Two Truths and a Lie(62)
45.
The Squad
If you turn down a spot on the committee for the Holiday House Tours two years in a row, you’re not going to get asked back. You’re just not. We know people who have been trying to get on that committee for four or five years—longer, in some cases. If Rebecca wanted to give her spot to Gina, obviously that was her choice. But she could have at least answered Gina’s texts about it, so Gina would know what she was thinking.
(By now it was almost August, and we had seen almost nothing of Rebecca.) One of us thought maybe she was seeing somebody, but why would she keep that a secret?
We wouldn’t blame her if she was! Peter had been gone for a year and a half by this point!
46.
Alexa
For the next several days the conversation with Cam roiled around Alexa’s stomach like a batch of bad oysters. She vacillated between self-righteousness (how dare he refuse to help her with this very scary situation!) and self-doubt (was there a chance he was right?). At the Cottage, she worked one five-hour shift, during which she made six Ringers, three milk shakes, and who-knows-how-many ice cream cones with rainbow sprinkles. She was scattered and klutzy. She dropped a doughnut, and then she stepped on it. She gave the wrong change to two different customers. She forgot to tell her boss that they were on their last container of chocolate ice cream, so they ran out—a huge problem, obviously.
“Whoa,” said her coworker, Hannah. “Amazon. What’s going on with you? You get in a fight with Tyler or something?”
“No,” said Alexa tightly. “No, I did not get in a fight with Tyler. Tyler isn’t even here. He’s still in Michigan.”
She sat on the beach for forty minutes after her shift, long enough to add a light golden topcoat to her tan without going too far.
Alexa simmered and simmered. She made and posted one video, about market orders and stop-loss orders, which she had planned on doing separately but then realized she could easily combine into two. She reorganized her closet and her bathroom drawers. In a fit of do-goodness, she took Bernice down to the boardwalk, to see the tall ship (Bernice loved boats).
Finally, when she could stand the terrible feeling no longer, Alexa got in her Jeep and made the short trip to Market Basket.
Alexa generally tried to stay away from Market Basket because you couldn’t get down an aisle without seeing someone you knew. Sure enough, near the yogurt she ran into her eighth-grade English teacher, Mrs. Sanchez, who never failed to remember and mention Alexa’s “cogent” essay on To Kill a Mockingbird. (Topic: Discuss the concept of fear in the novel.)
“It’s so nice to see you, Alexa!” Mrs. Sanchez gushed. And then, right on cue, “You know, I still use your Mockingbird essay as an example. Every year, I pull that thing out, and I read the whole thing out loud, and I try to explain to my students that it’s a close reading of the text that really makes for a stellar piece of work.” She beamed for an uncomfortably long time and then said, “Please don’t tell me you graduated. Is time going by that fast?”
“I did,” said Alexa. “It is.”
“Where are you headed next year?”
“Um,” said Alexa. “I’m not sure.” She was scanning the aisles for Cam. She was pretty sure he worked checkout, but then again she could imagine him cheerfully restocking the salsa and answering customers’ questions about where to find the Bob’s Red Mill flour. “Probably Colby.”
“How wonderful! And I hope you’re going to put those fabulous writing skills to use,” said Mrs. Sanchez. Alexa was pretty sure that when she moved to Los Angeles and got natural highlights in her hair from the sun and dated surfers and actors, she would not be using the skills that allowed her to delve into Jean Louise Finch’s young psyche, but she didn’t want to crush Mrs. Sanchez completely. Mrs. Sanchez, after all, seemed to be in the very tiny camp of Alexa fans.
“I might go more in a—financy direction,” said Alexa. “I’ve become pretty interested in the stock market.” Before she could register Mrs. Sanchez’s disappointment, both in her future and in her use of the made-up word “financy,” Alexa said her good-byes.
By the hard cheeses, she saw her neighbors from two doors down, the Walkers. She kept her head pointed toward the floor and avoided eye contact. In the nonorganic fruit aisle she saw the mother of the first family she ever babysat for, Mrs. Reyes, but she was sans children and thus easily circumvented. In the organic fruit aisle she came upon Caitlin, of all people, who was taking a selfie with a container of raspberries. Alexa didn’t know why and wasn’t about to ask. She skirted out of the fruit aisle, undetected.
She gathered enough random food in her cart (broccoli, seltzer, those crostini Tuscan crackers Morgan liked, as an olive branch of sorts—a cracker branch) so that her trip looked legit but not over the top, and she headed toward the checkouts. Cam wasn’t working any of the registers. She chose a line with a young checkout person who might be friendly with him. Everyone else working was at least forty-five.
“You could have gone in the express line,” the girl chirped, surveying Alexa’s items. “You wouldn’t have had to wait!”
Alexa shot her a withering glance that said, I know, but I didn’t want to. Then she tossed her hair and said, “Hey, do you know if Cam’s working today?”