Chapter 27
TWENTY-SEVEN
Emmett
It’s groundhog day.
I worked so hard to get out of this position, and here I am again, anyway.
I sit with my family around their breakfast table while Dad dishes out his homemade pancakes.
Rowan stares at the redness left on my neck while Macie loads her stack of pancakes down with syrup and a mountain of rainbow sprinkles.
I offer her a small smile to let her know that I’m okay, though I’m not sure that she believes me.
I’m not sure that I believe me.
“Whatcha do to your hand?” Macie asks.
“I wasn’t paying attention,” I tell her. “I shut it in a car door.”
Dad’s eyes flick to me as I lie to my little sister a little too convincingly and a little too easily in order to protect her from the truth.
“I think,” he says, peeling the plastic off of a jar of sprinkles before setting it in front of me, “that your timing is the perfect opportunity to resurrect pancake Wednesday.”
I reach for the jar and turn it over in my hand, inspecting the yellow and black mixture of sprinkles, with bat shapes mixed in. “No way!” I shout with a laugh.
I snatch the bottle of syrup and pour probably way too much of it on top of my pancakes, following with a sickening amount of sprinkles – maybe even more than Macie used on her own stack.
Suddenly I feel like a kid again, back in our old apartment, sitting around the metal fold-out table in the kitchen that wobbled if the takeout pamphlets slipped out from under the bad leg.
“Christ, when was the last time we did pancake Wednesday?” I ask as I slice through the stack of pancakes in front of me.
“The Wednesday before your eighth birthday party,” he answers.
I remember that party. Dad and Davis had made me an absolutely hideous Teen Titans cake and set up a game of laser tag with a few of my friends at my favorite arcade.
It was easily the coolest party I’d had up to that point; hell, if they wanted to put that together again for my twenty-sixth, I’d be ecstatic about it.
I remember asking him at one point if Anna was coming – I’d bugged him for more than a month about inviting her.
I think I pouted for a decent portion of the party over it when he finally told me she wasn’t coming, even after cake and ice cream.
The next week, Dad set up pancake Wednesday and I lied and told him I didn’t like pancakes anymore, but really, I blamed him for not bringing my mom to the party.
For not making her come. I don’t think he made pancakes again after that until he met Rowan and Macie.
“Well,” I say, stretching my back against my chair, “I’m not eight anymore, so I’m gonna need a lot more pancakes.”
“You got it, bud.”
Macie stuffs one of her last bites into her mouth and shoots her arm up over her head. “Wait, Dad!” She shouts with her mouth full. “Me too!”
I look to Rowan with wide eyes and she offers me a smile and a nod to confirm that Macie is, in fact, calling my dad ‘Dad’ now, too.
The little gremlin snatches the syrup bottle as soon as more pancakes are stacked onto our plates, sticking her tongue out at me; and because right now, I’m apparently also eight years old, I dump a thick line of sprinkles onto my top pancake, roll it up like a sugary taquito, and stuff the entire thing into my mouth while she watches.
“Children, settle,” Dad chides while Rowan cackles, holding her napkin over her face.
I was dreading coming downstairs when I woke up this morning.
I told myself over and over again that coming here last night was a mistake; there were going to be too many questions that I didn’t want to answer and too many eyes on me, but sitting at the table with my family, I’m really glad that I made the choice to come home.
·
Climbing out of my car, I peek into Rowan’s empty Bentley, which sits on my driveway in the space that she deemed hers almost as soon as I closed on the house. I think Davis is rubbing off on her a little too much anymore.
When I walk through the front door, Ro is sitting on the couch with some cheesy rom-com playing on the TV.
It’s the same one she’s probably watched fifty times by now; shy girl goes home to her old small town for the holidays, runs into the guy she knew and hated in high school, suddenly they’re in love with each other over the course of a weekend and a broken-down car somehow ties into it all.
It’s corny and ridiculous and I hate that it’s on my TV right now.
I drop my gym bag next to the couch with a chuckle and head for the kitchen to grab a cold bottle of water before returning to my friend. “You didn’t have to come check up on me,” I tell her as I settle onto the floor opposite her.
“I’m not checking up,” she insists. “My kids are in bed and my husband was watching golf while he played stocks…I ran away.”
I lay back on the floor, rest my head on my arms and kick my feet up onto the coffee table – which are immediately pushed off by Ro, who lets out a disgusted huff.
“You could have told me about him sooner.”
“I tried to a couple times. Chickened out, though.”
“So tell me now.” With a shrug, she pulls herself to a standing position and clicks off the power to the TV.
“We can make some cookies and you can tell me all about it. But start with the good stuff first so I don’t go into it hating him as much as I think I’m going to,” she tells me, tapping her finger against her neck.
“I need a shower.”
“Go take one,” she tells me. “You’re useless until sprinkles anyway.”
An appreciative smile creeps across my face as I head down the hall toward the bathroom to take the world’s fastest shower.
I rejoin her in the kitchen no more than ten minutes later and take a seat next to hers at the island counter, watching as she measures out ingredients, because she’s right, I will absolutely wreck the dough.
My cooking expertise stops at microwaving vegetables in a bag.
While we work, I tell her almost everything.
I leave names out of the stories, but I do tell her all of the other parts that she wants to hear.
She wears a smile while I talk, the same one that she gets when Sarah puts the right colorful shape into the corresponding slot in her puzzle or when Macie spells a challenging word correctly on the first try. It’s a mom smile, and it’s warm.
It scratches at the empty space where the ones I should have gotten from mine are supposed to be.
“You invited the good in,” she says. “And you learned something new about yourself.”
“That’s quite a spin to put on it,” I laugh.
“Am I wrong?” She raises her brows as she spreads frosting over the top of a cookie and passes it to me. “You told me one time that people can get over being scared, and you did that. You should be proud.”
I’ve made too many mistakes to be proud.
I’m too goddamn sad to be proud.
I don’t tell Ro that, though. Instead, I reach for the jar of sprinkles and top off every cookie that she passes to me until all twenty-four of them are covered.
She hangs out with me for a while as we scarf down way too many cookies and I somehow manage to steer the conversation away from Nash or my mom or breakups or bloody knuckles or anything else that I know she wants to fix.
It isn’t until she checks a message on her phone that she wears the ‘I wanna go home to my husband, but it’s weird to tell his son that’ expression that she’s developed over the past couple of years.
I clap her on the shoulder and head for one of the cabinets in my kitchen, pulling out a tupperware container.
“Go home,” I tell her. “And for Christ’s sake, take these cookies with you. ”
“Are you sure? I don’t w—”
“Ro,” I laugh, “get out of my house.”
Hopping off of her bar stool, she kisses my cheek and wraps me in a too-tight hug. “You’ll be okay? You have your key?”
“Yes and yes,” I tell her as I push her toward the door. “I’m just gonna do laundry and go to bed. I’ll see you in the morning.”
With another hug and another kiss to my cheek, she climbs into her car and pulls out of the driveway, and I go to my room.
I look at the cardboard box sitting on my desk and for a second, I consider opening it, but I decide that it’s something that can be Tomorrow Emmett’s problem.
I shove it further to the side as if its contents are radioactive and I climb into bed, the earliest that I have in a long time.
I pick up my phone from my nightstand and scroll through my contacts until I reach MENACE. My thumb hovers above the phone icon for too many seconds too long before I toss the phone to the other end of the bed and press the heels of my palms against my eyes.
Fuck.