35
T
HE
T
OAST OF
L
ITTLE
S
ALTY
F
leeting thoughts of home scratched at the back of Lily’s mind during her summer in Little Salty, along with a vague discomfort that she was in the wrong place. But then she’d hear Granny Kate singing “Copacabana” and all her misgivings would melt away.
Every day in Little Salty offered some kind of fun. She and Granny Kate buzzed around town shopping in the mornings—sometimes they even went to Midland—and in the afternoons there was bridge club or Jazzercise. She learned to play bridge, and by mid-June she could actually participate in Granny Kate’s club if they needed another person and if she didn’t have anything else to do.
But that wasn’t often, because other activities crowded in. She went to Granny Kate and Pop Pop’s church and had been recruited by the choir, despite the fact she really couldn’t sing all that well. Plus there was the church’s youth group. She joined the community band, too, which was going to have a big concert in the town park on the Fourth of July.
She felt like a wallflower who, as if by magic, had discovered her dance card was full. Granny Kate and Pop Pop’s friends fussed over her, and the kids she met were curious about her because she was new and from Austin—exotic, almost. The older teens kept telling her that she must be bored in Little Salty, without all the wild and fun stuff there was to do in Austin. To them Austin was Sixth Street, South by Southwest, the ultimate party town, the Live Music Capital of the World. Lily couldn’t bring herself to confess that if she’d been home in Austin she would be baby-sitting her brother and hanging out with a seventy-seven-year-old chess fanatic
.
Here, everybody said she was so supertalented, so smart, and so not like her weird sister. Jordan evidently had
not
been the toast of Little Salty.
If Little Salty was paradise, Granny Kate was her fairy godmother. She noticed that Lily had—in her delicate expression—“filled out some” and bought her some new bras and summer clothes that fit better. Remembering what Grace had told her, Lily asked if she could get contacts, an idea Granny Kate leapt on—“to show off those beautiful eyes.” She took her to the mall for a makeover and ended up buying her a ton of make-up. Lily got her hair cut shorter, in a layered cut that looked great at the salon but wasn’t so easy to replicate at home. Nevertheless, everyone told her she’d bloomed.
Grace had been right. Transforming herself hadn’t been the awkward ordeal she had feared. But maybe it was easier because the people here didn’t have a picture of her old geekier self burned into their brains for all time.
Over the summer, Lily tried hard not to think about Jordan, but it wasn’t easy. Granny Kate sometimes dished the dirt about the hellish time she and Pop Pop had had with her. (Granny Kate didn’t say hellish, but that’s how it must have been.) Jordan had slept late, she hadn’t picked up after herself or offered to help—not like Lily did—and she’d always sulked, even when they were doing fun things, like trips to Midland and lunches at Applebee’s. Jordan had to be browbeaten into Jazzercising and then would sit around all afternoon eating up all Pop Pop’s ice cream (they didn’t say anything to her about it, but they’d noticed) and watching some hippie painter on public television.
And then there was the business with the room. The final straw. According to Granny Kate, it had taken
three coats
of paint to completely de-Jordan the walls. Now the guest room was beige, with floral pink curtains and a matching bedspread.
Hearing Granny Kate crab about Jordan should have been a balm. But thinking about Jordan tended to set off flashes of them wrestling in the grass, and of the volcanic anger that had erupted out of her after hearing snatches of her journal read aloud, in front of everybody. She wasn’t proud of herself.
In the end, her father had let Jordan go to California. Naturally. Jordan always got what she wanted when push came to shove—people gave in to her just to get her out of their hair. But even if they were in different states, something felt unfinished between them, and Lily began to wonder if it would always be like that. Maybe this niggling feeling was what Grace had been warning her about.
In July, Granny Kate started bringing up the subject of Lily’s transfering to Little Salty High for junior year. Some of the kids in youth group were encouraging when Lily mentioned this. They promised she’d have fun and be superpopular. Not to mention, she’d be the smartest kid in the class, maybe the whole school. Without warning, Granny Kate spoke to Lily’s father about it on the phone one night. After the call, she announced that Ray had agreed to talk to her about it, if Lily thought she would be happier there.
When Lily heard this, her throat tightened. He was willing to let her go just like that? She couldn’t imagine leaving her father and Dominic forever, but the lure of Little Salty was strong. She was happy. She sort of fit in. And wouldn’t she have to leave Austin to go to college in two years anyway?
She received e-mail from Dominic sometimes, and as the summer stretched into the end of July and all the fun new things became more routine, she became more impatient for news of home. Because both she and Jordan were gone, their dad had hired a college girl, Jeanine, to come in during the day during the summer and look after Dominic. She wondered what Jeanine was like, and what else had changed in the neighborhood since she’d left.
Unfortunately, Dominic was one of the worst e-mail writers on the planet. Most of the time Lily just skimmed his messages with a sagging feeling of letdown.
But sometime in late July, she received an e-mail that made her stop and read it twice.
Hi lily
The bad news tday is that prof. o fell and now his arms hurt bad. I went over there and grace looked really worried, even though her brother the doctor said that it could be worse. Especially if he brk a hip. But he didn’t so thats good.
Poor professor Oliver! He had to be really demoralized, having another accident just a year after he got hit by the car.
She e-mailed Grace to tell her that she was worried about the professor and hoped he would get better soon.
Grace replied before Lily had logged off the computer.
Lily! It’s soooo great to hear from you! Dad and I talk about you all the time, wondering what you’re getting up to in Little Salty. In fact, Dad was just asking me to hunt down your address. He wants to send you his copy of
The Small House at Allington.
It has a character named Lily in it, who, according to him, “is just as resolute as our Lily.”
Dad is doing fine, all things considered. He had a pin put in his wrist after his accident, and the operation seems to have affected his memory a little, which he was already having problems with, as you know. It’s been another challenge for him. He’s a little slower in moving those chess pieces than he used to be. I don’t think he likes the game as much anymore, to tell you the truth, but he still beats me whenever we play.
I can’t give you much more news of home, I’m afraid. I haven’t seen much of your dad. He seems to be back to working long hours. Jeanine, Dominic’s minder, is twenty-one and—according to Dominic and Crawford—incredibly hot. She seems to spend most of her time sunbathing on your back deck.
I have a Clarinet Concerto CD that I think you’d like. If you send me your address, I’ll include the CD along with the Trollope book.
I’m so glad you’re having a fun summer! Maybe you’ve found your geographical niche!
Love,
Grace
Grace’s e-mail made her want to cry. And it wasn’t just because of Professor Oliver’s accident, or the idea of her dad backsliding into his post-accident routine, or that teenage boys were pathetic and shallow. It was because there were people who thought of her, who tried to understand her. It was because the world she’d left, her world, was going on without her, and for the first time in two months, she really missed it. So much that she understood what the word
heartsore
meant. She thought wistfully of the tag end of last summer—which had been an awful time in so many ways—hanging out at the professor’s house with her feet up on the uncomfortable velvet sofa in the front room, listening to classical music, and pretending to read a book while she daydreamed.
How could she be happy in one place, but still long for another place?
At the beginning of August, life ground to a halt in Little Salty. Everyone seemed to be taking a vacation except for Granny Kate and Pop Pop. Pop Pop didn’t like to leave his pharmacy when he was so close to retiring anyway, and Granny Kate said every day of her life was a vacation, so she didn’t need one. The youth group went on a retreat, but it had all been planned before Lily had moved to Little Salty, so she couldn’t go.
For the first time all summer, she started to feel lonely. Restless.
One day while Granny Kate was at bridge club, Lily did a little snooping. Along the top shelf of her grandparents’ closet, she found several photo albums. She pulled them down and sat on the floor among the clothes that smelled of mothballs to look at them. She flipped through her grandmother’s whole life, starting from the black-and-white baby pictures to the strikingly bright Polaroids from the fifties and sixties. Later Granny Kate almost disappeared, photographically overpowered by her own daughter. And then the grandkids.
When she came to the photos of her and her siblings, Lily slowed down. She couldn’t help it. She’d seen them all a hundred times—the awkward Sears portraits and school pictures, the crooked or blurry candid shots. Most were copies her mom had sent to Granny Kate. One, though, stopped her cold.
The photo was of her and Nina—they looked to be about eight and ten years old. It must have been snapped in the summer, because Nina was wearing shorts and a tank top and Lily, barefoot, was riding piggyback on her and wielding what must have been a plastic sword of Dominic’s. Standing to the side, half cut out of the picture, she could make out Jordan wearing her soccer uniform. Lily had the sword raised and her mouth was stretched open in what was obviously a full-throated cry—she and Nina were on the verge of charging at something—and Nina was laughing so hard it looked as if she was about to buckle over.
Tears brimmed in her eyes. The picture captured exactly how it had felt being with Nina—that happiness that obliterated everything else. Every worry, every bad thing, every hurt. She wanted so fiercely to crawl back inside that picture, back to that time, it was like an ache. If she’d had to live every moment of her life again, even the most awful, even seventh grade, she would have, just to be back in that moment, laughing with Nina.
A tear splattered the clear film covering the photos, which she pulled back. It took her a moment to pry the picture off the page’s sticky backing, and when she had it, she shut the book and put all the albums back on the shelf in the proper order. Maybe taking the picture of her and Nina was theft, but she didn’t care.
She wandered to the kitchen and found a bottle of diet cream soda. Usually they bought cans, but this stuff had been on sale. The trouble was, she couldn’t open the darn bottle. In one of the kitchen drawers, where Granny Kate kept less-used utensils and the emergency flashlight, she found an opener.
Something else caught her eye—a cheap MP3 player, the kind that was just a little bigger than the data sticks that plugged into a USB port. It seemed an odd thing for Granny Kate or Pop Pop to have. She couldn’t imagine them downloading anything; they barely had e-mail nailed down. She frowned at the gadget and then stuck it in her pocket. She had headphones on her iPod upstairs. She could listen to it sometime.
She retreated to the living room and sat on the sofa while she channel surfed and gulped diet cream soda. On her journey through the channels, she hit upon a middle-aged white man with an Afro painting a mountain. She watched for ten minutes before finally turning off the television. She would never understand Jordan, not in a million years.
The next day she decided to go to the pool. As she walked through Little Salty, it seemed emptied out, eerily so, like a Wild West town before the villains are due to ride in.
At the pool, she found a secluded spot far from the lifeguard. She lay on a towel, soaking up the sun and wondering if, should she actually go to Little Salty high school, she would finally get a boyfriend. One of the girls in youth group had told her a boy named Brandon liked her, but the trouble was, Lily didn’t like Brandon. He wasn’t as cute or as nice as Crawford. She dozed off thinking how great it would be if she could merge the things she liked about Austin with all the good things about Little Salty to create her own perfect Lilyland.
The next thing she knew, she was waking up, and it was obvious she was in trouble. For one thing, it hurt to open her eyes. She looked down at herself and to her horror saw that her skin, which used to be white and pasty, now was a dull pinky red. She staggered up, dazed from sun, and winced as she slipped her T-shirt over her head.
When she walked into the kitchen, Granny Kate cried out. She led Lily upstairs, told her to lie flat on the bed, and brought in a fan to blow on her full blast.
For the next two days Lily lay on her back and was all alone except for when Granny Kate came in to give her food or slather her down with aloe vera gel. Lily cycled through all the music on her iPod until she was tired of hearing it. Finally, she remembered Granny Kate’s MP3 player that she’d swiped from downstairs. She crawled out of bed and retrieved it from her shorts in the laundry basket. When she was reclined and re-gelled, she inserted her headphone jack into the new player, turned it on, and closed her eyes.