He nodded. “I should have known you walk to work. But I didn’t. And I don’t know your middle name, either.”
“Luanne.”
“Favorite color?”
“My favorite color is your gorgeous eyes, Dalton Deangelo.”
He cracked up. “Have fun at work. I don’t know when I can see you again, but I’ll call you.”
“Sure,” I said, and then I watched him roll off the bed and leave.
I listened to him walk down the steps and close the front door. A thought struck me: our goodbye had felt like a final goodbye, despite the casual words spoken.
Was this the end?
Part of me was sure I’d never seen him again, and that same part of me was relieved. He’d not just kept me up late. He’d disrupted my life, inserted himself into my every thought.
He and his whole life and personality were so damn big, where did that leave me?
And if we were done now, or in a few days, how long before the internet forgot all about me and left me in peace?
And one more thing: who was that moaning?
I lay still in my bed, listening.
It sounded like someone was…
I pulled my pillow around my head, because someone was moaning, and that someone was Shayla. I could still hear her, though the pillow. And now a guy’s voice, as well.
Wow. Go, Shayla!
~
I didn’t get to meet the guy who was getting Shayla to make such musical sounds, because I threw on some clothes and left the house early. If she was nailing her boss again, that was the last thing I wanted to be a witness off. If it was someone else, I’d meet him if he made it to a second audition. (A callback, as Shayla sometimes joked. She did have a string of one-night hookups in her past, because guys rarely got a callback from her, unless they were unavailable.)
I wandered around downtown with my thoughts, and by the time I opened the bookstore, mocha in hand, I wasn’t even early.
The yellow phone on the wall was ringing when I walked in the door, and after I turned off the alarm, I answered it with a breathless, “Hello?”
“Peaches Monroe?” came a woman’s voice.
“Speaking.”
She started talking, and I know she was speaking English, but it was difficult to comprehend her words, because they were so ridiculous.
I had to keep asking her to repeat herself, and I pulled out an envelope from the drawer and scribbled on the back of it:
New underwear line
Full figured girls with personality
Team Peaches
Wednesday
Photo shoot
$$$
Fly? LA
WTF???
I jotted down the woman’s phone number, told her I’d have to talk it over with my family, and hung up the phone.
“WHAT?” I said to the empty bookstore.
The houseplants on top of the shelves peered down at me in silence.
“Me, an underwear model,” I said. “Me.”
My father walked in the door just then, a welcome sight in his plaid, short-sleeved shirt and khaki trousers. His curly red hair had been freshly trimmed, which I noticed because he had that cute summer feature of a pale margin of skin on the back of his neck, where his now-gone hair had prevented a pink sunburn the previous day.
“Dad!” I ran out from behind the counter and nearly bowled him over with a hug.
“It’s chilly in here. You don’t have the air conditioner running already, do you? Open the front door and get some airflow.”
I pulled away and gave him a good look. He was the perfect person to ask for advice, because he was always so sensible (about everything but his recliner.)
“Did you come by to check on our power consumption?” I asked.
“I’ve got some epoxy curing back at the shop. Figured I’d save some brain cells by not sniffing it.”
“Good choice,” I said, then explained about the phone call I’d just received.
He seemed really hung up on the fact the job was underwear modeling. We got past that, by working through the concept that underwear covered the same stuff as a swimsuit, and he wouldn’t be worried about my modeling swimwear.
“Why wouldn’t they get a professional?” he asked.
“They want regular girls.”
He snorted. “No, they don’t. It’s the whole celebrity endorsement thing. You’ve got your image all over the place, in your underwear from that one time, and now they want a piece of you. If you’d sent in your pictures last week, they wouldn’t have even called you back.”
“You know about the half-naked photos?”
“How could I not? People keep telling me. I had an old college buddy call me out of the blue.”
“I’m sorry I embarrassed you and Mom and Kyle.”
“Kyle doesn’t know. And he’s not going to.” He gave me a long stare, the look in his blue eyes softening by the second. “And don’t you dare be embarrassed. You’re a beautiful girl, and you look beautiful in those photos. Plus you didn’t do anything wrong.”
His love nearly made me cry.
I looked around, double-checking that we were still alone in the store. “Dad, is this it? Is my life starting to happen?”
“Your life has been happening for a long time now.”
“You know what I mean. Life outside of Beaverdale.”
His eyes went wide, and he joked, “Take me with you?”
The garbage truck passed by outside the window, its weight making the whole building rumble.
“Mom would never let you go, and you know it.”
He grinned and said, “Let me have a look over the modeling contract, and I’ll tell you what I think.”
~
I called the woman back and asked her to fax me a contract to the bookstore.
By the time the contract came in by fax, my father was already back at his shop with all his radio-control helicopter parts, so I faxed it to him.
He strolled back in around lunch, saying, “This is not written to be in your best interests at all.”
My face got all disappointed, as did the rest of me.
“You won’t let me be a model?”
He gave me a cute Dad-knows-best look. “I know you’re excited, but you can’t jump into opportunities blindly, or they have a way of becoming disasters.”
My cell phone beeped with an incoming text from Dalton. “Speak of the devil,” I said. “Here’s a message from my current disaster. Did you know there really is a hot spring on the Weston Estate? Dalton took me to see it.”
“Hot springs sometimes disappear and reappear after earthquakes.”