“Thank you, I know,” Annelise said in all seriousness. “My mom taught me.”
“Hear that? I taught her,” Eden said.
The convoy of moms and dads were starting their engines, and one mom cheerily called out the window to Gabe, and so, with evident reluctance, he headed in her direction.
And Eden ferried Annelise home. Her eye on the rearview mirror, watching him walk away, and she realized that as pleasant as the back of him was to look at, watching him leave her at all, for any reason, was never going to be easy.
Chapter 9
Eden was studying her whiteboard as if it were a sudoku.
And gradually, that tricky little band of muscle between her shoulder blades tightened like a vise. At about three thirty today she’d gotten a call about a last-minute wedding—this weekend, that’s how last minute, and who was she to question the judgment of two twenty-year-olds in love?—and could she provide some simple flowers? She could, as it so happened. For a premium, she explained nicely. But they will bebeautiful.
And that wedding would push her nicely into the black when it came to monthly earnings, and she’d be that much closer to paying off the shop mortgage and maybe, just maybe, dropping a dollar or two into Annelise’s college fund.
But! And wasn’t there always a “but”? Where was a dentist appointment (Annelise’s), an annual gyno appointment (hers), a day off (Danny’s), a sleepover (Annelise’s at Chloe’s house) to be skillfully rearranged without the whole thing toppling?
Behind her at the kitchen table Annelise had bitten one-half of her grilled cheese sandwich into the shape of a lion and was pretending her bowl of tomato soup was a watering hole and the steamed zucchini on her plate was lion poop.
Eden didn’t have the energy—or the heart—to tell her to stop playing with her food. Frankly, the minute she was able to sit down she might bite her sandwich into the shape of a gazelle just to make things even more interesting. She’d learned to pick her battles. If some zucchini ever made it into Annelise’s mouth, even accidentally, even under gross pretenses, she’d declare victory.
Zucchini made her think of Gabe.
Would the broccoli stratagem work with zucchini? Would Annelise get wise to that?
Or did it have to be Gabe doing the persuading?
Lately all of her thoughts were fringed with addendum and footnotes just like that: what would Gabe think? Would Gabe like this? Today she’d looked at a flower arrangement and thought,These would look great with Gabe’s eyes. Which was patently ridiculous. They wereflowers.Orangeflowers. It was like six degrees of Gabe Caldera. She could make literally anything—a crack in the sidewalk (don’t step on a crack/you’ll break your mother’s back, Gabe must have a strong back, remember when Annelise thought she could ride on Gabe’s shoulders?) lead back to him within just a few thoughts.
Funny. She did the same thing with Annelise. All roads led to her.
The last time your heart was bro—
She wasn’t certain her heart had in fact been broken. Not by a man, anyway. Which seemed almost like a character flaw—had she not loved enough? Gabe had about ten years of life on her.
Still. Her last ten years had been, in many ways, about nothing else but love, thanks to Annelise.
But her heart did feel bruised and a little heavy and peculiarly thwarted all afternoon, like a bird futilely throwing itself at a windowpane. As though she’d been too late to protect him from hurt, from the grave injustice of his loss. Which made no sense, really. But then, ambiguous new emotions flapped into her life like unidentifiable butterflies a few times a day lately, thanks to Gabe. She allowed them to circulate rather than trying to pin them to a board.
She wondered if even Gabe truly understood how much he didn’t like being alone. She had a hunch that, just as her whiteboard gave her the illusion that the vicissitudes of life could be shuffled and sorted and managed like squares of a quilt, he was trying to drown out being alone with board meetings and hacking trunks out of pastures.
Although, who knew. Men often just liked to hack things.
Someone really ought to bear a burden or two for him.
How she longed to carve a place for them outside of time, just a small space. Maybe about the size of a phone booth, or a closet.
She indulged in a little fantasy now. Her and Gabe, alone, together, in this little space she’d just carved.
Wait. Something was wrong with this picture.
She mentally removed all of his clothes.
That was better.
And then hers.
Even better.