Chapter 20 Clarke
Clarke
“How’s your head?” Earnest asked as I dusted behind a few knickknacks in the living room curio. He hadn’t left me alone since my episode with Leith. Normally, Earnest was a little more elusive. But now wherever I went, he was sure to follow.
My phone buzzed with a text from my mom.
Mom: Did you update the inventory on the site? There’s an email in the inbox about someone’s purchase not going through. I think we sold what they’re trying to buy.
Me: Not yet. Will do today.
Mom: It was supposed to be yesterday.
Instead of responding, I put my phone face down on the kitchen counter. “It’s fine,” I said. I always felt more pressure in my head when I was at work than when I was home. Obviously, because there are far more ghosts at Toades than there are in my house. “I just need to push everyone out.”
Earnest was quiet for a second. “Do— Do you think that’s maybe the problem?”
“What do you mean?”
“Maybe it hurts because you’re working so hard at pushing all of them out all the time,” he said. Doubtful. There was no way that it was better to let all the spirits and their voices invade my head. I couldn’t imagine losing control like that. “Have you talked to Collins about it?”
I shook my head. I’d been avoiding my sister. Oh, how the tables had turned.
“Maybe you should,” Earnest said.
“Yeah,” I replied half-heartedly. The bell on the front door rang as someone opened it.
Honestly, I assumed it was Leith. He usually stopped by at least once a day—sometimes more.
“Kitchen!” I called to him, but I didn’t hear any footsteps.
“Leith?” I called and walked toward the front door, but it wasn’t him.
The last person I ever expected to see in my shop was standing nervously at the front door: Ali.
“Oh,” I said. “Hi.”
“Hey, Clarke,” Ali said. Her voice was timid.
“Are you looking for a gift for your mom again? Her birthday’s coming up…”
“She would love that you remember that, and she would want me to tell you that the vintage Avon candleholders were a great pick,” Ali said. “But that’s not why I’m here.”
“Okay.” I swallowed.
“Listen…with the whole, like, Team Ali or Clarke thing happening on Sweetwater Peakers, I just…I wanted you to know…I don’t buy into that. I don’t like that people’s gut instinct is to pit us against each other over a guy,” Ali said.
Well, that wasn’t what I was expecting at all. “Um, thank you,” I said. “I…I don’t like it either,” I said honestly.
“I figured,” Ali said. “For the record, I also don’t think you’re a home-wrecker.”
“That means a lot, actually,” I said. “I know the timeline is kind of blurry…”
“It isn’t,” Ali said. “Leith was checked out of the relationship long before the official breakup date.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. And I was. I knew it had to hurt, watching Leith get into another relationship so quickly. She didn’t know it wasn’t real.
“I know,” Ali said. “You’re a good person.
I just…I figured we’d run into each other sooner or later, and I wouldn’t have a chance to say that I’m okay and that I don’t want things to be weird between you and me.
I don’t want to be friends with Leith, to be clear…
” That made me laugh, and Ali smiled a little.
“But I know what it’s like to be the heart of the gossip.
People were constantly speculating about whether Leith would ever commit.
” She smiled a little sadly. “So I just thought, when we do run into each other in front of a gossip-hungry audience, I would like it if we could be a united front and not…you know…feed the beast.”
“I wouldn’t have it any other way,” I said. Ali nodded. “I’m really happy you stopped by.”
“Yeah,” Ali said. “I’m pretty proud of myself.
” I didn’t know Ali very well, but in that moment, I admired her.
“And for what it’s worth,” Ali said as she turned and opened the front door.
“I think you and Leith are good together. And I hope…well, I hope he finds what he’s looking for…
with you.” She shut the door before I could respond.
I stood there, dumbfounded, for a long time.
I didn’t know how long, but a while later, the door opened again. Damn, busy day at Toades.
This time, it was a Wilkes at my door, but not the one I was expecting.
“Hey, Lainey,” I said. “Is everything okay?”
She nodded. “I hope it’s okay that I stopped by…”
“Of course it is,” I said. “But don’t you have school?” It was the middle of the day on a Friday.
“I have a free period,” she said. “And I’ve never actually been inside here. I wanted to check it out.”
“Well, welcome to Toades,” I said with a smile.
“Wyoming’s Premier Antiques Emporium.” When I looked around, I realized that it was starting to look like the Toades I knew again.
Since the roof was done, Leith and I were able to move stuff back into the attic, so there was just the normal amount of antiques shop clutter.
He helped me hang the stuff that had come off the wall during the storm, and when I came to the shop a few days ago, the back door was replaced.
Not with a new door, but a repurposed one from the old saltwater taffy factory—extremely sturdy. That door wasn’t going anywhere.
Lainey and Leith had the same eyes, same nose, and they both bit the inside of their cheek when they were nervous or didn’t know what to say.
“Who’s this?” Earnest mouthed behind Lainey’s head, and I tried to shoo him away with my eyes. He didn’t budge.
“Do you want some coffee?” I asked. “I have oatmeal cookies too.”
“Sure!” Lainey said.
“Follow me.” I turned and started walking toward the kitchen. I left my duster on one of the many surfaces that lined the hallway.
“There’s so much stuff in here,” Lainey said. “How do you keep track of it all?”
“It’s less important to keep track of all of it all the time than it is to keep track of it when it comes to us and when it leaves,” I said. “We only keep a digital inventory for bigger ticket or rare items. We don’t really organize anything else at that level.”
“Why?”
“One of the best parts of being an antiquarian isn’t the hunt, it’s the wandering,” I said—repeating something my mom told me when I was a kid. “In here, there will be things you find, and there will be things that find you.”
“That sounds…inefficient,” Lainey said. She sat down at the kitchen counter, and I slid the plate of oatmeal cookies in front of her.
“Deeply so,” I said. “It goes against every fiber of my being to be a wanderer, but when it comes to Toades, or antiques in general, it’s natural,” I said. “Do you like cream and sugar?”
“Yes, please,” Lainey said. I poured each of us a cup of coffee and grabbed the half-and-half out of the fridge for her. When I turned around, she was biting the inside of her cheek again. “How did you…” She trailed off.
“What’s up, Lainey?” I asked.
“How did you know that this is what you wanted to do?”
“Work at my parents’ antiques shop?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said. “Leith says that you have a marketing degree. And that you made a lot of improvements to the store to make it profitable.”
“I did.” I nodded. He did listen when I talked.
“I’m taking this Intro to Business class for college credit at school,” Lainey said.
“And we’ve been talking about supply and demand, and I think it’s really interesting.
I like the process part of all of it.” I stayed quiet and let her continue to talk.
“And I’ve never known what I wanted to do.
Now that I’m going to be a junior next year, the counselor is telling us we should start thinking about it, and it’s a lot of pressure. But I think I like business stuff.”
The last half poured out of her, and when she was done, she took a deep breath.
“Well, first of all, you don’t have to know what you want to do with the rest of your life at sixteen,” I said.
“And, honestly, it’s probably better if you don’t.
It’s good to have options. To answer your second question, I didn’t. ”
In a lot of ways, Toades was my backup plan, or at least people thought it was. But whenever my parents or my sister or my friends would tell me they could see me in one place or another, I never could. I always saw myself here, in Sweetwater Peak and at Toades.
“I’m passionate about a lot of things related to antiques—like sustainability, circular economies, and repurposing, but I’m also, like, predisposed to be an antiquarian,” I said without thinking.
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, um.” Because I can talk to ghosts, I thought. “Because of my mom,” I said.
“Is it hard to work with your family?” Lainey asked. It was a genuine question, but poor Lainey had no idea what sort of minefield she was stepping on with that one—especially right now.
“Yeah,” I said. “It is.”
“I work at the farm during the summer,” Lainey said. “Leith makes me bale hay.”
“I feel like baling hay is a rite of passage,” I said. “I used to do it at Boone’s farm too.”
“Boone Ryder?”
“The man, the myth, the legend,” I said with a smile.
Boone didn’t often come down from his land in the winter.
He preferred to stay holed up with a fire and a good book through most of it.
Every once in a while, in the winter months, he’d send a text to my family, letting us know he was okay, and he came down to our place for Christmas Day.
Now that spring was on the horizon, I’d hopefully be seeing a lot more of him. That was good. I missed him.
“Isn’t he, like, kind of scary?”
“Yes,” I said. “But not to me. Or my sister.”
“Your sister’s a photographer?”
“She is,” I said. “An extremely good one too.”
“She took the picture of Wilder that’s in the living room?”
I nodded. The mention of Wilder sparked some curiosity in me. “Can I ask you a question, Lainey?” She nodded. “What was your relationship with Wilder like? Do you remember?”
I watched Lainey’s eyes move from one side of the room to the other, thinking. “I was only eleven when he died,” she said. “But it was fine. He wasn’t around a lot, but he took care of me.”
“Yeah, I’m sure he was a busy guy.”
“I don’t have that many memories of him.
” Lainey shrugged. “But there was this one time when he brought home a basket of, like, alien-looking radishes—we got all the ugly produce—and no one else was home. He grabbed the entire lazy Susan of spices out of the kitchen cabinet and told me to come out to the back porch. We sat at the picnic table and played, like, roulette with the spices. We would spin the lazy Susan and point our finger at it, and whatever spice landed in front of our finger was the one we had to put on the radish and eat.”
“That’s a good memory,” I said.
“Yeah, I guess,” she replied, nodding. “But if you ever have the chance to eat cinnamon or cardamom on a radish, I would…not.” That made me laugh. “Are you asking because of Leith?” Lainey asked after a beat.
“Yeah,” I said honestly. “It seems like he had kind of a hard time with him.”
“I don’t know a lot about their relationship, but I do know that Leith spends more time at the house now that he’s gone,” Lainey said, and then bit her lip.
“Just so you know,” I said. “Toades is safekeeping for all kinds of secrets.”
Lainey swallowed. “I just think…I just think I like that more—having Leith in the house. Even if it means Wilder isn’t there.”
Listening to Lainey talk about Wilder was a reminder that families are the world’s most complicated ecosystem. I thought about my parents, who were objectively great people and great parents. And yet, they still frustrated me and made me angry and hurt me without trying.
Even though recently it felt like my mom was trying to hurt me on purpose, I knew she wasn’t.
My mom was so…thoughtful and wise that sometimes I forget that it was her first time living too.
As a person, I knew she deserved room for trial and error.
As her daughter, I wished for significantly less error when it came to me.
And there was also my sister, who I loved more than anything in the world but was also so different from me.
Having a twin was a very specific type of relationship.
I trusted Collins with my life, but I didn’t trust her to turn off the stove before she left the house.
I’d crawl over broken glass for her, but I wouldn’t let her borrow one of my shirts unless it was absolutely necessary.
There was no way you could stick the four of us in a house together for eighteen years and for everyone to make it out unscathed.
“I think it’s okay to feel that way,” I said.
“Really?” Lainey asked. She sounded genuinely surprised. “I always feel…bad when I think about it. I’ve never said it out loud before.”
“Really,” I said.
“I just need Leith more than I ever needed Wilder.”
“Leith needs you, too, you know,” I said. “He loves you a lot.”
Lainey took a bite of a cookie and smiled. “I’m happy you guys are together,” she said, and I felt a pinch in my chest.
“Me too,” I choked out. Great, another person on the list of people my and Leith’s breakup was going to impact.
Maybe I could still stay close to Lainey after this was all said and done.
I liked talking to her, and the fact that she wanted to come to Toades during her free period was a real testament to her character.
The relationship I was building with Lainey felt nice. Important. Like something I needed, so I didn’t want it to end when Leith and I had to.
“Do you think you could show me everything you do to manage the antiques shop?” Lainey asked. “If you have time.”
“You bet,” I said. “But it’s probably boring compared to your class.”
“We’re supposed to be finding real-life examples for a presentation,” she said. “And using the farm feels like a cop-out. Plus, I think antiques are a unique angle for supply and demand.”
“I’ve never thought much about that before, but I think you’re right,” I said. “Grab a cookie. Let’s go to the front room.”
I grabbed my coffee cup and started heading in that direction. “Clarke?” Lainey said behind me.
“Yeah?”
“I’m happy I came over.”
“Me too,” I said.