Maine Squeeze (9 page)

“Still, you live here all year? That is so cool. I'd love to do that. This makes my town look pathetic—well, more pathetic than it
usually
does.” She laughed.

It was fun to watch someone new to the island see the place for the first time. You know how you get so used to something that you don't realize how great it is until someone else points it out?

“Wait until you see your room,” I told Blair as we walked through the kitchen. On the way in, I grabbed the sheet of poster board off the bulletin board. Blair was so busy looking around the house that she didn't notice.

After a quick tour of the first floor, she and I headed up the stairs together. “It's usually my parents' bedroom, so you'll have to be really careful and make sure you don't, um, wreck anything.”

“No problem,” Blair replied.

During a break at work, I'd called my parents and asked them whether it was okay for me to offer the extra room to Blair, since Erica couldn't take it. They'd said it was fine, that they trusted my judgment.

Sometimes I wished they didn't trust me or my judgment so much. It felt as if I could only go
down
in their estimation of me—and that it might happen fairly soon. But Blair seemed cool, and I just couldn't see that we'd have any problems. She was really making an effort to get to know all of us, and so far she was a great co-worker. Okay, so we'd only worked together one shift so far, but you could learn a lot about a person in that short time.

“It's huge!” Blair cried when she walked into the bedroom. She wandered around the room and looked out the windows. “Ocean view. King-size bed. The color's a little drab, but I can deal with that. So why has no one else taken this gorgeous room?”

“Well, it was set aside for Erica, remember?” I explained again how her family had decided she should stay with her grandparents this summer instead of here. “And then we decided to leave this room vacant for guests.”

“Wow. And you'd really let me just live here? Free of charge?” Blair looked at me.

“Well, yeah—I mean, you'd need to pitch in on house stuff with the rest of us, like groceries and the phone bill,” I said.

“You're the best!” Blair said, throwing her arms around me.

“Okay, but before we go any further, there's something you have to see.”

“The bathroom? Oooh, is it connected—a master bath?”

“No, not quite.” I laughed. “Feel free to go check it out, though, third door on your right. But I was talking about this.” I handed her the poster board. “It's a list of house rules, which my parents wrote up and made me agree to. It's important to them, so if you could look at it and make sure you're okay with the ground rules, that'd be great.”

“Ground rules?” she said, beginning to scan the list.

“Yeah. If you don't mind. Just review them. I know it sounds dumb, but—”

“No, it's fine. I know how parents can be.”

“I'm going downstairs. Come on down when you're ready,” I said.

As I started down the stairs, I heard Haley's voice. She didn't sound happy.

“You guys asked her to
live
here? Without asking me about it first? Without even letting me meet her?”

I gulped. Oh, no. Why hadn't I thought of that? Of course Haley would have to approve of the plan, too. And there was nothing Haley hated more than being out of the loop.

“But she's really nice,” Erica said.

“So what? You know, you don't even live here!” Haley cried. “How can you make decisions that affect the rest of us?”

“I'm so sorry,” I said as I walked into the kitchen. “We shouldn't have asked her without asking you.”

Haley just glared at me.

“Come on, Haley—I'm sorry. We got carried away—we just felt so bad because she didn't have a place to live. She's been sleeping on Trudy and Robert's living room floor,” I explained.

“But we all agreed that we'd decide who was in the group together. We're fine with just the three of us, aren't we? It's not like we
need
a fourth person so we can pay less rent. We
have
no rent! And then
you
always have a place to sleep when you stay over,” she said to Erica.

Erica shrugged. “I can sleep on the sofa.”

Haley rolled her eyes. “Come on.”

“Nothing's final yet,” I told Haley. “Meet Blair first, okay? If for some reason you don't like her,” I said in a soft voice, “we'll just tell her that we changed our minds.”

“We can't do that,” Sam said. “That'll come off really rude. We already
offered
it to her. And she really needs a place.”

“What's she doing up there, anyway? Moving in already?” Haley asked.

“I'll go get her,” I said. I headed for the stairs, but before I could go up them, I saw Blair heading down. “Hey, Haley's home—you've got to meet her.”

“Oh, sure. Great. Love to,” she said with a smile.

“So what did you think of the rules?” I asked as she reached the bottom of the stairs. “Are you going to be okay with them?”

Blair handed the poster board back to me. “They're exactly the kind of rules my father would write up for me. In fact, I think he has, already. So it's no problem. I'm ready to sign on, if you guys are.”

“Um … well, let's see. Blair, this is Haley. Haley, Blair.”

“Cool name.” Blair smiled at Haley.

“Thanks.” Haley wouldn't quite look at her, at first.

I went to the fridge and got out a pitcher of lemonade. I sliced a few fresh wedges of lemon and tossed them into the pitcher. “So, let's go outside and talk. We still have some time before we have to get back to work.”

“Where are you working?” Blair asked Haley as we filed out onto the porch.

On the way, Samantha grabbed four wineglasses from the cupboard. “Just to make it fun,” she said to me.

“Or, are you working, I guess I should ask,” Blair said to Haley as she settled into a chair. “Not everyone has to.”

“Oh, I have to, all right,” Haley said. “I work at the Landing—you know, the shack down by the water with coffee and ice cream—”

“Where are you from?” Blair interrupted.

“Here,” Haley said.

“You have that accent. I love that accent,” Blair said.

Haley shrugged. “I can't help it. I'm going to try to get rid of it in college.”

“Oh, yeah? Where are you going—Paris or something?”

“Not quite. Dartmouth.”

“Oh, God. Dartmouth. I got rejected by them before I even submitted my application. When I requested a catalog they sent it to me with this big
DON'T EVEN BOTHER
sticker on the front cover.”

Haley laughed. “They didn't.”

“Pretty much,” Blair said. “Ivy League … I mean, I'd kill to be Ivy League. I'm actually taking a year off so I can reapply and try to get in somewhere good next time.”

“I don't care that much about whether it's Ivy League,” Haley said. “I just want to be somewhere where the other people are smart. It's a lot of pressure, you know?”

“Yeah, but it's your ticket to everything when you graduate,” Blair said.

“My ticket's going to be to Europe. One way,” Sam said. “Right, Colleen? We're going to Europe for three months after we finish college.”

“Right,” I said. “Just as soon as my parents do all the groundwork this summer and figure out where we should go.”

“Yeah, but you wouldn't want to go or stay where your
parents
like. Would you?” Blair asked.

“She has a point,” Sam agreed.

“Colleen's parents think classical music is fun,” Haley said. “They read about ten books a week, and their last big road trip was to … Where was it? Historic Colonial Inns of Massachusetts?”

Everyone laughed.

“Hey, at least they have a great house, and we're all really lucky to be here.” Sam raised her glass. “To the Templetons.”

“To Starsky and Hutch!” Haley grinned at me.

“Starsky and Hutch?” Blair said.

“Our cats. Are you okay with cats?” I asked.

“Um. Sure,” Blair said. “Are they nice?”

“Supersweet.” Erica raised her glass in the air. “To a great summer!” She turned to Blair. “Your turn.”

“To … oh, my gosh, I can't think of anything original,” Blair said. “To … the ocean! And my new view of it. Thanks, guys.”

To ex-boyfriends,
I thought.
To new boyfriends
. “To friends!” I said.

We all reached forward to clink our glasses together.

I guess I must have clinked too hard, because my wineglass splintered into a hundred pieces and we all jumped back to avoid the shattered glass.

Maybe I should have taken that as an omen, but I didn't. It just seemed like something clumsy at the time.

Chapter 8

“Colleen?” Trudy stopped me on my way back into the kitchen on Friday. I was done, for the moment, with my lunch tables. “Could you help me out with something? There was just a woman here who insisted on looking at every single T-shirt we had for sale, and she and her kids must have tried on about twenty shirts. Could you do me a favor and go refold them all?”

“Sure,” I said.

“And there's some additional stock in the drawer underneath the cabinet. If you wouldn't mind restocking, too, while you're at it?”

“No problem.” I quickly washed my hands in the sink and then went out front. No one was working at the register, and Erica was nowhere in sight, which was odd. But, knowing Erica, she was probably carrying leftover boxes of food out to someone's car, or driving them home, or something. The phrase “above and beyond” was created for her.

I picked up the pile of T-shirts from the counter and moved them over, away from the register, so they wouldn't be in the way. I shook the first one out and laid it on the counter, then neatly folded it into a small square, with the Bobb's logo showing above the pocket.

When I finished folding the first stack, I crouched down to put them into the glass display case. I was doing some rearranging when someone else walked behind the counter and legs slammed into my shoulder. “Ow!” I cried.

“Sorry!” a voice above me said. Evan reached down and put his hand on my shoulder. “Colleen, you okay?”

I pushed his hand away and resisted the urge to spit on his sandals before standing up. “I'm fine.”

“How was everything today?” Evan asked as he ran through a credit card for a customer.

Everything was fine,
I thought, pulling myself to my feet,
until you showed up
.

“Great. Delicious,” the man said. “We'll definitely be back.” After he'd signed the receipt, and after he and his family left the restaurant, Evan leaned against the counter, watching me fold shirts for a second.

“I can ring up the next person,” I said. “I mean, I'm here. I could have rung up the
last
person.”

“I didn't see you,” Evan said. “I didn't think anyone was over here.”

“Yeah, right,” I murmured.

“What—you think I'd intentionally crash into you? Why would I do that?”

I shrugged and didn't say anything. I tried to slide open the cabinet door closest to him so I could put the size small T-shirts away. But it wouldn't open from the side I was on, so I looked up at him. “Do you mind? Moving?”

He took a few steps to get around me, but he didn't walk all the way out from behind the counter. In fact, he was standing about a foot away from me, giving me no room at all to work. “I don't want to leave because someone might come up, and, you know, you are busy with those shirts. Busy busy busy.” He smiled at me.

I let out a deep, annoyed sigh and just kept restocking the case, trying to get it done as quickly as I could, and also trying to ignore what it felt like to be in such close proximity to him again. He smelled the same as always. And I caught myself looking at his ankles again as I crouched down to pull out overstock from the bottom drawer. And then I started thinking about the time he came to my house for dinner last year and I played footsie with those ankles under the table. Or would that be “anklesie.” Whatever. Wrong, wrong, wrong to be thinking about it now.