The Sweetness of Salt

The Sweetness of Salt by Cecilia Galante





part

one





chapter


1


“Julia!” Mom leaped up from the couch as I walked through the front door. “I was wondering when you’d get back. What took so long?”

I glanced down at my watch and sidestepped my way over to the stairs. “Mrs. Soprano is in charge of graduation practice this year. She made us all line up and then walk across the stage three times. Like we’re in kindergarten or something.”

Behind Mom, I could see my bright gold graduation robe spread out over one arm of the couch, the hem folded back neatly. No, no, no. There was no time for this now. Milo was probably already in the window seat, a book resting on his knees. His worn-out Converse sneakers would be pushed comfortably up against the corner wall, while his honey-ribboned hair flopped across his forehead. I had to get up there. Now. I lunged up the steps, two at a time. “I’ll talk to you later, Mom, okay? I have some stuff I have to do.”

Mom took the needle and thread out from between her teeth.

“Wait a second, will you?” Mom turned around and grabbed my robe off the couch. “Just try this on for me real quick. I hemmed the bottom where it was loose, and I want to make sure it’s even all the way around.”

I paused at the top of the steps. “Later, okay? I got this great idea on the way home for the end of my speech, and I want to write it down before I forget.”

Mom paused, her small blue eyes crinkling around the corners. “Oh. Well, why didn’t you say that? After dinner, all right?”

“Great.” I turned, ready to head into my room.

“Oh, and Julia?”

“What?”

“You have it memorized, don’t you? Your speech, I mean?”

“Yes. I have it memorized, Mom. Don’t worry.”

She ran a hand through her short brown hair and then rested it on the hip of her purple sweat jacket. Beneath the hall light, I could see the tiny cord attached to the hearing aid in her left ear, something she’d had to wear even before I was born. As the founder of the neighborhood walking club, Mom was fit and strong, but sometimes, like then, when I caught a glimpse of her hearing aid, she looked a little fragile.

“I’m not worried, honey,” she said. “It’s just…well, the valedictorian has to be prepared, you know? When all is said and done, it’s kind of your day, Julia. You have to make sure you sound really professional. I mean, to the hilt.”

I sighed. “I won’t sound like anything, Mom, if you don’t let me work.”

“Go!” she said, tapping the step. “Work away! I’ll call you when dinner’s ready.”

I closed the door carefully to my room and then locked it. Mom had a habit of forgetting to knock sometimes, barging into my room with an armful of clean laundry or something she’d brought home from the florist, where she worked a few days a week. Some days I came home to find arrangements of sunflowers or dried seed pod wreaths arranged on my desk. I didn’t need that today. Not right now.

I walked over to my window and drew back the curtain ever so slightly. Oh God, there he was, right there, in the window across the street, just like he was every afternoon at this time. I withdrew a small notebook from the bottom drawer of my dresser, positioned my chair in front of the window, and opened the curtains. With everything in its place I set my feet against the windowsill, rested my tablet against my knees, and began.

Milo was easy to draw, not just because he was beautiful, but because he sat still for so long. At least during this time of the day. During school he raced from person to person, laughing and joking, always in on—and usually a part of—whatever new thing was happening. Just last week, he’d been voted Mr. Personality by the senior class. The nickname, I thought wistfully, fit him. But I wondered how many people knew this side of him, this secret-reader side. Every once in a while he would put his book down and just stare out the window. Those were the times I lived for most, when his profile turned suddenly, revealing the whole of his face: the long Roman nose, widely set green eyes that looked out from behind a pair of brown glasses, and the dimple in his left cheek, an indentation so deep that when his sister Zoe, his younger sister, told me she had been able to fit a peanut M&M into it, I’d actually believed her.

The pencil moved across the page swiftly, my hand knowing where the slope of Milo’s cheekbone began and how the curve of his chin dipped narrowly in the center. Soon, his eye appeared, the lashes framing an almond-shaped lid. I shaded most of the iris, leaving tiny speckle-points of white where I knew the lightest points were, and started on the other one.

My mind began to drift in the easy way it always did when I drew, wondering what book he was immersed in today. This morning, on the way to school, I’d watched from the backseat of Zoe’s car as he opened Carrie again. Lately he’d been reading a lot of Stephen King, which surprised me because his head was usually buried inside a book of poetry. Milo read poetry the way Zoe drank Dr Pepper, first thing every morning on the way to school and then steadily on the way back home. Walt Whitman. Anne Sexton. Sylvia Plath. Ralph Waldo Emerson. He read poets I hadn’t even heard of, like Mary Oliver and W. H. Auden, Billy Elliot and Sharon Olds, writers he called the “scary truth tellers.” Every once in a while he would look up and recite some line he liked. He’d just say it—whether Zoe and I were listening or not—and then leave it hanging there, like a tiny cord of stars strung on the dashboard.