Page 83 of Summer Reading

“Not that much they don’t,” I countered. The car behind me honked, and I waved in acknowledgment and started driving. “Don’t get me wrong, I love having you here on island with me, butwhyare you here?”

“You know why,” she said.

“Spell it out for me.”

“My dad left us forthatwoman and my mom couldn’t be alone,” she said. “You know that.”

“Couldn’t be alone or didn’t want to be?” I asked. “There’s a big difference.”

Em didn’t answer. She didn’t have to. I knew Mrs. Allen well enough to know that she was hanging on to Em with a tenacious grip. Mr. Allen had left Mrs. Allenright when Em graduated from college. Em moved back to help her mother acclimate to life on her own, but then she never left. I had thought she’d made peace with it and discovered she liked living on island in her childhood bedroom, but if she was rolling into full-on hypochondria, then clearly she was unhappy.

“I don’t know,” Em said. “It’s just so much easier doing what she wants. No drama or guilt that way.”

“But what about what you want?” I asked.

Em glanced out the window. I wondered how long it had been since anyone had asked her what she wanted.

“I’m twenty-eight,” she said. “And other than the four years I was away at college, I’ve never lived off island. You know, I thought I would have seen some shit by now.”

A laugh busted out of me and she smiled. I parked in front of her house and she hopped out.

“Do you want to go walk on the beach or something?” I asked. “We can keep spitballing ideas about what’s bothering you, because despite my advanced psychological degree, I’m sure there’s more to consider.”

Em laughed. “You’ve given me a lot to think about, Dr. Gale, reminding me of what I used to want.”

I grinned. She was laughing at my jokes. I took it as a good sign.

“I think I need to do some solo thinking, and I’m going to see if I can get an appointment with Dr.Davis,” Em said. “Before my mom comes back from her trip.”

“I think that’s an excellent idea. Call me if you want to talk,” I said.

“I will. Thanks, Sam, for... everything.”

“That’s what besties are for,” I said.

She closed the car door and walked up the walkway.

I rolled down my window when she was halfway up the steps, and called out, “And stay off the medical sites on the Internet.”

She nodded and sent me a double thumbs-up before she disappeared into the house.

Chapter Twenty

Ben texted me shortly after I arrived home. Actually,textedimplies that it was one message. It was not. It was a very lengthy message followed by several shorter messages including links to websites and books and articles. A quick scan indicated that they were all instructions about writing a cookbook. There were so many. I immediately felt too overwhelmed to try and read through them all.

Straight talk. I hate receiving texts unless they are very short or in GIF form. I’d much rather call a person and speak directly instead of texting back because, quite frankly, my spelling is atrocious. People laugh at it, heck, I laugh at it, but I wasn’t ready for the hot librarian guy, whom I really wanted to see naked, to laugh at it.

Because I knew he was at work and likely couldn’t take a call, I did what I usually did when I was feeling overwhelmed: I did nothing. His string of texts sat on my phone, ignored. Normally, I’d have opened the appthat can read my texts to me and replied with a voice to text, but he’d left so many I was undone.

Last night, when I’d opened my heart and shared with him about my vovó and why she was so special, that I believed she knew about my neurodivergent brain and had done what she could to help, I’d felt as if he and I had a soul connection like the one I’d shared with her. I’d thought he understood me on an elemental level, but now his string of texts mocked me like a reminder of how incompatible we were.

Sure, I could have waded through the texts and articles and my phone could read aloud his messages in its horrible robotic voice, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that I’d fooled myself into believing that he saw me, really saw me, when this string of messages proved that he didn’t. Not at all.

I decided to spend the rest of the morning working on my happy hour menu for that evening. Preparation was always critical for me when taking on a big job. I needed to time things out and memorize the flow. I had changed up this week’s menu, trying to be more efficient. While the guests had loved the peixinhos da horta, it had required me to keep running back to the kitchen to use the fryer. This week, I was going with shredded pork in a vinha-d’alhos, and by making it beforehand, I could keep it warm in a heated chafing dish during the happy hour.

I tried to focus on the task at hand. Still, the entiretime I prepped, my eyes strayed to the phone and the messages sitting there. I had to pick up Tyler later today. Maybe I would see Ben and I could explain. Explain what? That I was embarrassed? That his text string made me feel deficient? That clearly a big-brained booklover like him could never be content with a word-repellent girl like me even for the short term? I didn’t want to. These were the salad days in our summer situation, and I hated to have him think of me as incapable of even texting him.

I felt a tear well up in one eye and I swiped it away with the back of my hand. I wished it was the pepper I was chopping but it wasn’t. It was the same old mean voice in my head that called me stupid and useless. I reminded myself that this thing with Ben was just a fling. So why did I care? Because I was on the precipice of falling hard for Ben, so maybe this was the moment I should call the time of death on the relationship, end it, and spare myself the impending heartbreak.

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