Chapter Twenty-Three
Twenty-Three
Theodore Grabby was an archetype. Emmy was sure of it. She wasn’t sure what this particular type of character would be called, but she thought of him as a Jolly Wise Grandpa. Almost a Santa Claus. She couldn’t help but love him, and that was probably the point.
“Whichever one you’d recommend, of course,” Emmy told him, and got a chuckle in response.
He led the way, winding around shelves of books in various conditions, children’s toys, gag gifts, novelty mugs, and license plate frames. The back wall caught Emmy’s attention, and she stopped in her tracks.
When Will had spoken of discontinued candy, she’d imagined a little display by the register with a couple of spiral lollipops and a box of Bazooka bubblegum.
Instead, she saw shelves upon shelves of confections, many of which she’d never heard of.
Yes, there were giant rainbow lollipops in various twirling shapes.
Yes, there was Bazooka—by the jar and by the tub.
But there was also so much more. Chiclets, Fun Dip, Abba-Zaba, Payday, Pixy Stix, Walnettos, M&Ms bags that looked like they predated the Civil War, twenty-three different flavors of licorice, Warheads, Airheads, ring pops, push pops, baby bottle pops…
not to mention the myriad shelves of bulk-buy candy in their individually labeled jars with attached plastic scoops.
“Jesus Christ. You’re Willy fucking Wonka,” Emmy breathed. Then slapped a hand over her mouth as she realized she probably shouldn’t curse so blatantly in front of the jolly grandpa.
“If you’re going to stock candy, you gotta do it right,” Grabby said with a proud smile, clearly unfazed by her blue language. “My old man said it was like selling nostalgia.”
“I’ll say.” Emmy was already selecting a colorful bag from the bulk buy shelf. Their picnic dessert was going to be handfuls of random candy.
“I’ll just grab the board game and meet you up front,” Will said, his tone a mix of exasperation and amusement.
“Sounds good,” Emmy told him. “Prepare for a wait. Candy mixing is a science that can’t be rushed.”
“I’ll stay strong for you.”
She ended up filling two bags—one with chocolate and chocolate-adjacent flavors, one with fruit flavors.
The sour candy was at the bottom of the second bag with a buffer layer of wrapped candies in the middle, so the sour flavor would have the least chance to adulterate the unwrapped non-sour candies on top.
She carried her packages to the register where Will waited with a Scrabble board and Battleship.
Grabby weighed the candy and bagged everything for them.
“You kids have fun,” he said as he handed Will the receipt.
Emmy couldn’t help feeling she was going to miss Grabby if—when—she and Will made it to the real world. Sure, there were novelty shops in her reality, but it would take her a while before she found one owned and operated by an adorable old man with an appropriately cute name.
They stopped at the grocery store to buy tubs of potato salad and coleslaw, the makings for sandwiches, and drinks.
“Should we get a bottle of wine?” Will asked. “Isn’t that traditional for a romantic picnic?”
Emmy couldn’t help the little tremor that went through her at the question. How could she tell him she didn’t want alcohol anywhere near them?
“This isn’t a romantic picnic,” she said, hoping he didn’t notice her hesitation. “For Scrabble picnics, we need pop.”
His brow furrowed. “Pop?”
“Yes?” It took a second to figure out the source of his confusion. “Oh, for crying out… Soda. We need soda for our picnic.”
“Ohh!”
“Wipe the smirk off your face, Massachusetts. In the Midwest, we buy pop.”
“No problem.” He continued smirking. “The pop aisle is right over here.”
Emmy stuck her tongue out at his back and followed him. She thought the little linguistic hiccup had saved her from any uncomfortable beverage-related questions, but Will stopped her in the middle of the aisle with a hand over hers on the handle of the cart.
“You didn’t want me to buy wine.”
She let out a long breath. “No, I didn’t want you to buy wine.”
He kept his eyes focused on hers. “You’re that worried about me.”
“Yes.”
“God, what a wakeup call.” He thought back over the past couple weeks, remembered all the times he’d restocked the liquor on the fridge, how often she’d seen him with a glass of something hard and strong in his hand.
“I told myself I could destroy my liver because I wasn’t real, so my liver wasn’t real,” he said quietly.
“I told myself a fictional character can’t develop a substance abuse problem. ”
“Yeah, but you’re not a fictional character.”
Will laughed weakly. “I guess you’re right.
I never thought that an unexpected dependency on alcohol would be the thing that convinced me, but here we are.
” He reached over and snagged a twelve-pack of soda at random, plunked it into the cart.
Then, thinking about the sudden change in his future beverage choices, he grabbed two more.
“If I’m going sober from here on out, we’re going to need a lot more pop. ”
“Really?”
“Sorry, I was just teasing you. I’ll say soda.”
“No, I mean… you’re really going to drink less?”
“Yeah, Emmy. Really.” He saw the stark relief on her face and felt like the lowest kind of asshole. “Jesus, look at you. I don’t know if I can apologize enough for what I put you through.”
Emmy turned the cart toward the checkout area, her hands trembling a little. “I put you through worse, so we’re even.”
*
It was perfect weather for a picnic. Emmy assumed that it was some kind of rule of nature that when two people in a romance novel went on a picnic, the weather would cooperate.
Unless, she supposed, those two people needed a reason to kiss passionately—then it would rain so they would have to rush to the car and make out, soaking wet, while the rain drumming on the roof provided appropriate mood and ambience.
But she and Will had already gotten the passionate kiss part out of the way, so the sun was shining.
A few puffy white clouds drifted over them, borne by the gentle breeze.
They found a quiet little patch of grass, spread out the blanket Will had snagged from a pile of clean laundry, and made sandwiches.
They drank lukewarm soda/pop and ate two dozen varieties of candy while they played board games.
“Oh my God, I lost my E!”
“What?”
Emmy began searching the blanket, her lap, under her feet. “I had an E! I was going to put ‘pearl’ on that double word score. Where’d it go?”
“Hold on, I got you.” Will pulled out his keys, found Gordon. He turned the little flashlight on and shined it around where Emmy was sitting.
“There you are!” She scooped the tile up from where it had been hiding, obscured by the shadow of her tile tray. “I must have bumped my letters at some point. I didn’t even see it run away.”
Will put his keys back in his pocket. “I don’t know why I helped you when you’re kicking my ass. I should’ve made you take a lost letter penalty.”
“Too late now. Take that!” She put her E, A, R, and L down, using the P from his previous play: CLAP. “Fourteen points for me.”
“No one likes a sore winner.”
“Don’t sulk. You beat me at Battleship.”
“Only because you clustered three of your boats in one corner,” Will pointed out.
“It worked for a while.”
Will tallied her points, then fiddled with his letters. “I’d kill for a T or an S right now.”
“Want to trade? I’d give you an A and an S for a D or a G.”
“That’s not allowed, is it?”
Emmy shrugged. “That’s how we always did it.”
She hadn’t meant to bring up her family’s house rules, but it had come out before she’d thought better of it.
Now she couldn’t help but remember all the times she had spent days exactly like this one with them.
How she and May had joked that Japanese Scrabble would be way too easy since a ton of words were only one or two characters long.
“When did the Scrabble picnic tradition start?” Will asked.
“I don’t even remember. We liked to play board games as a family.
I think we were all feeling cooped up after a particularly long winter, and my mom just kind of suggested the idea out of the blue.
It was the first warm day we’d seen in a long time.
May and I helped my dad make bento boxes, and we packed up the car and drove to the park. ”
“Sounds fun. I’d like to meet them.”
“You will,” she said with conviction. “You absolutely will.”
“I believe you.”
She wasn’t sure if he did, but she appreciated him saying it.
He wanted her to feel better, and she did when he agreed to trade his G for her A and S.
Even when he used the tiles she’d given him to earn a good chunk of points by playing FLAYS and using the S to simultaneously turn PEARL into PEARLS.
“What would you name a landscaping company if you had one?” he asked suddenly.
“I’ve never really thought about it before.” No, it was time to come clean with him… and herself. She sighed. “I never let myself think about it before. Too… intimidating.”
“You can think about it now,” Will told her. “What happens in the romance novel stays in the romance novel. What would be a good name? Would you just call it Emmy’s? Or Miura’s?”
“Nah. I understand why Grabby’s dad named the store Grabby’s, but I don’t think people should name their businesses after themselves unless their name means something to other people.
Nothing against… what was it? Peggy’s Diner.
I’m thinking about SEO mostly. You want your stuff to come up on Google, so it has to be memorable and fairly unique. ”
“For someone who hasn’t thought about this, you sure know your stuff.”
She hesitated before answering. “I took some business courses in college, and I had to do projects and stuff. Sometimes I would use a landscape design business as the basis for a project. That was about as close as I could get to the idea without freaking out. I didn’t even name the fake business because then it felt too real. ”
“I didn’t mean to put you on the spot,” Will said apologetically. “If it’s meant to be, I’m sure a name will come to you.”
“Yeah, I don’t know. I think I spent most of my life waiting for some big lightbulb moment that would give me instant insight into my calling and how to go about achieving it. It gets tiring after a while, waiting around with a broken bulb floating over your head.”
Will’s keys jingled as he retrieved them once more. Leaning over, he turned on Gordon and shined him down on top of her head. “Don’t be sad, Emmy. Gordon believes in you.”
Emmy pressed a hand over her mouth and shook her head as she looked at Will. “How do you make being a dork look so sexy?”
“It’s a gift.”
He turned off the flashlight and dropped his keys onto the blanket beside him. Emmy looked at the little flashlight and immediately recognized the sensation that rolled over her, despite never having felt it before.
“Lightbulb,” she whispered.
“Hm?”
“Lightbulb,” she said, looking up at him in astonishment. “So that’s what it feels like!”
“You had a lightbulb?” he asked. “Just now?”
“Yes! It’s Gordon! He did it!”
“Way to go, Gordon!” He scooped up his keys and gave the mini flashlight an exaggerated kiss. “What’s the lightbulb?”
“Hikari. It’s Japanese for ‘light.’ If I named a landscaping business, I’d call it Hikari Landscape Design.”
“That sounds… really good. I mean it, Em. It sounds professional and unique.” He pointed at her. “Plus, when you get really big, you can always change it to Hikari Landscape Design by Emmy Miura.”
“Oh man, that sounds good.” Emmy sat back on her hands and looked up at the bright blue sky.
For the first time, it felt real without feeling scary.
She could actually do this. “I could incorporate kanji into the logo. I did some graphic design back in the day. Hell, I did some of everything back in the day. Will?”
“What?”
She pushed off the ground and tackled him. He caught her and fell backwards. This time, when she landed sprawled on top of him, it was her choice. She kissed him hard and smiled down at him. “I’m going to start a landscape design company. I’m going to make people’s yards beautiful.”
“Sounds great.”
“Okay, picnic over. I win Scrabble by default. Let’s go home so I can start drawing up a business plan.”
“Hold on,” he insisted as she pushed off him and began gathering tiles. “You win by default? I could have caught up. There’s still a ton of space left on the board.”
“Don’t kill my buzz, Will. I win because I had a lightbulb moment.”
“Okay fine, but I want a rematch someday where I can have my own lightbulb moment.”
“Deal.”
He helped her clean up their trash and pack up the leftovers.
Together they made their way back to the car.
She smiled over at Gordon dangling from Will’s keychain as he started the engine.
It occurred to her as Will pulled away from the curb and headed for home that those sexy Tarot cards had been right.
This shitty situation had turned out to be the best thing to ever happen to her.
Because she’d finally had her lightbulb moment.
Because they were going to find a way out of the book.
Because she was falling in love with Will.