Georgie, All Along
Kate Clayborn
This one’s for the quaranteam
Chapter 1
Georgie
Well, well, well.
If it isn’t yet another reinvention.
From the sweat-damp bucket seat of my old Prius, I stare in disbelief out my windshield at a storefront I hardly recognize. The last time I came to Nickel’s Market and Deli, the red-orange sign above the door had read “N el’s M et & D i” and the front window had been haphazardly adorned with white posterboard signs, each crookedly hung rectangle bearing a red-markered message about the week’s sales on six-packs or pork rinds or paper towels.
In fact, that isn’t just what it looked like the last time I came here.
That’s what it looked like every time I came here. All throughout my childhood, all throughout my adolescence.
But Nickel’s now is a different story, clearly—its once-dingy brick fa?ade charmingly whitewashed, its new sign artfully vintage-looking and hung perfectly straight above the sparkling-clean front window. Instead of posterboard signs, there’s an Instagram-worthy display of seagrass baskets, each filled with fresh produce and rustic-looking loaves of bread, Mason jars full of jewel-toned preserves and jams.
“What the heck,” I mutter to myself, even though I shouldn’t be surprised. For months, it’s exactly this sort of thing that Bel has been banging on about—the various transformations in our once-unremarkable, slightly shabby hometown of Darentville, Virginia. The shops, the tourism, the redevelopment of land along the river—they’ve all drawn my best friend back here for her own brand of reinvention: city to small town, child-free to mom-to-be, in-the-office workaholic to remote-work part-time consultant.
I should be happy seeing this transformed version of Nickel’s—happy for Ernie Nickel, who’s run the place forever, and happy for Bel, who probably loves this version of it. But I’m uneasy, and not only because the very specific strawberry milkshake I’ve stopped to order on a last-minute impulse probably doesn’t even get served here anymore.
No, this uneasiness is bigger, more diffuse—a tide of frustration at being so bowled over by a storefront facelift, a looming doubt about my decision to come back here. My eyes drift to the rearview, and I wince at the backseat evidence of my haphazard departure from LA, my whole life from the last nine years shoved into two suitcases, a duffel bag, and four extra-large black garbage bags.
It’s a mess back there.
It’s a mess in here, I think, pressing my palms to my eyes, gusting out a heavy sigh. Twenty-seven hundred miles on the road and I’m not ruminating any less about what’s happened to my life over the last month, a sort of slow-motion reverse reinvention that’s left me jobless and homeless and entirely without a plan for myself. Every five minutes, I hear a phantom chiming from my phone, the tone I have set specifically for Nadia, as if I’m expecting that any second now, she’ll call to tell me her own sudden, shocking plans for changing her entire life—giving up her hugely successful career, her hugely influential existence in LA, her absolutely indispensable personal assistant—were a total mistake.
“This will be so good for you, Georgie,” she’d said to me, as the movers had packed up the last of her things. “You’ll finally be able to do all the things you want to do.”
I’d smiled and nodded and made a checkmark next to the primary bedroom entry on the moving list, and tried desperately to ignore the terrifying blankness in my head at that phrase: all the things you want to do.
I reach for my phone, too late remembering that I’ve already made more than a dozen pledges over the course of this cross-country drive to check it less, to stop treating it like it still needs to be superglued to my hand.
There’s only one message, and it’s from Bel: a string of emojis that represent her excitement over my imminent arrival. Exploding celebration cone, heart-eyes face, those two Playboy-bunny looking ladies standing in some kind of weird formation, a bunch of pink sparkle hearts. It’s not the sort of frantic can you do this immediately? type of text that’s dominated my life over the last few years, but still, it’s a good reminder. If there’s one thing that’s cut through the terrifying blankness problem, it’s the prospect of spending time with Bel.
I want that, at least.
I take a deep breath, gathering my resolve. Get in, get Bel’s favorite milkshake, get over to her new house, and start helping her with whatever she needs. You’re good at that, I tell myself, unhooking my seat belt. You’re used to that.
Before I get out, I drop my phone into the center console, removing the temptation and recommitting to this new plan, the only one that’s made even a hair of sense since Nadia rode off into the sunset of her reinvention-slash-retirement. I think of Bel on the phone last month, begging me to come, and it’s the motivation I need to finally shove open my door and unfold my tired, tense body from the driver’s seat.
Of course, my settled resolve lasts only until I catch sight of my reflection in that sparkling-clean front window, at which point I remember what I put on this morning in the last lousy hotel room of this trip: a threadbare white tank top that I’m pretty sure I spilled coffee on somewhere back in Tennessee and a pair of ankle-length linen overalls that very much have the appearance of having been pulled from a garbage bag.