I’m going to murder my alarm clock one of these days. I don’t use my phone as an alarm because there’s a very real chance I’d chuck it out my attic room’s window. Every morning the clock shrieks, and I mentally flambé the whole damn thing. Set it on fire in a huge saucepan. Laugh as it melts. On the rare morning that I feel almost awake, I give the alarm clock a stately Viking funeral in my mind. And there it is again, screeching.
My feet trudge down the stairs. Must. Find. Coffee. Then shower, load of laundry, unload the dishwasher, work. Before I can get to step one, I’m sidelined by a hopping motion in the kitchen.
“Jonah! Today, today, today!” Leah’s feet hit the linoleum on every other syllable. She’s already dressed, right down to her pink sneakers. I was eleven when she was born, and sometimes I still can’t believe she’s old enough to tie her own shoes.
“What’s today?”
Her smile flatlines. “I get to paint pottery. I filled up my chore chart, and you promised.”
Shit. I did promise.
She crosses her arms. “Last week, Wednesday or maybe Thursday, you said Monday you would take me. Today is Monday. That means we’re going.”
“You’re right.” I’m not awake enough to figure out how this will work. I have to be at the restaurant by eleven, and my older brother and sister are already at their jobs. But I really don’t want to take the younger ones to the pottery place. There’s a saying about people being oil and water, but Bekah and Isaac are like oil and a hot frying pan. Put them together, and there’s hissing, spitting, and the occasional burn. They got into a screaming match yesterday morning over who’d get to sit in the recliner while watching TV. Bekah lobbed a pillow at Isaac’s head, missed, and broke a vase. So I grounded them both. I don’t really know what grounded entails for an eight- and an eleven-year-old, but it sounded authoritative at the time.
“So we can go?” Leah asks.
“Yeah, we can go.”
“Yay, yay, yay!”
Lifting a mug from the cabinet, I turn back to Leah. “You want oatmeal?”
“I want peanut butter–banana toast, but Bekah wouldn’t toast the bread for me.”
“How about peanut butter–banana oatmeal?”
She makes a face.
“Fine. Toast it is.” I redirect my hands toward a loaf of bread and then drop one slice into the toaster. I hand Leah the banana and a dull knife. She holds the knife in her right hand and braces the banana with her left, tucking the tips of her fingers under like I taught her. Our dad taught me, in the kitchen of his restaurant. He also showed me what would happen if I did not use this technique to protect my fingers from the blade. The demonstration involved ketchup as fake blood and a lot of dramatics. I was nine. It was the greatest thing ever.
When the bread pops up, I plate it for Leah. She smears the peanut butter. Smiling, she says, “I’m going to paint a coffee cup for Mom at the pottery shop.”
“Good idea.” I pour my coffee. Behind us, Isaac wanders into the kitchen. A chapter book eclipses his face. Isaac can walk while reading. Like, he can walk better while reading than the average person can walk while doing nothing else. He sidesteps street signs, climbs stairs, and dodges pedestrians. It’s almost disturbing. He peers at us, and the refrigerator door is reflected in his glasses.
“Did you say we’re going to paint pottery?”
“We are,” I say.
“Yes, yes, yes!” Leah says.
“Cool! I’m coming, too.”
“Nope. You’re grounded. And look at the chore chart. Who has all their checks for every week this month?”
Isaac squints at the chart, searching for an angle to argue. “Well . . . only Leah. But that’s not fair! She gets all the easy jobs because she’s the littlest. Anybody can sort laundry and set the table.”
Leah scowls. I resist pinching Isaac, hard. “Leah’s only five. She does everything she can, and I never have to ask her twice.”
Nobody argued during the days when my mom handled the chore chart, which is a laminated grid with our six names lining the left side. She managed our eight-person family’s calendar of activities and events. She signed permissions slips. She made waffles every Monday morning to soften the blow of the weekend ending. She put away Christmas decorations on December 31. But that was before we became a seven-person family.
Everything about my dad was big. His height, his laugh, his personality. Now I look at pictures of the eight of us and, when I imagine him not there, the whole picture is off balance. And so are we.
My dad used to joke that he’d forget his head if my mom didn’t sew it on every morning. I was too young to know the saying about forgetting your head if it weren’t attached to your body. Instead, I stared at my dad’s collar. I wanted to see Frankenstein zigzags across his neck. Then he died, and it turned out my mom relied on him for basic function, too. My mom mostly stays in her bedroom now. Sometimes I wonder if she’s whispering to her heart: Beat. Beat. Beat. To her lungs: In, out. In, out. Like it takes all her time and energy to exist.
On my way upstairs, Bekah calls for me from the room she shares with Leah. She’s on her knees, digging through the lowest drawer of her wardrobe. “Have you seen my dark blue shorts?”
“No. Wait—maybe. They’re probably in the wash.”
“Uggghhh.” Groans constitute at least half of Bekah’s interactions with me. She’s eleven, which I don’t remember being nearly as difficult as she makes it out to be. “I wanted to wear them today.”
“Then do your own laundry.”
She moves toward her closet with another groan, stamping her feet. I take a sip of my coffee. It’s moments like these when I savor the bitterness.
“What’s wrong?” This is Silas’s hasty response when I call his number. My older brother works at Cove Coffee as a shift manager, and I can hear the familiar noises in the background: whirring milk steamers and choppy voices.
“Is there any chance you can get off work early?”
“What? I specifically took the early shift so I could be home in time for you to leave for the lunch shift.”
“I know. I forgot I have to take Leah somewhere.”
“You can’t take Bekah and Isaac, too?”
Sure, I could. I just might wind up leaving them on the side of the road like old patio furniture or a moldy couch. With a cardboard sign that says, Free: Take.
“I grounded them yesterday.”
There’s a pause from Silas’s end of the phone. The silence communicates words we’ve exchanged many times before. What if Isaac gets it into his mind to perform a science experiment or Bekah decides to meet up with friends at the pool without telling anyone? Would Mom even know? Maybe it would make her snap out of it. Maybe she wouldn’t care. Leaving them here could be the same as leaving two kids totally alone. But Bekah’s eleven. “Then leave them, and just tell Mom. They’ll be fine.”
The line goes dead, and I dread my next stop. I don’t know when I started to feel like the warden of an ailing shut-in.
I stand outside the barely cracked door for a moment before opening it. Since my dad died, my mom has spent more time behind this door than she ever did while he was alive. On the good days, I know it’s a matter of time before she wakes up. On the bad days, I think I’m watching her die in slow motion.
“Mom?”
Her head lags over toward me. She smiles weakly. I’ll never get over it—how seclusion has whitewashed her cheeks. They used to flush from laughing. From running around in the yard with Leah and Isaac. “Hey, pal.”
“Hey.” I step closer, but not near enough to sit on the bed. “I promised I’d take Leah to the pottery place. Silas is at work till ten, so it’ll be Isaac and Bekah here for an hour or two.”
“Okay.” She rolls over so she’s facing me. “Sorry I didn’t get up to fix them breakfast. I’m just so tired today.”
Today and every day for the past six months. Although she does get up for church most Sundays. These apologies are a pretense. So are the questions. Would you mind packing lunch for the littles? Could you walk Bekah to soccer practice? She always asks; she always says thank you. I’d do it anyway. She knows that.
“Don’t worry about it, Mom.”
There’s no point in guilt-tripping. She can’t make herself feel better. I can’t make her feel better—none of us can. The least we can do is not make it worse.
“Thanks, pal.” Her smile is almost real, I think. “What would I do without you?”
I honestly don’t know. With all her professed gratitude, my mom must understand that we’re doing her job. The three of us older kids are trying to make up for two parents, day in and day out. I’d probably try to shake my mom awake if she didn’t look breakable.
I throw on the same clothes I wore yesterday and catch a glimpse of myself in the hallway mirror. Man, when did my hair get to looking like that? I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. My last haircut happened when Candice Michaels pulled me out of the street and into her salon. Like a stray dog.
“Best behavior while I’m gone; I mean it. If I find out there was fighting, I’m going to walk back to the pottery shop and put your nail polish collection,” I tell Bekah, then turn to Isaac, “and your favorite books into the kiln.”
Bekah rolls her eyes. Isaac doesn’t look up from his book. Leah dances around in my peripheral vision. She can’t contain her excitement within her personal space. She has to spin it around the living room.
We have a van, but we only use it for trips out of town—to the mall for back-to-school clothes or to see movies at a big Cineplex instead of our town’s tiny theater. My older sister, Naomi, uses the van to get to her internship most days. None of us mind because we can walk everywhere in Verona Cove. Leah skips twice for every stride I take. We pass Mrs. Albrecht and Edgar, a poodle that looks so much like her that I’ve wondered if they’re actually related.
“Hi, kiddos,” she says. We wave, and Leah pats Edgar’s head. On our left, we pass a power-walking couple in Serious Workout Clothes, and they do not say hello. There are two types of people in Verona Cove: vacationers and townies. Leah and I, we’re third-generation townies.
I’m not saying there’s a turf war. That’s an exaggeration. Townies rely on vacationers—we like them, even. And vacationers loooove Verona Cove. That’s how they say it. But townies love Verona Cove like we love air. We don’t have to say it or even think about it every day. It’s in our lungs. It’s what we’re made of.
Leah and I stop at Cove Coffee—me for more coffee and her to see Silas in action.
“Hey,” he says. He hands me a to-go cup of black coffee. “You got it figured out?”
“Left ’em. It’s an hour or two. I mean, we’ll see how it goes.”
“I can’t see!” Leah grumbles, so I lift her up. She loves a behind-the-scenes look at anything. Silas is topping a drink with whipped cream, then chocolate sauce, and Leah claps delightedly. He’s worked here for a while, but she can’t get over it. Her brother, behind the counter. Silas grins and slides a tiny cup to the end of the bar. Hot chocolate. Leah squeals with happiness, but Silas holds one finger to his lips, winking at her. She mimics him, winking in this overexaggerated way—closing her eye for too long.
Psychologists would probably say we spoil her because she’s the baby of the family. But it’s actually because she’s so damn cute.
On our way to Fired Up, I drain my coffee and Leah slurps her hot chocolate. We settle onto the wooden bench outside the shop and talk about what we want to do this summer. I want to perfect my beurre blanc sauce, and I want to keep running on the beach so I don’t die of a heart attack like our dad. But that’s not how I put it to Leah. I say I want to try a few new recipes and become a faster runner. She wants to go to the library a lot and see that animated movie about ducks and build a sand castle bigger than the one we built last year. We’re strategizing the latter when I sense a presence on our right side.
“Good morning!” The girl looking down at us has white-blond hair, and her lips are the color of maraschino cherries. She doesn’t look like any girl in my school. She doesn’t look like any girl I’ve ever seen in real life. And she’s looking at us . . . happily. No hesitation to be cheerful in our presence.
“Hey.” I nearly stumble in my attempt to stand up.
“You here to paint?” The girl cocks her head toward the storefront.
At my side, Leah nods, and I continue my verbosity. “Yep.”
“Well, come on in.” She grins, gesturing at us.
As we wait for her to unlock the door, I look down at Leah. I feel like we should know this girl—she works here. She must live here. But Leah is too busy watching her.
“Are you guys locals or here on vacation?” She holds the door open, and Leah and I walk into the store.
“Townies.”
“Oh, excellent.” She claps her hands as the door shuts behind her, and she sets her bag down. “Do you know if the Verona Cove police are strict? I mean, like, on first-time offenders. Who may have created some, ahem, unsanctioned art on the local plant life. Asking for a friend, of course.”
I open my mouth to say—well, I’m not sure what, exactly. Instead, the girl laughs as she motions Leah forward. “Listen to me, getting ahead of myself. First things first! Painting! Come on down. You’re this morning’s lucky winner. As your prize for being an early bird, you get to pick any seat in the whole place. I’m so thrilled to have customers this early in the morning. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I also enjoy spending time with myself. I’m pretty good company.”
The girl keeps talking as Leah selects the only table that sits inside a square block of sunshine from the window. I follow her, watching the beautiful girl as she ducks into the back room. She looks like lemon meringue pie tastes. Sunny, tangy, sweet. After she emerges, she drapes a small pink apron around Leah’s neck, then ducks down to tie it in a bow at her waist. “So, what’s your name?”
Leah looks at me. She does this a lot, asking for permission with her eyes. I nod at her. I always nod at her. She doesn’t need my permission to talk to people. When Leah stays quiet, the girl nods, too. “You’re so smart not to talk to strangers; that’s something I was never good at when I was little. Well, I’m still terrible at it, but once you get a job, they call it customer service. ” Her red lips move quickly, parting and closing to form each syllable. She holds out a hand to Leah. “I’m Vivi. I’m sixteen, almost seventeen, and I just moved here for the summer, and I live on Los Flores Drive. My favorite color is blue, and I love dogs and ice cream and laughing so hard that I almost pee my pants.”
Leah pushes her lips together, crushing the smile that wants to form. The girl—Vivi—looks triumphant. “There, now I’m not a stranger anymore. You know all sorts of personal things and even one embarrassing thing about me. But you don’t have to tell me your name if you don’t want to.”
“I’m Leah.” She gives Vivi’s hand a quick squeeze, not even really a shake.
“Hi, Leah. So very nice to meet you. And what about you, cutie pie?” Vivi tilts her head at me, and a few round curls bounce toward the ground and back. Did she call me cutie pie? The only person who calls me that is Betty. Betty is sixty-something and has known me since I was born. “Or are you also leery of strangers?”
“Jonah.” I deepen my voice as proof that I’m a guy. Not a cutie pie.
Her laugh sounds like wind chimes. I don’t know what I said that was funny. She stands on her tiptoes to slide an apron over my head.
“Oh, I’m not painting. I’m just the brother.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Jonah,” she says. She moves behind me, securing an apron around my waist as she did with Leah. I don’t hate it. She surveys me in the apron, smiling, before glancing down at Leah. “I think the paints are calling your name. I highly recommend going wild with them. There are eighty-six thousand colors, and I bet you could use at least half of them. The more, the better!”
Leah selects as many paint bottles as her little hands will hold and then grabs two mugs. Apparently I, too, will be painting a mug. I dip a brush into some dark blue paint. Leah hunches over her mug, already committed to detail work. I swab a wide paintbrush against the mug again and again, methodically. When Vivi returns, she sets a roll of paper towels and a mason jar of clean water on the table. Then she sits down in the chair next to mine. I’m going to say something first this time. Maybe I’ll decrease my chances of being such a dumb ass. “So, what do you think of Verona Cove so far?”
“Um, basically I’m in love. I actually expected ginormous beach houses and towering hotels, but it’s so refreshing that nothing here is ostentatious or trying too hard or soulless. All the quaint houses and B and Bs. It’s charming.”
I shake my head, eyes on the mug. I’m filling the coarse porcelain with flat blue strokes. “Yeah, the city council won’t approve zoning ordinances for any new single-family residences over three thousand square feet. They won’t approve hotels either, just bed-and-breakfasts.”
She blinks, taking in that information. Oh God, I am such a jackass. It’s unbelievable. This girl probably speaks three languages. This girl probably has a cool older boyfriend or an acoustic rock EP. Or both. And I say the phrase zoning ordinances?
“That is fascinating.” Her eyelashes have slowed. They’re so dark, hovering over blue eyes. Wait, did she just say fascinating? Without a shred of sarcasm? “I’m so completely taken with the history of Verona Cove because it’s not like anywhere I’ve ever been, and I just want to know how it’s this way and why it’s that way. Know what I mean?”
I want to say yes. I want to say, Yes, beautiful girl, I know. I understand you to your very core. We are soul mates. Instead, because of the aforementioned jackassery, I shrug. “I’ve lived here my whole life.”
“Well, take my word for it. You’re a lucky guy, like every-single-number-on-the-lottery’s-winning-ticket lucky. Not many people get to have their whole childhood in a place so beautiful. Or so small and kind that you tell people your name once and they actually commit it to memory.”
Holy hell, where does this girl live that people don’t remember her? New York, probably. “So where are you from?”
“I’ve lived a lot of places. Seattle, last. And most. I was born there, then we moved to Boulder but back to Seattle after a year. From there, we moved to Utah, then San Francisco for a bit before going back to Seattle. Been there a while. Until we came here.”
“Seattle. It rains there a lot.” Well, this is going great. Conversationalist of the Year. I’ll just continue to recite basic facts about US cities until she wants to go out with me.
To my surprise, she grins. “Yes, it does. It also doesn’t rain there a lot. They don’t tell you that part. That the rainy season is dreary, but the sunny days are more beautiful than anywhere.”
“So you’re on Los Flores? Which house?”
“The really modern one. Richard, the guy who owns it, is my mom’s number-one buyer, and he’s in China for the summer, so he offered it to us. He thought the seascape might inspire my mom, which it totally has.” She leans toward me, covering her mouth with one hand. “Plus he’s a bachelor, and between you and me, I think he’s got the hots for her.”
There’s a tug at my sleeve. I glance down at Leah’s mug, which she’s holding up for my inspection. Shakily painted hearts in every color. The in-between surfaces are filled with mint-green paint. “Looks great, Leah. Mom will love it.”
She smiles, but then Vivi starts in. “Oh wow. Are you an artist?”
Leah’s brow furrows. “No . . .”
“Well, you’re very talented, let me tell you. There are people much older than you who can’t paint nearly as well as you, and I know because my mom is a painter as her job, so I can tell when someone has a gift for painting. Jonah, for example, does not.”
This makes Leah giggle. Her cheeks are pink with pride. Mine are probably pink, too. I open my mouth to make excuses for my solid blue mug, but Leah gets there before me. “Your mom is a painter?”
The question startles me. At home, Leah will say what’s on her mind. But in public, even around her friends from school, she sits in the backseat of every conversation.
“Oh, yes. That’s why we’re here—so she can paint the sun and the ocean.”
Leah considers this. “So you don’t know anybody here except your mom?”
Vivi shrugs. “Well, I’ve met some people. Why? Do you have any good friend recommendations? Or fun things to do? Or the best places to eat?”
“My house,” Leah says. “That’s the best place to eat.”
“Your house?” Vivi grins.
Leah nods. “Jonah, can Vivi come over for dinner tonight?”
“Um . . .” Look, I’d love to go out to dinner with this girl. But not dinner at my house with my crazy family. They’re both looking at me. Shit, I honestly have no excuse. We don’t have any food? What a lie—I buy stuff in bulk to save money. The truth is too brutal: my mom is lost in a depressive episode, and I have five dysfunctional siblings. Vivi makes eye contact with me, and I mentally plead with her: Please don’t make me sit at our kitchen table and watch you take it all in. The bickering, the stark lack of a parent. “Sure. If you want to.”
Vivi claps happily, and Leah smiles. You didn’t have a shot anyway, I tell myself. So nothing lost. Leah handed me a ticking time bomb of an idea, and I signed for the delivery. Now I’ll have to let it blow up in my face.
“What are we having tonight?” Leah asks.
“I haven’t decided yet. What do you want?”
“Pizza. But not the store kind. The kind you make.” She glances at Vivi. “It’s the best. You’ll love it.”
It’s not a cheap meal to make, but I’ll do it. Leah gets up to choose an additional paint color. When she’s far enough away from us, I stoop my head down. “You don’t have to do this if you don’t want. Honestly, she’ll understand.”
“Of course I want to.” Vivi narrows her eyes like I’m talking crazy. As if accepting a dinner invitation from a five-year-old is the most normal thing in the world. “Like I said, I’m new to town, and also, my mom doesn’t cook, so I’ve eaten cereal for dinner for a week. Delicious cereal, actually, but I could use some hot food. Some sustenance, you know? So, what time should I come over?”
“Um . . .” I trail off. I’m calculating how long it will take me to get ingredients, walk home from work, and make the dough. And how long it will take me to clean up the house, persuade my siblings to be normal in front of Vivi, and figure out what, if anything, to tell this girl about my parents. Or lack thereof. I need two weeks, minimum.
“Here.” Vivi grasps my wrist, pulling my whole left arm toward her. I feel wetness against my skin, the cool stroke of a damp paintbrush. When she’s done, my arm displays ten digits in blue paint. Her phone number runs from my bicep, where my T-shirt sleeve begins, to the base of my palm. “Just text me when you know.”
By the time we step outside, we’ve been at the shop for less than an hour. In that time, Leah made a new friend, and I got a girl’s phone number painted on my arm. I look down at Leah. “That was weird.”
She nods. “Good weird.”
Now I have less than half a day to make my life seem normal—or at least normal enough that a pretty girl can come over and not run away screaming. I need a plan. And a haircut. And possibly tranq darts for my siblings.
Leah is walking on the curb like it’s a balance beam. I watch her for a moment before asking, “How weird do you think our family is, on a scale of one to ten?”
“One hundred,” she says simply. “But good weird.”
Most days, I feel like I’m barely holding it all together. But if my littlest sister can believe that her life is good despite having no dad and a ghost of a mom, then it’s worth it. Good weird. I know it doesn’t sound like much. But it’s enough.