Chapter Eight
By afternoon, Calisa had finished cleaning the bathrooms, and Jack had finished patching the porch roof. “It’ll hold until it rains,” he said confidently as he joined her in the kitchen, where she was putting away the latest batch of cleaning supplies.
“Just until it rains? Isn’t its entire purpose to block the rain?”
“Sure, but I don’t want to overpromise.” Jack pulled a glass jar out of the refrigerator and held it out to Calisa. “Soup for lunch? Could you…you know, the stove? If you don’t mind…Absolutely don’t want to take advantage, but you haven’t been banned from cooking yet.”
She took the jar. “What did you do before I showed up? Just eat cold soup?”
“No?” he said, as if it were a question.
Calisa located a pot and dumped the soup into it. It looked like a chicken soup with carrots, celery, and pasta. She turned the stove on. “No?”
“Yes.”
She raised her eyebrows at him.
“I also eat a lot of sandwiches.”
He sounded so pathetic that Calisa couldn’t help but laugh. “Do you think she’ll ever lift the ban on you cooking?” At some point, Auntie Zee had to admit he’d learned his lesson and forgive him, didn’t she? She doubted he’d make the same mistake again. “How long can she hold this against you?”
Jack shrugged. “How many years did you say it’s been since your family visited?”
Fair point. Auntie Zee had proved she could hold a grudge an impressively long amount of time. He was probably doomed. “I hope you like sandwiches.”
“Goat cheese and fig spread, you said? I’m going to try that sometime.” He pulled two bowls out of the cabinet. “As soon as I find a goat.”
“I’m going to assume you’re joking, and you know they sell goat cheese in the grocery store,” Calisa said as she stirred the soup.
She liked that he’d been listening to whatever cheese-related nonsense she’d spouted while she was stuck in the hole in the porch, even if he hadn’t helped her climb out of it.
“Do you think the guests want any soup? Or Auntie Zee?” She realized she hadn’t seen Auntie Zee in a few hours.
She wondered what the innkeeper was busy doing.
Had she noticed the clean bathrooms yet? Would she care?
“I don’t make it to the grocery store often,” Jack said, hovering over her shoulder to watch the soup heat. “Auntie Zee gets most of the supplies for the inn herself.”
As soon as the soup was warm enough, she ladled it into the bowls while Jack set out spoons, napkins, and glasses of water. She sat on a stool next to him. “Who made the soup, if there isn’t a cook? Auntie Zee?” It didn’t look store-bought.
“You ask a lot of questions,” Jack observed.
“I know I’m not supposed to.”
“It’s kind of the Faraway Inn policy,” Jack said. “Guests are supposed to come here to escape whatever they left behind. So that means we don’t remind them of where they came from or who they are.”
Calisa wondered if he’d overheard her with Kendra and winced. “So, we aren’t supposed to talk to them?” she asked. She ate a spoonful of soup. Herbs exploded on her tongue, and the warmth slid down her throat. “Wow, seriously, who made this?”
“You can talk to the guests,” Jack said. “Just don’t ask them questions about themselves. If they choose to share with you, fine, and if you want to share with them, also fine. But Auntie Zee really believes in respecting everyone’s privacy.”
“Including yours?”
He shrugged, which wasn’t a no.
“Come on, I want to know your story.” She poked his shoulder lightly.
“What do you like to do? When you’re not fixing things around the inn…
do you have hobbies? Obsessions? Shows you watch?
Wait, is there no TV in this inn?” She hadn’t seen one, and she already knew there was zero cell phone coverage, which with no Wi-Fi meant no streaming anything. Ugh, no wonder there were vacancies.
Jack laughed. “I don’t know why you’d want to know about me. I’m boring.”
“Where do you go to school?” she asked.
“Homeschooled,” he said. “Just got my GED.”
“Are you planning to go to college?” Her moms had been talking about college for the entire past year.
If she hadn’t come to Vermont, she was certain she’d have been brought on a dozen college tours.
As it was, she didn’t know what she wanted to do or where she wanted to go.
She figured she’d just apply to as many places as she could manage and then work it out after that, depending on who said yes.
It was better than getting her heart set on a college that was only going to say no. She’d made that kind of mistake already, with Ethan. Don’t wish for what you can’t have. Besides, it was a Future Calisa problem anyway.
“Been thinking of applying to the University of Vermont.”
“And?”
“And?” he repeated.
“You can’t just apply to one,” Calisa said.
She thought of her guidance counselor, a woman with perfect makeup, straight-as-hay hair, and a flower brooch on every blazer.
She’d have had fits at the idea of any senior applying to only one school.
She had very strong opinions about applications and a track record of being nearly always right. “What if you don’t get in?”
He shrugged. “Then I won’t go.”
“Huh.” She tried not to sound like she was judging him, but she was totally judging him.
Who applied to only one college and just trusted fate?
Your future was a very large thing to leave to chance.
And shouldn’t he have already applied, if he had his GED?
Unless he was taking a gap year? “What does your dad think you should do?”
Jack looked down at his soup. “We haven’t talked about it much.
He knows I don’t want to leave the inn—not when it needs me—and he’s fine if I delay college.
What I want…” He took a deep breath. “What I want is to convince Auntie Zee to hire me full-time as a permanent employee. She hasn’t committed to that yet, even though… Well, what about your moms?”
He said moms, plural. He had been listening when she’d talked about them. He listens. Not just about goat cheese. It was a very nice trait. She couldn’t help but like him a bit more. Just as a friend.
“They say they just want me to be happy,” Calisa said, “but Mom-Kate has made a spreadsheet of all potential colleges within driving distance of Brooklyn, and Mom-Elise just keeps buying books about how to decide what to do with your life and leaves them around, as if she’s being subtle…
. And I don’t know what I want to do with my life.
Crystal—she’s one of my friends back in Brooklyn—gives annoyingly good advice: she says I need to know who I am before I can know what I want.
” She stirred the soup and spoke directly to the noodles.
“That was one of the reasons that I liked being with Ethan so much. When I was with him, I thought I knew who I was. I was who he saw me as. Someone he wanted to spend time with. Except apparently that wasn’t enough.
I wasn’t enough.” She didn’t know why all these words were spilling out of her or why he would care, except that she knew he’d listen.
She stopped talking, looked up from the soup to his face, and waited for him to reply with some kind of platitude or make an excuse to leave.
But he didn’t.
He swallowed a spoonful of soup and then asked, “Who do you want to be?”
“Really, really good question.”
“Yeah. I know. Please don’t ask me to answer it,” Jack said. “It just seemed like the right question to ask…I mean, since it’s your choice. Not your moms’. Not that guy’s, Ethan, who I’m going to assume is your ex?”
“Cheating ex, yes.” She lifted another spoonful of soup, then lowered it.
It was supremely delicious soup, but thinking about how it all ended with Ethan made her not want to eat any of it.
She wondered how she was supposed to stop thinking about him.
Cleaning had helped distract her, but it hadn’t excised him completely—he was still creeping into her thoughts all the time.
Time, yes. I need time. Time away from him, from them, from everyone who knew who she was and had opinions on who she was supposed to be.
She needed to take a power washer to the whole inn and blast Ethan out of her heart.
“I need to stay longer than three days.”
“If you’d like, I could vouch for you.”
“You’d do that?” She met his eyes. He has really nice eyes. Open and honest. The kind of eyes that made you feel like you were seeing straight into his soul. She was absolutely not looking for a rebound guy, but she liked thinking she could make a friend.
“You can make pancakes and heat up soup,” he said, scooping more soup as if in proof.
“Also, how you handled that lizard shows you can deal with the unexpected, which is, like, half of the work here. But I have to warn you: Auntie Zee never listens to anyone. Least of all me. You’d have better luck asking the cat. ”
“Does the cat have a name?” She’d been meaning to ask.
“Portia. But don’t actually ask her. That was a joke. Also, don’t try to pet her. You’ll lose your hand. Or at least bleed copious amounts, and it’s hard to get bloodstains out of stuff.”
He worries a lot. She resolved not to become one of the things he worried about. She’d find her own way to convince Auntie Zee to let her stay. Still…his view of her had clearly changed, which was nice. She’d have to remember to thank the lizard.
—
The next day, Calisa started on the dining room.
She was fairly certain there was a table underneath the layer of dust, and it was absurd that no one had thrown out the very dead flowers in the vase.
As she was tossing the brittle blooms into the kitchen trash and filling the vase with hot sudsy water to soap, Auntie Zee entered. “You’re still here? I said three days.”
“It’s day two,” Calisa said.
“You arrived day one, yesterday was day two, and today is day three,” Auntie Zee said.