Page 5 of Heidi Lucy Loses Her Mind
“Oh, come on,” I say. “I’m sure it’s not—”
“It’s trash,” he says flatly. “Next subject, please.”
“Someone is touchy,” I say under my breath. “All right. So I left you this voicemail at…” I trail off, checking the timestamp. “Nine-thirty-eight in the evening. Okay. And then you came to the bookshop, where…?”
“Where you were lying on the floor, bleeding from that gash in your forehead,” he says. “So I picked you up and rushed you to the hospital.”
I shake my head. “Do you know how weird it is to not have any memories from yesterday?” I look at him again. “Did you see me during the day? Was I at work?”
“You were at the shop,” he says with a nod. “I came at ten-thirty—”
“Ooh,” I say, wincing. “That means you missed out on your spot.”
“Carmina beat me to it, yes,” he says, and I laugh at how surly he sounds.
Soren is one of the most faithful patrons of my little bookshop-slash-café, the Paper Patisserie. Almost every day he comes to write, and usually he shows up between nine-thirty and ten in the morning. If he shows up later than ten, his preferred seat has often been taken by Carmina Hildegarde, another regular and a real bear of a woman. She’s eighty-something with a short fuse, a horrible temper, and thinly penciled eyebrows, and aside from her family, I’m not sure there’s a single person in town who actually likes her. She and Soren have been in a less-than-silent war over seating arrangements for the past year.
“And I suppose you put up a fight,” I say now, because Soren is picky about where he sits. He doesn’t like people surrounding him, either; he glares at anyone who approaches and throws disgruntled looks around like confetti.
He huffs. “I just don’t think she actuallyneedsthat spot.”
“Of course she doesn’t,” I say with a snort. “And neither do you. It’s a seat, Man Bun. You guys are just too petty and stubborn to concede.”
“She’s doing it to spite me—”
“Plus she doesn’t stay for very long. She just eats breakfast. It wouldn’t kill you to let her have it until she leaves.”
“If I give that woman an inch, she’ll take a mile—”
“And speaking of the shop, I do have to ask,” I cut him off. “When’s the last time you shaved?”
He rolls his eyes. “I’m not having this conversation with you.”
“Because you’re getting scruffy, and you look meaner when you’re scruffy. You scare away my tourist customers.”
“Not. Having. This. Conversation,” he says pointedly.
“Fine.” I fold my arms. It feels good to bicker with him; that’s our normal, andnormalis what I crave more than anything right now. “So I was at the shop yesterday. And everything seemed okay?”
“Everything seemed fine.”
Well, that’s not helpful. What happened to me yesterday? How did I get this bump on my head?
“Hey, do you have my phone?” I say when I realize it’s not in my pockets. “Maybe I called or texted someone else.”
“Oh, yeah,” Soren says. “I do. Here.” He digs in his pocket for a second and then passes me my phone.
“Thanks.” I unlock it and check my text messages first, but it looks like I only sent a few yesterday. One was to Gemma, asking her if she could come an hour early to help me restock. Another was a response to a text thread between me, Eric, and our mom. I open those messages, swallowing hard when I see the photos my mom has sent. She’s getting ready to sell the house we grew up in, and I’m still not sure how I feel about it.
I scroll through the pictures, blinking rapidly. The living room is stripped bare, empty save for the spots of sun on the hardwood floor. The kitchen where Eric and I ate breakfast every morning is nothing more than four walls and a floor and the dying echoes of long-ago laughter. The bedroom where I once slept looms emptiest of all, bland and devoid of personality, a blank canvas for whoever will come next.
If I enlarged that photo and squinted, would I be able to see my ghost floating around in that space? Would I see her curled up asleep where the bed used to be? Would I find my childhood in the tracks she wore in the carpet, pacing as she waited for her first crush to call or her broken heart to heal?
And I find myself wondering, not for the first time, if there’s a word for when a place that used to feel like home no longer seems familiar.
Time is sort of sad, isn’t it?
Though Eric and I grew up in Boise, we both relocated to Sunshine Springs to go to the community college here. I decided to stay, and Eric, ever the wanderer, miraculously decided to stay with me—though I’m sure meeting Gemma had something to do with it. He started a job at an outdoor supply shop, working his way up, and now he helps run the place.
