Something Like Normal(17)

Harper’s smile is like standing in a patch of sunshine and feels like a reward. “So maybe you should try something a little less complicated, but still good,” she says. “Like… okay, I have an idea.”

As I follow her to the produce section, I notice her jeans are faded to white in spots with a circle worn into the fabric of the right back pocket where someone once kept a can of dip. Thrift store jeans. I used to buy most of my clothes from thrift stores, too. I liked that they were already broken-in and soft from wear.

On the way, she gives me a tutorial on choosing the freshest tomatoes, but I’m not really listening. I’m thinking about Becky Michalski. Why would my dad have an affair with her? She’s unremarkable, especially compared to Mom. Seems to me, she’s the ultimate loser in this scenario. Going from Don to my dad is kind of a lateral move.

“Travis, are you in there?” Harper is waving her hand in front of my face.

“I nearly punched my dad today.” I’m not sure what possesses me to blurt this to Harper Gray in the middle of the produce section of the Winn-Dixie, but there’s something I trust about her.

“Why?”

“He’s cheating on my mom.”

“I… wow, I’m sorry.” She looks up at me and what I see in her eyes isn’t pity or even satisfaction that karma is coming back to bite me for the way I treated her in middle school. She just looks sad. “Want to talk about it?”

“Not really.”

Those are the words that come out of my mouth, but then I find myself leaning against the vegetable bin, telling her everything. Including the part about getting my mom drunk.

Harper smiles at that. “That’s sweet… in a weird sort of way.”

She moves so we’re both blocking the avocados, her arm brushing against mine. It makes the hair on the back of my neck prickle. “My mom left when I was ten,” she says. “She went back to Denmark to take care of my grandma, who was dying of cancer, and never came back.”

“Oh, shit. I had no idea.”

“It was a long time ago.” Her shoulders lift in a careless little bounce that seems to have more care in it than she lets on. “For a long time I thought it was my fault. Like, if I had been better, she wouldn’t have left. Then I realized it had nothing to do with me and I wanted to punch her. Only she wasn’t here.”

An old guy comes up and we have to move out of his way. Harper leads me to a bin filled with rubber-banded clumps of herbs. They all look the same—green and bushy—but she explains we’re looking for basil.

“Have you had any contact with your mom since she left?” I ask, handing her a bundle of basil.

“She sends me birthday cards every year,” she says as I follow her to the pasta aisle. “Only she puts Danish kroner in the card instead of American dollars. It’s not even worth getting converted.” Harper drops a couple of boxes of penne pasta in the cart. “For graduation, she sent me a ticket to Copenhagen.”

“Did you go?”

“Yeah… she, um, lives in this communal house in Christiania with a bunch of other people, so the entire time I was there she was either painting in her studio or getting stoned with her twenty-two-year-old boyfriend. I slept on a couch that smelled like cat pee.”

“That sucks.”

She nods as she grabs a can of black olives from the shelf. “Copenhagen was cool, though. I went to LEGOLAND by myself and got this cute keychain.”

Harper dangles her keys from the end of her finger. The keychain is a little yellow LEGO duck.

“Did you punch her?”

“No.” Her nose crinkles when she smiles. “But I don’t miss her anymore.” We stop at the seafood counter. “You order a couple of pounds of shrimp. I’ll get the bread and cheese and then we’ll be done.”

Right now, if Harper asked me to swim out into the Gulf of Mexico and catch the shrimp with my bare hands, I’d do it. By the time the guy behind the seafood counter is finished wrapping the shrimp, she’s back with a long loaf of bread and a block of hard white cheese that’s definitely not the processed orange goo I’ve been eating. I still have no idea what I’ll be cooking, but it looks impressive. Too good for the Michalskis. Too good for my dad.

“So it’s just been you and your dad?” I ask, trying to imagine what it would have been like growing up with only Mom. “I’m surprised he never got remarried.”

“He’s never really dated that much,” Harper says. “But now… I don’t know. He spends a lot of time e-mailing back and forth with some woman he knew before he met my mom, which—it makes me feel weird.”

She pushes the cart into the checkout lane, and when the cashier is done ringing it all up—including the stuff in her basket—I pay the bill. “So what do I do with all this stuff?”

“I’ll write it down for you.”

“You could come over and—”

“I think you can manage.” Our eyes meet for a moment and I look for something. Anything. But then her gaze falls to her flip-flops with a shyness that kills me in the best possible way. She reaches out and gives me a playful punch in the arm. “Adapt and overcome, Marine.”

I laugh. I want to say more, but she starts getting that deer-in-the-headlights look, as if she might bolt any second. I unlock the Suburban and take out the notepad my mom has kept in the center console of every car she’s ever had. Our fingers touch as I hand it to Harper, and her cheeks go pink. Interesting. Frustrating, but interesting.