That night as I’m falling asleep, my phone rings—loud and shrill. I never actually talk on the phone, so it catches me off guard.
Grace, the caller ID says. My heart presses against my ribs like it’s a bird caught in a cage. My alarm clock reads 11:50. I clear my throat and pick up.
“Hey.” My voice is too low, like I’m trying to sound sultry.
All that answers me are screams and laughter and music so loud it makes my speaker crackle.
“Grace?” I can barely hear my own voice. “Grace?”
I listen for a minute or two, trying to decipher voices. I recognize her laugh, but my heart immediately plummets.
I hang up and text her.
think you called me by accident. just making sure everything’s okay.
I am trying hard in this moment not to feel like she’s moved on from me so quickly. Grace is allowed to go to parties and laugh and have fun, but it still feels too soon.
Now I’m awake. It’s too late to call Ruth or Saul, and Hattie’s actually sleeping in her own bed, so waking her up would only mean sharing mine.
I reach under my bed for my Whitman’s Sampler chocolate box.
If my house was on fire in the middle of the night, I know I could grab this box and everything would be okay. The box itself hasn’t held chocolate in years, but instead the contents include the closest things I have to important documents and a life savings.
The top layer of the box is folded-up pieces of paper Hattie and I played MASH, our absolute favorite game, on when we were kids. Beneath that is a picture of the three of us one Christmas at Grandma Cookie’s when she was still alive. She bought us green long-sleeved velvet dresses that our dad made us wear even though it was eighty degrees outside. Hattie’s cheeks are flushed and she is visibly annoyed, while I’m sitting in my dad’s lap, eyes ringed red from some tantrum I must have thrown just moments before. But my dad is grinning, wide and genuine.
Beneath that are a few magazine cutouts of Olympic swimmers. There’s even a folded-up pamphlet from the swim camp the YMCA ran every summer when I was a kid. These, I guess, are my important documents.
Under all that is my disaster fund. Every penny I have to my name. Money my dad has always said I should spend on something foolish. I should probably open a bank account, but the idea of having a bank account makes me sad. It’s not like I have a car or nice clothes that I can look at andbe reminded of how hard I’ve worked over the last two years. So there’s something therapeutic about laying out all my cash and being able to place an actual value on myself. It’s like finally having an answer to a question you’ve wondered about your whole life.
I lay each bill out carefully and add in my tips from Boucher’s and set aside enough money for Tyler’s cake. When I add up what’s left, I write it down on the scratch piece of paper where I keep a running tally of how much I’ve got in the box. It’s a lot, but not really enough to start fresh somewhere or go on a summer backpacking trip.
I’ve definitely almost drained it a few times. Mainly to help Hattie out. Well, always to help Hattie out. Like that one time she egged her ex-boyfriend’s house and ended up cracking both his bedroom windows. (She was arrested for that one.) Or the time she borrowed a friend’s car and backed it up into a ditch. (The police were involved that time too.) Then there are the handful of times we’ve bought morning-after pills and the times she lost her phone in the ocean or dropped it in the toilet of a dingy club.
For a long time now, I’ve felt like my head was scraping the ceiling here in Eulogy and this little box of cash would somehow take me and Hattie both away. But here I am—thinking of how many diapers this will buy and how expensive cribs are. It would be so easy to leave and let Hattie figure this all out on her own, but my mom already left the both of us. I won’t make my sister go through that again.
SIX
The next night, during my shift at Boucher’s, my phone buzzes.
GRACE: butt dial!
That’s it.
An ache tears through my stomach, and I think that maybe she meant more to me than I did to her. My fingers hover over the keyboard, but then my pride says to make her wait. I force myself to put my phone away.
As quitting time draws closer, everyone is quick to close out their tables. When the last customer leaves, Saul dims the lights (except for the string of twinkly lights strung above the bar) and sets out all the booze people have brought from home while Hattie makes a spread of all the leftovers from today that can’t be saved for tomorrow. As I wipe down the tables, Ruth walks by every few minutes to knock her hips against mine.
I find Saul staring out the window behind the bar into the dark parking lot.
I give him a poke in the side. “Waiting on someone?”
His lips twitch before giving in to a grin. “No,” he says. “No one at all.”
I’m tempted to press him for more info, but behind us Tommy wearily backs out the side door and yells, “You break it, you buy it! Don’t forget to set the alarm before you leave!”
The moment the door shuts behind him, Saul cranks up the brass band music that’s been playing all day as much as the speakers will allow. A few nonemployees trickle in through the back door, and then the party starts without anyone having to say so. It’s not that everyone at Boucher’s much likes Tyler, but none of us can say no to a party—or rather, none of us can say no to Hattie, the real wizard behind the curtain of more than one Boucher’s employee party.
Tyler wasn’t even Hattie’s boyfriend until she told him she was pregnant. To be honest, he’d been playing Russian roulette with almost every straight girl in town, and Hattie happened to be the one who lucked out. When his mom heard he’d gotten a girl knocked up, she kicked him to the curb. Now he’s either being faithful to Hattie out of sincerity or because he needs a place to crash. It’s hard to tell which.
