He replies within a minute.No. It’s ours now.
Thief!I text back, laughing.
Jonas will bring it by in an hour. Pa’s home. I’m heading back to Indy shortly.
My stomach bottoms out.Today?
I thought he’d said tomorrow.
Yes
That’s all he says, nothing else, no punctuation, nothing.
I fight the urge to ask him when he’ll be back—ifhe’ll be back.
Drive safelyis what I settle on.
He doesn’t reply.
It takes meabout a week to stop feeling flat whenever I think of him. At first, I’m furious with myself for developing a crush on someone who even went so far as totellme that he wasn’t interested. How on earth I ended up kidding myself that he might have changed his mind is beyond me.
At least I don’t revert to thinking about Scott. I spend my days working alone at my desk, my evenings with Dad and Sheryl, or Bailey and Casey, or sometimes a combination of all four, and whenever I have spare time, I crack on with the Airstream renovation.
Eventually my melancholy lifts and I go back to feeling lucky that I’m staying in Indiana for the summer.
It’s late afternoonon Saturday, at the end of the first week of August. In between taking turns to serve customers today, I’ve been helping Sheryl in the kitchen. Or rather, on this occasion, she’s been helping me.
After harvesting a massive crop of rhubarb, and inspired by the Bellinis, I googled cocktail recipes and found one that used rhubarb syrup. Sheryl and I have been sterilizing jars, washing and chopping two-inch lengths of rhubarb, and boiling them up with castor sugar and water, and our efforts have produced several dozen jars of brilliant pink syrup that sparkle under the kitchen-counter lights.
Dad, meanwhile, has been watching the IndyCar street race in Nashville. He called me through earlier because he’d spotted Anders on the TV and was beside himself.
The camera cut away before I got there, but he rewound it for me and, I have to admit, my heart skipped a beat to see him sitting at the timing stand on the pit lane, wearing a black headset and looking all serious.
I thought we’d agreed to be friends, if nothing else. But almost two weeks have gone by without a word.
I remind myself that I haven’t texted him either.
I do that, I’ve realized, make judgments about people,assume they’re thinking one thing when I’m often the one who’s getting it wrong. Like that misunderstanding Bailey and I had about where to sit at the dining table. She and Casey have come for dinner several times in the last fortnight, and on the first occasion she made a point of seating me next to Dad. I felt a bit silly, actually, as though I’d overreacted and was being a brat. But she was insistent and when I’d got over my initial discomfort, I appreciated that she cared. It helped. I felt more like a part of the family, not once feeling excluded.
“There he is again!” Dad shouts out from the living room. “Wren!”
“I’m coming,” I call back.
He’s already rewinding and pausing and, on impulse, I get out my phone and take a photo of the TV screen.
I text it to Anders with the messageLook! My mate’s on the telly!
The race has already finished in real time—Dad had to pause it to see to customers—but from what Anders told us about race days, he’s probably still at the track. I doubt I’ll get a reply from him anytime soon. I’m not convinced I’ll get a reply from him at all.
Bailey is coming over after work, and, when she arrives, I mix us up cocktails—one part rhubarb syrup, one part vanilla vodka, and two parts lemonade—and we take them outside to the veranda. Dad and Sheryl leave us to it. They have a white wooden swing seat and it’s my favorite place to sit early in the morning or on cooler evenings, when I can watch the last of the season’s fireflies dancing over the soybeans. The plants come up to my waist now and have small green pods growing on them.
Sometimes, Jonas goes by on his tractor or the Gator oranother farm vehicle. Yesterday, I saw him spraying the fields, giant mechanical arms stretching out on either side of his tractor. When, this morning, a crop duster flew over, putting some sort of treatment on the corn, I watched from my bedroom window and pictured him up in the little white plane too. I doubt he was, but it entertained me to think of him buzzing about all over the place, ticking off a bunch of jobs on his list. I can’t believe he also works at the garage in town.
I miss Jonas, I realize, and not just his brother. I liked hanging out with thembothwhen they helped with Bambi and I’m sad our paths haven’t crossed again.
Jonas still hasn’t given me an invoice for changing Bambi’s tires. I thought about popping in to his work to settle up and ask about replacing the spare tire too, but it occurred to me that he might’ve wanted to do the job off the books. Maybe I’ll go down to the farm tomorrow to sort out payment and see how he’s doing.
The oppressive heat broke today. Yesterday it was in the mid-nineties, but today it’s only eighty. I’ve been in Indiana for a month and I’ve taken to speaking in Fahrenheit.
