The Unsinkable Greta James(58)

Greta stops at the table and points to the blue plastic pitcher. “How much?”

“You’re from the ship, right?” the girl asks, squinting up at her from beneath thick brown bangs. She must be nine or ten, with pale skin and dark eyes, and she’s wearing a yellow T-shirt with a ladybug on it.

“Do I look like I’m from the ship?”

The girl considers this. “No, but you’re not from here.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I know everyone who lives here. Literally.”

Greta smiles. “So you’re gonna charge me the tourist rate, huh?”

“Those are the rules,” the girl says very seriously.

“Fair enough.” Greta hands over a twenty-dollar bill. “Guess I’ll have to move here to get the discount.”

“You would never,” the girl says matter-of-factly. She stands up to pour the lemonade, heaving the pitcher over a trembling paper cup. “Nobody ever does. At least nobody like you.”

“What does that mean?”

“Someone cool,” the girl says a little shyly. “From someplace cool. Probably.”

“I’m from Ohio, actually,” Greta says, and the girl looks disappointed. “But I live in New York City.”

“Knew it.” She hands over the cup and Greta takes a sip, trying not to wince at how tart it is. But the girl is watching her closely. She shrugs. “I know it’s not that good. But it’s something to do.”

“It’s great,” Greta says, waving away the change. “Keep it. Consider it a down payment for next time.”

A smile twitches on the girl’s face, but then she shakes her head and busies herself stacking the cups. “You’re not coming back here.”

“Maybe I’ll see you in New York, then,” Greta says, and the girl looks up in surprise, her face full of delight.

Greta waits until she’s walked a few blocks to toss the mostly full cup into a garbage bin. Then she stops to look around. The main street is lined with dusty bars and gift shops. There’s a statue of a wooden bear outside one of them, and a neon sign that says WILD ALASKAN SALMON in the window of another. A large black dog watches her from the bed of a muddy blue pickup truck, and across the street is the Hammer Museum, which Greta assumes contains artifacts from some great frontiersman named Hammer, until she notices the literal ten-foot sculpture of a hammer and nail out front.

Up ahead, she spots a wood-beamed brewery and heads toward it. Inside, the whole place smells of grain and hops, and it’s crowded with tourists from the ship. Greta waits in line to order the signature lager, then carries her pint to the garden out back, which isn’t nearly as busy.

For a long time, she just sits there, letting the events of the day recede. The beer is crisp and refreshing, and the sun is warm on her face. She listens to the rise and fall of conversations around her, and watches a bee circle an empty glass. Then, after a while, she takes out her phone and does something she swore she’d never do again.

She calls Luke.





Chapter Twenty-Three


“It wasn’t me,” he says the moment he picks up the phone, which is when Greta catches the eye of a harried waiter and points to her glass. The guy nods and starts to head back into the brewery, but she makes a frantic motion and he turns back again.

Two, she mouths, holding up two fingers.

“Greta?” Luke says on the other end of the phone, and she hates herself for missing the way he says her name, the e drawn out so that it sounds more like Greeta. It’s so specific, so unique to him, and the familiarity makes her stomach twist. “You there?”

“Yeah. Listen—”

But, of course, listening has never been his strong suit. “I swear I didn’t do it,” he says. “I didn’t even know till I got off the plane in Sydney a little while ago and had a million texts. It’s everywhere. My brother said it’s even trending on Twitter.”

“Fantastic,” Greta says flatly.

“Look, I know you’re probably not thrilled, but it’s obviously not true, so who cares, right?”

She grits her teeth. “I do.”

“Well, I don’t.”

“That sounds familiar.”

“So does that,” he says, but he seems more amused than anything else. “You have to admit it would’ve been a clever way to get you to ring me.” A few seconds pass as he tries to wait out her silence, but he can’t manage it. “How are you, anyway?”

“I’m fine, Luke,” she says with a sigh. “That’s not really the—”

“I saw you’re doing Gov Ball. That’s huge. Wish I could be there to see it.”

Greta adjusts her grip on the phone. “Yeah.”

“Are you ready?”

She doesn’t want to talk about this with him.

At least, she doesn’t want to want to talk about this with him.

But the truth is, nobody will ever understand her as well as Luke, at least musically speaking. Those years they were together, he could be an asshole about so many things—not making enough of an effort with Yara and playing devil’s advocate when they talked about politics and always needing to have the last word in a fight—but when it came to her music, they were almost always in sync.