Chapter 19 #2
“How’s our girl?” I hear a familiar, gruff voice ask.
“Chick!” I say. “What are you three doing here?”
“There’s a game today,” Chick Parkinson says. “Your boyfriend bought us tickets. Didn’t he tell you?”
Logan grabs my upper arms and pops over one shoulder into view. “Not yet.” His lips are dangerously close to my ear, their proximity making my legs weak. The way he squeezes my arms is so reassuring, so new yet familiar.
Someday, this could be our normal.
When he quits baseball and moves to Mullet Ridge to work on a coffee truck with you? Silly, silly Georgie.
Logan is joking around with each of the dear older men when I hear a woman call out to them from outside the truck.
“Uh oh,” Chick Parkinson says, chuckling, “Here comes Ashty.”
“It’s Rash,” Chick Allen says.
“You mean Rasty,” Chick Hanks says with a snort.
“That’s quite enough from the peanut gallery,” the woman says, coming into view.
She’s wearing a big smile and has stunning long brown curls with a single lavender strip framing her face the same color as her lavender glasses.
“You know very well the town decided Rusty and Ash makes Rush. Y’all are pot stirrers. ”
The moment she says Rusty’s name, I look farther out of the window and see Rusty holding her hand on her other side, and I smile at the way he’s watching her—his eyes glued to her every move, roving over her face like everything she says and does is magic.
But in the way she holds him and smiles so proudly, the way her eyes sparkle right before she turns back to him, I can tell the feeling is totally mutual.
“Wow,” Olivia says from a couple of steps behind me. I look back at her and see her watching the couple, too.
“I know.”
“Must be nice having someone look at you like that,” Olivia mutters.
“I know,” I repeat.
Olivia tilts her head. “Girl, that’s exactly how Logan looks at you. Like you hang the stars.”
I feel my nose scrunch in confusion, but before I can ask if she’s serious, Rusty’s introducing me to his wife, Ash.
“Oh, you two are adorable,” Ash gushes, pointing back and forth between Logan and me, making my chest, face, and the rest of me burn hot. She puts a hand on Rusty’s chest. “Remember when that was us?”
Rusty breathes a laugh and kisses his wife’s cheek, and she turns all the way to face him.
Her arms wrap around his neck as he kisses her cheek again and again, her wedding ring catching the sun and scattering it into a million pinpoints of light.
These two are no strangers to PDA, and with Logan right over my shoulder it makes me flush from my head under his baseball cap down to my toes crammed in my too-small Converse.
Then I flush hotter.
Because Logan puts his hand on my lower back, the pressure firm, like he’s thinking the same exact thing.
I want this.
And I want it with you.
“So, what can I get you?” I ask.
Rusty and Ash smile at me and place their order.
“Two vanilla Whip Smarts, please,” Ash says. “They’ve been all over my feed this morning.”
“What feed?” Chick Parkinson asks.
“It’s what the younguns call social media,” Chick Allen says.
“I have an alert for anything tagged in Sugar Maple,” Ash explains to me. “I do marketing for the town.”
As I back up and start helping Olivia make drinks, I notice that Logan is outside on a call.
Rusty hands Ash her drink first, and she’s nodding the second she tastes it. “Yum. Any chance you could add marshmallow syrup to this?”
“It’s more of a health drink,” Rusty says.
“Ew. Then why does it smell so good?”
I laugh and take the drink back, stir in a pump of marshmallow syrup, and hand it back.
Ash takes a long, slow drink. “Oh, that’s good. Y’all have got to start advertising this thing. A health drink that isn’t gross could almost convince me to be healthy.”
“Or it could at least let you eat more candy without feeling guilty about it,” Rusty says.
“I feel guilty eating anything but candy. I don’t want it to think I’m cheating.”
Rusty and the Chicks all laugh. They pay and say their goodbyes, and Olivia ducks out to the back of the truck to grab a fresh sleeve of cups from the storage bins, which leaves me alone in the truck with nothing but the hum of the compressor and the sudden quiet that comes from a rush ending.
The truck feels huge now that I’m alone. This is my first time working here with anyone else, and I’m afraid of how much harder it’ll be to work by myself after this. How much harder it’ll be to be alone. To be content with my lot and never let myself want more again.
Because my word, do I ever want it.
Logan’s leaving at three. I could drive to the airport in Augusta.
I could rush and get there to the gate in time to see the look on his face when he turns and finds me standing there instead of three hundred miles away—the heartwarming, wish-fulfilling, climactic version of a goodbye that exists in books but not in real life.
Except it could.
I have a car. I know the roads. There’s nothing stopping me except me.
“Your phone’s vibrating,” Olivia says, returning from the back of the truck with the cups balanced against her hip.
I take my phone off the counter and see a text—
Poof.
My idle fantasy vanishes faster than smoke in a tornado.
It’s my dad’s “Raymond’s Girls” chat.
Dad
Hey there! Driving through tonight on my way to Columbia—any chance my favorite girls are free for dinner? Would love to see you, Lulabelle too if she’s around Let’s make it happen!
He sent it to Marlowe, Nicolette, and me.
The man who “had to work” all through my mom’s illness, being gone every other week while I came home from school to an empty house.
The man who took out new loans instead of paying off the old ones that would have helped his daughter.
The man who has always taken the easy way out, the path of least resistance, the way of least involvement.
The man who loves the idea of love more than the strings that come along with it.
The man who chose everywhere else but home.
Logan doesn’t resemble my dad in the slightest.
But does his career?
I let the question sit there, ugly and unresolved, and peer out the window to see Logan on his phone, pacing and nodding. “Got it. I’ll be there,” he says.
Do I really think that driving to the airport to see him off would change the fact that Mullet Ridge is my home and the road will be his? Major League Baseball will take him all over the country dozens of times each year. From February to October, he’ll be a stranger to his family.
Like my dad.
I don’t drive to airports to see would-be boyfriends off because I don’t get to be that naive. I don’t get to believe that love conquers all or that if you wish and dream hard enough, anything can happen.
I don’t get to be that girl.
Pretending otherwise is like a knife to my own gut.
My phone buzzes with another text, this one from Marlowe.
Marlowe
Of course! I’ve made reservations at The Black Oyster at six and Sal’s at six-thirty. Tell us which one works better and we’ll be there. Love you, honey!
Her exclamation points are the twist of the knife.
Marlowe is that girl.
She’s clung to the idea of my dad, the belief that he’ll finally change, finally choose her, finally care enough to stay for more than a weekend here and there.
She has no love to spare for me, but she has plenty for him.
And maybe it’s her—what was the term in my behavioral-economics class?
—scarcity mentality. It makes her afraid that if she gives any love to me, she won’t have enough for Nicolette, Lulabelle, or my dad.
I wonder if the fact that I was first in his heart is why she tolerates me but doesn’t love me. She thinks I have a stronger claim on my dad’s love and that’s why he can’t spare as much for her.
How does she not see that we’re all in the same category of “people Raymond fits in between business trips when he wants his ego stroked”?
We serve the same purpose as a fan club serves a star.
He wants to feel good about himself, and he’s so charming, he’s always found a way to give people enough to keep them wanting more.
The warmth from a minute ago is already gone when Logan steps back onto the truck, his call finished, and a quiet resignation settles over me like a layer of dust.
Logan’s leaving.
I’m going to dinner with my dad tonight.
Both will hurt for different reasons. If that hurt can tamp down some of this irrepressible hope, it will be worth it.