Love and Other Words(8)

He shrugged. “People come to the Russian River on vacation and a lot of times they leave their holiday reads here when they go. The library gets a ton, and I have a deal with Sue down there: I get first crack at the new donations as long as I pick them up on Monday and bring them back on Wednesday.” He nudged his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “One time, she got six new books in from a family that was visiting for the week, and I read them all.”

“You read them all in three days?” I asked. “That’s insane.”

Elliot frowned, narrowing his eyes. “You think I’m lying?”

“I don’t think you’re lying. How old are you?”

“Fourteen, last week.”

“You look younger.”

“Thanks,” he said flatly. “I was going for that.” He blew his breath out, puffing his hair off his forehead.

A laugh burst free of my throat. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

“How old are you?” he asked.

“Thirteen. My birthday is March eighteenth.”

He nudged his glasses up. “You’re in eighth grade?”

“Yeah. You?”

Elliot nodded. “Same.” He looked around the empty space, surveying. “What do your parents do? They work in the city?”

I shook my head, chewing my lip. Without realizing it, I had really enjoyed talking to someone who didn’t know that I was motherless, hadn’t seen me broken and raw after I lost her. “My dad owns a company in Berkeley that imports and sells handmade ceramics and art and stuff.” I didn’t add that it all started when he began importing his father’s beautiful pottery and it sold like crazy.

“Cool. What about your —”

“What do your parents do?”

He narrowed his eyes at my outburst but answered anyway. “My mom works part-time in the tasting room at Toad Hollow. My dad is the town dentist…”

The town dentist. The one dentist? I guess I hadn’t realized how small Healdsburg was until he said that. In Berkeley, there were three dentists’ offices on my four-block walk to school.

“But he only works three days a week, and you can probably tell he doesn’t like to stay still. He does everything around town,” Elliot said. “Helps at the farmers’ market. Helps with operations at a few wineries.”

“Yeah, wine’s a big deal around here, isn’t it?” I realized as he spoke about it how many wineries we passed on the drive here.

“Wine: it’s what’s for dinner,” Elliot said with a laugh.

And there, right there in that second, it felt like we had something easy.

I hadn’t had easy in three years. I had friends who stopped knowing how to talk to me, or got tired of me being mopey, or were so focused on boys that we no longer had anything in common.

But then he ruined it: “Are your parents divorced?”

I sucked in a breath, oddly offended. “No.”

He tilted his head and watched me, unspeaking. He didn’t need to point out that both times I’d visited this town, I’d come without a mother.

I released my breath what felt like an hour later. “My mom died three years ago.”

This truth reverberated around the room, and I knew my admission irrevocably changed something between us. The simple things I was no longer: his new neighbor, a girl, potentially interesting, also potentially uninteresting. Now I was a girl who had been permanently damaged by life. I was someone to be handled carefully.

His eyes had gone wide behind his thick lenses. “Seriously?”

I nodded.

Did I wish I hadn’t told him? A little. What was the point of a weekend retreat if I couldn’t actually retreat from the one truth that seemed to stall my heartbeat every few minutes?

He looked down at his feet, toyed with a stray thread on his shorts. “I don’t know what I would do.”

“I still don’t know what to do.”

He fell quiet. I never knew how to reel a conversation back after the Dead Mother topic. And which was worse: having it with a relative stranger like this, or having it back home with someone who had known me my entire life and no longer knew how to speak to me without false brightness or syrupy sympathy?

“What’s your favorite word?”

Startled, I looked up at him, unsure I’d heard him right. “My favorite word?”

He nodded, slipping his glasses up his nose with a quick, practiced scrunch of his face that made him look angry and then surprised within a single second. “You have seven boxes of books up here. A wild guess tells me you like words.”

I suppose I had never thought about having a favorite word, but now that he asked, I kind of liked the idea. I let my eyes lose focus as I thought.

“Ranunculus,” I said after a moment.

“What?”

“Ranunculus. It’s a kind of flower. It’s such a weird word but the flowers are so pretty, I like how unexpected that is.”

They were my Mom’s favorite, I didn’t say.

“That’s a pretty girly answer.”

“Well, I am a girl.”

He kept his eyes on his feet but I knew I wasn’t imagining the gleam of interest I’d seen when I said ranunculus. I bet he had expected me to say unicorn or daisy or vampire.