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At the grocery store I pushed my cart through the aisles and tried to remember what was on the list I’d left on the kitchen table at home. I wasn’t paying close attention to where I was going, which was why I nearly ran over a little kid who was spinning out of control in the candy section.
I recognized a tantrum in progress and meant to steer my cart past him, but stopped when I saw his mother. “Mandy?”
She turned. “Oh, my God! Tesla? Wow. Long time, huh?”
Mandy had been one of my best friends in Lancaster before my parents dropped their mutual basket and my life had spun into something else. I hadn’t seen or heard from her in years. To find her here now, with a child, was surprising—but good, I discovered, when she clung to me in a hug that left her kid staring with goggle eyes.
“You look fantastic!” She beamed, taking me in. “You haven’t changed at all. Wow.”
“You have.” I grinned, pointing at the boy now clinging to her leg. “Yours?”
She lifted him, pride all over her face. “Yep. This is Tyler. Say hi.”
Tyler buried his face in his mom’s neck. I wasn’t offended. “So … you live around here?”
“Yep. My husband and I moved here a few months ago. He’s working for the state. And I stay home with the kiddo here. How about you?”
“I work at Morningstar Mocha. You probably don’t know it.”
“Sure I do! Sure. I’ll have to stop in sometime. Are you still living with…?” She let the question trail off.
“Vic? Yeah. And his wife, Elaine. Their two kids. Cap moved out, though.”
“Oh, Cap.” Mandy laughed. “How’s Cappy doing?”
“He’s doing great. Really great.” It was hard to believe that once we’d spent almost every day blabbering each others’ ears off, and now we were reduced to chitchat in front of a display of candy bars. “Listen, stop in to the Mocha. Really. It would be great to catch up with you.”
“I’ll do that,” she said, even as I think we both knew she probably wouldn’t.
Time had passed. Life had changed. She had a husband and a kid, and I was still single. Stuff like that gets between people, even if the years hadn’t.
“I have to run. This one’s about to melt down. You take care, Tesla. So good to see you.”
“You, too.” I watched her go.
I’d never wanted what Cap and I had always called “the front door,” from that old Adam Ant song “A Place in the Country.” The front door was marriage, kids, a mortgage, a dog. But there was envy again, that funny thing. It can creep up on you without warning, hit you over the head with a snow shovel. Envy can taste like the candy you buy because you suddenly crave something sweet.
Chapter 7
Here’s a story I never told Meredith.
At the end of my junior year of high school and Cap’s eighth grade, our father walked in on our mother fucking one of her colleagues from the college where they both worked. Apparently, even in an open marriage you can still be cheating if your partner doesn’t know what you’ve been up to, because my dad promptly packed up his stuff and left without telling any of us where he’d gone. With no more Compound to retreat to in the summer, my mom decided to take a cross-country camping trip with her new lover in an ancient Volkswagen Rabbit.
While Cap and I had no problems with her new boyfriend, there was no way we were going to subject ourselves to traveling across the United States in the back of a Rabbit. My mom, who could certainly have been called a free spirit or even flighty, was nevertheless the more responsible of our parents and wasn’t about to leave us living alone even though at seventeen and fourteen we were capable of taking care of ourselves. She insisted we go with them. We insisted we didn’t want to. So I did what any red-blooded teenage kid would do when faced with what promised to be a certain kind of hell.
I ran away.
I didn’t have to go very far, and I took my brother with me. I knew how to find Vic. I hoped I could count on him. We showed up on his doorstep with little more than the clothes on our backs and a couple hundred bucks I’d pinched from my mom’s dresser.
As it turned out, I could. Cap and I moved in with Vic, who might’ve been surprised to see us but didn’t let that stop him. My mother ended up staying in California when her lover’s car broke down. She still lived there. My dad turned up in Brazil, of all places. He’d found another community like The Compound where he could live full-time while teaching English in a nearby town.
Vic had been there for me when I needed him. It had nothing to do with sex—not unless he’d fooled around with Cappy, too, and I was one hundred percent positive that had never happened. It had everything to do with the sort of guy Vic had always been.
And I envied him.
Meredith had told me I went for what I wanted. That I had to answer to nobody and could do whatever I liked. In a way, she was right. I mean, I had my job, and my responsibilities as part of Vic and Elaine’s household. I had bills and debts. But I didn’t have convictions, not really. Nobody would ever come to me when they were in trouble. Hell, I was twenty-six and still living in a basement, not because I couldn’t get out and live on my own but because staying there was easier than moving out.
Not exactly a picture of someone wild.
When I got to work, Meredith was convincing people to tell stories again. I knew it the second I walked in the front door and saw her sitting at her favorite table with her head tipped back in laughter. I knew most of the others by face, not necessarily by name, but everyone looked as if they were having a grand old time.
She waved at me. “There’s our Tesla!”
I lifted a mittened hand in response to the raised coffee cups. Meredith’s smile made the cold outside seem faraway, but I didn’t stop at her table. She was busy talking; I had to get busy working.
“What is it about her, anyway?” Darek said when I rounded the counter.
I pretended not to know what he meant. “Who? Meredith?”
“Yeah. Queen Meredith, sitting over there with her … what do you call them?”
“Subjects?” I offered, shrugging out of my coat and hanging it on the rack in the hall leading to the storage room.
Darek shook his head. “Minions.”
“That makes her sound like some sort of evil overlord.”
“Yeah. What is it about her?”
I paused, thinking. “I don’t know. She’s just … I don’t know. Sometimes you don’t, Darek.”
He made a noise instead of an answer. I looked across the room at Meredith, whose laughter had trilled to catch my attention. She ran perfectly manicured fingers through her honey-blond hair and it settled just right.
Again, envy.
With the late afternoon sun slanting through the glass, she was so beautiful it made my heart hurt. Not just pretty. Not just sexy, though she was surely that with that mouth, those eyes, that laugh. She was like something set up high on a shelf, made to be admired and adored. Coveted, but never gained.
I must’ve sighed, because Darek gave me a sympathetic look. “You’re into her.”
I slanted a glance his way but wouldn’t gaze at him full-on. “Look at her.”
“Oh, I am.” He put his hands on his hips. “She wants people to look at her.”
“Who doesn’t?” I tied the strings of my green apron tight around my waist and took a few minutes to run my fingers through my hair to stand it on end after it had been flattened by my knit cap. “I mean, don’t we all want people to notice us?”
“I guess so.”
I stared at her, then at him. “Don’t you like her?”
“I like her just fine.” He grinned. “Married ladies are my specialty. But you saw her first.”
I laughed. Darek was a lot of talk. In all the time we’d worked together I hadn’t known him to have a single fling with a married lady. “We’re just friends. She’s not … you know.”
“And you are?”
I shrugged and checked over the desserts in the case, noting which would need to be pulled later if they didn’t sell. “Sometimes. Once in a while. Discriminately.”
“How many?”
I turned. “What?”
Darek appeared way too intrigued. “How many girls?”
“This place,” I told him with just the barest sourness in my tone, “has really become, like, this hotbed of prurience.”
“Whose fault is that?” Darek asked, with a lift of his chin toward Meredith’s table.
“Pffft. You can’t blame her for everything. You’re the one grilling me on my sex life! I already told Meredith—”
“Yeah?” Again, he seemed too interested, all lolling tongue and wide eyes.
I put one fist to my mouth, the other at my cheek, and made a cranking motion. “Roll up your tongue. It wasn’t about girl-girl action.”
Darek appeared only faintly disappointed before perking up again. “Then what was it about?”
I wasn’t going to tell him about the Murphys. Dredging up that past stuff had already wreaked a bit of havoc on my brain. “None of your business. God, do I grill you about your sex life?”
“You could,” he said. “So … I’m just curious, Tesla, that’s all.”
“About my lesbian history?” I had to laugh at him, so typical male. “I had one serious girlfriend. We dated for about four months before she dumped me for a guitar player in a folk rock band who wore wife-beaters all year round and had a tattoo of the feminine symbol on her twat.”
His look said it all.
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s what I thought, too.”
Darek made a face. “That’s it? That’s all you got?”
“Look,” I said, suddenly disgruntled. “What did you think I had? Some long and lurid inventory of lesbian dalliances I’d trot out for you like a laundry list, complete with descriptions? A ‘Desperate But Not Serious’ sort of thing going on? Who with and how many times?”
He totally failed on the Adam Ant reference. “Huh?”
I sighed. “Never mind.”
“Sorry.” Darek frowned. “I just, you know. Thought maybe it was more exciting than that.”
I sighed again, this time in exasperation. “Why?”
“Because you just seem like you’ve had an exciting life, Tesla, that’s all. Jesus. I’m sorry!”
Wild child. I touched my throat, felt the pendant in the shape of a rainbow with a star on the end. Today I wore a black shirt with a picture of the cover of the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers on the front—some dude’s crotch. Black leggings with rainbow leg warmers. Black ballet flats. I had glitter in my hair, but so what? Unconventional, maybe, but not that exciting.
“Well,” I said, “I’m really not.”
Darek looked over the front counter to the group of laughing customers. “Maybe you should tell her that.”
“Tell her what?” I frowned and wished for someone to come and order something, or for Joy to pop out of the back to yell at us. Anything to keep this conversation from continuing. “Oh, that. Well. It’s just a crush. It’s not like I haven’t had them before. They go away, Darek.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“You’ve never had a crush?” I rolled my eyes. “Please. I see how you look at that girl who comes in here, the one with the red hair.”
“Yeah, she’s hot. But it’s not a crush.”
“Whatever.” I waved a hand. “You gonna tell her you like her? Ask her out, maybe?”
“She has a boyfriend.”
“So you get it,” I told him. “It’s better just to crush in silence.”
He didn’t look happy about that, but he didn’t argue with me, either. Then finally one of Meredith’s admirers broke off from the group long enough to come up and order a slice of pie and another latte, so both of us had something to do and we didn’t have to talk anymore.
The rush helped, too, leaving both of us so busy we didn’t have time for deep and soul-searching conversations about the sad state of our love lives. By the time we’d gone through that, I figured Meredith would’ve left, but when I took a break to make the rounds of the shop, clearing away crumpled napkins and left-behind mugs, she was still sitting in her spot.
The sun had moved, and she was alone. She was still beautiful. Something pensive in her face as she tapped away at her keyboard made me pause. She’d pushed her hair behind her ears, in which she wore simple and elegant pearls I knew had to be real despite the size. Not Jangle Bangles, either. She might sell that stuff, but she didn’t wear it. She had faint lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth, but they didn’t take anything away from her beauty.
She caught me staring. “Hey.”
“Oh. Hey. You’re still here. Can’t get enough of the caramel crunch, huh?” I gestured toward the row of self-serve carafes.
“I’m fully caffeinated.” She showed me her empty mug. “But I got my money’s worth today, I’ll tell you that.”
“Joy’s going to charge you rent,” I said with a glance over my shoulder to the counter. Joy was serving Eric, actually giving him a bit of a flirtatious smile. “Jeez, that guy can make even Joy tingly.”
Meredith closed her laptop. “It’s all in the smile. I think he makes everyone a little tingly.”
“Yeah,” I said fondly, watching Eric take his plate and mug to his favorite table and lay out his paper.
“You missed some good stories today.” Meredith leaned back in her seat. “The things people get up to, you’d never believe it.”
“I’m sure I would. Want me to take that for you?” I pointed to her empty mug and the plate beside it. “How was the apple crumb?”
“Tesla,” she murmured.
I stopped with my hand halfway to the table, caught like the Tin Man with his ax up. “Hmm?”
“We should do something.”
I forced myself to take the dishes, though they rattled when I lifted them. “Like what?”
