I shook soap suds off my hand when my phone’s ringtone interrupted my music. A photo of my friend Vex with his arm around my shoulders lit up the screen, and the image blurred when my fingers left droplets of water behind as I tapped the phone icon to answer and turned it on speaker.
“So, you heard?” I asked before he could even get out a greeting.
Silence met my question for a split second before Vex chuckled and said, “Well, hello to you too, Jericho.”
I retrieved my sponge and returned to the pan I’d been scrubbing without much luck. One of these days, I’d be better about not waiting a week to clean the dishes after making curry. Unfortunately for now, past me neglected to think of present me when he simply dumped them into the sink and forgot about them for a week.
“Yes, hello, Vex. Please forgive my rudeness.”
A heavy sigh sounded from the other end of the line, and I swore I could hear his smirk in his voice. “I did indeed hear,” he said. “And I know I’m not the only one looking forward to you coming home.”
Home. I’d been away from Spruce Hollow for almost seven years, and even with the life I built here in Kansas City, that would always be home.
“It’ll be good to see everyone again,” I said. “It’s been too long.”
Vex grunted his agreement, then fell quiet for a moment. His voice was soft when he asked, “How are you feeling about coming back?”
When I first left, I thought I would dread the call to go back to Minnesota. There may have been nothing but happy memories for me there, and I may have loved being so close to family and so many friends, but there was hardly room to spread my wings in such a tiny town. I got restless. There was a whole world to explore and so many people to meet who would never find me there.
In hindsight, that last one was probably a good thing. It would have saved me a lot of anguish. Too bad that I only saw the positives on the other side of heartbreak.
Now, I looked forward to my return. If I didn’t need to finish out the last three months of my lease, I’d have packed up and made the ten-hour drive as soon as my dad called to let me know that he and my mom finally decided to retire.
“A little relieved, honestly. Most days, anyway.” I scraped the last of the dried curry off my pan, gave it a rinse, and set it into the drying rack beside the sink. “I’ve been pretty homesick lately.”
“Felix has been worried about you.”
I chuckled and rinsed the soap off my hands, then turned off the water. “Felix worries more than my own mother,” I said.
Felix owned most of the land Spruce Hollow was built on, and despite being well-loved by all the residents, the man still refused to let us make him mayor. He preferred to keep to his little shop of oddities and curios, but that didn’t stop him from fussing over the lot of us like we were his gaggle of sometimes wayward children.
“He doesn’t know how to handle people being outside of his shadow,” I concluded.
“Can you blame him? He feels responsible for all of us.”
“He just doesn’t like when people leave,” I said. “Because then he has to update the population on the welcome sign.”
Vex snickered, and I missed what he said in response when I opened the cabinet under the sink and a nearly empty soap bottle toppled out and clattered against the tile.
I righted the bottle and pulled out the bleach wipes. “Say that again?”
“I said, he never changed it when you left. He knew you’d come back.”
There wasn’t enough time left in the day to unpack whether I found that sentiment comforting or suffocating.
Vex paused, then sighed. “…You’re stress cleaning, aren’t you?”
I froze, bleach wipe halfway out of the canister, and peeked over at my phone to make sure I hadn’t accidentally turned on the video call.
I hadn’t.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, and silently tucked the wipes back where I found them. Maybe with my momentum interrupted, I could do something other than spend hours drowning my minor emotional turmoil in making my apartment spotless.
“Have you even sat down yet today, Jay?”
That was the downside to having the same best friend for twenty-five years: he knew me so well, I couldn’t get away with a brush off or an excuse.
“…For breakfast,” I mumbled.
