5

I MUTTERED TO MYSELF, “I have an illness.”

“What’d you say, sugar pie?” the lady who owned the store called through the curtain. “Do you need a different size?”

I raked back the curtain to show her the bikini.

“You do not need a different size,” she declared. “Maybe an extra bottle of sunscreen to protect all that lovely skin you’re showing, but not a different size.”

I paid for the bathing suit. The shop lady put it in a pretty bag with color-coordinated tissue paper fluffing out the top. But on my walk home, I felt like I’d stolen it. It was as if everyone at the street festival watched my escape. I was so self-conscious about the bikini in my bag that I stowed it in my room, at the back of my closet, where Mom wouldn’t see it. If she asked me about it, I’d never wear it. I would chicken out.

I went to find Mom. She was upstairs in one of the B & B’s guest bathrooms, on her hands and knees, scrubbing the grout on the floor underneath the sink. After I located her, I backed out of the bathroom, tiptoed down the stairs, and then stomped back up so she’d know I was coming and wouldn’t bang her head against the sink at my sudden appearance. I had found out a lot of things the hard way.

When I entered the bathroom again, she was sitting cross-legged, waiting for me. “Survived the heat in that outfit?”

I skipped right over that one and asked, “Where are the guests?” This phrase was our code to make sure we were alone before we said anything private. Mom had taught me it was more out of courtesy to the guests than to us.

“They’re all out enjoying the day,” she said.

“Do you still have my prescription for contacts?” Every time I got my eyes checked, I wanted only a glasses prescription. Mom asked the optometrist to give me a prescription for contacts, too, in case I changed my mind.

“You changed your mind!” she exclaimed.

I shook my head. “I just want to try them.”

She raised her eyebrows at me. “After five years of me begging you? What happened?”

I would rather have given up on the idea of contacts than tell her about Brody, Grace, Kennedy, Sawyer, Noah, Quinn. . . . I couldn’t even reconstruct how the wild ride of the last few days had dumped me off at a place where I never wanted to wear my adorable glasses again, or kitten heels, or a pencil skirt. And even if I could have verbalized my mindset, I didn’t want to share it with Mom, who would pass my teen angst around the B & B’s dining table tomorrow morning like a basket of orange rolls.

I said, “You don’t have to stop working. Just tell me where the prescription is.”

She lowered her brows and opened her mouth, ready to put up a fight. But her cell phone was ringing in the hall on her cart of cleaning supplies.

“Get that, would you?” she asked. “If it’s your father, tell him I’m unavailable.”

Not that fight again. I didn’t want to get dragged into it. And I didn’t want to get dragged into a personal one with her, either. I repeated, “Where’s my prescription?”

Because she didn’t want to take a chance on missing a call from a potential boarder, she quickly told me which office file my prescription was in. After that victory, I dashed into the hall, my heels clattering on the hardwood floor, and scooped up the phone, hoping it was my dad. I didn’t want to get in the middle of my parents’ fight, but I hadn’t talked to my dad in a month or seen him in three. I glanced at the screen. Mom had been right. I clicked on the phone and said, “Hi, Dad!”

“Hey there, Harper,” he said. “Is your mom around?”

My stomach twisted into a knot. I didn’t think about my dad a whole lot because he wasn’t home and didn’t have much to do with my life anymore. But I wanted him to want to talk to me. I said stiffly, “I’m sorry, but she’s unavailable.”

“Unavailable how?” he asked, suspicious.

I couldn’t lie to my dad, but I didn’t want to say Mom was just scrubbing the floor and refusing to talk to him either. I swallowed.

“Harper,” he said firmly. “Give the phone to your mother.”

Funny how his tone of voice could send my blood pressure through the roof, even over the phone. “Just a minute,” I whispered. With my temples suddenly pounding, I walked back into the bathroom, extending the phone toward Mom. “It’s Dad.”

She started upward and banged her head against the sink.

“Ouch,” I said sympathetically.

Dropping her scrub brush and pressing both rubber gloves to her hair, she glared at me with tears in her eyes. Ever so slowly, she reached for the phone. “Hello.”

In the pause as my dad spoke to her, I escaped. But her next words followed me, echoing out of the cavernous bathroom, into the wide wooden stairwell, and down the steps: “I told Harper to say that because we’re going to court next week. You’re supposed to leave me alone until then. Leave me alone.”

Inside the house was cool and dark with a faint scent of age and the sound of Mom’s angry language. As I shut the heavy door behind me, outside was bright and smelled like flowers. Tree frogs screamed in the trees. I skittered back to our little house and dug through Mom’s office files until I found my prescription, wondering how I’d ever thought I could spend the hot holiday at home.

*   *   *

The locally owned drugstores in the old-fashioned downtown around the corner from the B & B couldn’t help me today. To get my contact prescription filled on Labor Day, I needed the discount store with the optical shop out on the highway. And that meant I needed Granddad’s car.