FULL NOVELXO : Chapter 6
THE FOLLOWING FRIDAY, I’m playing my least favorite kind of Tetris at the reference desk: choosing which fall releases to buy for our branch. Rearranging and reprioritizing them, cutting title after title until the moment the cost dips into our budget.
Every time I go to remove a book, a different face flashes in my mind, the kid or kids I specifically picked the book for.
A superhero picture book for Arham. An early reader about mermaids for eight-year-old Gabby Esteves. A dense upper-YA fantasy that reminded me of the first time I read Philip Pullman, for Maya, the braces-wearing preteen with a Smiths patch on her backpack and a reading level so far above her age that she’s started giving me recommendations. She’s shy enough that it took months to get her to really respond to my attempts at book-related small talk (the only kind I can do). But now she’ll happily chat for forty minutes at a time about books we’ve both read and loved, an informal two-person book club. I’ve been working on convincing her to join one of the teen readers groups, but she’s very politely informed me that she doesn’t like “group activities” and is “more of an independent type.”
Basically, she’s me at twelve years old, if I’d been nine hundred times cooler. Right down to the fact of being the only child of an overworked but lovely single mother with a penchant for eighties British goth rock. During the school year, Maya walks the short distance from the junior high to the library, and her mom picks her up when she finishes her paralegal shift.
The new hardcover fantasy I handpicked for her is the most expensive book on the list, but I can’t bear to cut it. Ordinarily, I talk this kind of thing over with Harvey, the branch manager, but he left early for his youngest daughter’s med school graduation (the other two are already doctors; he’s apparently created an army of high achievers).
Back in the office we all share, the adult librarian, Ashleigh Rahimi, is on the phone, the shut door reducing her words to a flat rumble.
On the desk, my own phone buzzes with a notification from Sadie. My gut rises expectantly, only to plummet when I see that, instead of a message or even a comment, she’s simply Liked my most recent picture.
The one in which I appear to be milliseconds away from licking the side of Miles’s face as he hangs over me, arm latched across my chest.
I tap over to Sadie’s account and instantly regret it. She uses social media as infrequently as I do, which means there, right in the top row of images, three shots back, is a picture of her and Cooper with me and Peter at Chill Coast Brewing on their last visit—beer being the one thing Peter breaks his low-carb diet for.
I personally hate beer. Obviously Petra loves it. She’s a walking fantasy, and I’m a librarian who actually does wear a lot of buttons and tweed.
From behind the office door comes a frustrated shriek-groan. Not an outright scream, but a sound loud enough to cause kids gaming at the computer bay to spin toward the desk in unison.
“It’s fine, everything’s fine!” I tell them with a wave.
Behind me, the door flings open and Ashleigh, five foot nothing with a topknot the size of a melon, storms out. “Never make friends with moms,” she tells me before stomping over to her rolling chair.
“You’re a mom,” I point out.
She whips toward me. “I know!” she cries. “And that means I have basically one night, every two weeks, when I can do something fun with other adults, except all those other adults I used to call are also parents, and in many cases partners. So half the time, the plans fall through because someone’s puking or fell off a trampoline or forgot they have to build a fucking volcano for science class by tomorrow!”
“Ashleigh!” I hiss, jerking my head toward the row of teenage gamers.
She follows my gaze and greets their stares with a blunt, “What?”
They spin back toward their screens.
“I want to get out,” she says. “I want to look hot in public and drink alcohol and talk about something other than Dungeons & Dragons.”
And as she’s saying it, I’m picturing myself at home, alone, watching happy couples shop for or renovate the homes of their dreams on HGTV, just like I did last Friday night, and the Friday night before that, and basically every night since the breakup, barring my drunken MEATLOCKER escapade with Miles.
Meanwhile, Peter’s and Petra’s social media feeds are an in-real-time documentation of her and Peter kissing, hugging, and selfie-ing their way through our old haunts, with our old friends in Arbor Park.
His haunts, I correct myself. His friends. Just like Arbor Park is his neighborhood.
I’d thought we were building something permanent together. Now I realize I’d just been slotting myself into his life, leaving me without my own.
I feel the words rushing up my throat, and then they’re splatting out between us: “I’m free tonight.”
Ashleigh stares, wide-eyed. Like I just threw up on her shoes. Or like I threw up a whole shoe.
I search for a graceful way to take it back.
I’ve landed on something along the lines of, Oh, shoot, I forgot! I have plans to organize my e-reader, when she gives an abrupt shrug and says, “Why not? Text me your address, and I’ll pick you up on the way to Chill Coast.”
“Chill Coast?” I’m sure my face just went from tomato red to milky white.
Luckily Ashleigh is looking at her phone. “It’s a brewery,” she says, typing. “In Arbor Park? My friend who just bailed said it’s super cute, has a big patio.”
There is absolutely no way I can go to Chill Coast. Waning Bay is small enough without me wandering directly into the heart of the Peterverse.
“Unless . . .” Ashleigh reads my hesitancy. “You had somewhere else in mind?”
Of course I don’t have somewhere else in mind. I don’t foresee Ashleigh loving MEATLOCKER.
But I have to say something, so I blurt the first place—the only place—that springs to mind: “Cherry Hill.”
Her dark brow lifts appraisingly.
“It’s a winery.”
“Is that the one with the hot drug-dealer bartender, or the one down the road from that one, where they only play Tom Petty?”
“Um,” I say. “I really only know . . . about the wine.”
In that I know they have wine.
After a protracted pause, she says, “Okay. Cherry Hill.”
“Great!” I say.
She goes back to scanning books in. “Are you going to dress like that?”
I look down at my brown high-necked button-up. “No?”
He meets my eyes in the mirror, toothpaste foam spilling out of his mouth. “Why did you say it like that?” he asks.
“Like what?”
“Menacingly.” He spits into the sink and knocks the faucet on. “Like, Me and my friend are gonna pay you a little visit, and we might have a baseball bat with us.”
“Because me and my friend are going to pay you a visit,” I say, “and we might have a baseball bat with us.”
He thrusts his head into the sink, under the running water, to rinse. When he straightens up, he grabs his towel from the rack and buries his whole face in it.
“I just thought it might be weird for me to show up without mentioning it,” I say.
He faces me, one hand and hip propped against the sink. “I’m flattered you remember where I work.”
“I needed somewhere cool, to impress Ashleigh, and it leapt out of my subconscious,” I admit.
“Was she impressed?” he asks. “Does she like our wine?”
“No idea,” I say. “But she thinks one of your bartenders is a drug dealer. Or plays a lot of Tom Petty.”
He frowns. “She must not have tried the pinot.”
I laugh in surprise. “Are you offended?”
“A little,” he admits, shrugging. “It’s a double gold winner. Make sure she tries it tonight.”
“I’ll do my best,” I say.
For a second, we just stand there.
He waves toward the doorway, which I’m blocking.
“Right!” I step aside, and he breezes past, his warm, vaguely spicy scent hitting me. “I’ll see you later,” I call over my shoulder, shutting myself in my room to continue my—so far unproductive—outfit selection.
Wool, tweed, satin posing as silk, every piece of it easily matched to every other piece, and all of it a bit stodgy professor, even my casual summer clothes. Sadie used to say my look sat at the intersection of Personal Style as a Statement About Personality and Don’t Look at My Body, which is essentially accurate.
A quick Google search of “what to wear to a winery” reveals a plethora of the kind of bright and airy clothes that could be plucked from an Elin Hilderbrand novel. My own wardrobe is mostly creams, tans, camels, browns. I could just go with a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, but I suspect that between showing up overdressed and underdressed, the latter would be the greater sin to Ashleigh, and I want to make a good impression.
So I swallow my pride, and put on the slinky backless black dress I bought for Peter’s and my engagement party.
I haven’t worn it since, which is stupid, because it cost way more than I would ordinarily spend (Peter bought it) and it’s extremely flattering.
Fifteen minutes after seven, someone knocks on the door. I’m not surprised she’s late. I am surprised she came to the door. I thought I’d have three flights of stairs to get over my hanging out with someone new nerves before I was face-to-face with her.
It’s been years since I made a new friend. I mean, actually made a new friend, not just inherited one from Peter, or from Sadie, who’s always been more of a social butterfly than me.
I smooth the front of my dress, a nervous sixteen-year-old about to find out whether she really scored a date to the prom, or if the other kids are about to dump pig’s blood on her.
When I open the door, Ashleigh jumps a little, because she’d been looking at her phone.
“You didn’t have to come up,” I say. “You could’ve texted me from the car.”
“I drank a Pedialyte on the way over here, and my bladder’s bursting,” she says. “Plus I know basically nothing about you, so this was a good chance to find out if your house is full of surveillance equipment.”
I blink. “Surveillance equipment?”
“Landon and I have been taking bets on whether you’re in the FBI,” she provides helpfully.
I squint at her. “And you think I’m in the FBI because . . . ?”
“I don’t,” she says. “Landon does. My guess is witness protection.”
There’s being bad at small talk, and then there’s being so reticent that your coworkers assume you’ve recently testified against a mob boss, and I never knew how thin the line between the two was.
In my defense, Landon is nineteen years old and nearly always listening to shoegaze in his AirPods at the decibel of a launching rocket, so it’s not like there have been loads of opportunities to bond.
“Bathroom’s this way,” I say, leading her inside.
She gawks as she follows, apparently unbothered by the lack of surveillance equipment.
We pause in front of the entrance to the hallway, where Miles’s room, the bathroom, and my room are tucked off of the living room. “Cute place,” she says.
“Thanks,” I say, though honestly, this is all pretty much Miles, a funky mix of thrift-store pieces from the fifties to seventies, Laurel Canyon chic.
She shuts herself in the bathroom—quite possibly, I think, to dig through my medicine cabinet—and I go back to the kitchen for another glass of water. In college, I really took the posters that littered our dorm rooms to heart: ONE TO ONE, IF AT ALL, they read, with an illustrated beer bottle beside an illustrated glass of water. The habit stuck.
From the kitchen I hear the bathroom door whine open, and I pad back into the living room, but Ashleigh isn’t there.
“Do you snowboard?” she calls from around the corner, down the hallway.
“What?” I pass through the doorway and see her not on the right, in my room, but to the left, in Miles’s. She’s wandering through it like it’s a museum, moving from the snowboard and battered hockey sticks in the corner to the plants and incense holders in the windowsill.
“This is my roommate’s room,” I tell her.
She’s reading the tiny text around the edge of a framed show poster, but I’m fixated on the framed photograph of Miles and Petra on his dresser. They stand in front of the lake, her arms slung around his waist, a less scruffy version of him looking down at her adoringly. She’s waifish and cute, and he’s rangy and winsome, and it’s impossible to hate this version of her, the one who made him so happy. Until it occurs to me that now she’s making Peter this happy.
I’d always thought he and I were so good together. He was stable and reliable and driven. He had a five-year plan, and not in a boring way. We were going to go see the cherry blossoms in Japan together, visit Dubai, see the Eiffel Tower. But we were also going to put money into retirement and have monthly dinners with his family.
In short, Peter was the exact opposite of my dad, who was occasionally a doting father but rarely a present one.
It had taken a lot of therapy for me to stop gravitating toward emotionally unavailable men, the kind who’d get a matching tattoo with you one week, and be dating your upstairs neighbor the next. I’d been so relieved when I finally fell in love with someone who actually wanted to love me back.
A Relationship Guy, who craved the bond his parents had. Who liked routine, and texted back in a reasonable amount of time and shared his calendar with me.
Maybe if we’d never moved back here, we’d still be together.
Then again, maybe in five years, he still would’ve left me for Petra. Maybe they’re every bit as destined as he’s convinced. I’m nauseated by the thought that maybe she belongs there, in that home I’d thought was mine, while I belong nowhere.
Ashleigh points to the two and one half pairs of Crocs (yes, that’s five individual Crocs) halfway in the closet. “Excuse me,” she says. “How many Crocs does this man have?”
“Well,” I say. “At least those and the ones I assume are on his feet at this very moment.”
She stares at the clogs. “Service industry, nurse, or run-of-the-mill weirdo?”
“Service industry,” I confirm; then, with a tickle of affection, “But also a weirdo. Which reminds me, we’re supposed to try the pinot tonight.”
“How did that remind you of pinot,” she says, but as I turn to leave, I forget she asked.
My stomach flips at the sight of the wall behind Miles’s headboard.
I’ve never noticed it before, because I’ve only been in here one other time.
Dozens of Polaroids are tacked in tidy columns. Tidier, I suspect, than Miles would have been. Likely they’re a holdover from his Petra era.
Which makes sense, given that they very clearly tell the story of their relationship. Three years’ worth of birthday cakes. Three years’ worth of tiny tinsel Christmas trees. Three years’ worth of stand-up paddle-boarding, cliff jumping, sipping wine in front of a sunset, riding a share moped in front of what I assume to be the Mediterranean Sea. Three years’ grinning into each other’s mouths with their hands in each other’s hair.
They look so happy.
It feels intrusive to see them like this, let alone to let my coworker gawk at the evidence of his failed relationship. “We should go,” I say, quickly steering Ashleigh back into the hallway and closing the door behind us.
Would he take her back? I find myself wondering, before seamlessly transitioning into Would I take Peter back?
“Definitely not,” I say aloud.
“What?” Ashleigh says.
“Nothing!” I say. “Let’s go get wine.”
Ashleigh follows me back to the front door, her head on a swivel. “Do you see ghosts or something?”
“Or something,” I say.
“Well, Vince,” she says. “You may not be FBI, but you’re definitely more interesting than all that tweed lets on.”
“My last name is Vincent,” I tell her.
“See?” she says. “A whole syllable I knew nothing about. You’re full of surprises.”
“I hate surprises,” I tell her.
Out beyond the flowers and hedges, whitewashed tables dot a grassy stretch, customers milling from the bocce court on one end to a duck pond at the other, delicately stemmed glasses in hand. Globe lights hang over the seating area, just waiting for the falling night to give them the cue to light up.
“This place is gorgeous,” I say, climbing out of Ashleigh’s beat-up hatchback. It’s cooled down and I’m regretting not grabbing a jacket.
She looks at me sidelong. “Haven’t you been here?”
I guess my blatant awe gave me away. “Peter wasn’t a wine guy.”
“Peter?” she says. “That’s your ex, right?”
I manage a “mm-hmm.”
Ashleigh swings her oversize bag onto her shoulder and tugs the hem of her miniskirt toward the tops of her suede knee-high boots as she starts toward the front doors. “What about your friends? None of them wine guys either?”
What I don’t say is, we had all the same friends.
What I don’t say is, technically, this means I had no friends. Even after all those Frank Herbert novels I read just so I’d have something to bond with Scott over.
“Guess not,” I say. “What about you? You’ve been here before, right?”
“Only twice,” she says. “Duke wasn’t a wine guy either.”
“And Duke is . . . ?” I pull the door open.
“A large horse,” she says. “What do you think, Daphne? He’s my ex-husband.”
“I suppose I could have guessed that,” I admit, and follow her inside.
A smell like burning cedar wafts toward us as we enter the dimly lit room. A sleek modern bar runs along the left wall, the wall behind it entirely smoked glass, massive wine casks stacked behind it and softly glowing in golden light. The other three walls are likewise glass, but these look out over the vineyards, a narrow wooden counter mounted along them so people can watch the sunset while they sip. High-tops are arranged in the middle of the room, and in the windowed wall opposite the bar, a huge slate fireplace reaches toward the vaulted ceiling, flames crackling and leaping within it.
Ashleigh grabs my arm. “Come on—looks like those people are leaving.” She steers me to the far corner of the bar, which takes some maneuvering, because, despite the temperate weather, the inside of this place is even busier than the lawn. She slides between two middle-aged men in golf shirts to claim one of the newly vacated stools, slamming her purse onto the other one and waving me over. She doesn’t move her bag until I’m practically sitting on it.
Underneath the hum of conversation, sexy music plays, a low, raspy voice that perfectly blends with the clatter of forks and delicate clink of glass.
There are two people working the bar, but then a door swings open to the room hidden by the wall of casks, and Miles ducks through, carrying a wooden tray lined with glasses.
It’s hypnotic, the intricate dance between him and the other bartenders, or sommeliers, or whatever they are. They communicate in quick phrases and subtle touches, moving aside so he can replenish their supply. One bartender swaps places with him, and, after a quick exchange, she nods and disappears through the same door Miles just emerged from.
Despite his somewhat threadbare and hole-ridden T-shirt and work pants, he looks completely at home here, the warm glow behind the bar casting him in more of an artisanal light than a burned-out one.
He leans across the counter to hear what a pretty redhead is saying, then laughs and grabs an open white wine from an ice bucket, twirling it a little as he pours her another glass.
“See?” Ashleigh says, leaning in to be heard. “Hot drug dealer.”
My gaze judders over to her, follows hers straight back to the far side of the bar. “Miles deals drugs?” I cry.
His gaze snaps sideways at the sound of his name. He lifts his chin in greeting, a smile pulling at one side of his mouth.
“Wait, you know him?” Ashleigh asks.
He drops the bottle back into the ice bucket and crosses toward us.
“Order the pinot,” I quickly tell Ashleigh.
“I’m really confused right now, Daphne. Have you been here or—”
Miles slides his forearms across the glossy wooden bar. “Well, well, well,” he says, just loud enough to be heard over the room’s ambient noise. “If it isn’t my adoring girlfriend.”