“You’ll have to take that up with Muffybut you should know the answer will confuse you.” She shrugged. “I’ve been to a lot of places. Some that were welcoming and some not so much, and I have to tell you, that difference had nothing to do with festivals or small-town charm. It was the people, the energy of the community, the sense of belonging offered to anyone who arrived.”
“Where did you go after leaving Friendship?”
She jerked a shoulder up which served to remind me that her shirt screamedGET NAKED. “I visited everywhere but only stayed in a few spots. New York City and Boston, mostly.”
It wasn’t difficult to imagine Sunny as a wanderer. I was sure she adored every minute of it. “But you came back here.”
“Yeah.” She nodded, sipped her iced red tea. “Every time I landed in a new city, it wasn’t even six months before I called my parents to help me move home. Either I was lonely or I didn’t belong, or I realized being away wasn’t as fun as I wanted it to be.”
“There is nowhere in the world that you don’t belong.”
She held up her hands, let them drop. “I was never lonely in New York but I never felt like I belonged there. Even when I met Muffy and we couldn’t get enough of each other, I never found my way in the city. There were a bunch of times when I was lonely in Boston but I also felt like I was constantly meeting new friends I’d keep forever. Like Meara. I was lonely but I never felt alone, if that makes any sense.”
“It does,” I said. I understood that. More than I cared to admit. More than I wanted anyone else to know.
“There always came a time when I convinced myself I could live in Boston or New York or somewhere else for the rest of my life. That I wanted to stay and I wanted to be part of that place, and I had the best friends in the world by my side. But when that time came, I couldn’t fight off the feeling that, save for those few friends, no one would notice if I disappeared. Maybe after a few days, a week. But they wouldn’t notice right away, and that was like a phone that wouldn’t stop ringing in my head.” She set the tea down and then picked it back up. “If I disappeared in Friendship, I know someone would notice.”
I’d notice. I’d notice right away. But I didn’t tell her that. I wasn’t ready to say it. I could stare at her house in the dark like a fucking creep but I couldn’t form those words and force them into the undefined space between us yet. “Before coming here, before the oyster company, my dad was a roadie and my mom was basically the road crew den mother. Formally, she was some kind of traveling coordinator but that was the gig. Organize schedules, lodging, meals. Look after the roadies, basically, make sure they were on time and out of trouble. She spent a lot of time looking at injuries and telling people whether or not they needed stitches.”
“You lived on the road?” She tapped at her laptop, adding, “I’m listening, I just need to get Beth’s produce order placed. You’ve seen her crack cukes in half. We don’t want to awaken that beast.”
“About half the year on the road, yeah. More some years, less others. We stayed in a lot of small towns when we weren’t traveling. A lot of places that considered themselves just as cozy and quirky as Friendship.”
“Let me guess: you hated all of them,” she said.
“I didn’t hate them,” I replied, reaching for the faux BLT. I just knew this thing was going to blow my mind and I wasn’t prepared for it. If I was being honest, I kind of resented how good the food was. Not because I prayed at a carnivorous altar but because everything that came out of this place wasso goodthat it made me a little mad. It wasn’t a rational response or one I could justify in any form. One bite and I was left asking myself where garbanzo beans got the audacity. “But they were difficult places to love and most were openly hostile to newcomers. The worst thing in the world is being the new kid in a class—in the middle of the year, no less—when everyone else has known each other since birth. There’s no chance of competing with that. Not a fucking chance.”
“I’m not going to disagree with you because that is objectively terrible. How’d you survive?”
“I didn’t give a shit. Didn’t care about anything or anyone. It made it much easier to tune out the whole fucking world.” I bit into the sandwich and yes, it did alter my entire outlook on bacon and not-bacon and everything I believed to be true about food. Pissed me the fuck off. “It worked for me then and it works for me now.”
“Beckett. Please.” She glanced at me between clicks. “You care aboutso much.”
“It’s cute that you think so but I don’t. I do whatever the fuck I want and it doesn’t matter what anyone thinks of that.”
“And yet you are here,” she said as she scrolled down the page, “thousands of miles from where you live and work. You’re rebuilding docks and showing up at town meetings, fixing my whole patio for the sake ofappearancesand hosing off your brother after he comes home wasted.” She arched a brow at the screen. “Looks an awful lot like caring to me.”
“That’s different.”
“You think so?”
I pressed a fingertip to the plate to capture a few crumbs but didn’t respond.
“Maybe you’re right,” she went on as she scanned the screen before submitting her order. “Maybe it doesn’t matter to you what anyone thinks but that doesn’t mean you don’t care. I think you care so much and so deeply that you are unaware you’re doing it but you definitely do it. I mean, like I said, you’rehere, aren’t you? Eh, no, don’t interrupt me.” She held up one hand while she clicked with the other before I could do anything more than open my mouth. “What you don’t do is let yourself be vulnerable. God forbid you open up to anyone.”
“Does this abuse come standard with all sandwiches or am I paying extra for it?”
“On the house,” she replied. “I also think you project a very strongdon’t fuck with mevibe that can be felt from fifty feet away. Even the most loving, welcoming people will practice some amount of self-preservation when you’re in perpetual scowl mode. Which is most of the time.”
“Then what’s your excuse?”
She closed the lid of the laptop and swiveled to face me. “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”
“Where’s your self-preservation? If my perpetual scowl is as severe as you suggest, why didn’t you run screaming that day I told you to get your flowerpots off my property?”
She leaned back in the chair and gathered her hair in her hands, laughing hard. I wanted to burn that image into my brain. I wanted to see it in my dreams and hear that laugh every time I felt like the world was a series of spinning plates never more than a second from crashing down around me.
“Because I’ve already burned through a lifetime’s-worth of self-preservation,” she said, “and you don’t scare me. Not now and not when I was a kid. You do stoke rage, however, and that’s quite entertaining for me.”
