Chapter 3 Deli
Deli
Los Angeles
Deli MacDonald watched the blood trace a path down her foot and collect into a dark, glistening drop before it splattered against the white bathroom tile. She sighed, but it came out just like her mother’s, so she sucked it back into her face as quickly as possible.
Deli repositioned the shop’s communal tweezers in her hand, prepared to contract a tweezer-borne infection not seen since the freezing of the ice caps, and hissed as the metallic edge slipped against the brittle sliver of glass that had pierced straight through her sneaker.
Dropping a vase and paying the price was a rookie mistake, but Deli had been distracted.
Too distracted.
She dabbed the wound with a piddly wad of single-ply toilet paper and collapsed backward with a frustrated grunt as she slid her phone from her apron—still open to the last text from Trey, which she’d read when the vase now in her foot was in her hand.
I can’t wait to see you tonight.
She read Trey’s words again as she felt her cheeks stain pink. After half a lifetime of knowing and loving the boy she’d met when they were teenagers, Deli MacDonald had a feeling.
It was almost time, and she would finally be done waiting.
She opened a new text to Chloe.
Ugh, Chlo. Literally all he has to do is text me and I end up dropping everything and bleeding out.
Chloe wrote back in an instant.
Are you okay??
Deli rubbed at a bit of gunk on her screen.
There’s a vase in my foot.
She sent a screenshot of Trey’s text to her lifelong BFF.
Am I crazy for feeling like it’s happening? I know Trey and I talk every day, but not like this.
Deli played back the last six months of hazy push and pull between her and Trey in her head while she waited. She had begun to think Chloe might not respond when her phone chimed.
Has he brought up the kiss yet?
The words landed like a blow to her stomach.
No . . .
Deli studied the screen, waiting for her best friend to respond. A minute passed. Then another. Chloe probably needed more context.
But that’s what I’m talking about, you know? He’s going to. He’s ready to talk about it . . . about us. He just needed time.
She watched the three dots of Chloe’s response appear and disappear as a newly familiar unease pulsed alongside her heart. In twenty-five years of friendship, they’d never run out of things to say. Not until recently.
Something in Deli’s chest wilted, just a little, as she tapped on a new text from her mother.
Delilah, we’re here early. Please come as soon as possible. Your grandmother is already half a glass of wine in, and I’d like to get this over with.
Deli’s good foot tapped against the floor. Their reservation wasn’t for another thirty minutes.
Be there soon, Mom.
Chloe’s response came through.
I guess. I just think if it was going to happen for you, it would have already happened.
Her eyes watered as a fresh bead of blood quivered and fell to the ground. Chloe texted again with a link to a slinky backless dress that didn’t come in Deli’s size.
Do you think Jared will like me in this? I want to blow his mind for V Day.
Deli tried to turn off the unexpected and deeply uncool feelings that had been more and more common, and think. She filed the name Jared into her brain under “Chloe’s Boyfriends.”
From the moment Deli and Chloe met on the kickball court in first grade, they’d spent most lunches under their special sycamore tree, giggling while they braided each other’s hair and dreamed about make-believe worlds.
The lunch tree was a magical haven for the two little girls, where impossible things felt real and growing up felt far away.
Then, in third grade, Brayden broke Chloe’s heart when he didn’t give her a special valentine, and Deli had run to the bathroom to stuff her pockets with paper towels.
Beneath where “C + D = BFFS” had been carved into the bark—the precursor to a collection of carved hearts with Chloe’s and a boy’s initials that would all eventually be scratched out—Deli held Chloe’s hand while she cried until her nose was rubbed raw.
She’d learned to keep a travel pack of the tissues with lotion baked into them on her person at all times.
Since then there had been so many “lunch trees”: café tables, parked cars, beaches, and bedrooms—any place that had been turned holy by the sacred bond of girls’ friendships.
For Deli, there was a stretch of curb in a high school parking lot—where she and Chloe had waited for their rides home, coloring in the checkers on their shoes—that had been sanctified with the first whisper of Trey’s name.
Deli reacted to the link for the dress with a heart and typed back:
He’ll die! See you in a few!
She checked the time and checked her email.
Her foot stopped tapping. She had one new message from Maureen McDonnell.
Deli hadn’t spoken to her aunt in nearly twenty years.
Had she missed all her other family members’ attempts to reach her?
Had Grandma Rosemary finally succumbed to one of the many illnesses she insisted she was plagued with, and some poor EMT was currently trying to scrub her industrial-strength red lipstick off his face after giving her mouth-to-mouth?
To: Delilah MacDonald
From: Maureen McDonnell
Subject: Happy Holidays!
Hi!
Sorry for the late season’s greetings, but I was just thinking of you. Big day, huh? Hope you’re thriving in life!
Love,
Aunt Mo
Heat pricked her ears. When she was little, Deli had gotten in trouble at school for writing McDonnell instead of MacDonald as her last name on her homework, angry that her mom had married someone with a name so close to Auntie Mo’s but not the same.
But I just want to be like Grandma and Auntie Mo! she’d cried.
Well, you’re not, her mother had said. You’re just like me.
Deli scrolled to the bottom of the email and clicked on the first of two attachments.
It was a photo of a little girl in front of a cottage’s red door under a blanket of heavy clouds as smoke curled from the chimney in the slanted roof.
The girl’s belly poked out over the shorts bunching between her thighs.
Her knees and socks were stained with something dark, and her head was thrown back in a laugh or a yell as the wind tugged at her tangled pigtails.
Deli touched the screen with her fingertip. She didn’t remember it being taken.
She hadn’t thought about that little girl for a long, long time.
In the second photo, a group of people laughed in a pub with twinkling lights in front of a bar decorated with a string of ornament-dotted tinsel. Despite the great family fallout that had all but erased Aunt Mo’s face from memory, Deli still recognized her round cheeks and wide smile.
A towering man squeezed Aunt Mo’s shoulder with a considerable hand.
His smile crinkled the soft spray of freckles that crested his nose and disappeared into the stubble that matched his auburn hair, tousled into messy waves.
Behind the sort of eyelashes women coveted but only men seemed to be born with, eyes the color of molten amber glowed with warmth.
Something in Deli’s head fluttered against her memory, like a bird desperate to escape.
She could have sworn she knew those eyes from somewhere.
Deli’s boss pounded on the bathroom door as another text came through.
“Deli, quit roosting. The sooner you get to dinner, the sooner you can come back, and we need every second before D-Day V-Day. Plus, Carol has to pee.”
Behind Paola, Carol shouted, “We’re about to have a situation, kid.”
“One second!” Deli called, imagining their seventy-eight-year-old delivery driver in her leopard-print spandex outfit, dancing from foot to foot with her fuzzy pen tucked behind her ear.
Trey had just texted a photo of himself in the mirror—his sun-kissed skin and hair glowing against his cool gaze as he grinned in an expensive olive-green sport coat.
Is this the right color?
Deli forgot all about the pain in her foot and the golden-eyed man in a country far away.
She wedged a new wad of toilet paper into her sock and limped to the mirror.
Two weeks of no sleep and treating iced coffee like a food group had taken its toll.
Staring back at Deli was not the reflection of a twenty-nine-year-old spring chicken, but the sallow visage of a haunting swamp witch who had come to claim a mortal soul.
Normally, Deli embraced swamp witchery, and Paola had long since stopped cringing at the slept-in ponytails and nacho-cheese stains on the apron of her best designer.
But now Deli needed to be cute, and swamp witches were notoriously unsexy.
She tugged at the corners of her eyes and watched the wrinkles there smooth out and then reform when she released the tired skin.
She could hear her mother’s voice: I told you to wear sunblock, Delilah.
What type of retinol are you using, Delilah?
She reached for the dry shampoo nestled in her bag next to her new dress and doused her head in a powdery cloud, then wrapped a paper towel around her finger to scrub at her teeth.
She rubbed at the lily pollen staining her forehead, ditched the apron and sweatshirt she’d been wearing for two days to liberally apply deodorant, then slipped into the olive-green dress.
She tied the ribbon around the middle into a bow, coaxing her waist out of hiding, and stood back for one last look.
Staring at herself in the mirror, Deli practiced her game face, tugging at the fabric as it tried to bunch. Then she slipped out the back of the flower shop. The bathroom door slammed in her wake as Carol shouted, “You look bangin’, kid!”
Deli got in her car and took a deep breath, bracing to face her family.
And to face the man she’d been secretly in love with for half of her life.