24 · Lucy
Simon goes home for the Fourth of July, so I spend the night at Hannah’s. We sit on the deck, waiting for sundown and the fireworks over Halcyon Lake.
“So do you miss your boyfriend?” she asks, handing me a glass of lemonade.
“Yes.” I take a tentative sip. “What’s in this?”
“Vodka, what else?” She sits down. “Are you in love with him?”
I shrug. “I don’t know.”
“Well, I suppose we could try to figure that out. We’ve got all night.” She picks up her phone from the arm of her deck chair and starts tapping on the screen. “Let’s see, searching for are you in love quiz.”
“Hannah . . .”
“Here we go. ‘Number one: When you first saw your special someone, you A. Thought he was cute. B. Didn’t find him attractive but he grew on you. C. Didn’t give him a second look. D. Were deeply attracted to him.’”
I roll my eyes and Hannah laughs.
“‘Number two: How often do you think of your sweetheart when you’re apart?’ ‘Sweetheart’? What is this, the 1940s? ‘A. Every waking moment. B. Several times a day. C. Once or twice a day. D. Hardly ever.’ Well, Lucille? Your answer?”
“Hannah.”
“Fine.” She continues to scroll. “Oh, wait, one more. This one’s perfect for you. ‘Your sweetheart gives you a romantic card. What do you do with it? A. Sleep with it under your pillow. B. Scrapbook it. C. File it away. D. Toss it.’”
I slip my hand into my pocket and find the agate. I haven’t told Hannah about it. “Would you stop already?”
“Don’t you want to know?”
“I’m not going to find out from some quiz you found on the Internet.” I pause. None of these questions sound like anything I would ask myself about Simon—well, maybe the one about thinking he was cute. He is definitely cute. But . . .
Deeply attracted.
Every waking moment.
Carry it in my pocket.
I take a long drink of my lemonade. It’s strong, and the alcohol swirls through me, loosens me. “What about you? Is Dustin your special someone?”
She laughs. “I don’t need to take a quiz to know I’m not in love with Dustin. He’s fun and we always have a good time, but Dustin is not true-love material, at least not for me. And shoot, who says it has to be true love, anyway? I just want to have a good time, try new things, meet new people. Nothing wrong with that, am I right?”
“I guess not.”
“You like Simon, though, right? You have fun with him?”
I do. He’s sweet and attentive. He takes me to the movies, we play mini-golf even though he has not improved, I sit at the lakeside patio with him while he paints. It’s one of the things I like best about him, how he’s able to capture his surroundings in watercolor and acrylic. Sometimes we walk down to the beach between our houses, sheltered from view by thick trees, and kiss, falling to the sand, until our lips are bruised and our breaths come heavy.
“Yes. I like him.”
Her glass is empty, so she reaches for mine and takes a drink. “Lucille, it’s okay to like Simon. If not Simon, some other guy. You don’t need anyone’s permission.”
What she doesn’t say: especially Ben’s permission. She’s right.
“And nobody said it had to be love,” she continues.
I blow out a long breath. The idea of falling in love with Simon—of falling in love with anyone but Ben—scares me. The swirl spirals down, reaches my toes, but now it’s more than looseness, it’s relief, too. Nobody said it had to be love.
But there’s plenty of summer left for me and Simon, and I’m going to make the best of it. “I know.”
“Just remember that, okay?” She shakes her big blond hair. “Want to watch the fireworks from the middle of the lake? Dad got us a new paddleboat.”
A few days after the Fourth, I’m eating breakfast at the resort and Tami announces, “Our nephew is getting married in Duluth in a couple of weeks, and I wondered if you would like to come along to help with Emily.”
“Sure,” I say, not at all sure. The first question that comes to mind is—which side of the family, John’s or Tami’s? If it’s John’s nephew, the cousin I met on vacation last year, then Ben and his parents will be there.
“We’ll go up Friday morning and come home Sunday.” She prattles on about the hotel and the church and the rehearsal but never once says who’s getting married. After a few minutes, I put up my hand to stop her.
“Whose wedding?” I ask.
“Aaron. You’ve met him, haven’t you?”
Ben’s cousin. I nod.
Tami is talking nonstop. “This will be a nice little getaway for you, and you won’t have to take care of Emily the whole time. You’ll have some free time, too. Our hotel is right on the harbor. We’re getting two rooms so you and Emily would have a room to yourselves. A suite, actually, so after she goes to sleep you can stay up and watch a movie or something.”
I nod. I’m their nanny. Of course they expect I’ll go away for the weekend with them. And I love Duluth, I love Lake Superior.
“I’m so glad you’ll come with us. This is just what you need, a little time away. And maybe—maybe if you and Ben get some time together—”
“What?” The air is suddenly stifling. What is she saying? Did she invite me along to try to patch things up between Ben and me?
Tami has this terrible, pitying look on her face. “Oh, Lucy, I know how hard it’s been since Trixie died. My heart breaks for you. You lost your best friend. And Ben—well, I don’t know what happened between you two, but I know that you aren’t friends anymore. And maybe—maybe if you had a chance to talk about it away from here—”
“No,” I say. “Please, stop.”
“Lucy—”
I can’t talk to her about this anymore. “Emily’s waiting for me in the tree house. I have to go.” I open the sliding door and step out onto the deck, down the stairs, across the yard to the old oak tree.
I climb up and sit on the worn floorboards of the tree house, my back against the plywood wall, while Emily plays tea party, and I catch my breath. I think about the trip to Duluth with Trixie’s family last summer, one of the best weekends of my life.
At the cabin, Trixie and I skipped stones on the lake while Ben sifted through the rocky beach.
“Agates are quartz, you know,” Ben said. “And they’re pretty unique here because of the iron in the soil. The oxidation of the iron gives them that reddish-orange color. You want to help me look?”
I glanced at Trixie. She was smiling. “Sure,” I said.
“Did you know that the Lake Superior agate is Minnesota’s state gemstone?” Ben asked. “The agates were formed about a billion years ago. From lava eruptions. No, really, a billion years ago.”
I nodded and smiled as he told me about glacial movement and why Lake Superior agates can be found in other regions of the state, thrilled that he was talking to me about something he loved.
Later that weekend, we stopped at a lapidary shop in Beaver Bay filled with bin after bin of agates and other rocks. Ben must have spent an hour poring over each and every one, examining, humming to himself. After a while, Trixie and I got tired of waiting for him and left to buy ice cream cones from the diner next door.
We sat on the bench outside the agate shop, licking the dripping ice cream from the sides of our waffle cones.
“Rocks are boring,” Trixie said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “The agates are pretty.”
“You’re only saying that because you like Ben,” she whispered, and gave me a knowing smile over her ice cream.
When Ben finally came out of the shop, he asked, “Where’s mine?” Then he pointed at me. “Maple nut, right?”
I popped the last bit of waffle cone in my mouth and nodded.
“Finally!” Trixie said. “What took so long?”
Ben smiled. “I couldn’t leave until I found what I was looking for.”
Trixie rolled her eyes.
He looked at me and pointed to the corner of his mouth. “You’ve got ice cream on your face, Lu.” He turned to walk to the van.
My face burned, and I scrubbed at my mouth with a napkin.
“Come on.” Trixie pulled on my arm. “Let’s get out of here.”
Ben slid the door of the van open. Trixie climbed in and I started to follow her.
“Wait,” Ben said. He tugged me back behind the van and pressed something into my hand.
I looked at the object in my palm. It was the most beautiful thing—an odd-shaped agate, not quite an oval, not even an inch wide. The stone was polished to a bright shine, a deep rusty red with bands of ivory and pink and gray that together formed an L.
“Oh,” I gulped. “Is this for me?”
What a stupid thing to say.
“Well, yeah.” Ben smiled.
“It’s perfect,” I said, and I meant it. Everything about the agate was perfect—the irregular shape, the coloring, the fact that Ben had chosen it just for me. My heart pounded. “Thank you.”
Thank you. That’s all I could say. I should have said more, but not there, not in front of Trixie and his parents.
Something was happening between us.
“Are you getting in or what?” Trixie called from inside the van and I turned, slipping the most perfect thing in the world into my pocket.
I didn’t want Trixie to see. I didn’t want her to know. This was special, between Ben and me. It was the only secret I had from her, ever.
For a long time, as we drove along the shore of Lake Superior, I didn’t speak. I couldn’t. I gazed out over the vast blue water and thought about Ben, who sat beside me, silent. I was in agony, not knowing what he was thinking. Wanting to say more, to ask him if he happened to see this agate and thought of me, or if he set out to find me the perfect agate and this, the one with the L, was it? A tiny miracle in a bin of small, polished stones.
I never asked.
I wonder how many hundreds of agates Ben has collected. I wonder if he thinks about my agate, the agate with the L. L for Lulu, L for love. I wonder if he thinks about me, what we almost had.
I wonder what he was about to say to me the day that Trixie died, just as Clayton yelled for us that he couldn’t find her.
I’ll never know.
Now, in the tree house with Emily, I take the agate out of the pocket of my jeans. I roll it over and over between my index finger and thumb.