The Dead Romantics (86)

“We can’t,” I interrupted. “I know.”

Something inside of me gave then. Not hope, exactly, but the small thread of happiness I had this past week, because it couldn’t support me. I was balancing precariously on a string that snapped, thinking it was made of sturdier stuff.

“Florence—” he began, and winced again. He clutched his chest. “I—I want to stay but I . . .”

He couldn’t. He was begging me to let him go.

I took a deep breath. The good goodbyes were what you made of them. Elvistoo crooning The Supremes’ “You Can’t Hurry Love” in the background, Mom laughing through her tears as Seaburn spun her through the grass.

I turned back to Ben, and I smiled the only kind of smile I could muster. It was sad and broken, but it was mine. “Thank you, Benji Andor, for letting me live in your grandmother’s world for a few years. And thank you for wanting to live in mine.”

All I wanted to do was take his face in my hands and kiss him, but as I reached out to try, his eyes widened. He sucked in a short breath.

As if he saw something past me. Something I couldn’t see. Something I never would.

And then he was gone.

Forever this time.





34





Ghosts in the Floorboards


IN THE CORNER of the Days Gone Funeral Home, beneath a loose floorboard, there was a metal box full of my deepest dreams and my smutty fanfic. When you grew up in a family where everyone knew everyone else’s business, you had to find ways to keep your secrets. Carver hid his in the backyard. Alice wrote poetry and stashed it in a tree somewhere on the Ridge. And I hid mine beneath the floorboards.

“I’m gonna fix myself a drink. Do you want anything?” Alice asked, hanging up her coat and heading down the hall to the kitchen. I had excused myself from the gravesite soon after Ben disappeared, and Alice asked if I needed company. I think she sensed something was wrong.

Something beyond burying Dad, anyway.

“Whatever you’re having,” I replied, and headed into the red parlor room. I knew exactly where the loose board was, hidden under an end table, and wedged a fire poker between the planks of wood, and pried it up.

I took out the box and dusted it off.

Then I opened it.

There was a letter on top, written in that familiar loopy hand. Dad’s handwriting. He must’ve found it while cleaning the parlor—stepped on a loose floorboard, and pried it up to see what was underneath.

Or maybe I was never that sneaky.

Maybe he always knew I hid my secrets here.

I’m so proud of you, buttercup.

And stapled to the bottom were receipts. A sob caught in my throat. They were sales from the bookstore in town. A Rake’s Guide to Getting the Girl, The Kiss at the Midnight Matinee, and The Probability of Love. He had bought them. And he knew they were mine.

He knew.

I hugged the note to my chest.

And if he knew, then that meant—when the bar owner interrupted Bruno. The half-finished sentences about my writing. Ann Nichols’s new books in the window . . .

Alice found me in the red parlor room like that. She froze in the entryway, eyes wide, holding two glasses of whiskey on the rocks. “The hell? This is some Goonies shit here.”

“It’s my stash,” I replied with a hiccup. She came over and slid down to the floor beside me, and set down our drinks. She picked up Midnight Matinee and flipped it over to the back. “He knew, didn’t he?”

“Knew what?” Alice asked, feigning innocence. I could tell she was lying—what kind of older sister would I be if I couldn’t tell? I glared at her and she shrugged, putting the book back into the lockbox. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. He definitely didn’t tell the whole town.”

“Alice!”

“Oh I’m going to kill whoever told you.”

“No one did. Well . . . Dad did.” I showed her the letter.

“Good,” Alice declared. “Turns out no one wants to piss off the guy who’ll put them in a casket. Don’t wanna be looking like a clown.”

“Oh my god, he didn’t threaten anyone, did he?”

She gave a one-shouldered shrug. “I am sworn to secrecy.” We put the note and the rest of the books back into the box, and I slowly began to shuffle through the rest of it. Journals, concert stubs, little notes filled with smaller stories. She watched, stirring the ice in her glass. “Dad found mine, you know.”

“Your stash?” I asked. “Yeah, it’s in the knot in the tree out near the Ridge.”

She gave me an astonished look. “You knew?”

“Carver found it ages ago.”

“His is—”

“Under the woodpile in the backyard,” we said together, and laughed.

I took a sip of my drink. It was a lot stronger than the drinks Dana made. It personified Alice—she was there, in your face, unable to be forgotten. I admired that about her. She wouldn’t have let her ex-boyfriend steal her stories and publish them. She would’ve chased him down, and shit in his shoes, and penned an article for the New Yorker painstakingly detailing how much of a liar Lee Marlow was. Not just to me—but to his colleagues, to his friends, to journalists, and to colleges and deans asking him to be their guest professor.