Chapter 25 Orange Crush #2
“Dad got Brielle into fishing.” Allie swiped around on her phone and came to stand by Jack. “This was from five years ago, when she was seven.”
There was Ed Jensen, looking older but elementally the same.
He was wearing a much wider smile than Jack remembered being typical for him, but he supposed that was what a grandchild did to a person.
The girl, though… With her white-blond hair in a messy ponytail and her gap-toothed grin, it was like looking at Allie herself at that age, and it caused another onslaught of memory-vertigo.
What the hell was wrong with him?
He forced himself to act like a normal human being as he turned for the couch—same olive-green corduroy that he remembered.
He took the phone and sat under pretext of getting a closer look at the photo but really because, like before, he was overcome.
He felt like an aggressively corseted Victorian lady in need of smelling salts. “She looks so much like you.”
“Yeah, she’s my little mini-me.” She took the phone back.
“I’m going to have to run. You want to see the rest of the place before I go?
” Jack made himself get up. He knew now to gird himself against the onslaught of memories.
What he didn’t know was why these memories should be so destabilizing.
He’d had some good times here; his memories should be happy, should they not? Or at least milder.
Allie took them through the cabin’s single bedroom. “I didn’t do a reno, but I did switch the bedrooms around. You remember this room used to be my dad’s, and I slept in the loft?”
Jack nodded. Mr. Jensen used to have a big bed in here with a wooden spindled headboard and an old-school white knotted bedspread, but now the room was furnished with two twin beds covered with white comforters with unicorns printed on them.
“Call me a helicopter parent, but I wasn’t cool with Brielle sleeping in the loft alone at night—there’s literally no wall on the one side—so my husband and I sleep up there, and this is her room.
We put twin beds in so she can bring a friend when we come, which, as I said, isn’t that often anymore. ”
“So we’re not displacing you,” Blair said.
“Not at all. The beds, including the one in the loft, have fresh sheets.” She turned to Jack. “Oh! There’s a washer in the bathroom now! So no more trips to the laundromat in town. But no dryer, so if you want to wash anything, you have to hang it to dry on the clothesline.”
Back in the main area, Allie handed Jack a key and pointed toward the door on the lake side of the house, which was a Dutch door with the top open. “That door still sticks, so you really have to mean it when you want to close it. Just check that it’s locked when you leave for good.”
Jack and Blair followed Allie outside. Blair thanked Allie and Allie deflected. Allie said more nice things about Blair and Blair deflected.
“All right,” Allie said. “Call me if you need me.”
“I’ll let you two say goodbye,” Blair said, and she went back inside.
“Well, look at you,” Allie said.
“What do you mean?”
“Gentleman friend to Blair Kellermoon.”
“That is an incorrect characterization of our relationship.”
“Is it?”
“Yes.”
“Because you’re not friends, or because you’re not a gentleman?”
He rolled his eyes and changed the subject. “What is Hidden Gems about?”
“Plucky young assistant basically steals her sexist real estate broker boss’s job by being better at it than he is, all while maintaining her girlish charm.”
He nodded, trying to process the idea of his childhood friend being so influenced by a movie starring his… adult friend.
“Why were you so zoned out in there?” Allie asked. “Your lady friend noticed, I think. She offered to pay me, by the way, for this visit.”
He let the lady friend crack pass. “I was zoned out because I was… surprised by what I remembered from being here and what I didn’t. Why wouldn’t I remember exchanging letters in the tree?” To cite one example.
“Probably because that happened at a traumatic time for you.”
What? “It did?”
He would have expected a witty rejoinder, or for her to inform him about something else he didn’t remember, but once again she surprised him by saying, quietly, “It was. You might not have realized it at the time. You might not even realize it now. But yeah.” She flashed him a sad smile.
He didn’t know what to say to that because he didn’t know what she was talking about.
The moment was gone. Allie threw her purse into the car, turned back toward him, punched him on the shoulder, and said, “Anyway, I told your lady friend that I don’t require payment from her, just from you. You’re not allowed to ghost me for another decade.”
Jack found Blair on the deck that overlooked the lake.
Yet again he was assaulted by a mix of strange and familiar.
The deck had always been red, but he remembered the paint as more faded and peeling.
This was a brighter, cleaner red. The stairs that led down to the lake used to be semirotted, but they’d been replaced with new pressure-treated lumber.
But the clothesline that Allie had referenced, which retracted from a rickety, rusty pole, was the same, as was the hammock strung between two trees a little ways off.
He had spent many an afternoon reading on that hammock.
And there was the bell Mr. Jensen used to ring when it was time for dinner and Allie and Jack were out on the lake.
Blair glanced his way as he approached but returned to staring at the water. “There’s something about a lake. You’d think an ocean would scratch the same itch.”
“I wouldn’t think that.”
She chuckled.
He didn’t know what to say. He didn’t know how to be. How to process the last twenty-four hours. Not just the onslaught of memories he had been utterly unprepared for, but the fact that he and Blair had slept together last night and had plans to do it again.
“I have so many questions,” she said.
Good. Questions would be a distraction. “Hit me.”
“Where’s your dad’s place?”
“You can’t see it from here.” Thankfully. “This is a bay. The big lake—that’s what the locals call the main part—is around that corner.”
“Are you going to go see your dad while you’re here?”
“No.” And here he had invited her questions, had thought they would be a distraction from the memories swirling in his brain. “Don’t ask me why not. I don’t have a good answer.”
“OK. I have easy questions, too.”
He made a bring-it gesture.
“What is a foot bucket?”
He turned around and pointed to the plastic dishwashing bucket on the ground next to the door.
“It’s empty now, but it’s usually filled with water.
” Gross water, as it had never been changed frequently enough—no one ever wanted to walk around the side of the house where the spigot was, fill it up, and manhandle it back.
“You’re meant to dip your feet in it after swimming or running around barefoot.
Rinse off the sand and dirt before you go inside. ”
“Lest you track it in to the orange shag carpet, the absence of which I lament. I have already texted Tiff and asked her if there is such a thing as CGI shag carpet.”
“Wouldn’t it be easier to get some actual carpet? Put in the shag, then replace it with whatever flooring Allie wants?”
“You’d better cool it with these logical ideas, or you’re going to end up with a producing credit against your will.”
He rolled his eyes. “Next question.”
“Why is this door”—she turned and pointed—“cut in half?”
“It’s a Dutch door.” The top half was open while the bottom was closed.
“I beg your pardon?”
“A Dutch door.”
“Yes, I heard you. That ‘I beg your pardon?’ was not, like, ‘Repeat what you literally said,’ more like, ‘What is it for?’”
“I don’t really know. Maybe the Dutch like to walk around their houses with no pants on.”
“Ha ha, funny, but probably there is some clever function we just can’t think of because we aren’t as smart or efficient as the Dutch.”
“Probably,” he agreed. “I can tell you”—here was another memory—“that Allie and I used it to play store.”
“What do you mean?”
“One of us would be the storekeeper and the other the customer. The customer queued up outside. Mind you, there was only ever one customer, so the queue was very short. When the store opened, the customer would use currency—usually leaves—to buy products. Usually books.”
“Aww!”
Another memory was coming. “But sometimes pop.”
“Pop!”
“My dad did not countenance pop.”
“No, of course not.”
He wondered how she could say that with such certainty.