Chapter 15
FIFTEEN
“Picnics are wonderful…
as long as they are held in restaurants and there is wine service.”
—excerpt from the unpublished memoir,
Darling, I Must Say by Gloria Hayes
“Did you know we’re sitting in the presence of a hero?” Ali asked. All of us were crowded around the patio table which was covered in enough food to feed a small island nation.
“Who would that be?” Chris asked. His plate needed another plate to hold the overflow. The man ate… a lot.
“Didn’t you hear? A car drove right through the front window of the new coffee shop a couple of weeks ago.” Ali pointed at me with her fork. “Our own little Iris saved a baby.”
“I didn’t save a baby,” I muttered as I picked out the tomatoes from my garden salad. Mae shot me a disapproving look. But she could just get over it. I wasn’t all that picky, but I couldn’t stand the texture of tomatoes.
“Yes, you did. Grabbed the baby just in time.”
The truth was I’d stopped by the place to get an iced latte and had seen Sylvie Myers sitting at a table staring blankly at the wall in front of her.
Beside her, she’d rolled a stroller back and forth with one hand like she was on autopilot.
Sylvie had been a couple years ahead of me in school and this baby, a girl, I think, was her first. Judging by the wrinkled shirt with suspicious stains on both shoulders and the dark circles under her eyes, I would say it wasn’t going well.
“Sylvie, how ya doing?” I’d slid into the seat across from her and peeked at the tiny sleeping baby wrapped in a pink blanket with little ladybugs on it.
The two-month-old was out cold. Her pacifier had been slowly slipping from her mouth but the second it was about to fall, she’d jolted awake and began to suck furiously on it.
She did this over and over like a game of pacifier chicken.
“Iris.” Sylvie had slid out of the chair. “I have to go to the bathroom. You can watch her, right? That would be okay?” I wasn’t sure if she was asking me or convincing herself.
“Sure.” I’d smiled reassuringly. “Just remember to come back.”
“Oh. Yeah, I will.” She’d shuffled back. “I think. Probably.”
“That was a joke,” I’d said to her back. “If you’re not back in five minutes, we’re coming after you.”
Approximately three point four seconds later, the kid had lost her war with the pacifier.
She’d jolted awake and blinked at me with murky blue eyes like she was stunned to see someone other than her mother.
She’d opened her mouth and started wailing.
How that sound came out of such a tiny creature had to be magic. But, like, black magic.
“Okay. Someone’s a drama queen.” After she’d refused to take the pacifier back, I’d had no choice but to pick her up.
I had just set her little head on my shoulder where she’d kindly screamed in my ear when a Cadillac blasted through the front of the store, sending window glass and coffee mugs flying.
Out of instinct, I turned away and covered the baby with my body.
The car had come so close to our table, it had hit the stroller and sent it tearing across the room.
So, I guess I’d saved her by accident.
“You’re kidding,” Mae said. “I heard about it, but I had no idea about saving a baby. Iris, you didn’t say anything about that.”
“Again, not a big deal.” I squirmed in my chair, hating how I could feel all their eyes on me.
“Seems like a pretty big deal,” Theo, Ali’s husband, said. He was a quiet guy with patience in abundance and kind blue eyes. He and Abe had been best friends since they were kids. It was Theo who Abe kept in contact with for the years he was gone.
They were all staring at me like I was a performing monkey at a circus. Except Abe, who was sitting next to me and looking more thoughtful than wildly impressed.
“Can we please talk about something else?”
Theo took pity on me and turned to Chris. “Are you ready for the big move?”
“We’re getting there. I’m leaving in about a week to head up. While I’m gone, all of you need to make sure Mae isn’t falling apart.”
“I’m not going to fall apart,” Mae said, frowning. “I’m going to enjoy all the quiet around here. No video games. No sportsball on the television. No one calling me Sprinkles. I can’t wait.”
Smiling, he pressed a kiss to the side of her head. “Sprinkles, I love you, too.”
“We’ll keep her busy,” Ali said quickly. “It’s going to be an epic summer.”
Everyone started talking at once, Ali and Mae making plans for get-togethers. Theo and Chris discussed the upcoming football season.
Abe shifted in his seat next to me. His shoulder brushed my arm. “A hero, huh?”
“Not even close. Right place, right time is more like it.”
“So humble.”
I jabbed him with my elbow under the guise of laying a napkin on my lap. He huffed a laugh. “You think you can hurt me? Did you forget Ali is my sister?”
“What are you two whispering about down there?” Ali asked.
Abe straightened. “Iris is watching Hallie in the afternoons now. Just had a question.”
“You didn’t tell me that,” Mae said while she was currently wrestling Lulu to keep her shirt on. She was losing.
I shrugged. “I just started on Wednesday. I haven’t seen you. Sorry.”
“I’m glad that worked out,” Ali said. “Iris is fun. Right, Lulu?”
Lulu, only one arm in her shirt, grinned as she felt the attention shift to her. “Eye-bis letted me have ice cream when she comes over.”
“That last time, you did let her eat her weight in ice cream,” Chris said.
“…and then she got sick at two in the morning,” Mae said.
“That’s the best part of being an aunt. I get to hang out with Lulu and then I get to give Lulu back to you. I regret nothing.”
“I can’t wait until you have kids,” Mae said.
“Oh, really?”
“Just wait.” She wagged a finger in my direction.
Ali cleared her throat and changed the subject. “You know, Iris is one of the most dependable people I know,” Ali said.
“I am?”
Ali nodded. “You always follow through with your promises, you show up when you say you will, and you work hard.”
“Whatever,” I said, not making eye contact with anyone, lest they see how much her words meant to me.
Having a father who broke every promise, never showed up, and avoided work like he was allergic to it had taught me something: I did not want to be like him.
Still, there was a part of me that always worried people would see me as flaky or unreliable because I was his daughter, so I tried twice as hard to not be.
“I know about all that time you spend at Shady Cove,” Ali said.
“Everyone knows that,” Mae said.
I slumped in my seat. “Do I have any secrets in this town?”
“Nope.” Ali grinned.
“Oh, Iris,” Mae said. “We found the cutest little house in Austin. It’s in a great location and it was remodeled last year. The bathroom has a clawfoot tub.”
Not this. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.
“What’s this?” Ali asked.
“Yeah, about the house—” I started. Under the table, my leg bounced double time.
“Chris and I were thinking of buying a house in Austin as investment property and then Iris can live in it while she’s there for school. As a caretaker,” Mae explained.
“You’re buying your sister a house?” Ali glared at Abe. “You’ve never bought me a house before.”
“I’ll get right on that,” Abe said.
“No one is buying me a house,” I said, a little too loudly. I shot Mae a pleading look. “Please.”
I really, really, really needed to tell her I wasn’t going to Austin.
Why was I being such a wuss about this? Me!
One time, a guy came to the café and started hitting on Ellie.
Despite the very clear “I am not interested” signals she was giving him and in addition to the wedding ring and, oh, telling him to his face, “I am not interested,” he would not take the hint.
I’d had no problem confronting the jerk, got right in his face and told him he was no longer welcome.
When that didn’t work, I literally grabbed him by his ear and all but pulled him to the front door. Hadn’t even broken a sweat.
But telling my sister about Austin seemed insurmountable.
I stood up abruptly with my half-empty plate. “I’m going to do the dishes.”
Chris frowned. “You don’t have to do that.”
“I don’t mind,” I said, blindly snatching up plates and bowls. I was such a chicken. A spineless, weak chicken.
Once in the kitchen. I pulled up a playlist and began filling the sink with warm water.
“You need any help?”
I jumped at the sound of Abe’s voice. “You scared me.”
“Sorry. I wanted to check on you.” He set a stack of dirty dishes on the counter next to the sink and leaned on the large granite kitchen island. “You seemed upset.”
“I’m fine.” I turned back to the sink and snatched up a plate to pre-wash. “Everything is fine.”
“Liar,” he whispered, but he sidled up next to me and held out a hand. I studied him while he waited patiently. Finally, I handed over a plate, and he loaded it in the dishwasher. We worked in comfortable silence.
“What’s Shady Cove?” he finally asked.
I side-eyed him. “It’s a nursing home.”
“You spend a lot of time there?”
“Yeah. I had to do community service in high school. After that, I just kept going back.”
“Why?”
“Because I like it and I guess it made me sad to see how lonely so many of the residents were.” I paused.
“And it made me mad. We throw old people out when they aren’t useful enough anymore.
Imagine that’s how you spend the last years of your life, stuck in a nursing home, and no one comes to visit you ever. ” I shook my head. “It’s not fair.”
He studied me as I scrubbed a glass. “You’re pretty passionate about it, aren’t you?”
“Sometimes I wish I could wave a wand and make things better for them.”
“Ali was right. You are nice.”
“Stop calling me that.”
He grinned. I handed over a glass and ignored the fluttering of my pulse when our fingers brushed. Again, we fell into silence.
“So, Austin in the fall, huh?” Abe asked.
I laughed without humor. “That’s the plan.”
“Just not the plan you want?”
Slowly, I turned to him, my hands dripping water on the tiled floor.
Was he living in my head? How did he pick up on this stuff when even my family didn’t seem to?
My chest tightened with the desire to blurt everything out.
Maybe I could? He was like a neutral party so he wouldn’t give me commands under the guise of advice.
He wouldn’t be disappointed in me. More than that, he was easy to talk to.
There was a quiet steadiness to him that appealed to me far more than I was willing to admit.
“I was accepted into a counseling program. It’s what I always thought I wanted to do but…” I shook my head. “I turned it down.”
He grabbed a dishtowel, wiped the water up by my feet, and stood. “Did you have another offer somewhere else?”
“No. Mainly because I have no idea what I want to do with my life.” I handed the last plate to him to load and dried my hands on a dishtowel.
Silence followed, but there was an edge to it that hadn’t been there before. To distract myself, I wiped down the counters. Abe stuffed his hands in his pockets and stared down at his shoes.
“So, you could be anywhere in the fall?” he asked quietly.
“Yeah.” I paused. “I guess so.” I didn’t want to be anywhere else, but he wasn’t wrong.
“And Mae doesn’t know?”
“Mae was basically my second mom growing up and, I don’t know,” I said, staring into the sink. “I always felt like a burden. She didn’t really get to do all the teenage stuff that other kids did. She always had me to watch over. I don’t want to disappoint her.”
“Hey,” he said softly and waited patiently for me to meet his gaze. “I understand what that feels like.”
I thought of the stories I heard about him and his father. “I guess you probably do.”
“Something I learned about ten years too late is that I was too much in my own head to talk to my dad back then, really talk to him. I was too stubborn to go to him first and apologize for being a stupid kid. Maybe he would have admitted he was sorry for making me feel like a disappointment. It probably still would have ended with us yelling at each other but at least I’d have been honest.” As he rubbed the back of his neck with a hand, the black images on his arm moved as he flexed.
“So, what you’re saying is that I should expect a lot of arguing when I tell her? This is not making me feel better.”
“You’re only in charge of how you act, not how other people act.”
“Okay, now that had to have been from a fortune cookie.”
His grin was quick and deadly. That dimple… “Probably.”