Chapter 12 #2
It had backfired spectacularly. Although, in another way, it had worked, since Wendy and Eleanor had mended fences over being mutually mad at him for sticking his nose in their business.
And, yes, he knew that they were all about twenty-five years older than they had been. They probably wouldn’t get mad at him.
But sisters were sisters. And Winnie…
Well, he liked Winnie. He didn’t want her to be mad.
And maybe the tiniest part of him liked having a friendship in this town that felt like his own, like something he was building himself instead of just leaning on his sister’s kindness.
He knew Eleanor didn’t mind having him here, but it was nice to feel as though he was standing on his own two feet in this one aspect of his life.
That was probably a little silly, but it had been a long year.
He drove over to Winnie’s, his mind easily switching gears to anticipation. He was looking forward to seeing her, even though he had seen her only that morning.
When he got to her house, she was looking… decidedly more disgruntled than she had earlier in the day.
“Uh oh,” he said.
“Winnie Burnett vs. cornhole,” she said ominously. “Winnie Burnett is losing.”
“Oh no,” he exclaimed, laughing. “Oh, man, okay. Show me what we’re working with.”
She showed him. They were suspiciously simple. There was a large board on a slant, with a moderately-sized hole in the middle. The flat surface had a border extending from the back by about four inches, and the whole contraption was held up on a slant by a fold-out lever.
Or, rather, the whole thing should have been held up on a slant by a lever, but both boards merely flopped back flat when Winnie tried to prop them up.
“See?” she said, when the contraption dropped to the floor with a thwack. “It’s all connected, but it just doesn’t stay put.”
“Huh.” Shane knelt on the floor next to the two cornhole boards, pleased to see that Winnie had a toolbox nearby. He hadn’t even thought to bring by tools. Some help he was turning out to be.
He flipped the boards over and checked the mechanism, bending it back and forth to see what was going on.
“Right,” he said, affecting more confidence than he truly felt. “Okay, let’s see what we’ve got here.” He felt for tension, and, finding it lacking, looked at where the boards were all attached. “Oh, okay, so maybe we can just tighten this here…”
Winnie handed him a Phillips-head screwdriver, and he set to tightening the screws that held the lever to the main body of the cornhole board. When he was satisfied with the tension in both sides, he gently flipped over the board, stood it upright, and—
Thwack! Clatter!
Shane and Winnie watched as the board tipped over and the lever fell completely off.
There was a terrible moment of silence while they watched the lever spin a little on Winnie’s hardwood floor before coming to a stop. Shane felt horror sink into his gut.
And then Winnie began to laugh.
It was one of those irrepressible, deep belly laughs.
It struck her so hard that she had to bend over, pressing one hand to her knee.
She laughed and laughed until she was gasping for breath.
Gradually, Shane felt himself starting to laugh too.
It was funny, if he thought about it. They were these two bright, competent people, who absolutely could not fix something that, when you boiled it down to its base parts, was two pieces of wood stuck together.
“You know,” Winnie said through her laughter when she could catch her breath enough to speak at all, “I think you did it.”
This made Shane laugh all the harder, and eventually they had to move over to sit on opposite ends of Winnie’s couch, abandoning the cornhole boards.
They kept going for some time, as every time their gazes met, one of them would be sent into repeated peals of laughter, and the other would soon follow suit.
By the time they’d gotten control of themselves, Shane’s stomach actually hurt from the effort.
It felt really, really good.
“So,” he said a bit thickly, more laughter threatening to rise up in his throat, “I have a confession to make. I might not be as good with my hands as I wanted to believe.”
She put her hands over her face, pressing the heels into her eye sockets, like she needed to physically hold the laughter inside herself.
“You don’t say,” she chuckled.
“I promise I’m better at computers.”
“Shane.” She pressed her lips together. “I’m sorry to say this but…” A chuckle slipped out. “You could hardly be worse.”
He looked over at the boards, now in more pieces than when he’d started.
“Yeah,” he admitted ruefully. “That’s fair.”
She shook her head with a smile and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. Shane liked her sharp blonde bob, but he liked the way she looked with it pulled back a little too. It softened her.
“It’s not a big deal,” she said. “I can ask Garrett to help me fix it.”
Shane faked affront. “You had an offer from Garrett and you still made me come over here and embarrass myself? That’s cold, Winnie. Really cold.”
She pointed an accusing finger at him. “You offered, bud. And we both know perfectly well that all poor Garrett wanted this morning was to be left alone. I was trying not to bother him!”
“I have no qualms about bothering him,” Shane replied. “He and my sister are totally gaga for one another. That affords me certain privileges.”
At the mention of Eleanor, a tiny flicker went through Winnie’s expression. Their happy moment emboldening him, Shane dared to pry, just a little.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Yeah, of course.”
He took a deep breath. “There seems to be a… weird sort of vibe between you and some of the book club ladies, but you also seem like you are all friends. You all say that you’re friends, and it doesn’t seem like it’s a frenemies sort of thing. What’s going on there, if you don’t mind me asking?”
She twisted her mouth to the side a little, but she didn’t seem uncomfortable with the question.
“It’s not a totally flattering story,” she admitted.
He darted a pointed glance over at the broken cornhole boards. “Oh, well, since we’re all only showing our most talented sides tonight…”
He liked how her smile returned.
“The short version is that I think it’s me,” she admitted. “I was not a super social kid growing up. And I guess I just never really learned how to make friends? So this is pretty much the first time in my life that I’ve had any. And I’m beginning to suspect that I’m pretty bad at it, actually.”
Shane frowned. This story made sense in some ways, since it did explain the way Winnie got stiff and nervous around his sister and their friends. But there was something that did not make any sense to him at all…
“I don’t know how it’s possible that you never had friends,” he said. “You’re great.”
He was rewarded with another smile.
“I appreciate that,” she said. “But you know how it is. Kids aren’t always super accepting of other kids who are different.
And I was… nerdy. Quiet. Shy. Super into history and a little bit of a suck-up with the teachers,” she admitted, pulling a face.
“In hindsight, I can see that I was like that because I didn’t have friends, so I was looking for approval from adults, but at the time, it was sort of a self-perpetuating cycle.
And that was just elementary school,” she clarified. “Then middle school started.”
Shane had plenty of friends of his own in middle school, but even so, he remembered that kids could be harsh about the strangest thing.
It had seemed to be a little bit less severe more recently, based on what he had witnessed from his nephew’s adolescence, but it was always hard to tell, from the outside perspective.
“Yikes,” he said sympathetically.
“Yikes,” Winnie agreed. “Actually, the craziest thing happened this summer: the two girls who were the meanest bullies in my school showed up here. That was one of the first times that I bonded with any of the book club members. Diana and Eleanor told them to stop being jerks.”
“Eleanor never could stand for a bully,” he said, feeling a rush of pride and appreciation for his sister.
“Anyway,” Winnie went on. “Like I said, it was a cycle. Kids were mean, so I kept close to the adults, which made the kids meaner. When my family moved to Magnolia Shore when I was starting high school, I decided that I was going to strike first in a way… not bullying back or anything,” she hastened to add, not that Shane had been thinking any such thing.
Even at her most aloof, Winnie had struck him as reserved and a little self-conscious, not mean.
“I just played it very ‘too cool for school,’” she said using air quotes, then paused.
“Except actually not for school. I loved school. I played it too cool for friends, and then, surprise! I didn’t have any friends.
” Her smile took on a sad tinge to it. “I thought it would get better in college, and for a second, it looked like it was going to, but then my parents died.”
“Oh my gosh,” Shane said, feeling his heart squeeze in sympathy. “I’m so sorry.”
She nodded. “Thanks. It was really hard. My mom was sick, but fortunately not for too long, and then my dad had a heart attack not too long after that. About a year later. And heart attacks are obviously really common, tragically, but I always kind of thought that it was the broken heart that got my dad. He really loved my mom. We both did, but it just hit him differently.”
Shane couldn’t resist reaching out and giving her hand a squeeze. She returned the gesture and gave him a wobbly smile. Her eyes glimmered, but she spoke about her parents in a fond way that said that, although remembering them might be hard, she was still glad for the opportunity to do so.