Waking Olivia (20 page)

“
I
brought
you an early Christmas present, Mom.”

My mother pokes her head out of the kitchen and a smile breaks across her face that is too wide and too sudden to be fake. “Olivia?” she gasps. “What happened to your trip?”

“My plans changed,” she says hesitantly. “Is that okay?”

My mother pulls her into a big hug. “
Okay
? Of course it’s okay. It’s better than okay. I’m thrilled.”

Brendan walks out in a T-shirt and flannel pajama bottoms, running a hand through his riotous hair. “Holy crap you people are loud.” He blinks when he sees Olivia and quickly wakes up, looking a little too delighted to find her here. I step in front of her. I’m not sure why.

“Hey, Houdini,” Brendan laughs, “you realize that didn’t make her invisible, right?”

M
y mother manages
to actually get a decent breakfast into Olivia for once, and then suggests I take her climbing.

I shake my head. “I need to take a look at the combine. That engine isn’t going to last us another season with the noise it’s making.”

“I’ll take her,” Brendan says, and something ugly winnows its way up inside me. Yeah, Brendan knows how to climb. I taught him myself. Doesn’t mean I trust him.

“Not a chance,” I reply. “I don’t need my lead runner out for the rest of the season because you didn’t secure something right.”

“The season is over,” Olivia argues.

“Have you actually forgotten you have the Cooper Invitational in two weeks?”

“I haven’t forgotten, but winning the Cooper doesn’t get us back into regionals.”

“It would’ve been great to make regionals,” I reply, “but this race is far more important for you. The Cooper gets national media attention.”

“So it’s settled,” Brendan says to me. “You don’t have time to take her and I do. Have fun playing with your engine.”

Asshole.

Maybe if he’d offer to fix the fucking engine, I’d actually
have
time.

“
I
don’t want
to climb,” Brendan announces as soon as we get in his car.

“Then why’d you offer to take me?”

“Just trying to piss Will off. Mission accomplished. Did you see his face?”

I roll my eyes — it’s easy to piss Will off. That had nothing to do with me. “So what are we going to do instead?”

He grins. “Something a hell of a lot more fun than climbing.”

He takes me to a small one-street town about 20 minutes away, where we proceed to drink for the next five hours and then spend another two hours walking around while we try to sober up. It’s dinner time when we get home, and when Dorothy asks us how climbing was we both start to laugh.

“Am I missing something?” asks Will, that muscle in his jaw popping.

“Yeah,” says Brendan, grinning at me. “You’re missing a whole lot of something.”

T
he next morning
I’m up at six to help Dorothy. I don’t have a hard time rising early, since I do it every day, but I do have a hard time rising early in order to
cook
.

Dorothy hands me a bag of potatoes as I stagger into the kitchen and I look at them blankly. “Um … what do I do with these?”

“Make the mashed potatoes.”

I look at the bag in my hand and back to her. “Uh, okay. Do I bake them first or something?” Like I said, my cooking skills are unbelievably limited. Aside from eggs, everything I know how to make involves ground beef and spaghetti sauce.

She laughs. “Is that a serious question?”

“Well, they need to be soft, right?” I scowl. “I’ve only made mashed potatoes from a box.”

“You’ve never seen
anyone
make them?”

I shrug. “My grandmother stopped cooking when I was pretty young, and this is the only other kitchen I’ve been in.”

She turns to me, her eyes sad. “How is that possible, Olivia? You’ve been on your own since you were 16.”

“It is what it is,” I say, wanting this conversation to end rapidly. “So what do I do with them?”

“Peel them, quarter them, boil them. We’ll start with that.”

“Seems like a lot of potatoes for four people.”

“Peter’s coming too,” she says, as if that explains why she’s got me working with about 40 pounds of potatoes. I’m tempted to tease her about the fact that she blushed as soon as she said Peter’s name, but I decide against it. “How old were you when you took over the cooking for your grandmother?” she asks.

I pause. It’s a casual question that does not come with a casual response. My first impulse is to shut the conversation down.
Old enough
, I could tell her, but I don’t. “I was 11.”

I focus on the potatoes in my hand, the ache caused by the cold water, even though I know she’s stopped what she was doing completely. “What did you cook for Thanksgiving?” she asks quietly when she finally resumes her work.

I shrug. “Same as I cooked every other day. She didn’t really know the difference and it’s not like we celebrated Thanksgiving anyway.”

“So you’ve never had a Thanksgiving meal?”

I pause. “Yeah, I think maybe with my mom. I remember her making a pie.” A shudder passes through me. My mom is smiling in that memory, interested in me, explaining how a pumpkin is considered a fruit because it has seeds. In that memory she doesn’t seem like the kind of person who just abandons her child, and I prefer the monster I’ve created in my mind. It makes it at least possible that some of the fault rests with her.

“I always wanted a girl.” Dorothy smiles at me. “Especially for times like this.”

“You could probably still have one,” I reply. Maybe it’s just good genes, but Dorothy looks young. Too young to have grown sons, actually.

“Shop’s closed. And besides, I have you now, don’t I?”

W
ill wanders in an hour later
, looking adorably sleepy and unshaven,
and hot
. Who the hell looks totally doable just out of bed?

“Out,” says his mother.

“Coffee,” he replies, scrubbing a hand over his face. “You’re not getting me out of here without coffee.” He glances at me and grins. “My mom trusted you with a knife, did she?”

I narrow my eyes at him. “That was before she knew
you’d
be in the kitchen. Hope that coffee’s fast. I’m feeling stabby all of a sudden.”

He hops on the counter and watches me peel potatoes. “For the record, I’d like my potatoes without any of your fingers in there.”

“Keep jabbering and you’ll be getting them with an extra serving of spit, my friend.”

The next time he comes in he’s dressed and shaved, with Brendan behind him. “We demand food,” Brendan tells his mom.

“Have some cereal,” she says.

“
Cereal
? We’re growing boys.”

“If the two of you grow any more, you won’t fit in the house. Out.”

“Mom,” Will whines, sounding so young it makes me laugh, “we’re
starving
.” When that fails, he turns to me. “How about sneaking your favorite coach a few of those rolls?”

I feign surprise. “I didn’t know Peter was already here.” He laughs and gives me the finger at the same time, which is decidedly un-coach-like.

B
y 1pm
, everything is done, or nearly so. “I guess it’s time for us to get ready,” Dorothy says, removing her apron. She leans out of the kitchen and yells at the guys to go get dressed. They both make similar sounds of protest, which she ignores. “We all kind of dress up, by the way. The boys hate it and every year they complain, but a rule’s a rule.”

“Oh,” I pause. “I didn’t bring anything. Just jeans.”

“Well, as it happens, I bought you something,” she says hesitantly. “I hope you don’t mind. I just saw it in the store and thought, ‘Olivia would look gorgeous in that.’”

“You shouldn’t have done that.” They’re nearly as strapped for cash as I am.

“I always wanted a little girl to dress up, and you’re the closest thing to a daughter I’ve ever had, so damned if anyone’s going to tell me I can’t buy her a few dresses.”

I follow her to her room feeling nothing but dread. I figure there’s a 90% chance she’s bought me something I wouldn’t be caught dead in, and I’m going to have to sit through dinner with Will and Brendan making fun of me the whole time. In fact, I’m already annoyed at both of them for it in advance.

While she goes to her closet, I pick up a picture of Will that sits on her dresser. He’s a gangly little towhead, standing shirtless by a lake with a big crooked smile and a few missing teeth. I’m still smiling at it when she emerges.

“Wasn’t he sweet?” she asks.

“Yeah,” I sigh. He was adorable. There’s something so free and unencumbered about him in the photo that it kind of breaks my heart. I’ve seen glimpses of it when we’re climbing, but almost never outside of that.

She’s holding up two different dresses. “I got you one for today and one for the fall athletic banquet.”

I laugh uneasily. “I guess the one that looks like lingerie is for today?”

“It’s a slip dress,” she scolds, “and no, that’s for the banquet.”

Both of the dresses are beautiful, but the idea of wearing either of them makes me feel squirmy and self-conscious. She has me take the dress that doesn’t look like lingerie and try it on. It’s a fitted beige sheath in matte jersey, pouring over my body like it was made for me. Dorothy sighs happily when I emerge. “I knew it would be perfect on you. Do you like it?”

I nod. “I do. I’m just not used to wearing dresses I guess.”

She smiles. “Maybe that’s for the best. You’re dangerous enough in running clothes. Now run and put on a little makeup and I’ll see you in the kitchen.”

I go to my room and put on mascara and lip gloss, hating myself a little for how much I care. How badly I want Will to like it, for blindly hoping it will somehow change things for us when he’s made it so clear that nothing’s going to happen. It’s a course of action destined to fail but here I stand, undertaking it anyway.

I brought heels, thinking we might go out with Brendan one night, so I slip them on and look in the mirror one last time. I look good, and it won’t be enough. He made that clear last weekend, didn’t he?

I see Will before he sees me. He’s at the dining room table carving the turkey, wearing khakis and a button-down shirt, which isn’t all that dressed up, I suppose, but far more than I’ve ever seen from him. He’s gorgeous. Even in that shirt you can see the raw strength of him, the breadth of his shoulders, the taut forearms. He looks hot and grown up and just … I can’t put my finger on it but it’s something that makes my breath come a little short.

“Hey, Mom!” he shouts. “Do you want—”

His voice trails off as I come into his line of sight. He doesn’t smile. He doesn’t move. He just
stares
.

“You’re looking at me like I walked in here carrying a decapitated head,” I tell him.

“That’d be less surprising than you in a dress,” he mutters, turning back to the turkey.

H
oly shit
.

Olivia stands before me in a dress that flows over every curve. Curves even
I
didn’t realize she had, and I’ve done more than my fair share of looking. I am temporarily struck mute. I want to tell her that she is gorgeous, breath-taking, astonishing. That the second I saw her my stomach dropped with something that goes so far beyond lust that I can’t even name it. I can’t tell her any of this though, so I do what I’ve always done.

I try to pretend she’s no longer there.

T
here is
nothing about this day that isn’t hard. It’s hard to be this close to Olivia, looking like that, and not touch her. It was hard seeing her with my mom in the kitchen, seeing the way she seemed to cure a certain loneliness in my mom that me and Brendan and my dad never did. It was hard seeing how much she belongs here, and knowing it’s never going to happen. It’s hard looking at my brother’s smug smile. I don’t know where they went yesterday, but I know they didn’t climb for eight hours.

It doesn’t help that my mom invited Peter either. I struggle enough to conceal the way I feel about Olivia as it is without having my boss here as an audience. And it could easily come up that Olivia is staying here, and that I am too. I don’t think he’d fire me, but I know for a fact he’ll tell me I can’t stay here tonight and there’s no way in hell that’s happening.

Although, with the way Olivia looks right now, that might be the safest course of action.

P
eter doesn’t take
my father’s seat at the end of the table. Instead, he sits next to my mom and leaves the seat for me. I guess he’s just trying to be respectful, but I wish he hadn’t. I’d kind of banked on talking to him about sports and ignoring Olivia entirely, but now he’s talking to my mom and Olivia’s beside me, so pretty that my eyes trip over her, stutter, stall, every time I look up.

Peter and my mom have an endless stream of things to talk about, things I didn’t even know they had in common. He’s in her book club, which I’d always thought was some female thing, and their mutual friend Tina, apparently, drinks too much wine and thinks her husband is having an affair. I guess I should have realized my mom had a life outside of us and the farm, but it’s weird to realize that her outside life overlaps to the extent it does with my boss’s.

I don’t like it.

“How’s school, Brendan?” Peter asks. “You gonna graduate on time?”

Brendan shrugs as if doesn’t matter when most of my salary is what’s paying his goddamn tuition. “I don’t know. Don’t see myself using that degree anyway.”

“Oh?” says Peter. “Why’s that?”

“I got a buddy who’s trying to line us up jobs with a bike tour company next summer. I’d rather do that than anything I could do with my degree.”

“Bike tours?” I ask. “If you’re going to piss away your time, why don’t you piss it away by helping around here?”
Jesus I sound exactly like my father,
bitter and demanding and unfair. I hate it and yet I’m still angry.

Brendan laughs.
Laughs.
“Right, because working on a farm is just as rewarding as biking through Europe.”

Even before Olivia, I’d have been angered by his response. But now I’m enraged, and it has far less to do with the farm than it does the fact that he has choices. If he wanted to, he could take Olivia out tonight. He could sit across from her in a restaurant and feast on the sight of her in that dress and wonder how the hell he got so lucky. He could be the one who takes that dress off of her when they get home. And most importantly, he could be the one to follow her when she leaves here next year.

I want those things. I want them so badly that when I imagine them, the way I am now, I feel a little unhinged. I lower my head, thinking about the busted engine I still need to fix and the climbs I’ll never climb and the girl across from me that I’ll never have, and it feels entirely possible that I may explode in a fit of rage, right here, at the unfairness of it all.

Brendan says something I don’t catch and he and Olivia exchange a look. He looks at her like he knows things, as if he’s privy to her secrets. If he ends up with her, I won’t be able to fucking stand it. I won’t.

I hear my text tone chime across the room and practically leap from the table. I just need to get away from all of them for two seconds, away from the idea of Brendan with Olivia, or
anyone
with Olivia, before I lose it.

I walk slowly to the other room with my phone, checking the text mostly for show. It’s from Jessica, her tone breezy as if Tuesday night never happened. She wrote several times yesterday, asking if we could talk, which I ignored. I assumed she’d gone to Denver, but nope. Her text now says she’s on her way here.
I have a little gift for your mom
, she says,
and then maybe the two of us can have a chat
.

And here I thought my evening couldn’t get any worse.