Cruel Summer | ✓

chapter ten

The garden is strewn with pine needles after the storm but there's no obvious damage from where I'm standing in the doorway that leads to the back porch. The ground is sodden, soaked to the core after it rained all evening, all night. Now the sky is clear again and everything looks washed clean, the trees heavy with dripping rainwater, the lake surprisingly still. The air is imbued with that fresh smell that comes after a storm. Petrichor. One of Gaby's favorite words springs into my mind. The smell of rain.

"I'm surprised you don't feel worse." Lou hands me a coffee. It's the same mug I had last night. No, this morning. Too early this morning.

"I think the four a.m. coffee and tylenol sorted me out," I say. I expected to wake up with a banging headache, to be confined to my bed for hours until the nausea and the migraine passed, but I feel okay. A bit achey, sure, and my eyes are sensitive to the white of the ten o'clock sky, but I feel like a human instead of a pile of garbage stuffed into a sweater.

"It's a godsend," she agrees. "Any time I drink too much, I take a couple tylenol when I go to bed and so far, so good. I learned the hard way." She rolls her lips together, nodding slowly to herself.

"Wild college days?"

"More like a lot of ill-advised drinking after the whole, you know, becoming a widow thing," she says. "But yes, I was a bit wild in college, too."

I gulp at the word widow. It's so big. So serious. It packs a punch. But Lou drops it so lightly that I have no choice but to roll with it.

She has prepared the breakfast of kings: fried eggs and crispy bacon and thick slices of buttered toast. We eat together at the kitchen table and I have a second cup of coffee. I may not feel too bad, but I will need the caffeine. Give it a couple hours and I will crash, by which point I plan to be back in my hotel where I can charge up my dead phone and sleep for another couple hours before I drag myself to the cafe for a pick-me-up. Last night, when I felt like a loose tooth, wobbly and untethered and at risk of falling, I assumed today was going to be a write-off but it can be redeemed. I doubt I'll be lounging on the beach if I don't want wet sand sticking to my skin and clothes but I can at least try to rediscover some of my old favorite haunts. Like the amusement arcade at the other end of Main Street, where we used to pile into en masse with ten bucks each and the adults would challenge us to see who could make it last the longest, or if any of us could turn a profit. My favorite was the line of coin nudger machines, where I would post dime after dime into one of the slots at the top and attempt to calculate when the moneyload would fall.

"Sorry about last night. I didn't mean to cross a line," I say once I've finished half of my breakfast. Inhaled might be a more accurate term for the speed at which I've demolished my plate.

"You didn't."

"Okay. Good." I take another huge bite of my food, which is filling the hole in my stomach perfectly. Never has a more perfect breakfast been cooked. The bacon is crispy and greasy and salty, the eggs soft and golden, the yolk running down my chin. Lou hands me a paper towel. "My mom likes to joke that I need a crash course in social intercourse."

"Social intercourse. I like that. And don't worry about it, last night was great," she says. "I'm glad you came."

"Even though you had to put me to bed?"

She raises her eyebrows at me, her lips pinched together to stop her grin. "Even then."

"Your friends didn't think it was weird I was there?"

"My friends loved you."

"Even th–"

Lou laughs and says, "God, Charlotte, there are only so many compliments I can give out. My friends loved that you were here; I loved having you, yes, even though I had to put you to bed and yes, even though you asked a lot of questions about my dead husband. You're ... god, I don't know, you're a breath of fresh air, okay? It's been nice having you around."