“Divide and conquer,” she said. “Kitchen or store?”
“Kitchen.” If cleaning would make me feel better about breaking up with Will, I still had a whole town to polish.
After the kitchen was in reasonable order, I went outside. As we’d cleaned, we’d thrown mounds of trash into the yard, which probably frightened the neighbors. I bagged it up and stacked it neatly by the curb. Then I raked the magnolia leaves. I was pleasantly surprised to see that grass was living underneath. With some rain in September, the yard might start to look like a yard again.
I crossed the street with my rake and looked at our house from a distance, really looked at it like a potential buyer would have viewed it if Dad had followed his original plan of flipping it. A previous owner had painted it an unfortunate dark brown, but it had good bones for someone who didn’t mind a funky 1950s bungalow with retro lines.
My heart thumped painfully again as I realized I was viewing this house as if I was Will, parked in his Mustang on the street, capturing the proportions with a pencil and a ruler.
“Uh-oh, what’s the matter?” Harper said beside me.
I jumped. I’d been so absorbed in my thoughts that I hadn’t heard her roll up on the sidewalk. She and Kaye straddled their bikes, watching me with worried eyes.
“We came to ask what was up with you and Will last night,” Kaye explained. “But your yard looks beautiful. Obviously something has gone horribly wrong.”
That’s when I broke down.
***
“I have a theory,” Harper said.
My crying jag was over, but she kept her arm around my shoulders, even though this must have practically dislocated her arm because I was seven inches taller than her. We sat on a handmade bench my dad had brought home and set under the magnolia tree, then lost under the leaves. Cleared of plant rubbish, it was a nice place to sit—or would have been, if the heat hadn’t been so oppressive.
Kaye stopped sweeping the sidewalk to circle her finger in the air, telling Harper to cut to the chase. In spite of my despair, I almost laughed at this interaction I’d seen play out between them countless times since third grade.
“Your sisters missed your mother,” Harper told me, “and they felt like your family wasn’t whole. Starting their own families was their way of getting back what they’d lost. The problem was, they were so young that it didn’t work. I mean, I get carried away buying art supplies and run out of lunch money. You”—she poked me—“can’t get up in the morning. Could you imagine one of us being the primary caretaker for somebody else?”
“No,” I said. Izzy seemed stable now, but I had seriously worried about her children at first. I still worried about Sophia’s baby.
“And the boys your sisters hooked up with are even worse,” Harper said. “They bailed on their girlfriends and their babies. Seems to me Izzy is doing a pretty good job putting her life back together, though.”
“Now she is,” I acknowledged. Two years ago was a different story.
“You’ve watched your sisters make mistakes. You’re younger, so you may have seen your mother leaving very differently from the way they saw it. You miss your mom, but instead of trying to fix your life by filling her shoes, you avoid further complications by sidestepping responsibility when you can. You have an allergic reaction when you do get put in charge. You stay out of any relationship at all.”
“But that’s a good thing,” I defended myself. “I’m a lot better off than my sisters.”
“But what if you don’t change?” Kaye asked. “At some point when you’re older, you’re going to look around and see that everybody is in a relationship while you’re alone. And pretty much everybody in your high school classes will have gone off to college.”
“I’m going to college,” I declared. “I’ll be a National Merit Scholar.”
Kaye raised her eyebrows skeptically. “Not if you don’t get your grades up and convince some teacher to vouch for you. I worry that you’re going to stay right here because you couldn’t be bothered to take the next step.”
“At least the house will be clean,” I said.
“True,” Harper said. “And maybe there will be other boys you can mess around with. But most people want a relationship sooner or later. Even those boys will move on while you stay put. And as for your relationship with Will . . .”
I held my breath, waiting, hoping, praying for Harper to give me some insight into how to fix this.
“I wouldn’t have paired you two up in a million years,” she said. “But now that I’ve seen you together, I get why you’re so compatible. You’re different from each other, but you each understand what makes the other tick. It would be a shame for you to let your knee-jerk reaction rule your life, and let him go.”
I shrugged. “Our time together was all a misunderstanding to begin with,” I said. “He misread me as girlfriend material. I misread him as a player. By the time we found out we were wrong about each other, it was too late.”
Kaye nodded sadly. “You’d already fallen in love with each other.”
“Well, I don’t know about him. That’s what he said, yeah. But I . . .” The full meaning of her words hit me. “Yeah, I’d already fallen . . . Oh, God.” I put my hands over my face, horrified that I was crying in front of them yet again.
Harper drew me closer on the bench. Kaye called, “Group hug!” and wrapped her arms around both of us. This was a little much in the heat, but I relaxed into their embrace and tried to stop panicking about Will.
Kaye knocked her booty against mine so I’d scoot over to make room on the bench. After I’d crushed Harper sufficiently, Kaye sat down, then stroked a lock of hair out of my eyes with her middle finger. “Teen hygiene tip. If you try to get Will back today, bathe first. Guys love that.”
“Yeah, okay,” I grumbled.
“I agree with Harper,” she said. “After seeing you and Will together, I think you may be meant for each other. It’s obvious that he loves you. It would be a shame for your fear to be the only reason you let him go.”
We all turned as the front door opened. I hadn’t realized how late it had gotten—time for my dad to wake up. He called across the yard, “Lucita! What happened to the top four layers of the stuff in the house?”
***