7. Josie
JOSIE
Thursday afternoon I’m hauling a box of mason jars into the clubhouse for Dot—forty of them, wrapped in newspaper, for the table lights she saw in a magazine—and the place is half torn apart already, two days out.
Jonah’s up on a ladder with a staple gun and instructions being shouted at him from three directions; he’s Dot’s grandson, prospecting this year, which as far as I can tell means he’s everybody’s ladder-holder, gopher, and designated example.
“Left,” Dot’s telling him, from the floor, with the certainty of a woman directing air traffic. “Your other left, honey.”
“Grandma, this is my other left.”
“Then it’s the one after that.”
I set the box on the bar and that’s when I meet the photographer.
She’s standing in the middle of the main room with her back to me, one hand up, squinting at the ceiling like she’s reading something written up there.
Takes me a second to even register who she must be.
Tall. Blonde, the kind of blonde that gets maintained.
Put together in that way where jeans and a linen shirt somehow read as an outfit, and I’m standing there in Levi’s flannel with newspaper ink on my hands, sweating from the parking lot.
“Oh—hey,” she says, turning. “You must be the guest of honor. Josie, right? I’m Marley. Quinn. The photographer.”
Levi’s old flame. Small world.
And here’s the thing, the whole thing, the thing I’ll think about later: there is nothing.
No prickle at the back of my neck, no cold spot in the room.
She’s got an easy smile and a firm handshake, and she’s exactly the kind of harmless-pretty that makes you feel a little frumpy standing next to her without her doing one thing wrong—that’s not her fault, that’s mine, that’s just what standing next to women like her does to women like me.
I catalog it, and I let it go, and I like her fine.
“That’s me,” I say. “Guest of honor. Co-guest. There’s two of us.”
“Right, the famous Levi.” She says it light, like a joke about how small towns talk, and hooks her thumb up at the rafters. “I was just trying to figure out where Dot’s putting these string lights, ’cause if they hang below the beam line I’m fighting glare all night.”
“She said along the beams. There’s hooks up there from Christmas.”
“Perfect. Then everybody gets to look gorgeous instead of like a driver’s license photo.
” She crouches to her camera bag, checks something, all business.
“This is sweet, by the way. Three years and the whole club throws you a party? People don’t really do that anymore.
Where I was living, you’d get maybe a group text. ”
“They’re good people,” I say, and I can feel myself glowing a little, stupid with it. “It’s a good place to land.”
“Yeah,” she says, softer. “I’m getting that.”
“You grew up here though, right?” Because I’m making conversation, because she’s easy to talk to, because I have no reason on this green earth not to. “Somebody said you’re from here originally.”
“Born and raised. Left at nineteen like my hair was on fire.” She says it wry, self-aimed, hands busy with a lens cloth.
“Denver, mostly, since. And now—“ a little shrug at the rafters, at the town outside them—“back. Turns out the places you run from keep the porch light on. It’s rude of them, honestly.”
“Well.” I mean it kindly and I say it kindly, one transplant to one returner: “It’s a good town to come back to. People here don’t let you fall far.”
Something goes across her face at that—quick, unreadable, gone—and she smiles. “That’s what I’m counting on.”
We talk lights for another minute—she wants the tripod by the back wall, out of the traffic, and Dot hollers over a vote for the back wall on account of Tucker’s dancing needing a wide berth—and the whole time my brain is somewhere else entirely, somewhere warm: two days.
Two days, these same beams, those same lights, and me saying my line.
I catch myself touching my jacket pocket, out of habit, checking—and there’s nothing there.
The test’s not in my pocket anymore. Moved it Sunday night to my jewelry box, tucked under the tangle of chains I never wear, safest place in the house, because Levi has never once in three years opened my jewelry box.
I touch the empty pocket anyway. Phantom limb.
Saturday. It’s firm now, it’s poured concrete: Saturday, under the lights, in front of the family. I’ll tell him Saturday.
Before she packs up her light meter, Marley drifts back over with a little notebook. “Professional question. For Saturday—any moments I should know about in advance? Toasts, speeches, surprises? I like to be in position before the thing happens, not scrambling after.”
And I almost tell her.
I’m standing there with my mouth already open, glowing, dying to tell somebody, anybody, and here’s a stranger with a notebook whose whole job is moments—and something at the last second pulls it back, some small instinct with no name on it.
Not suspicion. Just thrift. It’s mine. Four more people know a thing, it’s a quarter as mine.
“Wyatt’ll do a toast,” I say instead. “He always does a toast. Get the toast.”
“Toast.” She writes it down, one word, and smiles her easy smile. “Got it. Anything else, I’ll catch it live.”
I stay another half hour unwrapping jars with Dot at the bar, newspaper ink going up both our arms, while Jonah gets sent up and down the ladder like a yo-yo with a work ethic. Dot keeps her voice low and her eyes on the jars.
“She was a firecracker in high school, that one,” she says, with a little tip of her head toward the tripod across the room. “Her and half the boys in this town, Levi included, back when he had that awful haircut. You seen pictures?”
“Of the haircut? No. Now I need to.”
“Casey’s got the yearbook. It’s worth the trip.
” She unwraps another jar, holds it to the light, squints for spots.
“Funny her coming back. Never thought she would. Her mama moved to Arizona years ago, there’s nothing here for her but—“ she waves the jar at the room, at the valley, at everything—“here.”
“Maybe here’s the point,” I say. “It was for me.”
Dot looks at me sideways, warm, and bumps my shoulder with hers. “And thank God for it. Hand me that box cutter.”
Jonah comes down off the ladder for the last time around four, shakes out his stapling arm, and stands there surveying the beams with his hands on his hips like a man who built a cathedral. “That’s a hundred and forty feet of lights, Grandma.”
“And it only took you all afternoon and both your lefts.” But she reaches up and pats his cheek when she says it, and he goes pink to the ears and pretends he doesn’t love it, and I stand there in the middle of my decorated clubhouse two days out from the best night of my life, surrounded by this family I married into without any paperwork, thinking: the kid’s going to grow up here.
In this building. With these people and their hundred and forty feet of lights.
Some children get luck like that. Apparently mine’s one of them.
And that’s the whole conversation. Two women unwrapping glass, being fond of a town. I file the haircut yearbook away as a mission for later and lose the rest before I’m even done stacking jars.
What I don’t see—because I’m elbow-deep in newspaper at the bar, because I’m laughing at something Dot said, because why in the world would I be watching—is whatever her face does across the room when the garage-side door bangs open and a couple of the guys come through hauling folding tables.
I don’t see if her eyes go anywhere, or hold anything, or come back.
I’m not watching her at all. I’m watching mason jars come out of newspaper like presents.
“Anyway,” she says behind me, pleasant as anything. “Saturday. Can’t wait.”
I leave the clubhouse humming with the empty box on my hip, already picturing his face when it lands—the blink, the beat, the getting-it—and I drive home with the windows down through all that gold June light, no idea in the world that the woman measuring angles behind me has been carrying three weeks of my life in her chest like a hand of cards, and hasn’t decided yet how she wants to play it.