“But at eighteen, that’s a lot of responsibility for a summer.”
“Lucie, Dakota is nothing if not far too old for her age,” said Catherine. “It’ll be fine. You’ll see.”
“And what are you going to be doing in Italy while I’m shooting and Dakota is babyminding?”
“Oh, I’ll search for pieces for the shop, taste some wines, that sort of thing. It’ll be a good break,” said Catherine. “I’ve become a little stuck in some bad patterns and I’d like to try and change things up.”
Using the Internet was a curious business. Efficient, in that she could type in the names of places that Catherine had given her and come up with endless reviews and commentaries on practically anything. She could find pictures of street corners, apartment swaps, blogs about airline meals. It was an extravaganza of the quirky and the unique. But there was always the danger of too much information. Googling people from the past: Was there any greater use of the Web? Wasting time researching, like she was doing right now, when she should have been working. Lucie’s goal for the day had been to make significant headway blocking out shots and ideas for the series of interlinked lovey-dovey pop song videos for Isabella’s new Timeless album. She won the assignment with her idea to do videos for each song on the album that could be put together as a single story—a short musical film, essentially—or each video song could be run individually. It was the idea of mix-and-match separates brought to music video to create one cohesive ensemble. Lucie’s story concept was to have Isabella be chased through the streets of Rome in period costume after period costume, conveying the idea that her love was lasting through the ages. A bit hokey, true enough, but sometimes that had its own appeal.
Problem was, she couldn’t stop opening new browser windows, the desire to do the one thing she’d never allowed herself to do in over six years. Her fingers floated over the keyboard, tracing the letters W-I-L-L-G-U-S-T-O-F-S-O-N without actually making contact. It’s very hard to unmake a decision that’s been made. This she knew. And yet all the talk about Rosie getting older and Ginger asking about her father and the sleepless nights ruminating what could happen if there was a tragedy. Like what happened to Georgia. Where was Ginger’s biological dad? The casual boyfriend who’d shared his sperm and then found himself dumped by Lucie? Maybe she could pull a James and Georgia, build a happy family for herself now that she was in a different place and could use a little help. She’d looked to Georgia as her role model in so many ways, and now that she had all these questions, Georgia wasn’t around to answer them. Sometimes it left the club bereft when they thought of Georgia. At other moments, it was simply inconvenient, such as when they wanted to ask her opinion about a stitch. Or what had she said when Dakota asked about James.
“I dunno,” was what Dakota had said when she’d asked after a night of babysitting, and Lucie warned herself not to push it, suspecting she was tiptoeing into dangerous emotional territory.
“But you were happy to meet James, right?” A bit of investigation wouldn’t do much damage, she told herself. After all, she needed to know.
“Yeah, I guess,” she said. “He was nice. Funny. A bit weird. We did a lot of stuff together.”
“So it was worth it?” asked Lucie.
“Maybe,” said Dakota. “Though sometimes I used to wonder if I was only ever allowed to have one parent. Maybe there was some sort of quota. Like if he hadn’t come back into the scene then maybe Mom wouldn’t have died. Stupid, I know.”
“That’s not what happened, Dakota,” said Lucie.
“I know,” said Dakota. “It’s just a thought I have sometimes. I was just saying so. Because it’s nice to have a dad. Sometimes. Not always, though. It’s just what is. He’s what I have.”
“And if you’d never met him?”
“Then, not to point out the obvious, Lucie,” said Dakota, speaking slowly as though Lucie were a little thick. “But then I’d just never have met him. That would be what is.”
“It’s not better, then?”
“I dunno,” said Dakota, who began shaking her head and packing up the books she’d brought to study after Ginger had fallen asleep. “I haven’t perfected my time machine yet to compare my real life against the imaginary alternative.”
Lucie paced through the house now, checking in on Ginger, who had pulled her covers over her head, no doubt in an effort to hide from the monsters who lived under her bed. (Pip and Butter, she’d told Lucie their names were, and they liked to eat Ginger-flavored toes.)
“Do you need your father, little girl?” she’d whispered to her sleeping daughter. Would it be so simple? she wondered. Georgia had loved James: there was that to consider. Lucie had merely enjoyed sleeping with Will. And he was interesting. But what were they going to do? Pick up where they left off? Well, what if they did? Would that be so bad? Sharing a babysitter with Darwin and going out for couple dates? She returned to her keyboard, at the name typed neatly in the Google search window. Waiting for her. All she had to do was press down the keys. Because odds were good that she was going to find what she was looking for, that was for sure.
All she had to do was press.
fourteen
The worst thing about being a college student was that you had to come home again in the summer. Had to move back into your high school bedroom with its blue walls from your ocean phase, submit to your father’s high school rules because it wasn’t worth the energy to fight them and you weren’t likely to be successful anyway, and spend every day walking the twelve blocks to Walker and Daughter to wait for the die-hard knitters to show up and get a fix. The rest of the day was just killing time. Let’s face it, thought Dakota, summer is tough on a yarn shop. And it was going to be tough on her.
Sometimes all she wanted was to be at the shop and just sit; other days she fought the urge to walk on by and never stop.
This is what no one seemed to grasp: She was a motherless daughter. And her missing mother was in every inch of Walker and Daughter. It was like confronting her absence all over again. “Welcome to Walker and Daughter. I’m the daughter, Walker’s dead.”
Then again, Peri was so busy trying to take over the store and turn it into a handbag boutique that the knitting shop was apt to get lost in the shuffle. So let her have it! I don’t want my mother’s shop, thought Dakota. I want my mother.
The loss had become the essence of who she was. And she grew to live with the little nubbin of emotional ache that was always there, secreted away in a place no one could touch.
She even defined her friends: those who knew, and those who didn’t.
Dakota concentrated late at night on remembering the sound of her mother’s voice, thinking through her favorite phrases until she was sure she had her mother’s cadence and tempo just right. “Hey, muffingirl. Hey. No thirdsies.”
In this way, she could do something to prevent the forgetting.
Sometimes she felt angry, especially when well-meaning people, like her grandmothers Bess and Lillian, yabbered on and on about how her mother was in a better place. Dakota wanted Georgia to miss her, wanted her to be sad that they had to be separated. To be in some sort of heaven, but a little bit melancholy about the whole thing, you know? Eating supper with God and telling him about her little muffingirl still on earth. Have him commiserate about the circumstances.
“My experience is not yours”: that’s what she’d yelled at her father when he told her she was acting out, that he wasn’t happy she wasn’t putting in enough time at the shop. “You have obligations,” he’d said. “Responsibilities. It’s not what your mother wanted.”
No other college kids she knew were part-owners in thriving retail businesses. They spent their summers doing internships and flying off to Australia to chase dingoes and earn extra credit in the process. But for Dakota it had looked as though it was going to be one long, hot summer, baking on the pavement as she shuffled her way to the shop and then listening to Peri lecture her on this, that, and the other. She remembered w
hen Peri had been the coolest, most glamorous person she could ever imagine. Now, most of the time, she was a nag. Oh, she had her moments, like when she gave Dakota a makeover before NYU, going through her closet with her and helping her look like a more sophisticated version of herself. But mostly things were tense, and one or the other of them grumped through the day.
And then Lucie sent her magic e-mail. Although Dakota mainly communicated with her pals via text message, she did try to check e-mail regularly. It only seemed fair since she had such an unusual complement of maturing older ladies in her life, who still thought e-mail was all that.
“Any interest in being my sitter in Italy?” That was the first line in Lucie’s message. Um, yeah. Lucie had sketched out a plan: she’d provide room, board, flight costs, and a very small weekly stipend. In return, Dakota was called upon for full-on Ginger duty. But—and this was what sealed the deal—Lucie would cover the costs for both of them to do whatever cultural things Dakota was willing to do. In short, expose Ginger to anything and everything and have an amazing experience in the process. It was, as they say, a no-brainer. And with the offer, Dakota knew she could rescue herself from a summer sleeping underneath the original Georgia afghan, staring up at the ceiling and wondering what she could do to save herself from the future that had been planned for her. It was going to be perfect.
The only thing that would have made it better was if she’d actually managed to talk with Andrew Doyle before the end of the semester. Then again, imagine how attractive she would seem after a summer in Rome . . .
“You’re not going.” There was no one else in the shop—no customers, no Anita—and Peri was not bothering to play nice. The air in the shop was stuffy, due to the humidity, and tense, due to the subject.
“I beg your pardon?” Dakota crossed her arms.
“You are going to show up for work here, just like you are scheduled to do, for the summer,” said Peri.
“I’m sorry,” said Dakota, jabbing a finger in Peri’s general direction. “But the last time I checked, I owned this place.”
“Your mother owned this place,” spat out Peri. “But you know who also has a piece of the action? That’s me. Your boss. And I’m telling you that you can’t just waltz in here and announce you’re not going to make an appearance this summer.”
“My boss?” Dakota began shaking her head. “What sort of garbage is this?”
“It’s reality,” said Peri. “You are a spoiled little girl and everyone else dances to your tune while I work my ass off to make sure this business continues to flourish.” Peri began pacing up and down the floor of the shop.
“I have kept my mouth shut for months,” she shouted. “Your every whim is catered to by a cadre of women who adored your mother. And you, you just spit on her hard work every chance you get. You don’t want to show up for work, you don’t want the store renovated. And you know who might like going to Italy, Dakota? Me. I’ve never been. I’d like to sit around drinking cappuccino and reading Italian Vogue. But you know what? I have a store to run. And believe me, honey, you are so not my boss.”
“And what about Anita? She’s been here long before you were!” Dakota was sputtering. “Since when did you begin to walk on water?”
“Since I put in the time,” said Peri. “I have paid my dues over and over again.”
“So all along you’ve hated me, then,” shouted Dakota. “You were never my friend.”
“I have always been your friend,” said Peri quietly. Calmly. She sat down in an upholstered chair at the table in the center of the shop. “And I’m your friend now. If I didn’t give a damn about you and about this business, I would say ‘Arrivederci!’ But I’m not going to let you behave this way. You want to be a grown-up? Behave like one.”
And what did that mean, anyway? Stuff down all of your emotions and suffocate to death in a job you didn’t want? Dakota stared at Peri, feeling her hope for the summer evaporate within her.
“You don’t know what it’s like!” she screamed. “To you this is just a business. But to me it’s all my life.” Dakota walked over to the closest bin of yarn and began grabbing out the pink cashmere, skein by skein, piling it up in her arms. “This one is building castles with the new shipment of yarn in the back office while my mother tallies receipts. This one is having my father give me my first bicycle,” she shouted, reaching onto the shelves for blue, for gray, for red. “This one is coming back from Broadway shows with Anita. This one is watching Lucie’s film about my mother. This one is sitting down with all of you, meeting after meeting, and having to listen to your feelings. I don’t care. Oh, I know, if I want to be a grown-up, I should.”
She flung the entire pile of yarn onto the table. A skein of purple merino rolled onto Peri’s lap.
“But I don’t! It’s me. I win. My pain trumps yours. Everyone’s. She was my mother and she’s gone. And everyone expects me to give a thumbs-up to running her store. You want to know something? My mother wanted to be a writer. She went into the knitting stuff because she was poor and she was pregnant. This isn’t her dream. It’s sloppy seconds and I don’t want it for her anymore.”
“Dakota, just calm down,” said Peri, her face no longer stern as it had been moments before, but creased with worry. “You are like a little sister to me. I was just trying to make you pull yourself up by your bootstraps.”
“There is no moment when it gets better. Don’t you understand that?” Dakota sunk into another upholstered armchair and began to sob hysterically. “It’s all acting. I just want a break. I just want to get away from it for once. I just want to stop being in the shop for a while. Let me go. All of you! Why can’t the club just let me go?”
“Oh, baby,” said Peri, coming over to hold on to Dakota as she cried. She didn’t even flinch as Dakota’s nose began to run and the whole mess fell onto her brand-new taupe blouse, didn’t pull away as Dakota cried harder.
The deal was struck: If Dakota could find a replacement to work in the shop, then Peri would go along.
“I’m surprised your father agreed,” commented Peri, long after the tears had subsided. Dakota was thankful summer was a slow time at the shop, mortified by the thought of a stranger witnessing her meltdown. Or, worse, a stranger looking for mounds of pink cashmere and leaving in fear it was snotty and tear-stained.
“I didn’t talk to him yet,” admitted Dakota. “I figured, I’m eighteen, and therefore . . .”
“Do you pay for college yourself?”
“You know I don’t,” said Dakota. “It’s some combo of him and the money from my mother’s estate.”
“Do you control that money?”
“Not until I’m twenty-five,” she said, knowing full well that Peri knew all of these details already.
“See where I’m going with this?” said Peri. “Chronological age does not signify adulthood in this country. It’s all about who is paying the bills.”
“So I’m a kid because my dad controls me with his wallet?”
“In a manner of speaking,” said Peri. “In practical terms, it means you’re going to have to get his permission to go to Italy or you may be desperate to work here in the fall because NYU isn’t getting its bills paid. Know what I mean?”
Dakota was a procrastinator. So, if she’d had her druthers, she wouldn’t have asked James until she had to catch her flight. But then she realized that (a) he had her passport in his safe and (b) he was planning a vacation for the two of them. In response, she baked up a beautiful chocolate and strawberry pie, in addition to a dinner of takeout Chinese. Dakota was a baker, not a cook.
“We should celebrate your first year of college,” he said, forking up a mouthful of flaky crust covered in dark chocolate and ripe berry. Dakota felt guilty imagining the money he would spend on flights and guidebooks if she didn’t say anything.
“Dad,” she said. It was strange to remember that when she’d first met her father, she was twelve, and she initially called him by his first name. What a
difference a few years and a shared tragedy make, she thought to herself.
“Dad.”
“This must be serious,” he said. “You’ve addressed me twice. Let me guess. You want to fly first-class. Well, I think we can arrange that.”
“No,” said Dakota. “That’s not it.”
“Don’t worry,” continued James. “I know you have to work in the shop for a little bit. We’ll go at the end of the summer, after you let Peri have a bit of time off. Then she won’t mind giving you a bit of a break.”
“Dad, I’d like to go to Italy.”
“Great idea!” said James. “They’re just opening two new V hotels in Venice and in Rome. The weather will be hot, though.”
“Not what I meant,” said Dakota. “Lucie has invited me to go with her when she goes overseas to do the film shoot for that Italian pop star. I told you.”
“You told me Lucie got an exciting assignment,” said James, very slowly. “You didn’t tell me this other business.”
“That’s because it’s new.”
“So you’d be a production assistant? Her helper or something?” James frowned. “I never knew you were interested in filmmaking, Dakota.”
“No, you’ve got it all wrong,” she said. “She’s asked me to come over and look after Ginger while she’s working.”
“What?” James looked at Dakota as if she’d lost her mind. “You want to take a job as her daughter’s nanny?”
“Yeah,” said Dakota. “I like Ginger. I want to do something different.”
“I like Ginger, too, though she’s always seemed a little hyper,” said James. “But there’s a huge difference between being someone’s occasional Saturday night sitter and becoming their nanny, Dakota. And I’m not sure if I’m so comfortable with that. For me. For you, a young black woman.”