Lemon Crush

2. August

2

AUGUST

It was a three-coffee morning.

When Wade dropped me off and took Myrtle away to parts unknown, I knew I’d never be able to get back to sleep. I’d taken a shower, refilled my travel mug and gone back out to the driveway to deal with the other car in my life—Mom’s bright yellow VW Beetle, Jiminy.

Naming our cars was a family tradition.

I’d needed to think, and he’d needed a bath, so I’d hosed off the cobwebs and pollen until he was shining again. Then, because my nightmare at the airport was still fresh in my mind, I’d also watched a YouTube tutorial, following the how-to-check-your-fluids instructions to make sure he wouldn’t give me the same problems Myrtle had if I needed to drive him before I got her back.

He was fine. The truth was, I’d taken better care of the cute little bug than I had my own car lately, driving him around the block when I couldn’t sleep and taking him in for all of his regular checkups. To somewhere other than Hudson’s Garage, of course.

The same was true for Mom’s apartment. My one-and-a-half-story soul-eater of a house with red-brick and white siding had been neglected. The weeds were up to the front windows, the swimming pool I never used was transforming into a murky bog of eternal sadness, and every room inside needed a thorough scrubbing. But the separate one-bedroom apartment in the courtyard-style backyard? That was pristine.

Because, unlike your house and your hair, you remember to clean it on a regular basis.

If my place sounds expensive, that’s because it was. Especially for the shape it was in when I bought it. The shape it was still in, because I hadn’t made any improvements. But I’d signed the mortgage as soon as it was put in front of me anyway.

“Mortgage” was now my least favorite word in the English language. It had surpassed both “moist” and the sentence “but you have so much potential” over a year ago.

It was also the reason I now stood, cleaning supplies in hand, in the open doorway of Mom’s apartment—otherwise known as the Mama Casita, or Home for Wayward Sea Gypsies (Morgan had made her an actual sign to hang by the door for that one).

The wild plan I’d worked up on the ride home from the airport would cost money that wasn’t in my already painfully tight budget, which meant deciding to do something else I’d been putting off for a while now. Renting this place out to supplement my income.

My sister and her husband had both tried to nudge me in this direction once or twice. Particularly last year, when I’d been spending enough on doctor visits to worry them.

I hadn’t been ready then. I wasn’t sure I was ready now. If Morgan and Gene knew I was finally taking this step, they’d no doubt be making me lists on all the prerequisites and precautions I needed to deal with before I took the plunge, which could take weeks to accomplish. Enough time for me to lose my nerve and change my mind again.

Luckily, right now they were somewhere over the Atlantic, probably enjoying espresso and biscotti between first-class naps, unable to slow me down with their common sense and logical thinking. If I was really doing this, I needed to start today. Right now. Ready or not.

Walking into Mom’s apartment without knocking felt strange. It was still so much her space. She’d definitely had a brand, and that brand said, “I love the beach, and who needs a coffee table that’s functional?”

That was the first thing you saw when you walked through the front door—a glass-topped rattan coffee table that looked like a giant ball of pretty twine. We’d teased her about it when she made the purchase, but now I couldn’t imagine the apartment without it.

I took a fortifying breath and went straight to her closet, where a handful of her favorite tank tops, blouses and two film crew jackets still hung amid a sea of empty hangers. A friend of the family had turned the silk robe she’d loved into a huggable stuffed animal as a gift for me, and the rest I couldn’t fit in if I ate nothing but celery for a year. I’d kept them anyway. I couldn’t deal with the thought of giving them away yet.

Morgan and I had spent a few weekends in here after her celebration of life, separating what we’d send to her closest friends, what we’d donate and what we’d split between the two of us.

My sister had been a rock for me then. Patiently holding my hand and quietly dealing with all the things I couldn’t. I’d taken Mom’s books and photo albums, while Morgan had taken her jewelry and the small tote of personal journals I hadn’t wanted to go through. We’d cleaned out her dresser, the bathroom and kitchen pantry. Everything else, we’d left exactly as it was. Her plates were in the kitchen cabinets. Her sheets were washed and the bed was made. Her ever-present iPod was charging on its portable speaker, as if she’d temporarily left the room and would be back any minute, asking me if my book was finally finished so we could go do something fun together. Just the two of us.

My throat tightened, but I laid the clothes out on the bed and started scrubbing the apartment.

“I’m still not finished,” I confessed to the silent walls.

My work-in-progress was, in too many ways, like this apartment and my life. Suspended in time. Lacking purpose and full of unresolved issues.

I’d known things were bad for a while, but I hadn’t realized how serious my situation had become until I dropped Morgan off this morning.

“You are not fine.”

I’ve heard it’s normal for people to fall into a slump now and then. To require some alone time to regroup before rejoining the living after a spiritual sucker punch or three. Like a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic, followed by your mother dying and, for a chaser, getting sick long after everyone else had started moving on with their lives, ensuring you’d be more isolated than ever.

But I’d been physically better for six months now, and no one but my sister and my friend Chick, who lived all the way in California, seemed to notice I was still hermitting. Pretty sure that was the technical term.

“She wouldn’t want that.”

She really wouldn’t. Mom wasn’t a fan of my isolated writer’s lifestyle before she left, and she’d hate how bad things had gotten since, which was why I’d decided to do something about it today. Better late than never, right?

I cleaned the baseboards and the molding, dusted and polished, but it didn’t take as long as I thought it would to make the space look brand new. Based on my five minutes of phone research, furnished apartments required multiple glamor shots to sell properly, so I snapped pics that caught the light beachy wood look of the laminate floors. The simple black-and-white kitchen. The soaking tub in the bathroom, and the flowery and feminine bedroom set, the dresser and side tables littered with baskets of shells. Then I aimed at the sand-colored dining table, the faded teal chairs that framed it, and the driftwood candleholder in the center that pulled it all together. Even the rattan coffee table and the art on the walls made the living room shot look professional.

This place put my own mismatched living room furniture, accented by random piles of books, comfy blankets and general clutter, to shame. If I had a theme, it was absent-minded bargain hunter in shades of brown and…lighter brown. I should have let her decorate it.

Before I could talk myself out of it, I signed onto the rental site, filled out the description as well as my requirements, and uploaded the apartment for all to see.

“There. That wasn’t so hard, was it?”

I hadn’t needed to ask for anyone’s advice or permission. This was my property and I could do what I wanted.

Say it again. Once more with actual feeling.

I grabbed the clothes I’d been moving out of every camera shot and left the apartment. Walking around the pool and into the garage, I moved like a woman on a mission when all I wanted to do was lie down and possibly curl up in a ball for the rest of the day. And not only because of my lack of sleep last night, or the chronic fatigue I’d been unable to shake despite my recovery. Still, I wasn’t quite finished yet.

This might have been a “car garage” in another life, but when Mom and I moved in, it had become a multi-purpose space. One side was a storage locker for all the things she hadn’t been able to part with when she pared down for tiny apartment living after years of marital nesting. The other was half tool-and-garden shed and half workout room, all covered with a fine layer of hasn’t-been-touched-in-a-while.

You should be in here every day to use that treadmill.

That was the trouble with the first step forward—all the shoulds and have-tos that had been accumulating came out of the woodwork all at once to overwhelm you. I should be walking on that treadmill every day. I should be eating healthier. I should be cleaning my house. I should have a better relationship with my sister. I should be working on that last book until it was finished. I should be out in the world, enjoying my life.

All of this should be easier by now.

I opened a labelled storage container and set the shirts and one jacket inside, pausing before I let the last one go. She’d only kept a handful of these from various productions over the years, and I could still see her wearing this one as she rushed around on set. When I was little and could still fit in it, I’d worn it all the time too.

I brought the fabric to my nose and inhaled deeply, wondering if I was imagining the scent of her favorite perfume. It must have faded by now, but I swore I could still smell it.

Mom had worked in the film industry. It sounded glamorous, but for most of the people who lived it, it was a business like any other. And she’d been a behind-the-scenes cog in that business until I was in my twenties.

She’d worn a lot of hats throughout her career: casting director, production assistant, second assistant director and accountant. She’d even written a script or two on spec. Most of her hats required traveling at the drop of one. It was one of her favorite perks of the job, but it made putting down roots an impossibility.

Think army brat with less discipline, fewer benefits and more random sightings of semi to fully famous people. For example, I’d met Meg Ryan once and seen Bruce Willis walking to his trailer. A couple of teamsters and I accidentally caught the original movie Buffy making out with the dad from Growing Pains in the back of a van. I also had in my possession what might be the only slightly negative story about Keanu Reeves to exist. He was young, it wasn’t that bad and I’d never tell because he’s simply too precious for this world.

None of that mattered now to anyone but me. As far as everyone else was concerned, Samantha Retta was an unfinished resume on IMDB. One of the faceless masses who’d never gotten an award or accolade for her years of tireless work to fuel the entertainment machine.

And if anyone sent me an application that was good enough to accept, she would no longer have an apartment.

Another piece of her erased.

She doesn’t need it anymore.

“I know that, damn it,” I said, laying the jacket neatly in the container and snapping the lid back on. I left the garage and closed the door behind me with a quiet snick that sounded disturbingly final.

Unable to bear being here for another second, I stopped at the apartment long enough to grab the keys and Mom’s iPod before hopping into the VW.

I backed out of the driveway with an excess of caution—I’d already had one car towed today and wasn’t looking for a repeat, but I needed to take a turn around the block to clear my head.

After a minute or two of driving with the windows rolled down and the iPod playing a comfortingly familiar stream of music, I could finally breathe again, humidity notwithstanding. I cruised down the street, following the 30mph speed limit, amazed as always that shifting gears came back to me so easily. I usually preferred automatics, but muscle memory was apparently a thing, even for me.

I passed a neighbor aiming a hose at her laughing, bathing-suit-clad kids, and then a few run-down houses interspersed with some new builds. They had very little in common, other than the spiky, dry grass in their yards and their taste in decorations.

Lone Stars. Everywhere. In case anybody forgot where we lived.

Instead of circling the block, I found myself heading deeper into the seemingly endless neighborhood. Seriously, when they chose “Everything is bigger in Texas” as the unofficial state motto, they weren’t kidding around. It usually took a solid half hour of driving, at minimum, to get to the nearest grocery store, restaurant or freeway on-ramp.

I occasionally wished the city planners had gone for “convenient” instead of “bigger.” And by occasionally, I meant every time I had to drive anywhere. At least I had this easy-listening and eclectic soundtrack to keep me company.

Paul Simon’s “Loves me Like a Rock” transitioned to Shakira’s “Gypsy,” which flowed right into Peter O’Toole’s film version of “The Impossible Dream.”

I turned up the volume.

“This is my quest. To follow that star. No matter how hopeless. No matter how far.”

To shake off my blues, I sang theatrically along with the lyrics I’d had memorized by the time I was in kindergarten. Mom appreciated a good hopeless quest and had adored Don Quixote, both the book and the musical version. Maybe it ran in the family, since I’d followed my own star into a writing career and was currently tilting at a new windmill that seemed even more unlikely.

“This is my quest, Jiminy. You’re going to be a real live racecar.” I patted the steering wheel. “It’s as close to the ending from your namesake’s fairytale as I could get.”

Now that I’d taken the first, obviously batshit crazy step of deciding to become an amateur racecar driver, I needed to start doing research to see what I was getting myself into. I’d never driven in a race before, unless you counted Super Mario Kart . Although, I supposed my LA freeway experience might become invaluable.

When my best friend’s distinctive ringtone blared over my off-key attempts at greatness, I turned off the iPod and put my phone on speaker. Speaking of California. “Hey, Chick.”

“I’m going to my second meeting with the wrestlers tonight to talk about this train-wreck of a treatment for their movie idea. They want to be the next Rowdy Roddy Piper or The Rock, but all I’m seeing is garbage. Anyway, I’m planning to seduce the big sweet one into a hotel room before I take their money and write their crappy screenplay, so I’m looking for suggestions. My Casino Royale outfit or a towel?”

“Hello to you too,” I said with a helpless grin. I hadn’t realized how badly I needed to hear a friendly voice right now. “Quick question before I answer: Do you have any other options besides a tux and nudity?”

“Do I need other options?”

My loud laugh made an old man who’d been checking his mail jerk like I’d goosed him, and I offered him an apologetic grimace through my open window as I passed. “Sorry, I forgot who I was speaking to. The hotel might have a dress code, so go with the tux.”

“I know the manager. I could get away with the towel. It sounds like you’re driving. You wouldn’t happen to be popping by for lunch, would you?”

“As much as I love you, I’m not driving all the way to San Diego today.” I stopped at an intersection and then turned onto a larger farm-to-market road.

“Then talk to me, sunshine. You dropped off Morgan this morning?”

“I did.”

“And…? What are you not telling me?”

I sighed. “That Myrtle nearly killed us all, and it’s entirely possible I’ve finally lost my mind.”

I told him about my pre-morning madness. Then I told him about putting the apartment up for rent, and my conflicted feelings about it. The only thing I’d left out was the car race. My plan wasn’t done percolating yet, and before I shared it with him, I needed to know what I was talking about .

Being Chick, he took my entire saga in stride. “Your morning sounds more eventful than mine.”

“Tell me this is a good idea.” I needed someone to say it, even if they had to lie.

“This is the best idea. Airbnb and midterm rentals are wildly popular right now. I’m on the website as we speak and the apartment looks gorgeous. Sam was clearly an interior decorator in a past life. How did she make six hundred square feet full of furniture look so spacious? Somebody’s going to see those pictures and hand you their wallet.”

“Thank you.” I exhaled and the tight muscles in my neck loosened a bit. “I didn’t let myself consider it until now.”

“She only flew in to visit a few times when I was around, but even I know she would have been all for this plan. That little bungalow is too adorable to become an uninhabited shrine. She’d want you to use it to give yourself some options.”

“You’re right. Options are good.”

I hadn’t felt like I’d had any in years.

“Since you like them so much, I’ve got another one we can revisit right now. What would you say to using that rent money to fix up your house and put it on the market so you can move back here with me?” His words were rushed, as if he was worried I might stop them. “We’ve lived together before and neither of us wanted to kill the other by the end of it. And now that I have the beach house, if you did want to kill me, you could go collect shells and stare at men in Speedos until the feeling passed. Believe it or not, I miss having you around so much I’m even willing to make room for that hellhound you inherited.”

“You’re such a sweetheart,” I replied sincerely, at the same time my brain was yelling Stop the presses! and making several quick addendums to my previous plan.

“Now you’ve ruined it. I’m a dangerously handsome curmudgeon, not a sweetheart. Invitation revoked for at least thirty minutes.”

I’d thought renting the apartment would add money to my coffers to pay for my Jiminy plan. But maybe I hadn’t been thinking big enough.

“I do love your beach house.”

“It was an impulse purchase not long after you left, but the view from the bedroom balcony was too stunning to pass up. If you’ll remember, your room has a balcony too.” He didn’t need to remind me. I’d been to that beach house more than once since he moved in, and it was glorious.

“We’d have to split the bills,” I told him firmly.

“She’s talking bills now. That’s a good sign. I mean, we’ll fight about it later because I have expensive tastes and from what I can tell you’ve been living on ramen and crackers, but you sound like you’re really thinking about it this time.”

I was. Wouldn’t it be poetic if buying my house specifically for its separate apartment turned out to be the reason I could afford to fix it up, sell it and go back to the West Coast? Make a fresh start, close to my supportive bestie and away from the unhappy memories and failures that had sent my muse into hiding and my career into the toilet in the first place?

You thought moving here would solve your problems too.

True, but they were simpler problems then. I’d had a comfortable amount of money in the bank, my new book had just been sent to my publisher and I hadn’t turned forty yet.

I’d also been recently cheated on, had a newly widowed mother and a sister whose husband had been fighting cancer…and I was about to turn forty. It had been easy to sell myself the story of the romantically wronged heroine returning “home” to write the final book in her second bestselling fantasy series while providing comfort to her family. On paper, it was a comeback with a great redemption arc .

At the time, I’d only allowed myself to remember the good things about my stay here. My first best friend. My first period. My first crush. (Fine, yes, two of those things weren’t good so much as memorable.) In hindsight, my reminiscing had distracted me from a few large plot holes that quickly came back to bite me in the ass.

“Earth to August. Did you hear what I said? I hope you’re too busy paying attention to the road to answer me instead of daydreaming. You know how many crazy drivers there are out there.”

“Oh! Sorry, I got—” I turned a corner and my breath caught. How had I ended up here ? I hadn’t even realized I’d been aimed in this direction. “Chick? I’m going to have to call you back, okay?”

“I was only kidding about the bills. I know how you are about that. We can split them.”

“Good. I really do love this idea, I promise. I just…need to run into the store for a second,” I lied, because he wouldn’t hang up if I didn’t.

“Okay, but you sound upset again, so if you’re shopping for more than an hour, I’m going to start pestering you. It’s your own fault for deciding to pack a year’s worth of emotional drama into a single morning without me. And now that you’ve practically accepted my invitation to live together, I’m not going to be able to think about anything else today.”

“You will as soon as your wrestler shows up. But I do love it when you pester.”

“Lucky you, since I’m so good at it.”

I ended the call, driving slowly past the small brown ranch house I used to live in and its larger, more attractive neighbor. Wade’s sister Bernie and my pregnant goddaughter Phoebe lived in that one, and I couldn’t take a full breath until I saw that both of their cars were missing from the driveway. Thank God—it would have been hard to sneak by unnoticed in this bright-ass bug .

If I’d come here subconsciously for comfort, I should have known better.

Chick had been my closest friend for over a decade, but that first best friend I mentioned? That was Bernie. Bernadette, if you wanted a black eye and she was in a mood. I still remembered the day I met them like it was yesterday. I was eleven, and Mom had driven us here from New York in a car exactly like Jiminy.

I called shotgun on the last leg of the trip so I could sit beside my mother as we entered the city limits. We were singing all the Texas songs Mom could think of at the top of our lungs—"All My Exes Live in Texas”, “Deep in the Heart of Texas”, “The Yellow Rose of Texas”—while my sixteen-year-old sister pretended to be asleep in the backseat, the orange headphones of her Walkman firmly pressed to her ears so she could ignore us in favor of AC/DC.

This place didn’t look that different from any of the others we’d driven through recently, but Mom kept saying it was. She was making all sorts of plans for trips to Galveston and the Alamo. She said we were close to Lake Conroe, but we’d be taking long drives to spend weekends camping at someplace called New Braunfels. She’d had me look them all up on our road map for fun.

“The state is so huge, they have a little of everything. Which is good, because we’re going to be staying here for a while.”

“Longer than Studio City?”

In California, we’d lived in a tiny apartment—so small she’d slept on the pull-out couch so Morgan and I could each have our own rooms—for a year and a half while she worked on a television series. She’d had an office on the studio lot, where I got to hang out and help after school until my sister got home. I’d missed it since we moved to New York seven months ago.

Her blonde curls whipped around her face as the wind rushed through the open window and she laughed, pushing it out of her eyes. “That’s the plan, pumpkin. High school is very important, and Morgan wants to stay in one place so she can rule the school. That’s why I accepted the job with this casting company. They’re doing more films here, and I’ll be teaching commercial acting classes for them whenever there’s a lull. The best part about it is, I’ll have more time to spend with you. Because you are my sunshine, my only sunshine,” she ended with a song, her hand stretching out to tickle me, as if I were still a kid.

I almost laughed, but my stomach was twisted with worry at the thought of starting at another new school. I’d never ruled any of them. By the time I got there, most of the class had known each other for years and usually thought I was lame.

“Can I tell people you’re famous?” I asked hopefully, thinking of the kids in California who couldn’t stop talking about what their parents did for a living. If it was movie related, they had tons of friends. Mom worked on movie sets all the time, but she had rules about not “telling strangers our business.”

She eyed me reproachfully before turning back to the road. “I’m not famous, August. I sometimes work with people who are famous. And you know bragging isn’t an attractive quality. Actors might have interesting jobs, but who you are is more important than what you do or who you know.”

“I know. But your job is better than acting.”

She pinched my cheek gently. “Buttering me up won’t make me change my mind. Anyway, I don’t know why you’d waste time talking about me when you’re already so incredibly cool.”

I snorted in disbelief.

“You are! Those poems and short stories you write? How kind you are? This is going to be a fresh start for all of us, and this time everyone here is going to love you as much as I do.”

I eyed her cynically as we turned into the cracked driveway of a mud-brown house.

“We’re here,” she said .

Before I could take in our new home, movement in the driveway next door caught my eye.

There was a tall, cute boy around Morgan’s age standing next to a beat-up old car with the hood up. Beside him, tugging on his shirt, was a girl with two dark braids, wearing jeans, a tank top and, unexpectedly, a tutu.

She was pointing right at me.

“Look at that,” Mom exclaimed delightedly. “I think I already see a friend in your future, and she’s right next door. It’s Fate, August. This is the universe telling us we’re supposed to be here. Can you feel it?”

We could all feel it. After that first day, the Rettas and the Hudsons became inseparable. Wade and Morgan. Me and Bernie. Mom and their stepmom, Yvonne. Weirdly, we never met Bernie and Wade’s dad. In the entire time we lived next door, he’d never come home from his trucking job, though Mom said we weren’t allowed to talk about it.

Other than that, we’d all been happy. I’d been happy.

Then, at the not-quite-two-year mark, she’d gotten a job offer back in California that was more important to her than I understood at the time. I was only thirteen. Unions and pay scales meant nothing to me. All I knew was that we were all moving again. At least, I thought we were.

My world was knocked off its axis when Morgan decided to stay behind without us. She was still months away from turning eighteen, but she’d made her case with irrefutable logic and an unbending will that our mother couldn’t find a way to work around. After long discussions and some difficult goodbyes, Mom and I had left and she’d moved in with the Hudsons until she finished her senior year. Then she’d gone to college, gotten her degree and come back to stay .

Morgan had made a place for herself here. Put down roots. Bought a house and gotten married.

Now she literally ruled the school as its principal.

When I came back four years ago, my place in the pecking order hadn’t changed all that much. I’d gone from introvert who read a lot to introvert who talked to herself a lot and wrote story ideas on napkins at the dinner table.

But I didn’t feel the same welcome that I had the first time. I couldn’t seem to find my seat at their table, and I didn’t get any of their inside jokes.

I was pretty sure I was still lame.

I’d become so lost in my memories that I was surprised to notice Jiminy pulling back into my driveway as if on autopilot. However I’d gotten home, I was glad to be back. I’d had more than enough of this emotionally draining day.

Five minutes later, computer on my lap and drink in hand, I was snuggled up on the couch and ready for a much-needed distraction.

24 Hours of Lemons: Racing for Real People

The first page of the website had a picture of a car painted with rainbows, clouds and sparkles. It had a unicorn mane and horn on its roof, and there was an arrow pointing to it with the words “Serious racecar” that made me smile. This was what Gene and his friends had been up to for the last few years.

I skimmed the rules, laughing more than once at each clever turn of phrase as well as the rules themselves. “No whining,” I snickered.

Then I went back to the main page and clicked the link that said in bold lettering: Become a Racer .

“Down the rabbit hole we go.”