Chapter 48
FORTY-EIGHT
“Being kind is often a thankless pursuit. Do it anyway.”
—excerpt from the unpublished memoir,
Darling, I Must Say by Gloria Hayes
When Abe came home that night, I was polite but distant. Hallie modeled her new (purple) dress for him and we sat through another magic show practice. True to his word, we practiced the song but it all felt like going through the motions.
After, I didn’t stay a minute longer. I took myself over to Shady Cove to talk to Gloria.
I found her dozing in her room. Bruce the Death Cat stared at me from her bed, seemingly annoyed I had disturbed him.
My heart dropped. I knew it was foolish to think a cat could predict someone’s death, except I’d seen it happen over the years.
“You need to go away,” I told Bruce, snapping my fingers at him to get him to move. But all he did was change positions. “Don’t get any ideas. You can’t have her.”
Gloria had woken long enough to tell me she was feeling under the weather and was “taking to her bed.” And yes, she said it with all the dramatic flare one would expect.
“Go away. I need my beauty sleep.” Then she shooed me off.
I stopped by Kathy’s office on the way out. “Iris, what can I do for you?”
“Is everything okay with Gloria?”
Kathy pressed her lips together. “You know I can’t tell you anything legally.”
“I know, I just hoped you throw me a bone.”
“Can’t do it.” She stood and gave me a hug. “The best part of this job are the people. The worst part of this job is saying goodbye to those people. Just keep being her friend. That’s all she needs right now.”
The whole visit had made me anxious. Something wasn’t right and Gloria wasn’t telling me. I wasn’t ready to lose her; I needed her for at least another couple of decades.
Maybe Gloria was right. I needed to get a life. Or at least a friend who was born in the same decade as me.
Instead, I went home to an empty house. Mom was off with her friends. (Oh, the irony.) So, I took a shower, indulged in a large bowl of ice cream for dinner, and watched Sabrina, the old version from the fifties with Audrey Hepburn.
But in bed that night, I couldn’t sleep. The conversation with Abe played on a loop in my head. I’d been hurt and disappointed and angry and… I’d also been selfish. Abe had spent years without his family. I didn’t want to be part of the reason he lost them again.
My feelings for him were not more important than him having his family back in his life.
Or Hallie getting to know her grandparents. They had birthdays and holidays and silly random days to spend together. What right did I have to make him feel bad or guilty for choosing them? The truth was I didn’t.
There was Mae and Ali to consider, too. The two of them had been friends forever. It would be ridiculous for anything to come between them. But both were stubborn as mules, and they’d said things that weren’t easy to take back. One never backed down and one didn’t argue; she got revenge.
Tomorrow, I would be the grown-up I wanted to be treated like. I’d apologize to Abe. I had a stupid, silly crush. That was it. (See? I could even lie to myself.)
As for my sister, she was a reasonable person. I just needed to have a conversation with her and clear up all this. Once I explained, she’d understand.
Everything would be fine tomorrow. I was sure of it.
I was wrong. Like really, really wrong.
It started in the morning. Mae went to open the library as usual and discovered the key no longer worked.
She spent the next two hours trying to contact city maintenance, but no one would answer.
Finally, hot, tired, and livid, she marched down to city hall and found Ali in the middle of an interview she was giving with a local magazine that was doing a piece on small towns in Texas.
The two almost came to blows when Ali admitted to having the library locks changed for “safety reasons.” Not to be outplayed, Mae sat down at the table and proceeded to tell the journalist every single revenge prank Ali had ever pulled.
The sheriff was called. It was a whole thing.
“People in town are taking sides,” Ellie said as we closed the café for the day. “There’s Team Mae and Team Ali. I overheard some of the old guys arguing about it today.”
“Which side are you on?”
Ellie smiled. “Your side, of course.”
It was the nicest thing anyone had said to me all day. I turned my head quickly before she could see how much those four little words had affected me.
With less than two weeks before the pageant, the number of practices increased to three a week and an all-day practice would be this Saturday.
Each practice was a little worse than the last. We’d spent all last week learning choreography for two dance routines.
One of those routines required all of us to wear matching outfits, a weird unitard thing but with sequins, and high heels.
I seriously considered how much it would hurt if I “accidentally” had one of my legs run over by a car.
Then there was the other kind of choreography—the entering and exiting of the stage, the music cues, and an obnoxious amount of time spent reminding us to stand on the X.
The required clothing had a practice all of its own.
Two formal dresses, athletic wear, something to wear for the talent portion.
Oh, and headshots. I had to have headshots.
Good news. Athletic wear was broad enough that yoga pants counted. Bad news. Most of the women were still wearing swimsuits. I was considering showing up in a snowsuit and skis.
Gloria still found me wholly underwhelming when it came to the basics—walking, talking, standing straight.
But Hallie took to the pageant life very quickly.
She learned her dance numbers, practiced her walk, and listened carefully at each meeting.
After each practice, she was a little more confident.
I often reminded myself that I wasn’t doing this for myself, but for Hallie.
Oh, and to see Megan Tillman wipe that smirk off her face.
Abe and I might be tiptoeing around each other for the rest of the summer, but Hallie and I were solid. My favorite part of the day was hanging out with her. She’d become a bonified member of The Beautifully Broken Fan Club, too.
The week before the pageant, Gloria demanded I model the formal dress I’d found at a thrift store.
“Absolutely not,” Gloria said, horrified. “You cannot be serious.”
I looked down at myself. “What’s wrong with it?”
“It’s black and clearly two sizes too big for you.”
I shrugged. “I’m not spending money on this pageant if I can help it. It’s just a dress.” And sure, okay, it was kind of drab and plain but it had been twenty bucks. I couldn’t pass that up.
“You are hopeless,” she said. Then she told me she was “taking to her bed” again. Not because she was sick but because she was so offended by my dress.
Yessica had become the one bright spot amid these stupid pageant rehearsals.
She’d moved to Two Harts to keep her elderly aunt company and would be working as an English teacher at the high school, her first teaching job, in the fall.
Then she’d arrived in Two Harts to discover Great-Aunt Stella had signed her up for the pageant.
“It will be a good way to meet people,” she’d said.
Like me, Yessica was not thrilled about being here. “I’m short, chubby, and a klutz. Go ahead, put me in high heels and make me dance. What could possibly go wrong?”
To be fair, even in high heels, Yessica was a much better dancer than me.
“She’s going to say my name wrong,” Yessica whispered. We were at the end of yet another meeting and Casey, our fearless leader, was letting each of us know when our assigned practice session for our talent would be on Saturday.
“Jessica,” she called.
“Told you,” she whispered.
“You’re on the schedule for practice at two thirty. What were you doing again? Do you need any additional props?”
“Yessica.”
Casey looked up from her ever-present clipboard, perplexed. “What is a Yessica?”
“It’s my name. It’s Yessica. You called me Jessica.”
Casey blinked rapidly. I worried her fake eyelashes might detach from her lids and fly across the room. “Oh, right. Yessica. What is your talent again?”
“I’ll be playing the viola.”
“The violin?”
“The viola. Kind of the same thing as a violin, but not.”
“Right. The violin.” Casey jotted it down and moved on to me.
“And lastly, Iris, what will you be doing?”
“Singing.”
A few of the other women, the ones who’d gone to school with me, who’d lived here in Two Harts their entire lives like me, turned on their stools and stared at me.
Casey cleared her throat delicately. “I wasn’t aware you were a singer.”
“Oh, you know, I’m a woman of many talents.” None of those talents were remotely musical, but this was what it came down to. Me. Singing. In front of the entire town.
At the end of class, Yessica gathered all of her things.
For such a small woman, she took up all the space.
Notebooks and pens with objects taped to them (so they were harder to lose), snacks, water bottles.
Last week, she brought a portable fan. Casey told her she couldn’t bring it back.
She told Casey that she had a medical condition that required access to a fan at all times.
Casey wasn’t bold enough to ask her what the condition was.
If she had, Yessica was prepared to make something up on the spot.
“That woman knows my name.” She stuffed her notebook in her bag and paused. “She does not like me.”
I slid my phone into my back pocket and waited for her to finish. “Join the club.”
“This town is something else. Everyone knows everyone, don’t they? I asked about a dry cleaner in town while I was at the grocery store yesterday and the cashier looked at me all suspicious-like and said, ‘Why do you need a dry cleaners?’ I think that was pretty self-explanatory from the question.”
I laughed. “It takes a minute for new people to get accepted around here. Think of your first few years here as an interview of sorts.”
“A few years?”
“You’re right. That’s a little low. Maybe five to ten years.”
We slipped out of the classroom and through a side exit door. Someone shouted my name three seconds before a little purple blurb slammed into my side and started talking all in the same breath. “Hi, Iris. Guess what?”
“I have no idea, but nice tiara.” I adjusted the bejeweled crown. It was, of course, also purple.
“Thank you. Dad said to dress for the job I want.”
“I meant doctor or lawyer, not a member of the royal family.” Abe came up behind Hallie. He placed a hand on her shoulder. She tilted her head back and grinned up at him.
Yessica laughed.
“Yessica, this is Abe and Hallie.” I carefully avoided meeting Abe’s gaze. “Yessica is competing in the pageant, too. She just moved here. She’s going to be teaching at the high school in the fall.”
“It’s nice to meet you,” she said, blushing prettily as she shook Abe’s hand. A surge of jealousy seeing the two of them next to each other rushed through me. There wouldn’t be any complications if the two of them dated, would there?
“You, too,” Abe said. He turned to me. “Do you have a minute?”
“I’ll wait for you right here.” Yessica grinned, her eyes darting from Abe to me.
Abe walked to a small group of trees between the parking lot and the baseball field, not too far away from where Hallie waited. We faced each other and I noticed how tired he looked. His hair was messy, like he’d shoved his fingers through it a million times.
“I’m sorry,” I blurted before he could speak. “I was a jerk. I wasn’t thinking about how all this could affect your life. I mean really, I’m nothing to you. I’m just… someone who watches your daughter.”
“No, that’s the problem,” he said, his voice low and fierce. He took a step closer. “You are something to me. I don’t want to pretend you aren’t.”
My breath caught at the intensity of his words.
I wanted to throw myself in his arms. But I could feel the weight of twenty pairs of eyes behind me hoping to catch a piece of gossip like a dog at a barbecue.
Jerks. Never mind that our sisters were determined to burn the town down over even a possibility of us.
“I don’t know what to do.”
“Me neither.”
“Dad,” Hallie yelled behind me. “Can we go yet?”
Neither of us moved, his gaze holding mine. My chest tightened and that silver string tugged hard, pulling me to him.
Sometimes the most important things aren’t ever said out loud. This felt like one of those moments.
Clearing my throat, I took a step backwards. “See you tomorrow then.”
I turned and walked back to where Yessica was waiting. I could feel his eyes on my back the whole way.
Yessica grabbed my arm. “When were you going to tell me about him? I thought we were friends.”
We were friends? I guess we were. I had a friend who was not Gloria. Look at that.
“Why would I tell you about him?”
“Hell-oooo. That kind of chemistry between you and the super-hot guy? I want all the details. All of them.” She started tugging me toward the parking lot. “Come on. We’re going to go get dinner and you are telling me everything.”
So, we had dinner and I told her every single detail. Because that’s what friends did.