Chapter 8. Callan
Callan
Lenore flips down the sun visor, which hangs crooked. Bills and unsolicited credit card offers flutter into her lap. “Are you living out of your truck or something?” she asks, tugging aside her seat belt to bend over and pick up the mail from the dirt-caked floor mat.
“Those are my dad’s,” I say. “You can stick them in the glove box.”
The contents of the glove box only reinforce the impression that I don’t spend much time at home. Stuffed alongside the usual hoard of fast-food napkins and paperwork is an orange prescription bottle, a stick of deodorant, and a folding travel toothbrush.
“I work long hours,” I explain, my ears burning.
Lenore sticks the letters inside. “What are you going to do?”
“What?”
“Now that the property is being sold,” she clarifies.
It’s possible the new owner will keep me on as groundskeeper, but it’s also possible they won’t. In the meantime, I’ve kept on managing the farm as usual, in part because I’m not ready to let go. “Worst-case scenario, I figure the hardware store will take me back,” I say.
“Hm.” Lenore stares out the passenger-side window, golden-green woods flashing past.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I didn’t say anything.”
I tear my eyes from the road long enough to look over at her. “You made a noise, ‘Hm.’ Like you don’t approve.”
“I don’t know,” she says slowly. “Do you want to work at the hardware store?”
I adjust my grip on the steering wheel. My future has always seemed obvious. I have my father’s skill set and no exceptional talents. I don’t know how to make someone like Lenore—driven, well-read, her horizons ever broadening—understand that I’ve always been pretty content with my lot in life.
“Are you hungry?” I ask instead.
“Hungry … for answers?” she says.
“I’m offering you hangover food.”
Her dark stare bores into the side of my head. I can almost hear her internal conflict, like she’s transmitting it to me telepathically. To accept the peace offering, or to press the issue further? “Fine,” she says begrudgingly, “but you’re buying.”
I pull into the parking lot. Above an old lunch car diner, the name Chandi’s is displayed in looping neon script, glowing a subtle pinkish red in the daylight.
It’s packed at this hour, so instead of waiting for a booth to open up, we grab a couple seats at the counter.
The windows are all decorated for autumn, orange twinkle lights and pumpkin garland reflecting off the gleaming chrome.
Chandi herself slips a couple laminated menus over to us, stealing a curious look at Lenore before moving to the other end of the counter to deliver a pot of steaming black coffee to a customer.
Beneath the logo, the menu boasts WORLD-FAMOUS MAPLE SYRUP.
I don’t know about famous, but I do know that they make a damn good breakfast platter.
The lunch car diner was here long before Chandice and Amoy Campbell moved from Jamaica, going on twenty years ago now, but the two sisters breathed new life into the dying business.
Lenore flicks through a countertop jukebox that sits between the napkin dispenser and plastic ketchup and mustard bottles.
“You might want to figure out your order first,” I say.
“I already know my order.” She punches the buttons for E5 with her thumb, queuing up a song.
It’s loud in here, people chatting noisily over late Sunday lunch, silverware clinking against plates. A few minutes later, Chandi sweeps back over. “What can I get for you?” she asks in that lyrical way. Nineteen years in rural Vermont hasn’t stolen away her accent.
I order the breakfast platter: bacon, sausage, hash browns, and eggs—sunny-side up.
“I’ll have the French toast with extra butter,” Lenore says, “and a Neapolitan shake, please.”
Chandi scribbles on a little spiral-bound notepad, tucks it into her apron, and collects the menus. “Your shake will be right out,” she says with a wink before disappearing into the kitchen.
Lenore unrolls her silverware from the cloth napkin and sets the napkin across her lap like we’re dining in a proper restaurant.
“Somebody has a sweet tooth,” I observe.
“Of course,” Lenore says, planting an elbow on the counter and cradling her chin in her hand. “I’m sweet, aren’t I?”
The easy answer would be a simple “yes” and then we’d move along, but my eyes have a mind of their own.
Her legs are crossed at the knee, acid-green grass stains smudging her light-wash jeans.
Working on the farm has lent her cheeks a healthy pink flush, and her messy brown braid is tucked into the neck of a corduroy jacket.
Sweet isn’t the first word that springs to mind.
Capable is, which, when said out loud, wouldn’t sound like the compliment I intend it to be.
There’s something so sexy about knowing that she isn’t afraid to get her hands dirty, after all this time.
I’d worried the city might’ve changed her.
I should’ve known that she was too stubborn for that.
I’m saved from answering when Chandi slides an old-fashioned milkshake glass across the counter, the dollop of whipped cream topped with a candied cherry. Lenore thanks her and takes a sip through the paper straw.
“There’s something you said last night that I can’t get out of my head,” I say.
Lenore squints in a way that makes me believe she’s straining to remember—maybe that she doesn’t remember at all.
“It was when we were talking about your art. You said that you’d lost your muse.”
Her expression smooths over in recognition. “Yeah,” she admits. “I guess I have.”
I shrug with my arms folded on the counter in front of me. “I’ve never really understood what people mean when they say that.”
“It comes from mythology.” She mixes the whipped cream into the shake, spoon clattering against the sides of the glass. “It’s a personification of whatever inspires you. A person, maybe—” she falters, locking eyes with me. “What?”
“I know what the word means,” I say.
Her voice pitches up defensively. “You just said you didn’t!”
“I only meant that I don’t really get it,” I say. “I was speaking in, I don’t know, exaggerated terms—”
“Hyperbole.”
I give her a flat stare. “Which Greek god is that?”
Rolling her eyes, she sucks a bit of whipped cream from the side of her thumb, and it conjures up thoughts that have no business being anywhere inside my head.
“All right,” she says, self-consciously fussing with the napkin on her lap. “So then what are you asking?”
“You always painted,” I say. “Long before whatever boyfriend or city or whatever you want to claim was your ‘muse.’ So, what changed?”
She lifts a shoulder. “Maybe I did.”
“I don’t believe that.”
Our food is delivered. I dump hot sauce all over my eggs, tapping the bottle with the heel of my palm. “Harvest Moon” by Neil Young croons over the speakers, another layer of noise in the already noisy diner.
Lenore takes her first bite and groans. “Not even joking: French toast is the greatest thing since sliced bread.”
“French toast is sliced bread,” I point out. “Let’s stay on topic.”
“Mm,” she says, and finishes chewing. “It wasn’t like I stopped painting all at once. I kept trying, for a while, even after it felt like I couldn’t create anything good. You can only take so much rejection before you start to wonder whether everyone’s right.”
“Who’s everyone?”
Lenore makes a dismissive gesture with her fork.
“I don’t know. Everyone,” she says. “I started obsessing over how other people saw my work, trying to anticipate what they would say, all the reasons they’d give me for turning it down.
Worrying about whether the things I was painting meant anything, which—they’re supposed to, right?
It’s fine for something to be pretty to look at, but as soon as you share it with other people, it’s supposed to be more than that.
Regardless of whether you meant for it to be. ”
“The way you describe it, people are going to give their own meaning no matter what you intend,” I say. “So, why worry about their opinions?”
Lenore leans her elbows on the counter, fork dangling as she chews and mulls the question over. “It’s not like I’m sitting around worrying. It’s more like … I was trying so hard to paint for other people, I forgot how to paint for me.”
I nudge my eggs around the puddle of hot sauce on my plate. “So, paint something for you,” I say.
“It doesn’t work like that,” she scoffs.
“How does it work?”
“I’m out of practice.”
“So, practice.”
“I can’t,” she insists, frustration rising. “I sit in front of my drafting table and it’s like my mind is as blank as the paper.” She waves a hand in front of her face. “Completely empty.”
“When was the last time you tried?”
“Why do you care so much?” she demands, loud enough that it knocks the chatter down a few decibels, forks lowered, curious eyes flickering in our direction.
Lenore senses them, too. Her posture stiffens, and she picks up her knife, sawing at what’s left of her French toast for the sake of looking busy.
I wait for the moment to pass, conversations and utensils taken up again. It’s not until I’m confident that we won’t be overheard that I say, “No—”
Lenore’s gaze snaps to mine, her eyes wide, her mouth full, a fleck of maple syrup at the corner.
“I suppose, if I had my way, I wouldn’t choose to go back to working at the hardware store,” I admit in an undertone.
She lifts the napkin from her lap and bows her head to meet it, dabbing as she finishes chewing. “What would you choose?”
“To stay. At the orchard,” I say.
An astonished laugh bubbles out of her. “How’s that any better?”
“All right, maybe I’d buy the place, if I had the option. That’s the difference between you and me. You have the option. I don’t.”
Hurt flashes behind those brown eyes. “Don’t act like I’ve had it easy.”
I shake my head. “I would never pretend that you’ve had it easy, Nore. But you’re choosing to work at that coffee shop because you decided to stop trying—”
She tries to talk over me. “I didn’t—”
“—and I’m going to be stuck at that hardware store,” I say, louder, pointing down the road, “because the one thing I was ever any good at is being taken away from me.”
We’ve drawn more than a few stares, now—people who will gossip about this on a town forum later, but right now I don’t care, because I have a point to make.
“We’re not trying to take it away from you,” she says, her voice shrinking.
I blow out a frustrated breath, planting an elbow on the counter and rubbing my forehead in my hand. “I’m not blaming you. It’s just the way it is.”
Lenore nudges her plate away. Her milkshake sits forgotten and melting. “Maybe the new owner will keep you on as groundskeeper,” she suggests, without much hope.
“Yeah.” I drop my hand from my forehead with a heavy sigh. “Maybe.” It doesn’t sound any more hopeful coming from me.
I flag down Chandi to ask for the check.
When she slides a receipt and pen across the counter for me to sign, her sharp green eyes cut to Lenore and back again, as though to say, Watch out for that one.
As though I wasn’t already bummed enough about the turn this conversation has taken, now locals are looking at her sideways, like she’s already an outsider.
I figure, in nineteen days, she’ll have the paperwork to make it official.
I scrawl a signature on the receipt and set the pen down, pushing it across the counter. “I want to take you somewhere.”
Lenore frowns. “Now?”
“Tuesday,” I say, rising from my stool and gathering my wallet and keys from the counter. “Come on. I’ll drop you off at your car.”