The Co-op

Chapter Forty-Eight

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

L A RYNN

Five days after we accept the offer, we decide that there’s one more thing we need to do for closure.

I get carsick on the drive like I always do, but Deacon holds my hair and rubs my back, waiting patiently until I’m ready to keep going.

And when we arrive at the little sliver of beach, we clutch hands as we carefully climb down the cliff path, wind whipping through our hair.

“I remember being so livid when they told us they had a wedding without us,” I say. I have to shout it over the wind.

“I remember, too,” he says. I see his small laugh and know how it would sound, how it feels when he presses it into my skin. The breeze robs me of it.

I let myself play out the memory like a film. I’d just arrived at the grands’ to spend the Christmas holidays with them while my parents traveled to Fiji, I think. I spotted the new picture on their photo wall, the two of them in white dresses on this beach, softly wrinkled hands wrapped around each other tight.

“You had a wedding without me?!” I’d said, floored and betrayed.

“Yes, ma fille, ” my grandma said, playfully tugging my hair. “You’ll understand one day, but marriage is about you and your person. Life tries too hard to get in the way. We wanted it to just be us.”

“We saved you our bouquets,” said Helena, her warm brown eyes crinkling. “I dried them for you and had them preserved.”

I’d been… upset, to say the least. I was coming off my first semester of freshman year at a school where everyone else had grown up together, and I’d been struggling to intermingle. For a moment I felt entirely abandoned, but these were my grands. They couldn’t have meant for it to hurt. Still, I had to play it off like I understood, then went and had a small, discreet cry in my room. When I came back out to the living room, I came face-to-face with a curly-brown-haired boy. He looked at me like he’d been wondering when I was going to show up. I scowled, wondering what he knew that I didn’t.

Obviously, I went on to find him incredibly vexing on that particular trip, but there had been a moment the following day, when he noticed that same photo and had been just as miffed as I’d been. Our first piece of common ground, I suppose.

Deacon passes me the ashes of my grandmother on the beach where she married his, taking his nana’s in his hands. We kick off our shoes and roll up our pants, let our feet sink into the freezing wet sand.

He lets out a decidedly unmanly sound when our feet reach the water and we both laugh, the wind snatching it away once more. Feeling brave at each other’s sides, we wade into the ocean up to our knees. When we turn over the little bags, we watch them tangle happily in the breeze.

I don’t cry when we settle in the car, or on the entire ride home. Deacon drives at a snail’s pace the whole way back, slow enough that I don’t get sick for once. We do weather our fair share of honking and middle fingers from people as they speed around us, though.

It’s when we get to the front patio gate, woody branches and orange-green leaves lining the fence instead of the bright flowers of summer, that I let the grief crash over me.

I let myself feel as if she has died all over again, as if it’s only just happened.

I let myself hear the sound of her voice in my mind, think of her standing at the gate to greet me every year. Let myself remember her teaching me to make beignets, and how she’d rescue sand dollars with me, throwing them all back in the ocean because I was convinced they might still be alive.

I cry for Helena and how I never had her peach pretzel Jell-O pie, and then cry some more when I wonder if she would’ve liked that I made it for Deacon. I cry for how I wasn’t there for Deacon when Helena passed. Or for Helena when my grandma did.

I cry for how lucky I feel that, even though my childhood may not have been particularly happy, I had them and this place and those summers.

I even cry for my dad when I think about how miserable and lonely he must be, how he must have let his anger fester so deeply that he has no idea how to pull himself out. How much he missed out on with his mother, me, and his life. I allow myself to feel it and let go, to be okay with the knowledge that I may never welcome that relationship back into my life, even while I feel sad for him because of it.

I cry on the sidewalk until I notice the goose bumps on Deacon’s forearms and feel the cold bleeding through our clothes.

When I look up at his face, I see that he’s been crying, too. I lean up and kiss him before we head inside, our little boxes tucked under our arms.

We step into the main hall and find Sally waiting for us, sitting on the foot of the stairs, oxygen tank at her feet.

“You know, what’s the point of these damn cell phones if you two never answer them?!” she asks. Deacon and I look at each other, dumbfounded.

“Everything okay, Sal?”

“Do you have a few minutes?” she huffs, pushing herself up to her feet.

We exchange another confused look. “Yeah, we’re just tired. We finally let them free.” I nod dumbly to the box at my side. “Well, most of them. We kept small portions of them for us.” This feels so morbid and odd all of a sudden.

“Oh good!” she says, overbright. “They can join us, then.”

After we settle in our seats around her table, she proceeds to catch her breath while she pours herself a drink.

“I have an offer for you on the house,” she says.

Deacon widens his eyes at me. I can almost hear his thoughts. Something like, Uh, help. Is Sal losing it? She knows we already accepted an offer.

“Sal,” I start, uneasy. “We already got a full-priced offer. We accepted it almost a week ago now.”

“Well, this offer is half of the asking price.”

Now Deacon rubs at his forehead and I wince at her. We’re both exhausted and already emotional and if Sal really is cracking right now, I suppose we’ll just have to handle it, but—

“The offer is from me. I’m able to give you the full market value for my unit, but I am offering to buy my unit, only. So you would get to keep yours.”

Blood rushes through my ears.

Sal explains further, “I only didn’t speak up earlier because I didn’t realize how much you might want to hold on to it. I also didn’t know if I could do it, but I was able to move some things around, and—”

“No,” Deacon says firmly. “No, Sal. You can’t do that.”

“Deacon, my rent has been nearly the same since the eighties. I was surprised at just how much I can do it.” She sighs happily. “Would I if you were anyone else? No, but I kinda look at it as buying into a co-op of sorts—with how much you help me anyway. Now I’ll really get to lord this over you. Maybe we put bingo back in the rotation.”

He gives her a helpless look. “Sal, that’s a lot of money.” Neither of us would have ever thought she could afford it.

“Would it be enough for what you need? For the café and for everything else you want to do?”

“Yes, but… Sal, ” Deacon says.

She pats his face sweetly and looks at me. “It would have been yours someday anyway. May as well give it to you both now and have the chance to see what you do with it.”

He looks my way. “I don’t know if we even can back out now, though. Can we?”

My shoulders lift in a weak shrug. “I really don’t know, Deacon. I think Cheryl would have to get us out of it somehow.”

A smile plays at his lips. “Do you want to?”

“I don’t want to get our hopes up, Deacon.”

But he’s already grinning.