I'll Stay Page 11

  I still wanted that. I bet Phoebe wanted that, too, despite being a hero. In charge of keeping her brother alive, she was the only person he trusted. What an amazing, precocious little girl, people said. Was I supposed to be her? Did my mother model me on her, or vice versa?

  One day when I was twelve, I snuck a copy of Listen into my bedroom and read it in one sitting. I was so surprised at the things my mother lifted from my life and put in the book (did Phoebe really have to throw up on the hairdresser, too?) and horrified at the ending, at what Whit did to himself, that I threw the book across the room. After that I didn’t always want the comparisons and expectations. I wasn’t Phoebe. But now, staring at Lee, I felt a horrible plummeting sensation in my chest. Phoebe and I truly did have something in common, after all. We’d both let down the people who had trusted us most. Phoebe wasn’t a hero, after all, and neither was I.

  I brought my hand to the side of my face. I knew what Lee was asking. But how could she still want me to help her after what I’d done? “Oh, Lee. I feel so bad.”

  She ran her tongue over her scar again. Her voice was full of anguish as she whispered, “The other day Ducky ran away from me.”

  A sob filled my chest. “We all feel so bad about what happened.”

  “You don’t have to feel that way.”

  “But we do. I do. Something terrible happened to you, Lee. And I—”

  She shook her head. “But I asked for it. I stayed and—”

  “Don’t say that! This isn’t your fault!” I said. What was she insinuating? “I shouldn’t have left you. Together maybe we could have—”

  “I told you to go. I don’t blame you for that.”

  Her eyebrows dipped into a frown and something foul settled in the back of my throat. I said, “But you blame me for something.”

  She stared at me with her head pulled back and her face muscles taut. But then her shoulders fell forward and her lips began to tremble and there was so much pain etched in her cheekbones and eyes that I suddenly felt as if I couldn’t breathe again. Lee was my closest friend. Meeting her was one of the best things that had ever happened to me. And now look at us.

  “I don’t know what I did. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I can’t stand feeling like this!” I burst into tears.

  Lee’s lips stopped quivering and her face relaxed but as she stared at me I didn’t think she really saw me. She was zoning out again, floating, like a piece of driftwood in the water. Like a boat untethered from the dock. Finally, she said, her voice a monotone and a whisper, “Can we not fight anymore? And can we never fight again? Because it’s so lonely. I just need to know where you’ll be.”

  “Okay,” I sputtered. I hadn’t realized that we’d been fighting.

  I flinched when two cars began honking at each other. Next to me the cool breeze sent a loose leaf of paper—someone’s homework, someone’s exam—fluttering in the air and then settling in the gutter. Outside the Daily Grind a group of girls began singing. And still, Lee seemed to be floating.

  When I heard a low rumble of thunder in the distance and felt the first drops of cold rain on my bare, sunburned arms, I knew that I couldn’t abandon her again. Maybe what she needed was to move on from this terrible place she was in. She needed to move forward, and not look back, and by God I had to help her with that.

  PART TWO

  1986

  CHAPTER 7

  The scones were dry again. I knew before I even peeled back the cellophane and lifted one of the neatly arranged scones out of the box that Donna hadn’t fixed the problem. Dry and grainy, they were worse than the batch she’d delivered on Tuesday. I tried to ease one off the waxed paper, but it crumbled in my fingers. I picked up the pieces and carried them into the back room where Lorenzo was sitting in front of a long wood table that he used for a desk.

  He looked up from his notebook and calculator. “What now?”

  When I’d interviewed for the job last year, Lorenzo told me that he wanted to make his new coffeehouse a “destination where students and young professionals gather to enjoy fancy coffee drinks and upscale breakfast foods.” No bad coffee served out of cheap white cups. Lorenzo saw the future: two-dollar cups of coffee, comfy couches, eclectic music, and scones. So far, the future was still the future.

  “What do you mean, what now?” I asked. This was part of our daily routine. Pushing, pulling, arguing, accusing, teasing, and laughing. We both loved it.

  “You were in here an hour ago complaining about how I make cappuccinos.”

  “The customer thought the milk tasted sour,” I said. He threw up his hands to complain. “Lorenzo, we have to make customers happy or they won’t come back. This won’t make anyone happy, either.” I set the scone pieces on the desk.

  Lorenzo stared at them for a moment before putting one of the pieces in his mouth. He tilted his head as he chewed and grimaced as he swallowed. “It’s dry.”

  I nodded. “I thought you were going to talk to Donna.”

  “I did!” At thirty-five, he was only ten years older than me, but already his black hair was streaked with gray. Women flirted with him, especially when they heard his Italian accent. At first I thought he must have a girlfriend because he seemed so uninterested. “Don’t say that we should serve croissants. Damn French.”

  “I won’t.” I picked up the scone pieces. “But we need to have better scones.”

  “But it will cost me?” He arched his right eyebrow and then picked up his pencil. I knew this sign—our conversation was nearing the end for now. Lorenzo lived in Back Bay, drove an old BMW, and wore Cole Haan loafers. This wasn’t the first business he’d started. He might be a good businessman but he had a blind spot when it came to food quality.

  But I smiled. Lorenzo was a good person. Open, too. He kept a business card for his therapist (she’s like a mother) taped to the wall above his desk and recently he’d started confiding in me about his boyfriend. But he never dumped anything on me or expected me to fix his problems. He didn’t need encouragement, either. He was strong and just wanted me to listen. I so appreciated that.

  “You remember that I’m leaving today and will be gone until Monday,” I said.

  He shook his head. “I am quite sure that we will not survive without you.”

  I laughed. “You’ll survive.”

  Just as I started into the front room, he called my name. He always drew out the last letter so that it sounded as if he were saying Clara instead of Clare. “Claraaa. You should learn to bake delicious scones. That would solve our problem.”

  I laughed and thought about my recent cooking attempts. Chicken that tasted like rubber. Grilled pork chops with charred edges. Yet I’d made a solid spaghetti sauce last night for Ben and my parents and everyone loved my sugar cookies.

  I glanced at my watch. Four hours until my train left. I felt a twist in my stomach, but I didn’t have time to worry about my trip now.

  I wet a rag and worked through the front room, wiping down tables, straightening chairs and couch cushions, and organizing newspapers on the giant coffee table. After sweeping the floor and organizing the counter, I surveyed the room. Not bad. It was ten, past the breakfast rush. The rest of the day would be spotty with people looking for a place to study and hang out, but no big crowds.

  I’d been working the same shift, Tuesday through Friday, six to eleven, for the last six months. I loved smelling that first pot of coffee and greeting the regulars—the dog walker, the sociology professor who took a latte to go, and the French students who practiced conversing at the far table. I always felt a letdown at the end of the morning, especially on days like today when I had to hurry to my college’s English department’s writing center where I tutored three afternoons a week.

  I stepped behind the counter and opened my book. I was a year away from finishing my master’s degree in English literature, and this summer I was taking a class on D. H. Lawrence. My mother thought Lawrence was one of the world’s greatest authors and
that Sons and Lovers was a masterpiece for the way Lawrence’s themes infiltrated the text. She called it “thematic penetration,” which always felt so overtly sexual that it made me cringe. So far, I thought Lawrence was overrated.

  I began to read, but after a few sentences glanced at the remaining scones in the box on the counter. Donna owned a bakery in Brighton and had promised scones and muffins—no croissants—delivered by six every other morning. That she was four hours late today was only part of the problem. I’d never tasted a good scone, but Elise, Logan’s girlfriend, loved them and once described them to me. Flaky but not dry. Sweet but not too sweet. And best served warm out of the oven. I glanced at our industrial stove next to the counter. I didn’t think it had ever been used.

  The bell on the door rang, and I looked up to see a woman and a young girl take their usual table in front of the huge window. I frowned. The other day I had to scrub the window to get the girl’s grimy fingerprints off the glass. The floor-to-ceiling glass was twice as wide as my outstretched arms and let in light even when it was cloudy outside. It was the most important part of the room.

  “What can I get for you?” I shoved my hands into my back pockets.

  The woman didn’t look at me as she tied her daughter’s sneaker. “Earl Grey tea, an apple juice, and a blueberry muffin. That’s all.”

  No smile. No please or thank you. The woman screamed privilege with her massive diamond ring and big Coach bag. I didn’t move. I wanted her to know that I wasn’t just a coffeehouse waitress, still living at home with my parents. I was somebody, too. But instead the girl looked at me. She couldn’t have been more than five years old. She had a roll of fat around each wrist and stubby fingers speckled with brown. I imagined those fingers on my window and when I frowned again, she lifted her arm and gave me the finger. I was so surprised that I stumbled backward. The woman finally looked up.

  “Anything else?” I grabbed onto a chair to steady myself.

  “I said that was all.”

  I felt a jolt of anger. What kind of mother was she? But oh, no, I’d be nice. And good. I’d be good even if it killed me. I marched back to the counter. But my hand wouldn’t stop shaking as I poured hot water into a mug.

  Three hours until my train left.

  My problem was that I was nervous about my trip. I was going to New York to help Lee move yet again, her fifth place in three years. I didn’t understand how she kept getting herself into these situations—bad roommates, bad landlords, bad apartments. Tomorrow she was moving into a two-bedroom apartment in a much safer neighborhood with new roommates. Anyone would be better than her current ones, Tina and her rude boyfriend, Markus.

  But it was the second part of the trip that made me nervous. On Friday, Lee and I were flying to Chicago. Amy was getting married and nearly everyone in our pledge class would be there. Over the years I’d hardly seen college friends; just Sarah, who came through here last year, and Lee, of course. This would be the first time since graduating three years ago that we’d all be together.

  Everyone was disappointed that Lee and I hadn’t gone back for football games or birthday parties. But traveling was expensive and I was saving to move into my own apartment. Which would happen, finally, in August when Ben, who was living with us for the summer, went back to Philly for his last year of law school.

  “Of course, Clare, you can do whatever you want. But everyone I knew lived at home for a while after college,” my mother said when I told her that I was the only one of my friends not to have an apartment. It wasn’t 1960, I’d said, and times had changed. But in the end, it didn’t make sense to move out. Even Sarah, who scoffed when I told her I was still at home, agreed. My parents traveled or were on the Vineyard three quarters of the year. Why rent an apartment when our house, completely furnished and with a new alarm system, sat empty and the utilities paid?

  Still, I worried what people would think. Everyone was doing amazing things. Sarah was in medical school. Amy was in the marketing department at Kraft Foods. Lynn worked for an ad agency in Dallas. And who would have thought that Ducky would be running half-marathons and selling commercial real estate in Chicago?

  I was almost finished with graduate school and looking into PhD programs. That was what I’d say. Not that I still slept in the bed I’d had since I was twelve, thought D. H. Lawrence was boring, didn’t like tutoring, and worried about a giant window in a coffeehouse that sold two-dollar cappuccinos. Oh, God, I felt my nerves churning through my stomach like water boiling on the stove.

  I carried the tea, muffin, and juice over to the woman’s table. The door opened and a tall brunette walked toward us. The women hugged and then the brunette smiled at me and ordered a cappuccino. She even said please.

  See? It was easy to be nice. It didn’t take much.

  I made the woman’s cappuccino and retreated behind the counter. I could tell by how they leaned toward each other, how they smiled and laughed so easily, that they were old friends, maybe college friends, like Lee and me. We were still close, despite living in different states. I called her every day to listen, cheer her up, and offer advice. Try adding beans to rice, for protein. Tell the asshole Markus to get his own laundry detergent! Maybe the next job will work out! Last night she said that she needed to tell me about an awful conversation she’d had with her mom regarding her twelve-year-old twin siblings, whom Lee called The Miracles. Maybe this time I’d be helpful. Knowing what to say about her family was often a challenge.

  “I wanna go to the zoo!” the girl squealed. I glanced up from my book, her words landing like cement in my stomach. Take her to the zoo, for God’s sake. Go!

  The mother was too busy to respond. The girl frowned as she scooted behind the table. She plucked a blueberry from the muffin, squished it, and took her finger across the window, leaving a foot-long streak. I glared at the woman. Why bring your daughter just to ignore her? Pay attention! Love her! Get her away from my window!

  I licked my dry lips.

  It would be a jam-packed weekend. By coincidence my parents and Logan were going to be in Chicago, too. Logan, who was bringing Elise, had a meeting, and my mother was speaking at a conference. Lee and I were joining them for dinner when we arrived tomorrow; afterward, we’d meet up with our friends.

  Ducky was selling commercial real estate?

  You should learn to bake delicious scones.

  I glanced at the stove again. I had this sudden urge to pour sugar into a bowl and unwrap sticks of cold, slippery butter and knead the dough—was this how to make scones? I’d ask Elise and when I got back next week, I’d make a batch. Maybe they’d be better than Donna’s. Maybe they’d be good enough to sell. I felt excited, suddenly, and hopeful. Yes, hope was a wonderful feeling.

  The bell on the door rang and I grinned. Ben. The law office where he was interning was only a mile away but he rarely left his desk. Not for lunch. Hardly for dinner, either. Leaner than he was in college, he wore an old suit, charcoal gray, with a white shirt and blue tie. By the end of the day his shirt would be untucked and his eyes blurry from reading. When he got back late to the house every night, he was often too tired to do anything but sit on the couch and watch baseball on TV.

  “This is a surprise,” I said. Ben wasn’t going to Chicago with me. He barely knew Amy or Dougy, her fiancé, and hardly anyone was bringing dates. Besides, he wanted to work all weekend. I straightened and smoothed the front of my apron. Then I made sure my earrings were straight and tucked my hair behind my ears. We’d broken up for a few years after college and had recently gotten back together. At first we were a little careful around each other. Sometimes I still felt that way, especially now that he was living with us at the house.

  “I’ve been calling.” He sucked in quick breaths. “Is the phone off the hook?”

  His cheeks were flushed and sweat dripped down the sides of his face. I reached up and flicked off a few drops. I asked, “Wait, did you run here?”

  “Yeah. I couldn’t find a
cab. And I had to hurry.”

  I glanced at his black dress shoes and imagined his feet, hot and sweaty, swimming in his socks. I pulled him over to the counter and poured a glass of water.

  He drank and then pointed to the scones. “What are those?”

  “Scones. Here, taste this.” I handed him one of the pieces.

  He turned it over in his hand and popped it in his mouth. He chewed and then shrugged. “It’s bland.”

  “I know, right? I’ve got this idea. I’m going to start making really, really good scones. And maybe sell them here.”

  “I thought you were going to quit this place and try to get more hours at the writing center,” he said as he took the back of his hand across his forehead.

  “I know . . .” I shifted my feet. He was right. I’d said that. I glanced at the scones. Butter, flour, baking soda. Yes, scones were made with baking soda. But maybe not.

  “I’ve got to get back. I came to tell you that your mom called. She’s been trying to reach you. You left your credit card at the house. You’ll need it to travel.”

  How had that happened? Then I remembered being on the phone the other night with the airline and paying for Lee’s ticket to Chicago, and I must not have put the credit card back in my wallet. I shifted my feet again. I didn’t want Ben to think that I was irresponsible with money. “Oh, no.”

  “Your mom didn’t have time to run it down here to you, so I told her that I’d get ahold of you. She was pretty relieved.”

  Of course she didn’t have time to run it down here. I was surprised she even knew the phone number. Neither parent had visited me here yet. I wasn’t surprised, however, that she called Ben. My parents loved him. He was, as my dad liked to say, “a practical person who got things done.” And I was happy, for the most part, that they felt this way about him. “Thank you.”