“So,” Henry said, getting back up on the bike’s pedals, “I was going to the beach. Want to come?”
I looked at him and thought about it. Hanging out with Henry would definitely be better than going home—even if he did call me Edwards and was always trying to get me to race him or see who could eat more hot dogs. “Okay,” I said, spinning my pedal back and standing on it. “Sounds fun.”
“Awesome.” Henry smiled at me, and I noticed that his teeth were no longer crooked in front, like they’d been when I first met him. And his smile was really nice. Why hadn’t I ever noticed that before?
“Race you to the beach?” he asked, already ready to ride, his hands gripping the handlebars.
“I don’t know,” I said, as I pretended to fuss with my gears, all the while getting into position. “I’m not sure if I—Go!” I yelled the last word and started pedaling as fast as I could, leaving Henry to catch up. I laughed out loud as I started to fly down the street, the wind lifting my ponytail. “Loser buys the Cokes!”
Lost & Found
chapter twelve
THE WAITING ROOM IN THE ONCOLOGY DEPARTMENT OF THE Stroudsburg hospital seemed like it had given up on any attempts to be cheerful. The walls were painted a dull peach, and there weren’t any encouraging posters about managing your cold or proper hand-washing techniques, like I’d been used to seeing in my doctor’s office. Instead, there was only a single badly painted landscape of a hill dotted with either sheep or clouds, I wasn’t sure which. The chairs were overstuffed, making me feel like I was slowly sinking down into them, and all the magazines were months out of date. Two of the celebrity marriages trumpeted on the glossy covers had since imploded in messy divorces. I flipped through the closest magazine at hand anyway, realizing how different these happily-ever-after stories seemed when you were aware of what the outcome was going to be. After a few minutes, I tossed it aside. I glanced down at my watch, and then at the door my father had gone through to meet with his doctor. This was not exactly how I’d imagined spending my day off.
I had planned on quitting the snack bar after the first disastrous day, seeing no reason to spend the summer with people who disliked me and made no secret of it. But at dinner that night, as we’d feasted on corn on the cob, French fries, and hamburgers cooked on the grill—what felt like our first real summer meal—my plan hit a snag.
Gelsey, it seemed, hated tennis. While she complained about how stupid the sport was, and how all the people in her tennis class were equally stupid, and Warren was simultaneously attempting to tell us that tennis had been invented in twelfth-century France and popularized in the court of Henry the Eighth, I’d just sat there, enjoying my corn, waiting for the moment that I could jump in and explain that while I was sure that there were merits to working at the snack bar, I felt that my time might be better utilized this summer by doing something else. Anything else. I was working out my explanation in my head, and so wasn’t really paying attention to the conversation around the table. It was only when I heard my name that I snapped back to attention.
“What?” I asked, looking at my father. “What was that, Dad?”
“I was just saying,” my dad said, mostly to my sister, who was glowering down at her plate, “that you also had a new, challenging experience today. But unlike your sister, you are taking it in stride.”
Crap. “Um,” I said, glancing at Warren, trying to see if I could silently communicate with him, and get him to distract everyone, or tell us how something else was invented. But Warren just yawned and helped himself to more fries. “Right. About that…”
“Taylor’s not quitting,” my father said. I cleared my throat, hoping that I could get him to stop somehow without looking like the flakiest person on earth. “And I’m sure her day wasn’t easy. Was it?”
He turned back my way, and everyone in my family looked at me, Warren’s fry raised halfway to his mouth. “No,” I said honestly.
“There you go,” my dad said, giving me a small wink, making me feel terrible about what I was about to do. But then I thought of Lucy’s face when she’d realized I was working there, and how lonely it had been, eating lunch by myself.
“Look,” I said, realizing that this might be my best chance to extricate myself from a situation that, I was sure, was only going to get exponentially worse as the summer went on. “It’s not that I don’t want to work. It’s just that the snack bar wasn’t… um… exactly what I expected.” My mother glanced over at me, her expression indicating she knew exactly what I was about to say. I looked away from her as I continued. “And, given my academic workload next year, I think I should use this summer to—”
“I don’t care!” Gelsey wailed, sounding on the verge of tears. “I don’t want to play tennis and I shouldn’t have to. It’s… not… fair!”
Warren rolled his eyes at me across the table, and I shook my head. This was what came of being the baby of the family. You got to throw tantrums years after you were officially much too old to do so. Gelsey started to sob into her dinner napkin, and I realized that the moment to announce that I was quitting my job had probably passed.
So I’d suffered through two more shifts at the snack bar, mostly just so that I could quit and still save a little bit of face with my dad. They were pretty much the same as my first day—Lucy barely spoke to me, and I spent the entire workday counting down the minutes until I could go home, more convinced with each passing hour that this was not worth the minimum wage. I’d planned on taking my day off to go down to the clubhouse, tell Jillian, leave a message for Fred (who would undoubtedly be fishing), and then tell my family once it was a done deal. But that afternoon, as my dad set aside his work and prepared to go to Stroudsburg for his doctor’s appointment, my mom called me out to the porch.
She was sitting on the top step, combing my sister’s hair. Gelsey was one step below her, a towel around her shoulders, her head tilted back slightly as my mother pulled a wide-tooth comb through her damp auburn curls. This was a ritual the two of them had. They didn’t do it all the time, just when my sister had a bad day or was upset about something. As I watched her getting her hair combed now, I wondered if this was because of the trauma she’d suffered at her tennis lessons (which she hadn’t been allowed to quit) or something else. Years ago, I’d wanted my mother to do this for me, when I was much younger. I’d eventually realized, though, there was probably no point to it. My mother and Gelsey had the same reddish-brown hair—long, thick, and curly. And I had fine, pin-straight hair that never got tangled and that I barely needed to comb myself. But still.
“What?” I asked. Gelsey made a face at me, but before I could respond in kind, my mother turned her head back so I could only see her profile.
“Would you go to Stroudsburg with your dad today?” my mom asked.
“Oh,” I said. This was not what I had been expecting. “Is he okay?”
“He just has his doctor’s appointment, and I was hoping you could go with him,” my mother said, her tone even, as she drew the comb from the crown all the way down to the ends that were already starting to curl into ringlets. I looked at my mother closely, trying to see what she meant by this, if there was anything truly wrong, but my mother could be inscrutable when she wanted to be, and I couldn’t tell anything. “You’re all set,” she said, smoothing her hand down Gelsey’s hair, then whisking the towel off her shoulders.
Gelsey stood and headed inside, crossing to the door in a series of fast twirls. I stepped aside to let her pass, totally used to this, since for several years now, when she was in the mood, Gelsey would seldom walk when she could dance.
“So?” my mother asked, and I turned back to see her plucking the loose hairs from the comb. “Will you go with your dad?”
“Sure,” I said, but still felt like there was more to this than she was telling me. I took a breath to ask when I noticed that my mother was tossing the stray hairs into the air, where they were lifted by the faint breeze that had been ruffling the tr
ees all afternoon. “What are you doing?”
“It’s why you should always comb your hair outside,” she said. “This way, mother birds can weave the strands into their nests.” She looked down at the comb, then started to head inside, folding the towel as she went.
“Mom,” I said, before she reached the door. She looked at me, eyebrows raised, waiting, and I suddenly wanted nothing more than to be able to talk to her like Gelsey could, and tell her what I was really afraid of. “Is Dad okay?”
My mom gave me a sad smile. “I just want him to have some company. Okay?”
And of course I had agreed, and my dad and I drove the hour into Stroudsburg together, my father behind the wheel—I felt like I’d learned my lesson as far as questioning him about that. My dad seemed to be treating this excursion, brief as it was, like a real road trip. He stopped at PocoMart for honey-roasted peanuts and sodas for us, and put me in charge of radio duties as we headed out of town. This was perhaps the most unexpected part of the afternoon, since whenever we’d been in the car together before, he was always either on the Bluetooth talking to his office, or listening to the financial report.
When we’d arrived at the hospital, my dad led the way up to the oncology wing, and as he headed into his appointment, he promised me it wouldn’t be too long. But it had been twenty minutes now, and I was starting to get restless.
I bypassed the elevator and took the stairs down to the lobby, feeling the need to move. The lobby didn’t offer all that much distraction—just oil paintings of the founders and plaques commemorating big donations. There were also a surprisingly large number of people smoking outside the building’s entrance, considering that this was a hospital. I ended up in the gift shop, walking around the aisles, taking in the bouquets of flowers for purchase, the cheerful, bright-colored teddy bears emblazoned with GET WELL SOON! across their stomachs. I wandered into the card aisle, looking through the racks of Thinking of You and Get Well Soon options. I moved past the sympathy section, not even wanting to know what was inside the somber-looking cards that mostly seemed to feature a single flower, a bird in flight, or a sunset.
Since there was nothing I wanted, I just bought a pack of gum, tossing it onto the counter as I dug in my purse for change. As I did, I noticed a large flower arrangement on the counter, made up of summer flowers, all bright purples and oranges. It looked vibrant and healthy, and seemed to smell like sunshine even in the sterile, fluorescently lit gift shop. Looking at it, I got, for the first time, why people would bring flowers to sick people, stuck inside the hospital with no way to get outside. It was like bringing them a little bit of the world that was going on without them.
“That it?” the woman behind the counter asked.
I started to reply, but my eye was caught by the preprinted card in the arrangement, displayed on a long plastic holder that poked out of the flowers. JUST TO SAY I LOVE YOU, it read.
“Did you want something else?” she asked.
I looked away from the card, embarrassed, and handed her a dollar. “That’s it,” I said, as I pocketed the gum and then dropped my few cents change into the penny cup.
“Have a good day,” she said, then cleared her throat. “I hope everything… turns out all right.”
I looked up at her then, and saw that she was older, closer to my grandmother’s age, wearing a name tag and a sympathetic expression. It was different from the expressions of pity and premature sympathy that I’d hated so much in Connecticut, and I realized I didn’t mind. It struck me that she must see, all day long, people coming through the shop who also didn’t want to be in the hospital, who were looking for something they could buy, some cheap teddy bear or arrangement of flowers, that would seem to make things better.
“Thanks,” I said. I let my eyes linger on the card for a moment longer before I headed out to the lobby. I skipped the stairs and took the elevator to the oncology wing. The card had made me uncomfortably aware of something—I couldn’t remember the last time I’d told my father I loved him. I searched my memory as the elevator rose silently through the floors. I knew I’d said it a lot when I was younger, as our home-movie collection attested to. And I’d sign his birthday and Father’s Day card every year with a scrawled love, Taylor. But had I ever said it to him? Out loud, and in recent memory?
I couldn’t remember, which made me pretty sure that the answer was no. This fact weighed heavy in my thoughts, to the point where once I got back to the waiting room, I didn’t even bother picking up one of the outdated magazines. And when my father finally appeared, and asked me if I was ready to go home, I agreed without a second’s hesitation.
In contrast to the trip there, our ride home was pretty silent. My dad looked so worn-out after his appointment, he hadn’t even tried to drive; instead he just tossed me the keys once we made it to the parking lot. We had kept up a conversation for the first few miles, but then I noticed the pauses in my dad’s responses getting longer and longer. I’d look over and see that his head was resting against the seat, his eyelids fluttering closed before opening once again. By the time we got on the highway that would take us back to Lake Phoenix, I glanced over to change lanes and noticed that my dad was fully asleep, his eyes closed and head tipped back, mouth slightly open. This was unusual to the point of being shocking, because my father wasn’t a napper. Though I knew he’d been sleeping more than normal lately, I couldn’t remember a time when I’d seen him nap—especially not like this, not in the afternoon. It made me feel panicky, somehow, even though I couldn’t have said why, and I wanted more than anything to put on some music, drown this feeling out a little. But, not wanting to wake my dad, I hadn’t turned on the radio, and had just driven in silence, punctuated only by my father’s low, even breathing.
As we crossed into Lake Phoenix, my dad’s cell phone rang, startling both of us, the sound of his ringtone suddenly very loud in the quiet car. My dad jerked awake, his head snapping forward. “What?” he asked, and I hated to hear the confusion in his voice, the vulnerability in it. “What’s that?”
I reached down for the phone in the cupholder, but he got there first, answering the call and smoothing his hand over his always-neat hair, as though trying to make sure he hadn’t gotten too unkempt while he’d been sleeping. I could tell in a second that it was my mother, and after their brief conversation, my dad seemed more composed, and much more himself, his voice no longer thick with sleep when he hung up and turned to me.
“Your mother requested we pick up a few things for dinner tonight,” he said, “and I just realized that we haven’t been to Jane’s this year. I for one feel like we’ve been skimping on the dessert this summer.” There were still eleven oatmeal cookies in the fridge, but I didn’t mention those. The one chocolate chip had been divided into five equal pieces among us, and the rest had sat untouched.
I glanced at the clock and saw that it was almost four, definitely verging into what my mother would consider the dinner-spoiling hour. But my dad and I had a tradition of getting ice cream and keeping it a secret—like when I was younger and he would pick me up from wherever I’d tried to run away to. “Really?” I asked, and my dad nodded.
“Just don’t tell your mom,” he said. “Otherwise, I’ll be facing a rocky road.”
I couldn’t help laughing at that. “I don’t know,” I replied, as I pulled into a spot along Main Street. “She might be in a good humor about it.”
My dad smiled in appreciation. “Nice,” he said.
We parted ways as he headed to PocoMart and Henson’s Produce, and I walked toward Sweet Baby Jane’s. It was a tiny shop with a sky-blue awning, the name printed across it in curly white type. There were two benches on either side of the entrance, a necessity because the space had only room for the counter and a single table. Maybe because of the in-betweenness of the hour, Jane’s didn’t look very busy. There were just two boys who appeared to be around Gelsey’s age, eating cones on one of the benches, their bikes tossed in a heap to the left of t
hem. It was rare to see Jane’s this deserted—at night, after dinner, the benches would be packed, the crowd spilling out along Main Street.
As I pulled open the door and stepped inside, a blast of air-conditioning and nostalgia hit me. The store hadn’t changed much from what I remembered; same single table, same painted signs listing the flavors and toppings. But apparently time hadn’t totally passed Jane’s by, as there was now a list of frozen yogurts, and many more sugar-free options than I had remembered before.
I didn’t need to ask what my father wanted. His ice cream order had never changed—a cup with one scoop of pralines & cream and one scoop of rum raisin. I got one scoop coconut and one scoop raspberry in a waffle cone, which had been my ice cream of choice the last time I’d been there. I paid and, finding my hands full with the cup and cone, was pushing open the door with my back. I was about to take my first bite when I heard someone say, “Hold on, I’ve got it.” The door was held open for me, and I turned and suddenly found myself looking right into the green eyes of Henry Crosby.
By this point, I should have just been expecting it. It probably would have been more surprising if I hadn’t bumped into him. I smiled and, before I could stop myself, I was quoting something I’d heard my father say, a line from his favorite movie. “Of all the gin joints, in the all the world,” I said. “You walk into mine.” Henry frowned, and I realized in that moment that of course he didn’t know what I was talking about. I barely knew what I was talking about. “Sorry,” I explained hurriedly. “It’s a quote. From a movie. And I guess I should have said ice-cream parlors….” I heard my voice trail off. I wasn’t entirely sure what a gin joint even was. Why had I felt the need to say anything at all?
“It’s okay,” Henry said. “I got what you were going for.” His dark hair was sticking up in the back, and he was wearing a faded blue T-shirt that looked so soft I had a sudden impulse to reach out and rub the cotton between my fingers. I didn’t do this, of course, and took a small step back, just to remove the temptation.