Chapter Seven Pancake Capital of the World
Chapter Seven
Pancake Capital of the World
Beverly
The wind whips against my face as I wait outside Asheville Regional Airport with a fresh cup of coffee in my hand and the bite of January on my nose.
It’s a jarring shift from the warm winter in California to the ravaging gnaws of freezing wind in a North Carolina New Year.
What was once light bomber jacket weather is now thick faux fur coat hanging down to my knees type of weather.
A succinct, squeaky honk raises my attention to a minivan at the end of the airport’s pickup line.
Through the windshield’s vignette of condensation, my dad’s bearded face grins out at me.
I return the smile, feeling like a kid again as I hurry over, my backpack key chains rattling against the zipper, and the two massive suitcases in my freezing palms bumping over the sidewalk.
He opens the driver’s-side door and rounds the front, then pulls me into a tight hug.
“Hey there, sugar.” His words have that familiar drawling lilt as they croak, muffled in my hair. He grips my shoulders. “Let me get a look at you. Ah. Pretty as always.” He sighs in faux disappointment. “But still not tan. What’s that California sun ever done for you?”
I look him over as well. All Dad’s head hair has officially migrated down to his chin and cheeks, but I knew that from our last video call together.
What the low-quality phone camera couldn’t show was the tiny lines beside his eyes that have gained new friends or the way his once brown beard has more salt and pepper than before.
Since moving to California five years ago, I’ve only returned to North Carolina for the holidays or occasional weekends when we’re between shooting schedules or performances.
I didn’t get the chance to return for Christmas last month, since Flock Workshop was in the last stages of shuttering its doors.
I force a smile. I don’t like that I can see the slipping time now.
A car behind ours honks. The minivan’s side door slides open, and my nana’s puff of dyed red hair pokes out.
“Let’s get going, Glenn! Before I start picking fights.” Her playful grin beams over to me. “Come on, Bevvy.”
Bevvy.
The only people who have ever called me that are Finch, Grandpa, and Nana. Finch would be happy to know that his best friend’s widow is still sticking with tradition.
“In the car, you two!” she yells. The impatient car honks again. Nana waves them around us with a “Well, go on!”
My nana, Alice Jones Starling—keeping her maiden name as her middle, thank you very much—is the type of woman who keeps tasks moving.
Grandpa always deferred to her as the matriarch of our household.
He was a cautionary admirer of his wife, who still functions like a tornado, even now at seventy-five.
Dad pats my shoulders with a final smile and grabs both my suitcases. I follow him to the van, parting ways at the open sliding door as he rolls the bags around back.
Nana engulfs me into a hug through the open door, smelling like her usual mix of her floral perfume and vanilla lotion.
“All right, come on, come on,” she says, coaxing me in. I hunch and crawl inside the van. It’s stuffy from the dry heat and too many bodies. Rustling limbs and swishing coats. A panting dog.
“Let’s make some room,” Nana says. “Rob, would you take her backpack?”
“I’m a little busy!”
My brother’s knobby knees pull up to his chest in the back seat as he grips Pudge’s collar. Rob’s aptly named portly basset hound tugs against his hold, struggling his way between the middle seats and toward me.
“Oh my God, when did you get so lanky?” I ask, watching Rob’s arms stretch out to pull Pudge’s torso backward.
Rob and I are eighteen years apart—his fourteen to my thirty-two.
He was a late-in-life, totally unplanned but beloved baby.
I guess that’s what happens when your parents never let the spark fade. I try not to think about it too much.
Nana shifts in her seat as I bypass her for the opposite one. I twist to make sure my backpack hits the front passenger seat—filled with various diner supplies—instead of her.
“Okay, I can take that now,” Rob offers, reaching out. I slide off my backpack, holding out my coffee so it doesn’t drop, and pass the bag to him. Pudge immediately rubs his nose over it.
“And I’m not lanky,” Rob adds with a grin.
“Tell that to your elbows—ow!”
One accidentally protrudes into my shoulder as he murmurs, “Sorry.”
“Settle on in,” Nana says, reaching across the center aisle to slide up the other middle seat’s arm. She shuts the sliding door, and suddenly my coat feels like it’s swaddling me in sweaty heat.
Dad opens the trunk, and cold air whips through like a wind tunnel.
Rob leans forward between the middle seats. Pudge’s drooling jowls coat his knee in slobber.
“You have to tell me everything about Griffin Harvey.”
I buckle my seat belt as I fumble out a laughing “What? I just got here. Dad’s not even driving yet.”
I don’t know if I’m ready to talk about Griffin. My brain is still tired from travel. Probably because I spent the entire flight thinking about him.
“Our little superstar,” Dad calls from the open trunk.
“Oh, let’s not,” I say, wincing.
“But you’re all over social media,” Rob says, already extending his phone toward me.
I don’t look. I’ve seen these pictures everywhere. Griffin’s hulking body attempting, and failing, to shield me from the flash of a camera. His palm on my waist. My purse slung over his shoulder. Our bright faces illuminated in a flash, accentuating the dark circles under my eyes.
Rob waves the phone again, as if prompting me to look.
“Yeah, I know,” I say with a laugh. “I was kinda there.”
“When’s he coming over? You didn’t tell me on our last—”
“Probably in a few days.”
My dad heaves the last suitcase and slams the trunk closed. He run-jogs his way to the driver’s seat.
Rob asks, “So, is Griffin Harvey gonna be at our house a lot?”
I shrug. “Maybe.”
“Is he your business partner now?”
“Uh, sort of?”
“Y’know, I think that Griffin Harvey—”
Nana lets out a mix of a laugh and a sigh. “You don’t have to always say his full name, Robert. Now sit back and get that dog of yours under control.”
Rob groans in a petulant teen way, buckling himself in and patting Pudge on the head.
I catch Nana’s eye. She winks. I return a sheepish smile and a silent Thank you.
Dad buckles in. “We all locked and loaded?” he asks, meeting my eyes in the rearview.
“Dad, can we drop by a rest stop for Pudge?” Rob calls from the back seat, barely audible over Pudge’s heavy breaths and whines. “He’s probably gotta pee.”
My dad puts on his turn signal. “You got it, boss.”
“They’re gonna honk again,” Nana says.
“They can honk all they want, but I ain’t moving any faster.” Dad steers into the other lane.
The next ten minutes are a jumble of layered sentences and misused turn signals and Nana’s “Well, that wasn’t very nice, was it?” as we transition from concrete and sidewalks to an interstate lined with trees.
“Here’s another one,” Rob says, holding out his phone toward me.
I wince, having not seen this photo yet. It’s similar to all the others, though; I look flustered, and Griffin looks angry.
“Griffin Harvey isn’t really a jerk, is he?” Rob asks in a whisper, as if trying not to let Nana hear. Like Finch’s, Nana’s hearing aid is better than my ears, so I know she catches it. She doesn’t say anything.
I sigh. “No. He’s not.”
“I didn’t think so,” Rob continues. “Just reporters wanting headlines, I bet. Also, uh, whoa. I didn’t know he had a sister! Way to drop that bomb on us.”
“Yeah…me neither,” I say with a cringe. I’m a terrible liar. So, so terrible.
I expect a lot of questions now that I’m buddy-buddy with Griffin.
I have questions of my own, honestly. Mostly, how in the world did Griffin Harvey keep something as groundbreaking as a child a secret from the world?
I was thorough in my online searches. I couldn’t find a single sniff of a rumor about Griffin being a dad.
Is she his biological child? How old is she? Who is the mother?
It doesn’t matter what I know because, as far as my family is concerned, she’s the forgotten Harvey. Griffin’s little sister. I promised I wouldn’t tell a soul, and I keep my promises. But it’s impossible to excuse an additional human being, so I did what I could with what I had.
“Have you met her?” Nana asks.
“Not yet.”
“I can’t believe he’s coming here,” Rob breathes, flicking through his phone. “Griffin Harvey is so cool. Is he friends with Beau? Were y’all hanging out or something? It looks like you were talking in this photo and—”
“Let me see that,” Nana says, holding out her palm. Rob passes his phone to her, and then she drops it in the cupholder up front.
“Nana!” he yelps.
Only my parents, Nana, and Uncle Greg know the gritty details of Beau’s and my breakup two years ago.
Rob heard things at school due to the viral video, but the clip was so out of context and contradictory to his image of Beau that I think it only confused him. Rob’s only talked to me about it once.
“Are you still friends?” he asked. His worried twelve-year-old eyes killed me.
“We’ll always be some sort of friends,” I answered.
Beau was the brother Rob never had, leaving him almost as heartbroken as me. As a family, we try not to trash Beau in front of Rob, but we do change the subject often.
“Nana’s right,” Dad says from the front seat. “Let’s be more present, son. Now, Bev, tell us all about the show and your plans.”
I dive into the details of my pitch process. I tell them about the research I’ll need to do, the new scripts I’ll need to write, and how Griffin will be making the music.
Eventually, Rob leans in again. “So how close are you with Griffin Harvey? I know he’s not your actual boyfriend…right?”
“That was just for the press,” I confirm. “There’s nothing going on.”
“Good,” he says.
I laugh. “Good?”
“He’s just so much cooler than you.”