The drive to town felt light-years longer than normal, and every second, dread gripped me tighter with its talons. I didn’t do “hanging out” in town. I wasn’t part of the Cozy Creek crowd anymore. It wasn’t that anybody was mean or judgmental; it was the opposite. They adored my mother. Their pity rolled off them in waves, drowning me in a tsunami of memories I wasn’t able to process in public. Lily Carmichael was stamped all over town from the origami cranes she made for Betsy that still hung in the display window of the store to her photographs that lined the walls of several of the establishments. They wanted to talkabout her contagious laughter or recall the stern flare of her nostrils when Pace bullshitted her. They wanted to find peace in her memory. They wanted to share the bits of her before they were truly lost forever.
And I just couldn’t. I wasn’t at that stage of grief yet, and I wasn’t sure that I ever would be. The memory of my mother was so drenched in anger over the injustice done to her that I couldn’t think about one without drudging up the other.
I gripped the steering wheel tighter and glanced out the driver’s window away from Claire.
If the growing tension felt stifling, Claire was oblivious. She chatted happily down the winding roads back to Cozy Creek, one stream of consciousness thought melting into the next. She hadn’t stopped chittering since the moment we left the house. Claire didn’t need to suffer for my sins like the rest of them. She was passing through this town and deserved to see it in all its autumnal glory.
“And honestly, I think that’s what’s so weird about memories. They’re all as real and as fake as everything else. Like, what if your whole life was an illusion and a lamp was the thing that broke it? You had a wife and kids and were happy, only to wake up and find out you had a traumatic brain injury, you were eighteen, and none of that had happened.”
“That would suck,” I said as I parallel parked on Main Street. I had zoned out somewhere about a mile back, so I wasn’t sure what she was talking about.
She unbuckled her seat belt. “But then, really, what is theculmination of our lives but memories? It’s trippy to think about. Wait. What were we talking about?”
“Be more specific,” I said, glancing at her quickly.
“Wasn’t I making a point?” Her nose crinkled in concentration.
“When we left the house, you were talking about cheese sticks. Now, we are talking about parallel universes and timeline hopping. Or faulty memories.” I wasn’t entirely sure.
“Oh right. Anyway. Are we here already?” She leaned forward to look out the window. “Whoa. I didn’t think places like this actually existed outside movies,” Claire said. Her smile was as wide as her eyes as she took in the setting. “It wasn’t like this when I got here.” I turned off the truck and looked at her as her brow furrowed. “Or maybe it was, and I’d missed it. I was a little distracted that day.” She shot me a wince at the reminder of our first meeting. That felt like a million years ago. It was hard to even think of her as that same person.
I went around to help her out of the cab like the proper gentleman my mother would have wanted me to be. She gave me an amused but questioning look as she took my extended hand.
“Thanks,” she said, coming to a stop at the corner. “Wow.”
I gave her a moment to take in our Main Street in all its kitschy delights. I imagined it through her eyes, seeing it for the first time, instead of these local eyes that had grown accustomed to the breathtaking sights. The streetlamps were wrapped in fall foliage garland, and many storefronts had hay stacks with scarecrows or sunflowers. Brightly colored marigolds and mums sat with pumpkins in the flower beds lining the road. And behindthe old buildings of “downtown” were the great snow-capped Rockies, watching over the town of Cozy Creek.
This was pretty picturesque Americana at its finest.
“Where should we start?” she asked, her focus bouncing from one spot to another and never stopping.
I shrugged, wishing I had my tool chest and safety goggles on to slip by unnoticed. Already, Gigi and her visiting granddaughter, Madi, had noticed me and waved cheerily. I lifted my shoulders up to my ears. Billy Mackenzie warned me that there had already been a couple of offers on the storefront on Main Street and that I needed to give him an answer soon. Claire shot me a puzzled look with the interaction but didn’t comment.
“Usually, the town square is where the action is, but the whole town seems to be into the event.”
She nodded, listening but also highly distracted. “Oh my God, are those hay rides?”
“It’s much bigger than I remember,” I said. “Lots of tourists.”
I didn’t look but felt her studying the side of my face. “Then we’re both playing tourist today too.”
“More like the helpless being led by the clueless.”
“I can’t imagine there’s a bad place to start,” she said, ignoring my bad attitude. “This is gonna be fun! Look at us, both leaving the house, among the people.”
At that moment, Mack McCreedy came around the bend, steering his tractor down Main Street, pulling a hay-lined trailer full of grinning children and adults.
“How about there?” I pointed at the tractor, thinking at leastif we were moving, nobody could talk to us.
“Yes!” She started in the direction where a small queue had formed at the next stop for hay rides. “Is that an apple cider stand?”
Her head whipped to the right, and her feet stopped mid-step, causing me to bump into her backside. I grabbed her shoulders to steady us both, and for just a flash, the full length of her body pressed against mine, and a pulse of nerves flashed through me.
“It is,” I said with gruffness.
“Okay, I want that first.” But even as we started toward the cider stand, she grew distracted by a small dog passing by dressed as a stormtrooper.
I ran a hand over my smile as she spun in the new direction to crouch to pet the dog. She was making it very difficult to wallow in my misery. It went on like that for a while. She bounced from one side of the street to the other and I followed right behind her. She visited several of the shops, and when she spotted one of my pieces, she raised an eyebrow and pointed at it questioningly.
