sell out, though. She’s just that good.
“Lilah, baby, you’ve got to pick a lighter substance to sell. Can you start baking artisanal marshmallows or something? Hauling those crates of jars to the fridge in the garage is going to kill me.”
I plop down in the seat across from her at the kitchen table, waiting for her to laugh at my stupid joke or even correct it and tell me you cook marshmallows, not bake them, but no.
Delilah just continues to stare at nothing.
She’s been spacey all week, ever since Earl showed up at her parent’s house and dropped the whole baby bomb.
And I get it, I really do. For weeks the pregnancy has just been our thing, like we were two kids keeping a secret that we only talked about in the privacy of our treehouse under the cover of nightfall.
Now it’s out in the open—her parents know, her daughter knows, and given the way her body is changing, it won’t be long until everyone in town knows.
All this change and uncertainty would shake up any person, but Delilah especially.
She’s never done well with unpredictability, so I know she’s got to be freaking out inside.
I just wish she’d talk to me about it.
“Alright, Delilah. Jam is jammin’, ready for the farmer’s market. Want to move on to phase two of Operation Goodbye Earl?” I ask. My tablet is on the table, so I open it up to the notes app and flick the stylus between my fingers.
“Sure,” Delilah shrugs, noncommittally.
“We don’t have to. In fact, we don’t have to do any of this if you don’t want to.
I think the glitter and the pink hair dye did enough emotional damage to last a lifetime.
One of the moms at camp drop-off this morning told me Earl was wearing a baseball cap when she picked her car up on Wednesday, which is weird since he has an aversion to hats.
I think that means that hair removal cream is doing its thing, too. ”
“It's not enough,” she mutters, running her finger absentmindedly through a bit of leftover sugar on the table, shifting the white crystals back and forth in circles.
“Alright then, Loathsome Lilah. Clock in, let’s get to work.” Damn, I don’t even get a dirty look for trying to bring back ‘Loathsome Lilah’. She’s really in her head.
I tap the end of my stylus on the table as if I’m clicking open a pen.
“We’ve already ruined Earl’s first great love—his hair.
It’ll take him months to grow back what our Nair has already stolen from him and even if it doesn’t all fall out, what’s left on his scalp will be tinted pink and orange for eternity unless he shaves his head.
Now, I looked into it, and going full crazy-angry-country-singer on one of Earl’s ugly white boy cars will most definitely end with us behind bars, especially since he’s totally on to us now.
I say in lieu of taking a Louisville Slugger to his headlights and carving your name into the leather seats, we continue with leaving him stinky little gifts under the seats.
“I think some steak from The Dugout is a good call, since it already smells like a fart when it’s fresh and will only get worse with time.
But if we want to be economical, there’s some canned tuna from the late eighties in the back of Grandma Millie’s pantry that we could open up.
Though that might cause a nuclear reaction that Fox Hole isn’t prepared for.
If we can catch Earl’s car outside the town limits, it’s worth the risk. ”
“You know what would really drive Earl nuts?” Delilah says, giving no indication that she’s been listening to me at all.
“What’s that, Lilah?”
“If you and I were together. Like, together together. That would be a blow to his pride that he would never recover from, and then we’d have hit all three points on our plan.”
“Oh yeah, that would fucking kill him,” I snort, jotting down ‘fake date a hottie???’ in my notes.
“I’m pretty sure Earl despises me more than anyone on this planet.
Too bad you’re not into women, or we could really rot him from the inside out.
Are there any men in town that he hates as much as he hates me? ”
Delilah doesn’t say anything for a long moment, and when I look up, her gaze is fixated on my mouth.
I think I might be hallucinating because I almost swear that I can see heat blazing in those big brown eyes that I know like the back of my hand.
I can almost feel the fire singing my skin as her eyes drop from my mouth to my chest, down to where the collar of my tank top dips between my barely there cleavage.
And when her lips part just a millimeter, I think I have to be imagining that quiet, sharp intake of breath.
I must be going crazy. Either that, or all this fresh, small-town air is going to my head because there is no way in hell that my very straight, very pregnant best friend is checking me out right now.
“Lilah,” I say, my voice betraying me with its breathy tone. Her eyes snap up to meet mine, her pupils dilated as she chews on her bottom lip.
“Right. Too bad I’m not…into women.”
The pause in her words feels loaded like a shotgun, and the silence stretching between us is thick as molasses.
Delilah isn’t into women…right?
She certainly is not into me.
Has my world just been flipped completely on its axis? Or am I just falling victim to twenty years of suppressing romantic feelings towards my best friend at the worst possible time?
I search my brain for something to say, something to break this spell of awkward uncertainty cast on me by one little sentence, but I come up short.
Delilah slaps her hands on her knees and stands abruptly, and I come face to face with the slight bump protruding from her lower belly and stretching the confines of her lycra bike shorts.
I want terribly to lean in and kiss that bump.
Ordinarily, I would. Lilah and I have never shied away from physical affection.
But right now, the thought of touching her feels like the beginnings of a shift I’m not ready for.
“Right. Steak under the car seats sounds good. The forty-year-old tuna should probably be shot into space, but we’ll keep it in our back pocket in case we need it.
Artie’s wife might swing by the stand at the market this weekend.
I’ll ask if she can rope him into doing our bidding in exchange for a couple of jars of jam and some of your famous HJs.
I know that old man is always looking for a reason to knock Earl down a peg.
Oh, and I read something online about putting cayenne pepper in someone’s lotion to burn their skin. We should look into that.”
And with that, Delilah glides out of the room, and I’m left sitting at the kitchen table I grew up at, wondering what the hell just happened.
And adding cayenne pepper to my online grocery cart, because that idea wasn’t half bad.
“Hey kid, how’s it going in here?”
“Just finishing up, old man. What do you think?” I ask Cliff as I wipe down the fresh ink on Olive Valentine’s wrist. The twenty-something school teacher booked an appointment with me last night for a small, smiling kitten holding a butcher knife from my flash sheet.
She saw a post on my social media page and said she absolutely needed the feral little cat.
Olive said it was exactly how she felt standing in a room full of screaming, snotty kindergartners trying to teach them how to read.
I was more than happy to fit her into my afternoon.
I’ve been dying to tattoo my murder kitten for months.
I love inking these goofy little doodles that often come to me in the middle of the night.
They’re not as mentally stimulating as some of the more intricate work I do, but they’re certainly a good time.
We added the words ‘everything is fine’ under the kitten’s paws, and I think it turned out wonderful.
“Cute,” Cliff says with a chuckle. The word sounds almost gruff coming out of his mouth, as if he were choking on it.
Cliff is old-school as hell. He must be about a hundred and fifty years old, covered in faded American Traditional style tattoos, his voice raspy from a lifetime of chain-smoking cigarettes before switching to a vape five years ago.
Cliff gave me my first start when I was too young to operate a tattoo gun, let me practice on unsuspecting Fox Hole tourists who had no idea a sixteen-year-old was permanently inking their Mandarin letters they think say ‘Dream’ but actually might say ‘Pork Fried Rice’.
Legal? Absolutely not. But it was damn good practice.