CHAPTER 10
The rain began after lunch, in the steady, cooling drizzle of late spring. I fidgeted through the afternoon, futzing around with the gelato ad, avoiding Glynnis’s plaintive stares, and meeting Jackie outside to complain about everything. “We’re fucked,” she kept saying, blanching slightly at the curse word. “Byron and Rhiannon actually met Miss Trinka. That equals a head start.”
“Seth met her, too. Maybe he can offer you insight.”
Jackie rolled her heavily made-up eyes. “I don’t think Seth even looked her in the eye. That boy has his mind set on one thing, and makeup ain’t it.”
I couldn’t counter that one with positivity. She was right. “There’s time,” I went with. “You and I both know how well we work when we’ve got the time to think.”
The rain tapered off as Jackie finished her cigarette, the clouds lumbering out of the sun’s way. The warmth it brought rejuvenated my spirit. “What are you doing later?” I asked Jackie.
“Nothing,” she said. “A whole lot of nothing.”
“Want to go to the nursery with me? I need to buy some plants.”
“You’re gonna need a lot. You know that, don’t you?” Jackie said, but I could tell by the humor in her voice that she would join me. She shrugged. “All right. Got nothing better to do.”
“Glad for the company.”
“Don’t expect me to plant anything, though,” she added as we walked back inside Guh. “I just had my nails done.”
“Those were some slim pickings.”
Jackie sat in the passenger seat of my car, a sad-looking tomato plant propped between her knees. The plants stuffed into the back seat and trunk were an equally sorry lot. Yellowed, withering leaves, teetering stems, dry soil—even the nursery employees had given up on them. “After Memorial Day, they just don’t care,” she said, shaking her head. “Shame.”
“They’ll be fine,” I assured her. “After we get them in the ground, they’ll perk up.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Tell you what. You help me unload them, and I’ll make you dinner.”
Jackie mused about the offer for a moment before answering. “Okay.”
The rain returned as we cruised the streets of Willow Falls, a steady pummeling. “Do you think it’s a bad sign Lukas didn’t put us together for the Landon assignment?” Jackie asked, her smoker’s voice barely audible as we turned the corner onto my street.
Yes, instinct told me. It means he’s definitely going to get rid of one of us. Jackie sounded so dejected I didn’t have the heart to tell her the truth, but I didn’t have the heart to lie either.
I didn’t have to choose. When we pulled up to my property, the sight that met me stole my ability to speak.
When we were thirteen, Jesse and I practically lived at the library. By that age, we’d run through most of the paltry fiction section, so we’d set our sights on nonfiction. He would head straight for the hard-science books while I meandered through the history section. I once pulled a book about Woodstock from the shelf, a book consisting mostly of photographs I found shocking but enthralling all the same. Hippies danced in the rain, mud covering their half-naked bodies, ancient creatures rising from the earth, at one with the natural world. I envied them, the joy they took from not caring, not giving even the tiniest bit of a shit. It looked exhilarating, their freedom, and I knew if I could somehow find the right door to open that I could be that free. At thirteen, I’d thought I would love the sight of all that mud, that I would roll in it and roll in it and maybe never come up for air.
At forty-three, getting dirty had lost its luster. If freedom really was another word for nothing left to lose, I didn’t want it. I had things to lose—a home, a son, and, hopefully, a garden. If that meant I wasn’t free, then I didn’t want to be free.
I pulled the car over with a jerk of the wheel. Jackie gasped as we exited the car. “Oh, Paige. What’s going on here?”
The soft earth was no match for the rain. Dark pools of water pockmarked the yard. Mud ran onto the sidewalk in wide streaks.
“AAAAYYYEEEEIIIIAAA!”
Jackie and I watched, wide-eyed, as a vaguely human-type form dashed from my back patio, making squelching sounds as it ran through the muck, leaping through the air, only to land on what looked like a tarmac made of garbage bags and duct tape.
“Trey?” I screeched.
He came around the back patio, plastered head to toe in mud. When he saw it was me, he did an about-face, took a running start, and skidded over the homemade slip-and-slide, spraying mud onto Mr. Eckhardt’s pristine white fence.
Another kid followed his lead. And then another, until my backyard resembled that Woodstock photo from so many years ago. It was impossible to tell how many kids slithered around in the mud, their limbs intertwined, their laughter sounding light and musical as the rain, Trey’s ringing out over the rest. I hadn’t seen him this happy in a long time. He looked alive.
He didn’t look like Jesse. He didn’t look like me.
He looked free. Really, truly free.
Maybe freedom had nothing to do with loss. Maybe it had everything to do with joy.
Jackie bent over and removed her shoes and tucked her socks inside. She tossed them into the car and then carefully rolled up her jeans.
“What are you doing?”
“I dunno,” she said while she waded into the muck. Weighed down by water, her blonde hair hung heavily down her back. She wobbled a little until she found her footing. “Can I try?” she called out to the group of kids but didn’t get an answer.
Jackie didn’t wait for one. She awkwardly slogged over to the patio. Without waiting for an opening, she half ran, half stumbled onto the slide, falling on her ass when she got to the end. She sat there for a moment, unmoving. “Paige?” she finally said. “I think I might have hurt something.”
Jesse didn’t like to get dirty. I didn’t either, but for him, staying clean was a near obsession. It didn’t take a psychiatrist to figure out why Jesse had such an abhorrence of dirt; it merely took a glance at a few old photographs of the apartment he grew up in. The hodgepodge of relatives crammed into it had little time for keeping tidy. Jesse’s tiny room—narrow twin bed made with military precision, scratched dresser without a speck of dust, books shelved in alphabetical order—was an oasis of calm in a sea of chaos. Neatness and order became talismans for him, things to keep him steady when the twin tornadoes of poverty and crime swept through the world around him. He kept his habits into adulthood, and I was happy to join in. I liked the feeling of satisfaction brought on by cleaning my house. Feeling satisfied was right next door to feeling safe. And that was close enough for us.
Until death filled me in on a little secret—there was no such thing as a safe life. As much as I hated to admit it, that sense of satisfaction, that feeling of accomplishment when everything was in its rightful place, was gone. Jesse wasn’t in his rightful place, so what did it matter?
Jesse avoided dirt while he lived, but in death he was surrounded by it.
Now I was.
And I didn’t have a talisman to keep the tornadoes away.
“That was awesome,” Trey exclaimed, studiously avoiding eye contact with me. I’d hosed down all of Trey’s friends, sent them home with one old towel each, and put a pot of coffee on for Jackie. She’d twisted her ankle on her way to her ass, and now her foot perched atop a stool in my kitchen.
“That was so far from awesome,” I said. The rain had stopped temporarily, but I worried about what would happen if it started pouring again. Would all of my topsoil run off into the gutters? I wished I could ask Mykia to come over, but she was fifty miles away at her farm. She would know what to do. Her men had the foresight to throw a tarp over the pile of mulch—too bad they didn’t have a supersized one to cover the whole backyard. Maybe I’d text her later, but maybe I wouldn’t. I needed to start learning things for myself if I was going to get serious about this garden. I had a date with Google later.
“You’re going to help me put the plants on the porch and at the side of the garage,” I told Trey. “Tomorrow, if the backyard dries out enough, you’re going to help me plant the tomatoes. Those we can put in rows.”
Trey made a face. “I’m going over to Colin’s tomorrow.”
“No, you’re not.”
He went silent for a moment and then said, “Fine. I’ll help you. But afterward, I’m going to Colin’s. His dad’s painted the gallery wall, and I want to hang some of my stuff.”
“What kind of stuff?” Jackie asked innocently, though I thought she’d caught the look that said, sensitive topic!
“I’m kind of into photography,” Trey answered, suddenly shy. “Wait, I am a photographer. Well, sort of. Colin’s dad said I shouldn’t belittle myself just because I’m young and lack experience. He says talented people are born that way, so technically I have a lot of experience, even though I’m not an adult.”
What a bunch of horseshit, I thought, but knew enough to keep it inside.
“He’s right about that,” Jackie said.
Trey and I responded at the same time. “He is?”
“Big Frank used to say something similar—‘fake it till you make it.’” Jackie gestured to me. “You can only fake it well if you know what you want to be.” She flashed her nicotine-stained teeth at Trey. “You just gave us a good reminder. Your mom and I are fighting for our jobs because we forgot how to fake it until we could figure out what to do.”
Trey turned to me, his face pale. “You might lose your job? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“It’s not likely,” I assured him, shooting Jackie a surreptitious dirty look.
“Forget I said anything,” she muttered. “But I’m right about the faking it part.”
She was. Jackie and I needed to up our confidence game. Here I was worried about Glynnis’s self-esteem, when I could use some lessons myself. “We don’t need to fake it,” I said, still thinking the opposite. “You and I could write a hundred campaigns for Landon Cosmetics, and they’d all be fantastic.”
“Landon Cosmetics?” Trey wrinkled his nose. “What’s that?”
“Makeup. They do retro products. Red lipstick, cream blush.” I fished around in my bag for the sample lipstick I swiped before walking out of the meeting. “Here, check this out. They’re getting into sixties stuff, and we might work on their campaign.”
Trey accepted the lipstick case as though it might double as a hand grenade and studied it closely. “It looks kind of like a rocket.”
“I call that one,” Jackie said quickly.
I took the lipstick back from Trey. “You can have that idea. I think we need to move beyond the obvious.”
We. But we weren’t “we.” Jackie and I weren’t on the same team. That was vaguely unfair and depressing, but it was the reality of it. “We’ve both got to work our hardest on this, and I don’t think we should help each other until we’ve got a solid idea down on paper.”
“I don’t think we should help each other at all,” Jackie said, frowning. “One of us is going to be disappointed, and I couldn’t stand the burden of feeling that I hadn’t helped enough.”
“What are you two talking about?” Trey said, his gaze wandering back and forth between the two of us.
Briefly, I explained Lukas’s obsession with Petra and the competition he’d set up, carefully editing out the part about two of us losing our jobs. But Trey was sharp, and he’d picked up not only on the tension but also the true effect the competition could have on our lives.
“One of you needs to come in first, and the other second,” he said, working through it aloud. “That’s doable, isn’t it? What does this Byron guy have over you? Or Rhiannon? That’s a stupid name.”
I smiled to myself. It’d been a long time since Trey was on my side about anything.
“They’re younger,” Jackie said miserably. “Hipper. And Rhiannon is a beautiful name.”
“Well, ‘hip’ is definitely a stupid word,” Trey interjected. “Why does Lukas have you following a book? Is it any good?”
I pulled Petra’s book from my work tote and handed it to Trey. He stared at the cover for a long time, and then paged through it while Jackie hobbled outside for a smoke. (I told her to exhale in Mr. Eckhardt’s direction.)
When Jackie returned, Trey pushed the open book to the middle of the breakfast nook. “She’s hot. And British. Did you notice?”
I slid the book toward me and flipped open the back cover. “She is? I hadn’t noticed.”
“Why should we listen to someone who isn’t even American?” Jackie added. “That’s weird.”
“I’m guessing the principles of business don’t vary much, Western nation to Western nation,” I said.
“Frank would use her book as a coaster,” Jackie said grimly. “Or he’d leave it in the john for bathroom reading.”
Trey’s addition to the conversation was, “She’s seriously hot.”
A smaller photo of Petra Polly stared back at me. I read the short biography aloud, “‘Petra Polly lives in the London area with her three kittens, two dogs, and pet cockatoo. She is currently developing a line of business products based on her popular philosophy.’”
Jackie rolled her eyes. “Of course she is.”
Trey paged through the book while Jackie and I drank another cup of coffee.
“Check out what she has to say about the creative process,” he said after a while. “This Petra is pretty slick.”
Chapter 5. I hadn’t read it, and from the look of mild interest on Jackie’s face, I could tell she hadn’t either. I began reading aloud:
Petra’s Rules for Creative Engagement, Part 1
1. An idea has both a body and a soul, just like a human. The soul is the initial spark. The body is what you share to your group—the practicalities, the plans, the blueprint. The key to success is retaining the energy of that spark through the life span of your project. After a while it will become greater than you, and only then will you achieve success.
“Does she think she’s the freaking Dalai Lama?” Jackie grumbled. “Come on. That doesn’t make any sense.”
“I think it’s kind of interesting,” Trey said. “Keep reading, Mom.”
Trying to please both of them, I rolled my eyes in solidarity with Jackie, but cleared my throat and read on:
2. How does one enrich the soul? Reveling in nature. Falling in love. Eating a delicious meal. This is how you prepare your idea to live in the world. Expose it to the elements. Share it with others so that they may become entranced. Feed it with the contributions of your peers.
“I’m not feeding my idea with anything Seth wants to cook,” Jackie said. “This is stupid. Petra is stupid.”
I closed the book. “I don’t know. Maybe she’s got a point. When you came up with that great ad for Castorelli’s Deli, didn’t you fall head over heels in love with it?”
“Was that the dancing pickle?” Trey asked, laughing. “I loved that pickle.”
“It was a good idea,” Jackie said slowly. “And I came up with it on my own and designed the whole thing myself. I don’t think these tips, or whatever they are, are practical. Or fair. I’ve been doing this longer than anyone at . . . the company. I know what I’m talking about.”
“You do,” I said. “But maybe what we’re talking about and what they’re talking about are two different things.”
“It’s all advertising,” Jackie scoffed.
“I don’t know,” Trey said. “I kind of dig this Petra chick.”
Jackie made a face and went outside for another smoke.
“You live for your work,” Trey said quietly. “What are you doing when you’re there, Mom? You’ve never worried about losing your job before. You’re freaking obsessed with it. Is this guy picking on you?”
“No,” I said. “Not really.”
“Then what are you doing?”
I heard the fear in his voice. Trey knew more than I wanted to tell him about our financial situation. Children shouldn’t need to know about lapsed life insurance policies and low-return 401(k)s and college savings accounts that would only cover one year’s tuition. Jesse and I had been diligent about our money, but that didn’t seem to have the results we’d anticipated. Even careful people couldn’t save enough to cover retirement, college tuition, and the constantly rising costs of everyday living. Trey had a right to be worried. I had a responsibility to hide that I was terrified.
“Don’t worry about it. I’ve been a star at Giacomo for seventeen years. That means something.” The lie left a sour taste in my mouth. I filled a glass with water and squeezed some lemon into it. Trey stared out at the backyard.
“I can’t believe I’m actually saying this to you,” he said, “but you need to focus.”
I thought about the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of times I’d said those same words to him.
“I’m always focused.”
“You’re giving too much attention to weird stuff, like this garden idea. You’ve never done anything like this before. You would have grounded me until the next decade if I did something like it.”
“Maybe I’m exploring, like you are.”
He smiled faintly, and then shook his head. “You aren’t allowed to do that.”
“And you are?”
“Yeah. I’m not a parent.”
“I’m not being irresponsible, Trey.”
He pointed at my shoes, encrusted with dirt, that I’d forgotten to take off when I came inside. “You sure about that?”