The Summer of Lost Wishes (10 page)

“
Well, the building has been here
forever. Not exactly the fanciest of places but they have nice
furniture,” Mom says. “Come on.”

A rush of air greets us as we step in the
doorway. A bell dings overhead. Before us are rows of recliners,
couches, tables, chair sets, dressers, and beds. It’s almost a bit
overwhelming. I can’t focus on what my bedroom will look like. I
can’t focus on anything other than Rooks Carter and the love
letters in my purse, which aren’t even from Rooks
Carter.

“
Welcome to LQ!” a girl in a dark
blue T-shirt shouts from behind a counter with a register. She
waves but doesn’t leave her post.

“
LQ?” I ask Mom.

“
Limited Quantity,” she clarifies.
“These pieces aren’t something you can just order in a store. If
you see something you like, point it out. If you love it, we need
to have them put a ‘sold’ sign on it. Once it’s gone, it’s
gone.”

I follow Mom around the store while she chats
with a salesman about the multiple ideas she has for our house.
With every idea she rattles off, the man instantly has “just the
piece” for her. Mom eventually settles on a neutral-colored couch,
a bright blue puffy ottoman, and blue pillows to match. She sticks
with simple white bar stools for the kitchen.

“
Now the dining room,” she says,
moving toward a section of tables and chairs.

This is what’s going to take ages. Mom has
changed her mind on centerpieces and décor for the dining room
twenty times a day since we got here. She’s certain that if she has
the right dining room, people will take her seriously as an
interior designer. If not, she’s doomed.

“
I like this one,” I say, running
my fingers along a gray washed wood table.

It’s the same washed out color as the stones
outside of Shark Island, like a rain cloud but not quite a storm.
Faded and weathered, like it’s been able to survive the elements,
but still dark enough that you know it’s been through a few
battles.

“
You know, I kind of do too,” Mom
says. She walks around the table, studying it from a few different
angles. “It’d match a lot of color schemes, and it’s not stark
white either.”

She discusses the price with the salesman and
tells me that she’ll meet me near the beds and dressers. She
already has an idea of what she wants for her bedroom and office,
but I don’t have the first clue. I should be more excited about
picking out new furniture for my new room in my new awesome beach
house, but I’m not.

Replacing my bed and changing my dresser are
both permanent. Decorating my room with new things is permanent.
Right now, it’s still somewhat surreal to be in a new place with
new things and a new life. But the novelty will wear off. Even if
the town doesn’t get over the Calloway Cottage quickly, I will.
It’ll become normal for us. It’ll be where I wake up in the
mornings and brush my teeth and eat breakfast before going to
school. It’ll be where I come home and have to do homework every
night. It will become home, even if it’s not Tennessee.

I sit down on a red couch with black and white
chevron pillows. I grab my phone from my purse and scroll through
Facebook. By graduation, these people will be complete strangers to
me. They may comment on a random picture here and there or pop up
with an “I miss you” on my birthday, but eventually, it’ll be as if
I were never there.

Life is going on with me already – the pool
parties, the cook outs, the mud riding, the weekends at the lake. I
stare up at the ceiling and blink away the urge to cry. Then I take
a deep breath, ignore the photos, and scroll up to the search bar.
I type in the name Rooks Carter.

I don’t even fight the stupid smile that
dances onto my face when I see his photo pop up. I select his
profile picture, which is a shot from a baseball game. 237 friends.
I instantly request him and hope he has his phone nearby so he can
approve number 238 soon. If nothing else, at least my friends back
home will see that I’ve added a hot guy to my friends list since
moving here.

They don’t have to know that I’m setting
myself up for heartbreak. It’s a lot like Hanna’s letter to Seth. I
don’t know if I believe in destiny either, although the idea of it
is beautiful. I don’t know why fate would bring me here, introduce
me to this really cool guy, and then snatch him away from me. I
can’t even enjoy the moment because I know the end is lurking
around, watching and waiting for me to reach for those falling
stars and never catch one.

But I get it. I’m too intrigued to step away.
Rooks may have become my friend anyway just by working on our
house, but those letters are what sealed the deal. Those letters
were our destiny, and just like Seth and Hanna, we’re
doomed.

“Did you give up?” Mom asks, plopping down on
the couch with me. “This is more draining than I expected. I’ve had
to measure every piece we’ve looked at to make sure they’ll fit in
the spaces we have. How about we pick out the last few pieces and
call it a day?”

I flip through the images of our soon-to-be
furniture on my phone while Mom searches for a parking spot near
the pier. Tourist season is in full swing because there’s not a
vacant spot anywhere close by, and it doesn’t look like we’ll get
out of this parking lot any time soon because we have to keep
stopping for pedestrians.

“
I think the gray will look good
in your room,” Mom says, leaning back in her seat. She motions for
a mother and two children to go ahead and cross in front of us.
“It’s light enough that it won’t look too bad with those tacky deer
heads.”

“
So I’ve won the great deer head
battle?” I assume. I glance her way, but she doesn’t look at me.
Instead, she motions for a guy on a bicycle to ride by.

Then Mom sighs. “I’ve decided to pick and
choose my battles,” she says. “I know you’re going to fight for
those damn deer, so I might as well fight for furniture and
accessories that will look nice with them.”

The taillights of a white SUV light up just
ahead of us. Mom stiffens in her seat and stretches her neck to see
if they’re leaving. Their reverse lights come on.

“
Thank God,” Mom says. “I didn’t
think we’d ever find a parking place, and I didn’t want to walk a
mile just to get here.”

My phone dings with a notification. Then it
buzzes immediately after. There’s a new text from Rooks – and a
Facebook notification that he’s accepted my friend
request.

I open the text
message.
Stalking me online now,
Davenport? I knew my charm was working on you.

I instantly type
up the first thing that comes to mind.
You
accepted the friend request, so obviously my charm is working
too.

I drop my phone back into my purse before Mom
can inquire about who I’m texting. I don’t need any smart remarks
about Rooks texting on the job. She slides into the parking spot
previously occupied by the white SUV. She debates hiding her purse
in the car, but she says she can’t afford another broken window.
It’s not even a debate for me. I have buried treasure. The purse
goes with me.

Mom double checks that the car is locked
before we walk up the steps to a picnic area above the beach. A few
families sit at the tables eating lunch and discussing if they
should spend the day at the beach or go on one of the boat
tours.

We descend the stairs on the other side of the
giant gazebo and walk onto the sand amidst large beach umbrellas
and volleyball nets. The ocean drifts calmly, pushing against the
shoreline and pulling itself back out, a never-ending splash of
aqua against the sand.

“
We used to come out here when I
was a kid,” Mom says, slipping off her shoes. “It wasn’t nearly as
busy back then. Fewer restaurants. Not much of a tourist town yet.
This was my favorite spot.”

She doesn’t venture into the crowd on the
beach. Instead, she hangs back toward the small sand dunes lining
the bottoms of the pavilions. A pier stretches out in the distance.
Kids and adults stand close to the railing, tossing over fishing
lines and pointing at the waves.

“
I actually met your dad out
here,” she says.

She stares into the distance, but I’m pretty
sure she’s not watching the volleyball game up ahead. She’s
somewhere else, maybe eighteen years ago, right here on this sand,
in a bikini, maybe by a bonfire or playing her own volleyball game.
And my absent father is somewhere nearby, sipping on a beer or
tossing a football with his friends. Aside from a few pictures that
Mom has shown me, I’ve never seen the guy. I wouldn’t know him if
he walked up to me right this very moment.

“
Did you guys have the same
friends?” I ask.

I wonder if they started out like Seth and
Hanna, opposite spectrums that somehow polarized at the same axis.
I still can’t imagine the golden couple being anything less than
genuinely golden.

“
Not really,” Mom says, tucking
her hair behind her ear. “I was working at this ice cream stand up
that way. I think it’s still there. Seaside Scoops. He was a
regular who always ordered a pineapple milkshake after he and his
friends won their volleyball games.”

She points up ahead, near the pier. There’s a
small turquoise shed sitting in the sand, not too far from the
parking lot but still close enough to the pier to seem like it’s
‘on the beach.’ A few picnic tables are scattered around it, in
random places, as if there were more but they were washed away with
the tides and these are all that remain.

“
The day he asked me out, they’d
actually lost their game,” Mom tells me. “He ordered his usual and
then asked for my phone number. Completely caught me off guard. We
had two really great years together, though.”

“
Until I came along,” I say. The
words sound harsh and terrible when they exit my mouth. That wasn’t
how I intended them.

“No,” Mom quickly interjects. “You were the
best thing that came from that relationship. I don’t regret my time
with him because it gave me you. You just happened to be the
eye-opener that proved to me that he wasn’t all that I thought he
was.”

We stroll toward Seaside Scoops. The order
window is trimmed in lime green, but the words are painted in
bright pink across the top. A painting of an ice cream cone with
double scoops is painted next to it.

“Would you be offended if I tried the
pineapple milkshake?” I ask.

Mom laughs. “Not at all,” she says. “I
brought it up, so that’s what I get.”

While we wait in line, Mom speculates how
much longer the renovations will take and whether or not she’ll be
in business before school starts this fall. All talk of my sperm
donor ceased upon my asking about pineapple milkshakes.

After we order, Mom and I walk toward the
pier. We pay the two-dollar toll, receive a starfish stamp on our
hands, and venture on. A teenage couple snuggles up for a selfie
just as we step onto the wooden flooring of the pier.

“Summer love,” Mom says dreamily. Then she
huffs and shakes her head. “I don’t want you to think your father
didn’t want you. I know we don’t really talk about him much. He was
just young, dumb, and not ready to grow up. He wasn’t ready to face
adult responsibilities.”

If he’d been a little older, a little more
mature, things probably would’ve been very different. My mom never
would’ve left Coral Sands, and my life in Tennessee would be
non-existent. We wouldn’t be living in the Calloway Cottage now.
I’d have grown up going to candlelight vigils every year, and I
wouldn’t have faux deer heads covered in old sweaters waiting to be
placed on my bedroom wall.

“I think we turned out okay,” I tell Mom. I
sip on the milkshake to keep from saying anything else that may
make the conversation awkward.

Further down the pier, a man pulls back on
his fishing line, and a massive fish lands on the floor. It flops
around, and a little girl screams. I sort of want to turn back now.
I don’t want to be blasted by a flying fish.

Fortunately, Mom seems to feel the same way
because she stops and walks over to the railing overlooking the
ocean. I join her, but we stand in silence sipping pineapple
milkshakes for a few minutes before she finally speaks.

“I’ve been thinking,” Mom says. “I’m torn
between letting you make your own mistakes and stepping in to keep
you from being hurt. I don’t want you to go down the same path I
did falling for a pretty boy with a bad reputation, even though I
know firsthand how tempting it is.”

Oh, great. The awkward ‘dad talk’ has now
turned into the ‘stay away from Rooks’ talk. Here we go again.

“But I think you’re a good influence on the
boy,” she says, completely surprising me. “Maybe having the right
people around him and working with his dad will help him get back
on the right track. So I’m not going to stop you from hanging out
with him. Or whatever you kids call it these days.”

I stir my straw in my milkshake and stare
down at my flip-flops for a moment, trying to find the right words.
I don’t know if I should thank her, reassure her, or just nod.

“Are you sure they didn’t spike your
milkshake?” I ask. Humor shouldn’t fail me now.

Mom cracks a smile. “I’ve been thinking
about it,” she says again. “But the first time he gets in trouble,
he’s not coming back around. I’m going to give him the benefit of
the doubt for now. This summer is about fresh starts, so I’m
willing to let him have one too, but I expect you to guard your
heart like it’s your most prized possession.”