Well Met(57)

I never felt particularly dirty while I was at Faire. It wasn’t like I was walking through clouds of dust, or spent the day being pelted by handfuls of dirt. But by the time I got home my skin practically itched for a shower, and I couldn’t wait to strip down and scrub. I loved watching in bemused disgust as the water swirled down the drain in a dark brown stream. But after shampooing my hair twice and basically loofah-ing off a layer of skin, I felt cleaner than I ever had in my life. Stacey had said at the beginning that a long hot shower at the end of the day would be my new best friend, and she was right.

When I made it back out to the kitchen, April took in my outfit: yoga pants and a stretched-out T-shirt. “Staying in tonight, huh?”

“Yep.” I’d had enough of the men of Willow Creek for a while. I reached for a plate and the carton of sesame chicken, which was thankfully still warm. Across the table Caitlin was finishing up her sweet-and-sour pork.

“Can I have my phone back?” No phones at the table, that was the rule.

April shook her head. “Dishes in the sink first.”

Cait huffed a little, then brightened. “They were fighting over Emily today.”

I dropped a chopstick.

“What?” April asked.

“Nothing.” I looked daggers across the table at Caitlin, who gleefully refused to get the hint.

“At the chess match.” She got up to clear her dishes and grinned as she walked by me. “Coach Malone and Mr. G.”

“Oh, really?” April turned to me, a slow smile crawling up her face.

I turned in my chair to watch my niece take her dishes to the sink. “You weren’t even there!”

“I heard about it!” she called over her shoulder, and I slumped in my chair. Great. I was officially part of Faire gossip.

“Here.” I scooped up Caitlin’s phone from where it sat next to April’s plate and tossed it to her. Cait caught it neatly. “Why don’t you go play on your phone. Somewhere that isn’t here.”

“Don’t think you’re getting out of it that easy.” April turned back to me as Caitlin all but skipped out of the room. “Why are men fighting over you? Something you’re not telling me?”

Oh, God. I hadn’t talked to April about any of this—Simon’s hot-and-cold actions, Mitch’s easygoing if meaningless flirting—and now I didn’t know where to start. Instead I stared hard at my sesame chicken. “It’s nothing,” I finally said. “It’s a bit. A little sketch we’ve been doing at Faire. Simon plays this pirate character who’s in love with me . . .” And he’s kissed me. More than once. But it isn’t real. None of it’s real. The thought made me sadder than I expected. “Mitch has been getting in on it lately, so they did this whole thing today . . .” I shrugged. “It was silly.”

“Mmm-hmm.” April crunched on an egg roll, and she sounded so much like our mother that I knew I hadn’t fooled her a bit. “So this has nothing to do with why you’re staying in tonight.”

I had to laugh. “Oh, it’s got everything to do with it.” I pushed my food around on my plate a little before tossing down my chopsticks. I’d lost my appetite. Which was a shame, because I loved Chinese food. I reached for the fortune cookies in the middle of the table and cracked one open. Tell me what to do, fortune cookie. I unrolled the little slip of paper inside: Ask the right question.

Hmm. Adding “in bed” didn’t make it much funnier, so it was kind of a bummer of a fortune as far as I was concerned, but at the same time it had a point. I’d been doing a lot of going along with things since I got to town, and hadn’t asserted myself. I needed to ask more questions. Maybe it was time to start.

I looked up at April again. No time like the present. “How did you do it?”

She raised her eyebrows. “Do what?”

I gestured around. “All of this. After you got divorced. How did you pick up and keep going? How did you move on?” I held my breath. Was this too personal a question? We didn’t talk like this. We never had. This may have been the first time I’d asked my big sister for advice.

April blew out a long breath. “Wow. Well . . .” She looked around the kitchen, as if seeing it for the first time. “I mean, ‘all this’ took a really long time. When Robert and I first got divorced, it was pretty much me, a baby, and a tote bag full of diapers.”

“He really didn’t help you at all? No child support, nothing?” I’d never known the details of April’s divorce. I’d been younger than Caitlin when it had happened, after all.

“Nothing,” she said. “My lawyer tried to call his bluff. Told him that if he didn’t want to pay child support, he wouldn’t have any parental rights. Turned out he was fine with that. I mean, I could have fought it. Tried harder to get him to step up. But I was so . . .” She sighed a long sigh. “I was so tired, and I was too young to feel that tired, you know?”

“Do I ever.” I was thinking about Jake and me now. About how I’d come home one night last year from my second job, realizing I was twenty-three and my soul was exhausted. That night I’d felt much older than I had any right to. Yeah, I knew exactly what April meant.

“I figured the best way to stop feeling that tired was to stop fighting losing battles. Stop banging my head against a brick wall, trying to get him to do the right thing. I focused on what I had. Caitlin. Mom and Dad. You.”