Chapter 21
May, Four Years Ago
Over Zara’s graduation weekend, my loneliness launches off me, banished to the stratosphere when Dad, Maren, Candice, and her longtime girlfriend, Hailey, come to town.
Zara would never admit it, but I know it means a lot to her that Dad flew all the way from Southern France for this.
He may be doing his own thing now, but unlike Mom, he’s never not been there when it’s important.
Dad calls each of us every month, fires off texts whenever he’s thinking of us.
For Zara, that was most recently when he was at a used bookshop in Paris.
For me, it was when he passed a street busker in Vichy that made him think of my orchestra concerts.
When everybody arrives in Knoxville, we catch up at Zara’s favorite bar, the last stop of her farewell tour.
“I always knew you’d grow up to be a professional book nerd,” Hailey jokes.
“She means that as a compliment,” Candice says, twirling a lock of Hailey’s hair.
“In my universe, that could only be a compliment,” Zara says.
“I remember getting a call once from the Bristol Public Library, informing me you were reshelving their young adult hardbacks against their system,” Dad says.
“Subgenre matters.” Zara shrugs at him insouciantly.
Dad laughs, tosses me a wink. He has long hair now, which he accompanies with a perpetual farmer’s hat and lengthy opinions on pesticides.
“I wish I had all my girls here,” he murmurs, eyes going sad. He looks at Zara and asks, as if it was something they’d previously discussed, “Did you end up inviting Folly?”
Her face says it all, that she didn’t even bother, but I know Dad invited Folly to come for Christmas in France. She told him she’d think about it.
“If Folly wanted to be here, she would be here,” Maren says diplomatically.
“Now, back to Zara.” She sets her chin in her hand, eyes twinkling.
“What else do you want to do while we’re here?
Besides sit in this lovely little dive bar with beer buckets and wings?
” Maren squints at the wall of graffiti to our left.
Zara grins. “I figured we’d stay here for at least another six hours, and then we could come back first thing in the morning.”
“What about a walking tour?” Maren counters.
“What about a food tour?” Candice asks.
“What about…” my father suggests, leaning over our picnic table conspiratorially. He winks at Maren, who whips a pack of honest-to-goodness strawberry stickers out of her purse. “We play a round of—”
“—find the strawberry!” everybody—including Hailey, and except for me—shrieks at once.
Immediately, I try to run, but my dad is a big guy and pins me easily back on the bench while the others rip open the packet and cover my arms in strawberry stickers.
I’m laughing by the end of it, accepting my fate.
Zara snaps a photo of me while Maren rips scraps of paper from a notebook and scribbles out each of our names to pick teammates.
“I’m only agreeing to this,” I say, standing up again, “if you each give me five dollars in drinking money while I wait to be found.”
Dad tsks, narrows his eyes at me. “Hang on a second, Strawberry. I may mix up my kids’ names sometimes, but I’d never forget a twenty-first birthday. And yours isn’t until next week.”
I set my hands on his shoulders, narrowing my eyes right back at him. “Aren’t you supposed to be European now?”
He’s been living over there for nearly two years at this point, and we all secretly think it’s because he’s fallen in love, though Dad won’t own up to it.
He smirks. “Paige Ryan Lancaster. Which one of your sisters gave you a copy of their ID?”
“All of them,” I say, grinning.
They each drop a five-dollar bill on the table and bolt.
Liam: Why did Zara send me a photo of you covered in strawberries?
Paige: When I was little, I had this strawberry costume I never took off, and my family would play this game called find the strawberry.
We did it at the lake, the park, around the house.
But when we got older, the playing field widened to downtown Bristol, and now it’s basically a drinking game.
They pair up and search for me at a bar, and if I’m not there, they have to finish a drink before they can keep searching.
Liam: You as a little girl playing hide and seek in a strawberry costume is the cutest thing I’ve ever pictured in my life.
When everyone leaves, even Zara, it’s so lonely.
Six days of the specific kind of lonely that sneaks up on you after too long without a conversation, or even a friendly smile at the convenience store checkout.
The kind of lonely that hides under your bed at night, follows you down the street when you’re walking alone in the dark.
One night, I ask another waitress who got cut when I did if she wants to grab dinner; she smiles tightly and makes an excuse. I have a feeling Evan talked to my coworkers about me after we broke up. I just don’t know what he said.
My family took me out to dinner and gave me birthday presents when they were all here, but I wait to open them until the day of.
A limited edition Laufey vinyl from Zara, a packet of rare seeds from Dad.
A monogrammed planner from Maren, new shoes from Candice and Hailey.
They all call and text, every single one of them.
They love me so much. I can feel it when they’re there. We parted ways so excited to see each other again in France this Christmas.
So why doesn’t it feel like enough when they’re far away?
I drop off Maisy’s birthday gift by her door, just to return the kindness of her charm bracelet, and otherwise don’t hear from her. She may already be gone.
I’m suggesting we get some distance.
What’s wrong with me, I wonder as I clock into work that night, not even having bothered to take the time off, that I’m desperate for a level of affection nobody else needs from me in return?
“What are you going to do about the apartment?” Maren asked me on the ride to the airport last week. Zara had paid through the end of July, so I have that long to decide if I’m renewing.
“She doesn’t know yet,” Zara answered for me. “She’ll tell us when she figures it out.”
I open Liam’s letter in bed after my shift and am terrified by how well he can read me.
Happy birthday, Paige!
I know how much you love your birthday, and I know it probably felt a little weird this year. But I’m going to be back in one day, and we both know I’m the best present you’re getting. So just hang tight, and I’ll see you soon.
Liam
Only one more day; I distract myself practicing chord progressions.
But when Liam gets back, it’s like the clouds part, and I finally have sun again.
He takes me out for my first legal drink at a German brewery built like a castle, and at first, it’s just the two of us, catching up about our time apart. But then some of his teammates come, and I get to meet his best friend Carlos, the first baseman.
“We’ve got a good little home stretch coming up, thank fuck,” Carlos says. “Will you be at the games, Paige?”
“As many as I can,” I promise.
Mouth by my hair, Liam says, “You don’t have to.”
But when I’m at the stadium two days later in a newly purchased jersey, his number on the back, he can’t stop smiling at me before the game, can’t keep his hands off me after.
Now that his classes are finished, if I’m not at work and he’s not with the team, we’re together.
Sharing ice-cream cones, practicing guitar, drinking through cocktail menus, reading at the library (now that we don’t have an inside woman at the bookstore to forgive our loitering), or exploring each other’s bodies in the vacant privacy of my apartment until it feels like he knows the precise degree of my curves, like I know the choreography Liam wants from my body before he ever has to say it.
But he loves to say it.
By June, I’m in love with him.
“Tell me about your family?” I ask one Saturday on a blanket in Sequoyah Park, near a spot where tiny mushrooms and tall dandelions are sprouting across the grass.
He closes his eyes and aims his face toward the sky, palm going beneath his head.
“Keep playing that thing,” he says.
I pick back up the tune, strumming on my brand-new mandolin.
“My dad,” Liam starts, then bites his lower lip in thought.
“My dad was my favorite person on the planet. He was both of my sisters’ favorite, he was my mom’s favorite.
I know you’re not supposed to admit it, and nobody ever did out loud, but—he was ours.
He kept everyone happy. He knew how to soothe my mom’s anxieties and make my sisters feel like the most special girls in the world.
He could defuse tension with one line and make you laugh until your abs ached.
He owned a landscaping company and knew more about native Georgia plants than anyone.
And he was in love with baseball,” Liam adds with a gruff laugh. “Just like me.”
“You love baseball?”
“I’ve been meaning to tell you.”
“Well, now I feel like I hardly know you.”
He grins, but it fades fast. “Sometimes I think you’re the only one who knows me.”
I keep strumming and ask, “The rest of your family?”
Liam keeps his eyes shut. “When my dad passed, it was like … like each of our worst tendencies heightened or something. My obsession with baseball, at the expense of everything else. My mom’s penchant for histrionics.
My sisters’ insecurity. He was the balancing act, and without him, none of us have been …
We haven’t figured out how to…” He drifts off, finally peeking his eyes open to glance at me. “To be a family again.”
I start to play something different, trying to make sense of his aching words the only way my brain knows how.
Liam props up on an elbow, his eyes on mine. “They don’t come to any games,” he admits, his voice low.
I’d noticed. Since I’m there, at Lindsey Nelson Stadium, every time.
“Have you asked them to come?”