The entire walk down the hall to the residents’ break room, I keep checking the pocket in my scrubs pants to make sure that I haven’t lost the small Post-it folded inside. Not that I really needed it in the first place. I stared at the numbers the whole ride up to the fourth floor. I guess it never occurred to me that he would have the same phone number all this time. His number used to be a rhythm that would get stuck in my head like a song.
I drop my bag in a locker in the break room and stare down at my phone. My rounds start in five minutes, and where I’m going, I need to be levelheaded. If I don’t do this now, it will be a stone in my shoe the entire shift. My heart is a thunder-drum in my ear.
Without overthinking it, I text,
I work 9-6 today. Do you want to meet for dinner? To talk.
Only a few seconds later, a reply bubble appears. He’s typing. Inexplicably, my palms begin to sweat. It hadn’t occurred to me until now that he could say, No, you’re too big a dick, forget it.
Is this Macy?
Or that he wouldn’t have this number. I am an idiot.
Yeah, sorry. I should have said.
Not at all.
Tell me where, and I’ll be there.
then
thursday, march 13
fourteen years ago
As my fourteenth birthday approached, I could tell that Dad wasn’t sure what to do. For as long as I could remember, we’d always done the same thing: he would make aebleskivers for breakfast, we’d all see a movie in the afternoon, and then I would pig out on a giant sundae for dinner and go to bed swearing I would never do that again.
After Mom died, the routine didn’t change. The constancy was important to me, a small reminder that she’d really been here. But this was the first year we’d had the weekend house, and the first year I had a close friend like Elliot.
“Can we go to the house this weekend?”
Dad’s coffee cup paused in mid-air, his eyes meeting mine over the thread of steam. He blew over the top before taking a sip, swallowing, and setting it back on the table. Picking up his fork, he speared a piece of scrambled egg, doing his best to act casual, as if there was nothing that particularly thrilled or disappointed him about my request.
It was the first time I’d asked to go up there, and I knew him well enough to know how relieved he was to be able to continually rely on the perfect predictions in Mom’s list.
“Is that what you’d like to do this year? For your birthday?”
I looked down at my own eggs before nodding. “Yeah.”
“Would you also like a party? We could bring a few friends up to the house? You could show them your library?”
“No . . . my friends here wouldn’t get it.”
“Not like Elliot.”
I took a bite and shrugged casually. “Yeah.”
“He’s a good friend?”
I nodded, staring at my plate as I speared another bite.
“You know you’re too young to date,” Dad said.
My head shot up, eyes wide in horror. “Dad!”
He laughed. “Just making sure you understand the rules.”
Blinking back down to my food, I mumbled, “Don’t be gross. I just like it up there, okay?”
My dad wasn’t a big smiler, not one of those people you think of and immediately picture with a big grin on his face, but right now, when I looked back up, he was smiling. Really smiling.
“Of course we can go to the house, Macy.”
We drove up early Saturday morning, the first day of my spring break. There were two things Dad wanted to check off the list this week, including items forty-four and fifty-three: planting a tree that I could watch grow for many years, and teaching me to chop firewood.
Before I could run off into my book wonderland, Dad pulled a tiny sapling from the back of the car and hauled it into the side yard.
“Grab the shovel from the back,” he said, kneeling to cut the plastic container away from the apple tree using a razor blade. “Bring the work gloves.”
In some ways I always assumed I was my mother’s child: I liked the color and clutter of our Berkeley house. I liked lively music and warm days, and danced when I washed dishes. But up at the cabin, I realized I was my dad’s kid, too. In the chill of the March wind snaking through the trees, we dug a deep pit in easy silence, communicating with the point of a finger or the tilt of a chin. When we’d finished, and a proud little Gravenstein tree was firmly planted in our side yard, instead of enthusiastically wrapping his arms around me and gushing his love in my ear, Dad cupped my face and bent, pressing a kiss to my forehead.
“Good work, min lille blomst.” He smiled down at me. “I’m going to town for groceries.”
With this permission, I took off. My shoes pounded on the ground as I moved in a straight path from the end of our driveway to the top of Elliot’s. The doorbell rang throughout the house, carrying back to me from the open windows overhead. A loud bark reached my ears, followed by the clumsy scratch of a dog’s nails against wooden floors.
“Shut it, Darcy,” a sleepy voice said, and the dog fell silent, only to release a few small apologetic whines.
It occurred to me that in the nearly six months we’d had the cabin, I hadn’t been inside Elliot’s house. Miss Dina had invited us, of course, but Dad seemed to feel it was wrong to intrude. I think he also liked the solitude of our house on the weekends—Elliot’s presence excepted, of course. Dad liked not having to come out of his shell.
I took a step back, nerves rising, when the door opened and a yawning, shaggy-haired Andreas stood in front of me.
The second-oldest Petropoulos brother had clearly just climbed out of bed—messy brown hair, sleep lines on his face, no shirt, and basketball shorts that defied gravity by barely clinging low on his hips. He had the kind of body I hadn’t been entirely sure until that moment actually existed.
Is this what Elliot would look like in a couple of years? My mind could barely handle the idea.
“Hey, Macy,” he said. It sounded like a growl, like a sin. He stood back, holding open the door and waiting for me to follow. “You coming in or not?”
I willed my eyebrows to inch back down my forehead. “Oh, sure.”
It did smell like cookies inside. Cookies and boy. Andreas smiled and lazily scratched his stomach. “You guys are up for the weekend?”
I nodded and his smile widened. “And very talkative, I see.”
“Sorry,” I said, and then stood there, arms at my sides, fingers pulling at the hem of my shorts, still not sure what to say. “Is Elliot home?”
“I’ll grab him.” Andreas grinned and walked toward the staircase. “Hey, Ell! Your girlfriend is here!” His voice echoed in the wooden entryway as my body exploded into a scorching blush.
Before I could answer, there was the sound of feet pounding on the floor above us.
“You’re such a douche!” Elliot said, barreling down the stairs and into his brother. Andreas grunted with the blow and grabbed Elliot, putting him in a headlock. Andreas was taller and pretty muscular, but Elliot seemed to have the desire to avoid public humiliation on his side.
The two boys wrestled, came dangerously close to knocking over a lamp, said a bunch of words I wasn’t even supposed to think, and then finally broke apart, panting.