Chapter 13
Anne
“Where are you going?” Mom asked after we’d finished dinner and the dishes were drying on the rack beside the sink.
“To get Dad’s workbench.”
“And how are you going to do that? You can’t carry it home.”
I hadn’t thought. “I guess I’ll…” Ask Joe. “Figure it out,” I said. He hauled it away, I reasoned. He could haul it back.
Mom sat on the couch and reached for the remote. “You might as well take that casserole dish to Nicole, then. Since you’re going over anyway.”
“Is Joe still living with his mom?”
“He moved home,” Mom said, without glancing away from Love Is Blind. “After the divorce.”
Weird to think of Joe married. And divorced. And sleeping again, apparently, in the room he’d grown up in. As if I weren’t the only one whose life wasn’t proceeding exactly according to plan.
I trooped down the street to knock on the Millers’ front door like a nine-year-old asking Joe’s mother if he could come out and play. Blergh.
The sun had slipped behind the trees. The sky ran with color like a paint box, the purple clouds edged with pink and gold. I walked along the grassy verge past tidy yards and small, square houses, their windows glowing in the dark.
The Millers lived in a bungalow on a long, narrow lot with a chain-link fence and an addition built on in the back. The big golden, Honey, woofed at my approach.
“Hey, girl, hi,” I crooned, reaching over to ruffle her fur. “How are you?”
She wagged in reply and licked my wrist.
A tall figure moved behind her, dark-haired, big-framed, and lean, casting a long shadow in the yard. My heart bumped. In alarm, I told myself.
He sauntered forward into the floodlights. Joe.
“Anne,” he said. Not nearly as welcoming as his dog. On the other hand, he didn’t stick his nose in my crotch. “If you want Hailey, she’s in the house.”
“Oh, I, um….” I held up the Pyrex dish like a flag. I come in peace, maybe. Or, Surrender. “I came to return this.”
“Bit late,” he observed, unlatching the gate.
“I know. Dad’s been dead for two months. But we didn’t eat the casserole until tonight. After I burned dinner,” I confessed.
Beneath his beard, his lips quirked. “I meant, it’s after nine o’clock.”
I realized I was staring at his mouth and jerked my gaze up.
“Right. But Mom was at the shop until after seven, and, like I said, I burned the chicken. Also, well, I was cleaning up Dad’s workshop”—Remember why you’re here, get to the point—“because as long as I’m going to be home, I need a quiet place to work. And a desk.”
He nodded. “Rob said you were writing a book.”
Which made me feel warm all over and also like the worst kind of imposter.
“I’ve started a book.” Several books, all of which went nowhere.
“I haven’t published anything. Or finished anything.
I don’t even have a blog. So I’m not a real writer.
Not yet. Not like Nora Roberts or Lucy Maud Montgomery or Madeleine L’Engle. ”
“I read that in school. A Wrinkle in Time.” He rubbed his jaw. “Don’t know the others.”
Look at us, politely discussing books like grown-ups having a normal conversation.
I felt a lurch of hope that we could be…
friends, maybe, or at least friendlier. “Nora Roberts is, like, the original queen of romance novels. And Montgomery wrote Anne of Green Gables.” Nothing.
I tried again. “The book I gave to Hailey?”
“I saw it. Thanks.” There was a pause, as though he was thinking through exactly what to say, a talent I, obviously, did not possess. “I read to her. When she was younger. Now she spends all her time on her phone.”
The image of Joe reading bedtime stories to his little sister, looking out for her the way he’d once looked out for me…It stirred memories I didn’t want to think about.
“Reading requires focus,” I said, taking refuge in lecture mode.
“That’s the payoff, really. You get immersed, you get engaged with the story, you have this connection to the characters.
But phones are addictive. Every time you hear that ping, it’s a dopamine rush.
The problem is, it’s a short-term buzz. All the likes and comments and shares in the world are no substitute for a good book. Or a true friend.”
“No, yeah, I keep telling her that.”
“The problem is, teens have all this pressure to perform, to conform, to get good grades to get into a good school to get a good job they feel passionately about that will somehow also magically pay all their bills.” I waved my hands around, building steam.
“And then something like the pandemic happens”—school shuts down or your job is threatened or your boyfriend moves to Atlanta—“and you realize that all the education in the world doesn’t actually prepare you for life. ”
Except, oh, oops, that wasn’t teenagers, that was me. I flushed.
He arched an eyebrow. “Speaking from experience?”
“I am a teacher,” I pointed out. If I still had a job in the fall. And then honesty made me add, “Also, I can relate. Because I was a teenager.”
“I remember.” He held my gaze.
Something in the way he stood, cut in light and shadow, the snug fit of his Henley shirt across his shoulders, the smell of him, warm and male, made me remember, too.
The problem with blushing was the more I tried to stop, the worse it got. I bent to pet the dog, hiding my flustered face. “Yeah. I made a fool of myself.”
“That’s not what I remember.”
Was I relieved or offended he’d forgotten? “Prom night? Six years ago?”
There was a very faint, possibly imagined, smile on his mouth. “When you kissed me.”
So he did remember. Jerk.
“You said it was like kissing your kid sister.”
I thought he winced. Good.
“It wasn’t,” he said.
I cocked my head. “Glad to hear. Because at the time, it sounded kind of pervy.”
“I felt pervy. You were seventeen.”
I rolled my eyes. “Please. It’s not like I was a virgin being seduced by the rakish lord in a Regency novel.
” I tried to sound dismissive, but the truth was I loved those stories.
All those cheerful, kindhearted heroines who found happiness with brooding, charismatic men simply by being themselves.
“I’d been kissed before,” I added unnecessarily.
Will Butler when he caught me on the playground in fifth grade. (I’d punched him in the stomach.) A boy named Clay who’d been visiting the island with his parents the summer before. (Disappointing, but at least I could tell Daanis I’d done it.)
Joe regarded me impassively.
“Besides, you kissed me back,” I said.
“That was a mistake.”
“What every girl dreams of hearing. Thanks.”
He frowned down at me. “I was twenty-four.”
The same age I was now. Back then I’d been in high school, the age of one of my students. Which…You know what? I was an adult now. A teacher. I nodded. “Fair enough. Obviously, I put you in a really awkward position. Sorry.”
“No, yeah, I’m sorry, too. I didn’t mean to…”
“Reject me?”
“Hurt your feelings.”
My throat thickened. Because, yeah. I could handle the blow to my adolescent pride, the physical rebuff of my teenage self. But what hurt the most, even after all these years, was that for one moment, I’d seen myself reflected in his eyes—a brighter, better, starlit me. Before he pushed me away.
“It’s fine,” I said. “I get it. You were protecting me.”
“Protecting us both. Your dad would never forgive me if I took advantage of you.”
“Dad loved you. And he trusted me to take care of myself.”
Joe frowned. “I figure that should be the other way around. He loved you. And he should have been able to trust me.”
I blinked. I’d always been proud of my father’s unquestioning faith in me. Even when I didn’t deserve it. Even when the pressure not to let him down was overwhelming. “Dad did trust you. He made you his partner.”
“That was business. I shouldn’t have kissed you.”
So flattering. “Because then you’d be cheating on Brittany.”
“Britt had nothing to do with it.”
“You married her.”
“Three years later.”
“My senior year,” I remembered. I’d missed the wedding. The ghost of my adolescent self whispered in my ear, prodding me on. “How long did that last, anyway?”
He gave me a long, unreadable look. “Five months.”
“Oops. Ouch. That’s awful. I’m sorry.” I was swamped with guilt. And curiosity. “What happened?”
Another look, like he couldn’t believe I was asking. “Turns out we wanted different things.”
“What kind of things?”
“I wanted to be married,” Joe said. “And she wanted to go to Vegas.”
“Because…?”
He shrugged. “Why does anybody go to Vegas?”
“To gamble?”
“Gambling’s for suckers. Brittany’s not the sucker here.” A pause. Like he thought he was the sucker. “Heard she’s working in a casino now.” He laid each sentence down deliberately, like a card in a game I didn’t know how to play.
I wanted to pick them up. To study them. To know him. Maybe even to comfort him? Which was dumb. I should change the subject. Ask about the workbench.
“My boyfriend’s moving to Atlanta at the end of the month,” I heard myself say.
“But here you are.”
I liked the way he said it, not as a question, not as a challenge, but accepting it as my choice to make.
“For now.” I turned the casserole dish over in my hands.
There was a strip of masking tape on the bottom with his name on it.
miller. I picked at it with my thumb. “Did you ever think about going with her? To Vegas?”
“No.” And then, when I’d given up on getting anything more, he laid another card on the table. “Hailey was only eleven. My mom, your dad, depended on me. I didn’t have any reason to go.”
“And Brittany?”
He was silent so long I thought he wouldn’t answer. The dog leaned against his leg, and he bent to scratch behind her ears. “She didn’t have any reason to stay.”
“You were married.”
“That wasn’t enough for her. I wasn’t enough.”
My heart squeezed. I knew that feeling. I fought a ridiculous urge to pat him, to comfort him the way he was petting the dog.
He looked up. “What about you?”