Page 33 of The Shop on Royal Street
“You know what I do when I’m scared?”
“I told you, I’m not scared.”
“Apprehensive, then. It’s something my dad taught me. He said it got him through combat more than once.”
“So that he wasn’t afraid?”
He shook his head. “Nope. He was still petrified. But it wasn’t about not making him afraid. It was about using his fear to make him do what needed to be done.” He held out his arm to show me a rubber band I’d seen him snapping against his wrist pretty much the entire time we’d been showing Thibaut the house. I’d thought snapping it was a nervous habit, like biting fingernails or cracking knuckles, and equally as annoying. “I snap it when I need to be reminded that fear can’t win. That whether or not I’m afraid isn’t important. What matters is that I don’t allow it to get between me and my objective.” He paused. “And then I remind myself that the rain always stops.”
We were silent for a while, listening to the hum of the motor. Finally, I said, “I chipped a tooth.”
He turned to face me, waiting for me to explain.
“On my LA-to-Charleston trip. I clamped my teeth so hard, they hurt. But the pain reminded me that I had just survived another five minutes alone, and that was five minutes less until I reached my destination.”
Beau nodded slowly, absorbing my words. “My guess is that learning to drive will be a whole lot less scary.”
“Apprehension inducing,” I corrected him. I crossed my arms and held them tightly to my chest. “That remains to be seen.”
Beau put the truck into gear and pulled out onto the street. We traveled in silence until he turned into a large parking lot empty of cars, filled only with an obstacle course of tall light posts. Looking at the dashboard in front of me, I said, “I’m going to say thank you now, because I have no control over what’s about to come out of my mouth, so I need you to know now that I’m actually feeling appreciative. I can’t promise I’ll still be feeling that way in thirty minutes.”
I stepped out of the truck, prepared to change places with Beau, and took a deep breath, remembering one of the few things my mother had taught me. Whether you ran through a rainstorm or walked through it, you were still going to get wet.
CHAPTER 11
When I returned home, my jaw throbbing from clenching my teeth and my hands curved as if still gripping the steering wheel, Jolene was sliding cookies into her Emerald City cookie jar. It took up a lot of counter space, but judging by the rate she made cookies, it was necessary. She already had ribbon-wrapped Baggies—one with Trevor’s name on it—next to it and ready to go.
I picked one off of the cooling sheet, knowing Jolene would understand why I didn’t ask first. Most people would have poured themselves a drink, but I wasn’t most people. I must have looked shaken, because Jolene didn’t scold me. Instead, she handed me another and a napkin. “You poor thing. You look like you’ve been chewed up and spit out. And you’re white as a sheet. Was it that bad?”
I nodded and closed my eyes, trying to savor all the sugary goodness of the cookie, but had to open them again as my body jerked with muscle memory from the sudden and frequent braking that had made up most of my driving lesson. I rubbed my neck, wondering how Beau had survived the ordeal and if his left ear hurt as much as my throat did from all the shouting.
She looked at me with concern. “Did you at least learn something?”
“I’m not sure. We’re both alive and the truck is intact. And I now know that it’s important to turn the steering wheel when approaching a stationary object.”
Jolene smiled encouragingly. “Well, that’s a start, isn’t it?” The timer on the circa-nineteen-sixties oven began buzzing. I was surprised that the ancient oven still worked, much less the timer. Not that I would have noticed. Until Jolene had arrived, I had yet to open it.
She put on two oven mitts emblazoned with a likeness of Dorothy’s ruby slippers and pulled out a bubbling Corningware dish. “I hope you like squash casserole. No meat, so it’s vegan, right? Mama used to make this for me when I’d had a hard day. Like that time I didn’t make the cheerleading squad when everybody knew it was fixed so that the mayor’s daughter, who didn’t know her left from her right, could be on the squad. I figured you learning to drive would feel the same.”
She slid the kitchen stool over and forced me to sit down while she handed me another cookie.
“You look like you’re tuckered out—you’re practically swaying.” After making sure I wasn’t going to fall off, she said, “These are another of my creations—peanut butter oatmeal with pecans. And a little bit of this and that. We had a passel of pecan trees in our yard in Mississippi, so most of my recipes have pecans in them.”
I blinked. “Why are you here? You usually aren’t home until after eight.”
She retrieved a full tea glass and handed it to me. “I finished up in Mandeville early, so I decided to bake some cookies and make us a nice dinner so we could spend time catching up.”
I blinked my eyes again to show I’d heard her, not wanting to make the mistake of nodding and setting off my PTSD symptoms again.
“Did Beau say when he thinks you’ll be roadworthy?”
“Not really. He did say that we needed to practice more. I just have a feeling that he might have learned as much as I did.” I was embarrassed to admit that I had exposed Beau to cusswords he hadn’t heard before, courtesy of Melanie’s father, who’d been in the Army and whoused interesting adjectives to describe many of the insect and plant pests that invaded his garden.
I put the cookie in my mouth. “These are so good,” I said, rotating my neck, making sure it was still connected.
“Have another,” Jolene said, holding out a plate. Not wanting to hurt her feelings, I took another one. “If I keep eating like this, I’ll have to buy a whole new wardrobe.”
“Would that be such a bad thing?” she asked, eyeing my jeans and T-shirt. “Besides, you’re too thin. And I figure, since you can’t drink, you should eat. No one’s starving to death on my watch!”
