Chapter Five
Five
A Pearl of Wisdom
from Isabel Espinoza
“Remember to ask the important questions early in new relationships. As in ‘What’s your credit score?’”
Juliet
My first morning in Forget-Me-Not had passed by quicker than I could’ve imagined. Between walking Katy to camp, driving Tenn to the doctor, and bathing the stray puppy, half the day was over.
I was currently on a mission to pick up Tenn’s prescription and a few groceries. Tenn had given me use of his truck, his credit card, and directions that made no sense to me, like “Turn left at Wooly Joe’s place” and “Just past the Lickety Split, you’ll see the turnoff for Snug’s.”
So, I’d simply typed the store’s address into the GPS on my phone, which now seemed to be working just fine, and let it guide me.
“Who just gives a stranger their credit card? Is he senile?”
My sister Amy’s reproving voice carried clearly through my earbuds, reminding me why my brother Eric—the oldest sibling at thirty-nine—often called her a stick-in-the-mud.
She questioned everything. Everyone. I wasn’t sure if she’d always been that way or if it was a result of her working in the PR industry, where she’d perfected the art of spinning a lie—and spotting one, too.
I had the feeling her eleven-year-old twins, identical girls who were about to start middle school, were not going to enjoy their teenage years.
“He’s perfectly normal,” I said. “Adorable, even.”
I’d left Tenn back at the house with the puppy, which Katy had lobbied to keep. Tallulah, however, had overruled that notion immediately. Plans were already in place to post FOUND notices with local online groups and hang posters around the neighborhood this evening.
Amy said, “Maybe he’s luring you into some sort of trap. A cougar trap.”
“That would be an older woman luring a much younger man.”
“Same difference, really.”
“Nope.”
“Why are you being so argumentative, Juliet?”
Amy hated to be wrong, so she often went on the offensive to divert attention from her blatant … wrongness. I suspected she’d always been that way, but I could only vouch for the last ten years since I couldn’t remember anything from before I started college.
“Who’s the one being argumentative?” I asked, sweet as could be.
She huffed, but there was an air of good-naturedness to it.
The heart of the town was full of aging brick storefronts that lined both sides of the street. A hardware store, a florist, a coffee shop, a breakfast café. Many of the buildings could use a little TLC, but on the whole, the area gave off an air of lived-in charm.
Once through the main business district, I passed a fire station, the elementary school, and a large park that had a banner touting the upcoming Flour Festival. Then there was the Forget-Me-Not Library.
Perfectly inviting, it was set back from the street by an expansive lawn and elaborate flower beds. The building stretched wide and had a brick-and-stone facade, columns, and massive windows. As I imagined the rows and rows of books inside, I was sorely tempted to pull in but kept on driving.
“Oh!” I said to Amy. “There’s the Lickety Split.” It was an ice cream shop, built to look like a soft-serve cone, complete with a vanilla-swirl roof. “Did Mom and Dad take us out for ice cream much as kids?”
I, of course, couldn’t remember. Doctors were hopeful my early memories would return one day. Given time. Given continued healing.
I was starting to have my doubts.
“Mom would be horrified you asked,” Amy said. “She might actually keel over.”
One good thing about never-wanted-to-be-wrong Amy was how easily she was sidetracked. She loved answering questions about my past because I couldn’t question her accuracy. Who even knew if half the things she’d told me were true?
“So, no?” I asked.
“They most definitely did not take us out for ice cream.”
I could have guessed that. My parents were both health nuts. The kind of people who woke up before the sun to go to the gym, kept track of macros—long before it was the trendy thing to do—and ate an all-natural diet.
“And forget buying ice cream from the grocery store. Not with all those pesky preservatives. No popsicles, no sherbet, no nothing. Every once in a while, Mom would try to make homemade oat milk ice cream, but it always turned out more like soup, so then she’d put granola and berries on it and try to call it a parfait.
It was Grandpa who’d sneak us out to get cones at the Whippy Hut, then swear us to secrecy. ”
During the last three months, I’d been told, over and over again, that Grandpa, my mom’s father, had moved in with us not too long after I’d been born.
He’d been a widower for quite a while at that point, and after recuperating from a stroke caused by stress, he decided to sell his insurance business and retire early to spend more time with family.
My parents had built an addition, a full in-law apartment, onto our house so he could still have separation, peace, from the rest of us.
However, more often than not, in his free time he could be found alongside me or my younger twin brothers.
By the time I was school age, he’d taken on the role of caregiver, babysitter, and fill-in parent—which, it seemed, had been desperately needed because my parents were workaholics.
My mom, Lydia, had a PhD in nursing and worked as a nurse scientist doing research for a cancer foundation. My dad, Chris, was a biomedical engineer who regularly worked twelve-hour days at a medical device company.
According to my family, my grandfather had been more than happy to take on his new role, and I could hardly believe it was less stressful than his career had been.
The twins had been—and still were—a handful.
Amy added, “Do you remember the Whippy Hut? It caught fire when you were in high school.”
“I don’t. Cute name, though.”
“Oh, it was great. Before it burned down, I mean. That was tragic. You’d always get a chocolate cone with a chocolate shell.”
I smiled. Apparently, I’d always loved chocolate. “What did Grandpa get?”
“He liked to get a mash-up, which was ice cream mixed with candy or cookies or brownies or sprinkles. He had a sweet tooth. Just like us.”
I’d been told my grandpa and I had been especially inseparable.
Yet I wouldn’t even have any idea what he looked like if it weren’t for all the pictures my family had shown me, trying to jog old memories loose.
Amy had even taken the time to upload family albums online so I could access them anytime I wanted.
There were hundreds of photos of us together, him and me.
Smiling and happy. I didn’t recall any of them.
The lightning strike had stolen all my memories of him, not only the ones from my childhood. Doctors couldn’t quite explain the discrepancy.
Well, that wasn’t quite true.
One doctor—a psychotherapist—suggested I was suppressing the memories in order to forget just how much Grandpa had meant to me in an effort to protect my heart, my mind.
Every night I studied photos of my grandfather, of us, hoping to remember something, and last night, for the first time since the lightning strike, I’d dreamed of him. A dream so detailed that I woke up with tears in my eyes.
“Don’t tell Hunter and Jordan about the credit card,” Amy advised. “They’ll want to borrow it and buy something stupid.”
“I won’t.” My twin brothers were minor league baseball players, both on the same Colorado team, and often used their sibling relationship—and good looks—for social media fodder. The boys loved the attention. Their social media numbers were astronomical.
They’d also been in my dream last night. We’d all been much younger—the twins around three years old and me around five. Grandpa had taken us on a picnic. It had felt so … real.
“Hey, Ames? Do you know if Grandpa ever took the boys and me on a picnic at a park? There would’ve been stuffed animals involved.
Mine was a small, light brown polar bear, and the twins had matching blue teddy bears.
The park had a merry-go-round and a splash pad and there was a big tree that was snapped in half and the boys kept crying because they felt bad that the tree was broken and—”
“Juliet!” she shrieked. “Are you remembering things?”
As I parked the truck at the far end of the Snug’s lot, I winced at the high pitch of her tone. The excitement in it. “No, I mean, I don’t think so. I dreamed it. Last night.”
“That wasn’t a dream. It was a memory. Grandpa called it a teddy bear picnic. There used to be a picture. It was of you and the boys with your bears somewhere in front of that fallen tree, but the boys destroyed it because you could tell they’d been crying. Your bear’s name was—”
Milk.
“—Milk,” she said. “Stupidest name for a bear in the history of bear names, by the way, but there was no swaying you. So stubborn. I mean, come on, the bear was brown.”
My heart raced. I’d remembered the name of the bear. My voice was gravelly, filled with emotion that I was trying to keep in check as I said, “Have you not heard of chocolate milk?”
I’d remembered.
I wiped tears from my eyes. This was a huge moment. Enormous.
Amy adopted her smarty-pants tone. “Well, that wasn’t its name, was it?”
I didn’t have the energy to argue, my mind too wrapped up in the possibility the dream had been a piece of my past that had been missing for months.
“What else have you dreamed about lately?” she asked eagerly.
“Nothing. I don’t usually remember my dreams.”
Which was one of the reasons the dream from last night had stood out.
“Well, if you have another one, let me know.”
“I will. But hey, don’t tell anyone about this, okay? I don’t want to get anybody’s hopes up.”
“O-kay,” she said in a way that told me I’d soon be receiving a flurry of text messages.
I held back a sigh. From what I’d pieced together of my upbringing, I’d been a somewhat stereotypical middle child. Forgotten, mostly.