“Oh, right,” I said. “I forgot you did that.” Emily was an unabashed Shakespeare nerd, and she’d started a read-along of some of his works that had been well attended by the junior and senior high school students who volunteered at Faire. Most of the kids, in fact, were in Simon’s advanced placement English class. Simon and Emily really were ridiculously perfect for each other.
“Like I said. Plenty to keep you busy.” Chris took the lid off her Tupperware and started fluffing through her salad with a fork. For all that Chris owned the bookstore, and had for years, she seemed perfectly happy to leave the running of it to Emily these days. And why not? Em was really good at it. And Chris had more important things to worry about.
“How’s your mom doing? Any better?” I didn’t know a lot about strokes, but I knew they could be tricky to recover from.
But Chris’s smile was unconcerned. “She’s fine. As well as can be expected, anyway. Not any better, not any worse. But I think it helps for me to be with her.” She shrugged. “Better that than assisted living.”
I didn’t have anything helpful to say, so I just nodded and popped the last of my sandwich into my mouth.
But Emily’s mind was still on the store as she turned back to me. “Okay. So with you and your mom joining book club, maybe you can help me brainstorm titles, since Chris is off to Florida in October.”
Chris snorted. “Just one more month till I’m back in the land of alligators and mosquitos.” For the past couple years Chris had split her time between Maryland and Florida in the winter, taking care of her mother in both locations. It seemed like a hell of a sacrifice, but I would probably have done the same thing.
“And hurricanes.” I nodded solemnly while I checked the time on my phone. My lunch break was about over; I needed to think about getting back to work.
Chris chuckled as I got to my feet and collected the lunch trash into one of the bags I’d brought. “Hurricane season’s about over by the time I get there. That’s the best part of Florida, at least: the winters. Don’t have to worry about getting snowed in anywhere.”
Emily groaned. “Don’t start. Your emails all last winter were bad enough, mocking us for freezing our asses off up here.”
I threw the both of them a wave over my shoulder as I headed back to work. I checked my phone again on the walk back, but my notifications were all but empty. Just a couple comments on an Instagram picture I’d posted of Benedick over the weekend. He’d been especially cute, snoozing in a patch of sun, and frankly it should have gotten more attention than it did. But there was never any telling what the internet liked. I shoved my phone back into my backpack with a frown. I’d been hoping for another message from Dex; now that we were messaging, and our conversations were getting deep, I wanted more from him.
It wasn’t until I was about halfway through the afternoon that I realized he’d been the last one to send an email. It was my turn to write to him. I almost slapped my palm against my forehead in the middle of scheduling an annual cleaning, but quickly got my mind back on task and filled out the reminder card. Then I impatiently counted down the minutes until the end of the day. After work I stopped for another Pumpkin Spice Latte (number four of the season so far) and sat at a table with my phone to reread his last email before answering it.
To: Dex MacLean
From: Stacey Lindholm
Date: September 5, 5:44 p.m.
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: My Real Name
Oh, yes, I’m an only child. I know I mentioned the whole IVF thing, but I don’t think I mentioned that Mom was almost forty when I was born. That’s the other part of me being a miracle baby. I think I was also her last-chance baby. No more kids after me, so they got to take alllllll their parenting issues out on me. It’s fun.
I’m kidding, it’s really fine. My parents are great, and they’re ridiculously supportive of me. And I’d do anything for them. Which is one of the reasons I still live in Willow Creek. We’ve been a team of three my whole life, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Also, you’re wrong. Anastasia was a fancy Russian princess who met a gruesome end. There’s nothing about that that fits a small-town girl like me.
Inexplicably, tears filled my eyes when I typed that last sentence. What the hell was I doing? My friends were making real, tangible plans with their lives, while I was getting caught up in this weird fantasy spun from words and pixels on a screen. I was supposed to be getting a life, something real, and instead I was fixating on this online flirtation, letting it fill my mind and my heart.
I hit Send and clicked out of my email app before I could think any more about it. Enough of this distraction. Time to go home and feed the cat. Time to turn my attention to my real life, instead of whatever game Dex and I were playing. I needed to get my head on straight. Stop living my life online.
Of course, the problem was my online life was much more exciting than my real one. I needed to do something about that.
Six
As it turned out, I was only human, and the lure of my online life was too great to be ignored. There was an email waiting for me before I went to sleep that night, and every time I answered, Dex wrote back again. Despite my initial reluctance, my heart thrilled every time there was a new message. It was my own personal shot of dopamine, I looked forward to it every day, and he never let me down.
After a couple weeks I started to notice his patterns. He usually wrote to me late at night, after shows were done for the day. I thought about his “wench at every faire” reputation, and it was all I could do to not ask about them. Was he still picking up new conquests at every stop? Was he having flings and then writing to me every night after they left? Or worse, after they’d gone to sleep? I imagined beautiful women, sated and happy, sleeping soundly in his bed while his face was bathed with the blue light from his laptop or phone as he wrote yet another email to me.
But I didn’t ask. I probably could have at first, but as days became weeks, Chris left for Florida with her mother, and Pumpkin Spice Latte season gave way to peppermint mochas, it became harder and harder to bring it up. How could I? In the middle of deep conversations about fears we’d had as kids, was I supposed to slip in, “Hey, forgot to ask, but are you still banging your way across the country?”
So I buried that one important question I feared the answer to, and concentrated on more pertinent things instead.
To: Dex MacLean
From: Stacey Lindholm
Date: November 15, 10:47 p.m.
Subject: PSL Final Tally!
Fourteen. I had fourteen Pumpkin Spice Lattes this year. My sorority sister Monica guessed thirteen, so I sent her a Starbucks gift card as a prize. In my head she’s still nineteen—well, we both are, dyeing our hair pink for breast cancer awareness. She’s a psychiatrist now, officially much smarter than me. How did that happen?
Sometimes I think about time, and what we do with it. I turned twenty-seven last month, so I’m inching closer to thirty, and what am I even doing with my life? I look at my friends on Facebook. Friends from high school who grew up and moved away. Friends from college who went on to brilliant careers. At one point we were all in the same place; we theoretically got the same basic start in life. I look at what they’ve accomplished. And then I look at me. Part of me thinks that I really screwed up by staying here. But when my mom got sick all my priorities shifted.
Here’s what I won’t tell Mom, though. It was like that first heart attack jump-started her into getting old. What an awful thing to think, right? I mean, my parents have always been old. Older, at least. Mom was thirty-eight when I was born. She was in her forties when I started school, while all my friends’ moms were much younger. So it’s something that I’m used to. But then she had that heart attack. I can’t tell you how . . . old she looked in that hospital bed. That was the thing that got me. My mom, who’d always been the strongest person I knew, the person I went to with every single problem of my life, was suddenly this frail little thing that I wanted to swaddle in bubble wrap.
Now that she’s better I could get on with my life, of course. Start that fashion merchandising career that I’d intended. But an internship in New York at twenty-seven is a lot different than an internship at twenty-two. Those connections dried up long ago, and I have no idea how to find new ones. Not to mention, every time I think of leaving I think of my mom in the hospital and how helpless she looked. What if it happens again? What if it’s worse, and I’m not here? I mean, yeah, Dad’s here, and he took great care of her before. But he’s not getting any younger either. I feel like I should be close by. I love them so much, and they love me.
You know, love songs say crap like “love will set you free,” but lately I’ve been thinking that love is more like a cage. The most beautiful cage, with gold filigree and diamonds on the bars. But a cage nonetheless.