Chapter 10 #2
His gaze drifted from my hair to my leopard-print platform Vans. The creases deepened beside his eyes. “So it does.”
Hailey, growing bored with our conversation, scowled at her brother. “I don’t see why I can’t stay home.”
“Because you can’t.” Joe nodded to Zoe. “Cup of coffee, please.”
“Coming right up.”
“Working is good experience,” Joe said to his sister. “And you need to save for college.”
“What if I don’t want to go to college?”
He sighed, as if this were an argument they’d had before. I felt an instant’s sympathy for him. “You still need money. And you need to get off your phone. Learn responsibility. Get out of the house.”
He sounded like my mother.
“Excuse me.” A customer in a pink mama needs wine T-shirt raised her voice. “Is that gluten-free?”
My mother gave her a straight look. “It’s fudge.”
“Gluten-free and all-natural,” I assured the woman, summoning my best parent-teacher conference smile. “Made from butter, cream, and the best Belgian chocolate. Would you like a sample?”
“I don’t like chocolate.”
“We also have”—I threw a quick glance at the board on the wall—“sweet cream vanilla, Michigan maple sugar, or peanut butter.”
The woman frowned. “I guess I could try the vanilla.”
“Coming right up,” Zoe said. “And for you, sir?”
Joe and Hailey had moved down the counter, continuing their argument in quiet tones.
“…not like you’re missing out on the entire summer,” I heard Joe say. “All your friends are working, too.”
“I don’t have any friends.”
“What about Liv?”
“She called me a space cadet!”
“Well.” Joe took off his cap. Ran a hand through his hair. “Maybe you’ll make new friends working here.”
Hailey rolled her eyes. “Great. Maybe after work, I can hang out and play pickleball with the other old people.”
“You’ll have to teach me,” I said.
They turned to me with identical why-are-you-talking? expressions.
I shrugged. “I’ve never played.”
“Since when do you work here?” Hailey asked.
I touched a finger to the visor of my maddie’s candies cap. “Started this morning. Actually, I started the summer I turned fourteen. My mother is a firm believer in child labor.”
“Less talking, more doing, Annie.”
“Yes, Miss Hannigan,” I singsonged in my best Orphan Annie voice. “I love you, Miss Hannigan.”
My mother’s lips twitched. Hailey smiled. Or almost smiled, anyway.
Joe met my gaze with what could have been gratitude. “We good here now?”
“Unless you’re going to pay for that coffee,” I said.
“It’s on the house,” my mother said. “Anne, that kettle won’t wash itself.”
Joe tugged gently on his sister’s ponytail. “See you after work, kid.”
She rolled her eyes. “Whatever.”
He gave her a quick sideways hug, pressing a kiss to her hair. Catch and release. The sweetness of the gesture tugged at my chest. Who knew the jerk had a tender side?
He glanced up and caught me staring. His eyebrow rose. “Anne.”
I flushed. “Joe.”
Back to one-word greetings again. But this time felt different. His bearded lips parted almost as if he wanted to add something. Say…something. And then he left.
—
“Joe said you were a teacher,” Hailey said later as we stood at the triple sink.
I swallowed the urge to ask, Your brother talked about me?
When? Since I wasn’t, in fact, a crush-obsessed teenager giggling with my friends in the school lunchroom.
“Guilty,” I said instead, and dunked another kettle into the soapy water.
We were both swathed in aprons, my arms swaddled to the elbows in ugly blue rubber gloves.
“So, what are you doing here? Did you, like, quit?”
“Nope.” Not yet. Sarah’s words replayed in my head: “Let’s give it the summer…. The break will do you good. We can make a fresh start in August.”
I swished the inside of the pot. “I thought my mom could use the help.”
Hailey nodded. “That’s what Joe says.”
I thought of the way he’d walked into my parents’ house without knocking, like he lived there. The way he’d casually fixed my bike. “He does seem to be around a lot.”
“It was cool when I was little.” She sanitized and rinsed the kettle. “But I don’t need him to be my babysitter anymore.”
Heat rose to my face like steam. She was talking about Joe helping their mother, not mine.
“And I don’t need your mom to keep an eye on me, either. No offense,” Hailey added. “She’s been really nice to me.”
I imagined my mother being nice—really nice—and smothered a completely inappropriate yearning. “I’m glad.”
I chucked a batch of scrapers into the sink. Hailey hoisted the pot onto the rack over the sink to dry.
We fell into a rhythm, working side by side. Wash, rinse, sanitize, repeat. Mom could say all she liked about taking satisfaction in a job well done, but dishwashing was boring, repetitive work—labor without reward.
“She didn’t have to hire me,” the girl confided. “She only gave me a job because Joe asked her to.”
Teenagers, I thought with amusement. Like wild animals, they were more at ease communicating without eye contact.
How many times had I invited a student to stay after class, arranging chairs or shelving books, so they would tell me what was bothering them?
Or followed my dad around, watching him focus on some project while I talked to the back of his head?
“I was really looking forward to taking a break,” Hailey said.
“From school?” I prodded gently.
“From everything. But Joe doesn’t want me to stay home by myself.”
“I get it. I need time to myself, too.” That’s why I’d come home, after all. To find my way forward. To discover if there was anything in my laptop files / career / relationship worth salvaging or if I needed to scrap it all and start over.
“He thinks I’m lazy.”
I’d heard that one, too. Lazy, disorganized, absent-minded… “Did he say that to you?”
“No,” she admitted. “He says I spend too much time on TikTok.”
I grinned. “Doesn’t everybody?” I ran water over the scrapers, shifting my weight from foot to foot.
“Although he might just possibly have a point. You don’t want to spend the next three months alone in your room scrolling on your phone.
” Or staring at a blinking cursor, waiting for inspiration to strike.
“He doesn’t trust me.”
I thought of what she’d said about not having any friends. “Or he’s worried you’ll be lonely.”
She flushed. “He thinks I’m going to burn the house down. Just because I didn’t turn off a burner on the stove that one time. Okay, twice. But the house didn’t catch fire, right? I’m not irresponsible. I’m not stupid. I was busy. I forgot.”
I could have been listening to an echo of my younger self. Or my current self, honestly. “Sure. It’s normal to get distracted sometimes.”
“Tell that to my brother. He still treats me like I’m six.”
Me, too. “He used to call me Pest.”
That earned a genuine smile.
“Maybe this is the summer to show him who you are now,” I suggested. “Make him see that you’ve grown up.”
That was my plan, anyway. I was going to do something. Finish something. Prove to my mother—and Joe the rest of the island—that I was a competent adult.
“How do I do that?”
“I have no idea,” I admitted cheerfully.
Her laugh floated over the sink like a soap bubble.
“In the meantime, I’m glad you’re here,” I said.
She rolled her eyes. “Right. More child labor.”
“Well, sure,” I said. “And we’re kindred spirits.”
“What?”
I tried again. “Bosom friends?”
“Ew.”
“Like Anne Shirley and Diana Barry.”
“You do know I have no idea what you’re talking about, right?”
“Anne of Green Gables?”
“Was that on Netflix?”
“It was. But before that it was a book. A whole series of books.”
“Okay, teacher.”
“And now that we’re going to be friends—bosom friends—” I grinned.
“Again, ew.”
“I can loan them to you.”
“I can hardly wait,” she said. But she was smiling.
I felt a familiar swell of excitement. This was what I did best, putting the right book in the right hands. Every child needed a story to fall into, a soft place to land.
Maybe I did, too.