“Nik said two months, right?”
She licks her lips quickly, forcing down yet another smirk. “He did say that toyou,yes.”
“Nads…what do you know?” I ask, looking urgently between her and the road ahead. “Did you talk to Sef? What’s going on?” IknewNik wouldn’t use his one-one-nine on a fucking bar opening. “Nadia!”
Nadia releases an incredulous laugh, her eyes glued to her phone as she scrolls. “You’ll have to wait and see, big brother.”
Two
Prue
Sliding on myfavorite pair of fuzzy slippers, I step out into a breezy Sunday morning from my A-frame on my parents’ property and walk the short distance to their back porch.
Everything about my parents’ home is colorful: yellow siding interrupted by white-trimmed windows and doors, shades of orange and red and pink filling every inch of the garden beds, the perennial flowers on their last legs before they disappear until spring. Every post of the balcony railing is painted in a slightly different shade of blue, complementing the cobalt back door. A narrow, curving walkway was painted a calming shade of green, leading from the back door to the base of the four porch steps.
No part of our home was safe from my mother’s creativity or brush, inside or out.
I enter through the kitchen and find my dad at the table. “Top of the mornin’, Tom,” I say, brushing my palm over his bald head before darting to grab the chocolate donut on his plate out from under his nose. I take a bite, before he’s even noticed it’s gone.
“Mmm, delicious.” Brown crumbs spew out of my mouth as I speak, dusting his newspaper. “Did John try a new recipe?”
He chuckles, the apples of his cheeks rising alongside his cheery smile. “Tom? That isFather dearestto you, young lady.” Hereaches out to take his donut back but I dodge him, my socks sliding against the hardwood floor as I take another bite.
Today is Sunday, which means a delivery of donuts from the bakery around the corner, owned by my father’s best friend, John. His shop, called John Dough, is a mainstay of our one-stop-sign, pass-through, tourist-trap of a town.
Well, technically, it’s not a one-stop-sign town anymore. They put in a traffic light last month. The townies even held a ribbon-cutting ceremony to celebrate, not that I was in attendance. The light was installed in anticipation of yetanotherbusiness that will inevitably close its doors in a year, or even sooner once the owners decide the winters aren’t worth it.
Though I’ve yet to meet our newest neighbors, Dad—the Miss Congeniality of Baysville—has. He likes them fine, from the sound of things. Or, at least, he likes the sampler beer flight they sent him home with. He certainly likes them more than the couple who tried to open a grocery store three lots down a few years back. Groceries arehisbusiness, after all.
Resting along the main road connecting Baysville to the much larger surrounding towns of Huntsville and Bracebridge is Welch’s Gas and Grocer. It has been in our family for four generations now, as Dad proudly tellseverynew customer. It’s relatively big in comparison to the surrounding businesses. We have two gas pumps out front, then the storefront itself, which is a one-story windowed building attached to the front of the two-story, two-bedroom, yellow-slatted house my parents live in.
The A-frame out back was originally built for my parents when Dad began working for Grandpa after Mom had finished her teaching degree and took a job at the nearest high school. When my grandfather passed away, Mom and Dad moved into the yellow house and the A-frame became Mom’s art studio. In the two decades that followed, Mom worked as an art teacher while Dadran the store, providing anything customers needed, from worms for fishing to overpriced cartons of eggs.
As the sign out front says…Welch’s: We’ve got what you forgot.
The irony of this inherited slogan is not lost on us.
And, when Mom needed to move into her own bedroom, the loft above her studio became my chilly, spider-infested, cozy safe haven.
I take one last bite of Dad’s donut as he manages to grab hold of my elbow and tug me closer.
“Cheeky!” He swats my arm with his rolled-up newspaper as he steals the pastry back. “There’s one on the counter for you but now I want half of it.” The wooden chair underneath him scrapes against the uneven floorboards as he moves to shield his donut and coffee from me. He opens his newspaper with a flourish and writes something into the crossword with his pen, plucked from behind his ear.
I turn to look at the kitchen. A few feet from the table my father is sitting at, the countertops are so entirely covered in clutter and dirty dishes that I can barely see the grain of the butcher block beneath. It’s a visual reminder that these Sunday mornings, when the store opens later and Dad can sit down to eat his hand-delivered donut, read his paper, and rest his mind before work, are precious and needed.
I make my way over to the sink, wait for the water to warm, plug the drain, and get to work on last night’s dishes. Mom wanted soup, despite it being an uncharacteristically hot September day, so Dad and I made her favorite—French onion. Dad stopped by John’s for a fresh baguette, got lost in yet another conversation about the Beatles no doubt, and then visited Cheryl’s Deli after hours to pick up some Gruyère. All the while, I cutonions at the table, trying to keep Mom in conversation as she worked on another puzzle.
Mom’s recently been downgraded from five-hundred- to one-hundred-piece puzzles to avoid outbursts. I’ve spent too much time picking up puzzle pieces off the kitchen floor while Dad ushers her upstairs to not reduce the number of pieces.
That’s not her,I remind that bitter voice inside of my head. I scrub the baked-on cheese off the lip of Mom’s favorite blue bowl and scold myself once again for feeling frustrated.
That’s not her.If I don’t remind myself, I’ll cry. And I try not to do that much anymore. Mostly because I don’t have the time for it.
Though patience has never been my best skill, it certainly had been one of Mom’s. She raised her voice at meonetime in my entire childhood. I remember it vividly because it felt so unnatural and foreign to her usual softhearted, gentle approach. I was trying to find my special pen and spent probably less than ten seconds looking for it before I ran to find Mom and make her look instead. Running into her studio, I managed to knock over an entire jar of freshly opened paint.
Truthfully, I had done that countless times. Mom was always leaving paint cans scattered around, having gotten pulled in a new creative direction that required immediate attention, and I wasnevergood at looking where I was going. But that morning the jar of blue paint spilled all over the brand-new large canvas that Mom hadjustfinished binding, and she snapped.
“Dammit, Prudence!” Two shouted words, one stunned expression shared between us, and then fits of uneasy laughter that slowly relaxed into resting smiles when Mom eventually grabbed a brush, turned that spilled blue paint into a picturesque sky, and invited me to help her make clouds.
