The Precious One (7 page)

The mission was to find a father/daughter/stepsister/stepmother (although, as always, Caro felt like an afterthought, someone I had to remind myself was part of the picture) reunion outfit. I wouldn’t go so far as to get an entire new wardrobe. Wilson would have to see me in jeans eventually, despite his bone-deep loathing of them. But the initial meeting outfit seemed especially crucial. I needed to look accomplished, pretty, smart, grown-up, offhandedly chic, emotionally independent, and as though I weren’t trying at all.

The first thing Trillium found for me was a pair of leather shorts. And while they weren’t especially short and weren’t especially tight and could indeed be worn with black tights and a silk blouse, and while I do like to wear clothing that shows off my legs, since they seem to be the part of my body that is best hanging in there, the leather shorts were
leather
and
shorts
, and, as I reminded Trillium, my father had once, not so long ago, called me “whorish.”

“Seventeen years ago,” singsonged Trillium, turning down the waistband. “
Look
at how immaculately they’re lined. You don’t see a lining like that every day. And the seams!”

“Lining, seams, blah blah blah. No.”

“Oh, you!” She gave me a grandma-style cheek pinch. “How about this: you forget about pleasing him? Let your outfit scream, ‘Go to hell, ya big bossy galoot!’”

I did a little internal squirming at this because, obviously, Trillium was right. “Go to hell, ya big bossy galoot” had always been the appropriate response to Wilson, and I hadn’t given it anywhere close to often enough. When I had, there’d always been a thrill of satisfaction—and
a lot of high-fiving from Marcus. But the thought of doing it now, with the anxiety trifle growing more layered by the minute, just made me tired.

“Don’t want to give the man another heart attack,” I mumbled.

Trillium raised an eyebrow at me.

I sighed. “Okay. For the time being, I’m in path-of-least-resistance mode.”

Trillium considered this for a moment, then nodded. “So be it.”

We found some narrow, charcoal gray, almost black (“but much wittier than black” according to Trill) pants made of some kind of smooth, non-itchy, stretch wool (“like wool when it dreams it’s silk; this puts the ‘fab’ in fabric!”) and a loose ruby-red cashmere sweater with an open neck (“perfect for the dark-haired girl who what she lacks in cup size makes up for in collarbone gorgeousness”). After I swore on my life to wear a certain pair of flat-soled, black, knee-high boots that Trillium had bought for me for my last birthday (she has a habit of giving gifts so extravagant that you must protest, even though they are so perfect that you sort of hate to), I said, “Are we allowed to eat now?” And we were.

Never one to mince words, as soon as we had placed our order, Trillium leaned in and said, “Okay, let’s talk about ‘whorish.’”

The waiter, a skinny handsome boy with Tin Tin hair, began, with grave nonchalance, to whistle, never taking his eyes off his notebook, before walking away, “Moon River” trailing in the air behind him.

I sighed. “Wilson never name-calls. He just uses hideous adjectives and stabs people with them.”

Trillium made a gnat-swatting motion. “Pfft! Who cares about Wilson? What I want to know is: who was
the boy
?”

For a few seconds, I ceased to breathe. Then, I began whistling “Moon River.”

“Nooooooo you don’t,” said Trill. “Where there’s a father saying ‘whorish,’ there’s a boy. Spill it, missy.”

I opened my mouth. Shut it.

Trillium reached for my hand. “Hold on. The boy wasn’t a bad one, was he? He didn’t abuse you or something?”

I shook my head. “He was good.”

My mouth was dry. My heart was marbles in a tin can that someone was shaking.

“Name?” asked Trillium.

“Ben Ransom.” The tin can shook harder. Clatter, clatter, clatter. After all this time, all it took was saying his name.

“Tall or short?”

“Tallish.”

“Outstanding facial feature?”

I shut my eyes, and there he was. I made my way down his face. Dark hair; dark brows; black eyes; fair, flushy skin; cheekbones tilting up; nose tilting down; deep, v-shaped divot in his upper lip.

“I don’t know.” It was almost a whisper.

I opened my eyes to see Trillium smiling.

“So it’s like that, is it?” she said.

I shrugged. “It was. Seventeen years ago.”

“Uh-huh.”

I shrugged again, shrug overkill. “You know what he looked like? He looked like a guy who should wear corduroy trousers, boots, and a fisherman sweater and maybe some kind of brown jacket, and live in Wales. Or something.”

“You’ve been to Wales?” asked Trillium.

“I have not been to Wales.”

“Did he wear all those things?”

“Of course not. He was in high school. I just mean he looked sort of, or gave the general impression of being—forget it.”

“Windburned? Tousle haired? With those pink lips that look chapped but aren’t?”

I stared at her.

She did a victory dance.

“Don’t get carried away,” I told her. “Sometimes they actually were chapped.”

“You. Must. Tell. Me.” She signaled the waiter. “We will get wine, and then you will tell me
everything
!”

In the end, I didn’t tell her everything. Apart from Marcus and my mom, I trusted no one as much as I trusted Trillium, but there were some parts of the story that had been stowed away in the dimmest, dustiest corner of my mind for so long that just thinking about pulling them out into the light of day hurt. What I ended up giving her was the story of how we met. I told it carefully and hoped for—what’s the word I want? Synecdoche. I wanted that small part to stand for something bigger, if not the whole story of me and Ben, then the essence of it.

And because, if you’re going to tell the story or even just part of the story of the love of your life, you should begin with solemnity and maybe even a little pomp and circumstance, I began like this: “In all my life, I’ve loved just three men. One was only a boy, so maybe he doesn’t even count, except that he did and does, and he wasn’t an ‘only’ anything, ever. He was Ben Ransom, the love of my life.”

IT STARTED THE WAY
a lot of things in tenth grade started, with Itzy Wolcraft shrieking across the cafeteria. Marcus and I had attended the same school since prekindergarten, private, paid for by Wilson but chosen by my mother, so it was a good place, tough on academics and community service but easy on things like dress code and cafeteria shrieking. In this instance, Itzy’s shrieks were so high-pitched, so nearly hysterical that they sounded first like undifferentiated noise, then, as she got closer, like an insane and vaguely Japanese chant—“Hagai aga nurshi”—before, at long last, resolving themselves into, “Hot guy at the nursery; hot guy at the nursery; hot guy at the nursery.”

The afternoon before, Itzy had gotten in trouble for a C- on a math test and, in addition to losing her phone privileges (which happened
a lot, hence her frequent episodes of piercing cafeteria gossip mongering), she had been forced to accompany her mother to Ransom’s Garden World to buy fall yard decorating supplies, “mums and pumpkins and hay and corn husky thingies and such.”

“And I was sitting in one of those big white chairs, the wooden ones with the flat armrests, where you are in no way supposed to sit because there’s a sign saying
PLEASE DO NOT SIT
, when this totally beautiful wavy-haired guy just
materialized
from behind some rubber trees or something, and I swear to God I was paralyzed, like momentarily
frozen in place
, until I saw that he was wearing one of those man-aprons with
RANSOM
’
S
across the chest part and carrying a humongous pumpkin that was possibly diseased because it was totally covered with barnacles or possibly plant tumors and was completely disgusting, but luckily he had those leathery or cloth or something gloves on, which
anyway
I realized meant that he worked there, and so no doubt knew that I was sitting illegally, so I started to, you know, scramble to my feet, and you’ll never guess what he said.”

There were five of us, and we all yelped, “What?”

Itzy dropped her voice to a near whisper, “‘Don’t worry about it. Everyone sits there. That one’s really just a sample.’”

Our excuse was pumpkin shopping. Six teenaged girls dressed in their best jeans and new fall boots and sweaters, lip-glossed within an inch of their lives, and eager—avid, breathless, pink cheeked—for gourds. It was a big place, Ransom’s, deep and wide, with rows of open-air wooden tables covered with pots of plants and flats of flowers giving way to rows of larger plants and shrubs, and delicate, hopeful little potted trees, and interspersed throughout, pretty objects: birdbaths and garden furniture made by local artisans, and ceramic planters full of artful arrangements, funny things like purple-hearted cabbages and chili pepper plants and trailing vines mixed in with the usual flowers.

There was a shop, too. A cottagey structure full of vases, wind chimes, fancy, seasonal tabletop decorations, blown-glass hummingbird
feeders, candles, crystal garden balls, wreaths made of herbs, pomegranates, eucalyptus. My mother rarely shopped there. “Too expensive,” she’d say, “but it’s a great place to get ideas.”

I’d find out later that Mr. Ransom and his wife had opened the center together, years before Ben was born, and that in the beginning, it was Mrs. Ransom who had been in charge of all the arty things. After they divorced, when Ben was three, Mr. Ransom had taken over that part, too, and, to his surprise, found that he had a knack for it, a real eye. Sometimes, the local rich ladies would even pay him to come to their houses and decorate their yards, dining room tables, and mantelpieces, fill their planters and window boxes. Mr. Ransom didn’t really need the extra jobs because the center did fine; he did it because he loved it.

Because the six of us had so much ground to cover, we decided to divide and conquer, some of us starting at the perimeter and walking in ever-smaller circles toward the center, a couple of us taking the cottage, and one of us cruising the displays out front.

I took the front displays, and because, even though I was boy crazy, I was also kind of a nerd, I got interested: gripped by gourds, pulled in by pumpkins. There was a mind-boggling variety of them: the usual basketball orange, of course, but also green-striped ones, bone-colored ones, enormous blond ones, flattish princessy ones, the barnacled type that had made such an impression on Itzy, and giant tear-shaped ones whose long, curved handle-tops made you want to grab one and club something. And all along one bench were the gourds that would change my life. I’d never seen anything like them, not gourds so much as creatures: small orange pumpkins with squatty white legs.

I picked up two of them, one in each hand, and made them toddle, jauntily, along the bench. I hummed a little tune. Behind me, someone said, “Hey.”

A boy’s voice. Slowly, I turned around. His eyes sparkled under his eyebrows. His smile was crooked and genuine. I noticed he had one
dimple, just like I did. I also noticed that he was perfect, man-apron and all, and I was making little pumpkins walk. I stood looking at the boy, my hands full of gourd monopod spacemen. And here’s the thing: I should’ve been mortified. Every interaction with the opposite sex I’d had since the age of ten had taught me that, at that moment, I should’ve wanted to disappear from the face of the earth. But I
didn’t
.

“Hey,” I said, smiling back at the boy. “You probably thought I was trying to steal your gourds.”

“I don’t know about that,” he said, shrugging in a way that made his hair fall sideways on his forehead. Luckily, my hands were occupied or I might have brushed it back into place. “Most gourd stealers don’t make them dance a jig before they take them.”

I snorted.
Snorted
. “Well, that’s stupid. How else would they know which ones to take?”

“Good point,” he said, grin deepening. “You know, I sort of hate to tell you this, but those Turk’s Turbans might not actually be gourds. They might be squash.”

“That might matter to me if I were a gourd stealer,” I snapped, “which I’m obviously not.”

Then, that bright star of a boy tipped back his head and laughed, a sound unself-conscious and ringing, so completely uncool, more like the laugh of a little kid or someone’s granddad than like a high school guy talking to a girl his age he had just met. If I’d been in another state of mind, my usual state of mind, I might have felt embarrassed for him. But nothing at that moment was usual, and his laugh was like my own private meteor shower.

“I’m Ben Ransom,” he said.

He held out his hand for me to shake, and later, I’d kick myself all the way home for not jumping at the chance to touch him, to grab hold and hang on, but at that moment, I would’ve given everything I owned to hear Ben Ransom laugh again, so I slapped a Turk’s Turban into his open palm and said, “Taisy Cleary.”

“
I KNOW WHAT YOU
’
RE
thinking,” I said to Trillium. “Granddad laughs and dancing pumpkins don’t make for the most romantic meeting in the world. But they did! We were sixteen. We barely felt comfortable alone in our own rooms, and we cared more about what people thought of us than we cared about anything, world peace,
anything
. Yet there we stood, talking like no one was watching, like we’d known each other all our lives.”

Trillium said, “Actually what I was thinking is that you were insane to ever let him go.”

As soon as she said that—
boom
—there was Ben’s face again, the way it looked the last time I saw him, stunned, betrayed, a world of hurt in his eyes. I blinked the image away.

“I didn’t want to. Trust me. But I was a kid! I didn’t have a lot of choices.”

This must’ve come out more plaintive than I’d intended because Trill reached out and took my hand.

“Hey, babe, I wasn’t judging. No way. Of course, you were a kid! So let me guess. Wilson caught you doing some totally normal people-in-love thing with Ben that he thought no daughter of his should be doing, called you whorish, and—kaput, Ben and Taisy were no more.”