Page 48 of Restored Dreams

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By evening, Chopper calls me to say he’ll see Lauren. He picks Thursday as it’s his day off. We make plans for him to come to the bakery, and then we’ll ride together in my car. I trust myself to drive more than him, especially if he gets emotional. He isn’t crying over his mother, but the hurt is still real.

Thursday isn’t a good day for me as we have three weddings on Friday night, but I know Ester can manage, and the new girl we hired at the beginning of the summer, Julia, has come in handy. She’s a natural at baking—ironic, right?—although she’s quiet and a little innocent. Ester frightens her with her louder voice and brazen talk about sex. Julia blushes each time Ester speaks, but she’s listening with ears open, learning. I recognize a sexually curious girl inside the shy body of my little worker.

However, I can’t tell Chopper no. I rearrange some things and confirm the address with Crystal. Lauren’s been staying in Sun Valley, California, a twenty-five-minute ride northwest of Pasadena. If she wasn’t dying, I’d kill her for being so close yet so inaccessible to her son. I have no idea, though, how long she’s been living in that area or why. Our parents moved to Texas long ago, and my mother claims she wasn’t aware Lauren had been so close to our original home.

“I think it’s nice she finally got in touch with you,” my mother mentions when I call her to ask if she knew about Lauren. She didn’t seem as surprised as I would have expected, so I have my answer. Ironically, she wasn’t breaking any speed limits to rush to the side of her eldest daughter who lay dying.

My sister is dying. I mull the words over in my head and find I feel strangely numb about this information. We might have been sisters, but we were never friends. Rick started the wedge between us. By the time I was eighteen and Lauren was twenty, we weren’t enemies but definitely did not want to be near one another. She drank. She snuck out. She hung with a rough crowd, and when she found out about Brut, she went ballistic.

“He’s older than you by four years.”

“He doesn’t seem to mind,” I recall saying.

“He’ll mind when he sees you’re a child. Has he taken you out? Why haven’t I seen you at parties with him?” Those valid questions stung, but I didn’t feel the need to justify Brut to Lauren even though I’d had the same quandary myself. He didn’t include me in parties with his friends or find me a fake ID, as I’d heard other guys do for girls, to get me in a bar with him. Then one time we went to hear his brother’s band. That’s when Lauren found out about us.

Knowing I couldn’t go the places she could, Lauren took advantage of him. I’d like to think he was strong enough to resist her, be a man and all that, loyal to me, et cetera, but I also had my eyes opened from the experience. Brut didn’t love me enough to commit, and I’d never felt more like a child than when everything happened. Neither here nor there, the fact remains my sister and I were estranged from the moment she told me about Brut and her. She became nonexistence to me. You can’t miss what you don’t have, and I didn’t have sisterly love to pine over. I didn’t know this person who was dying in Sun Valley. She was a stranger to me.

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On Wednesday night, I’m busy in my apartment kitchen which doubles as my office, working on finances. My cell phone rings under a pile of papers, and I almost ignore it, not wanting to lose my place in my calculations. When the phone rings a second time, vibrating some of the future party orders, I scramble to find it. Two missed calls from Chopper.

Quickly, I call him back.

“She’s dead,” he announces into the phone, a choking sound in his rough male voice.

“What? Who, honey?” Although the second I ask, I know who he’s speaking of, and my stomach drops. I don’t know if I feel more sorry for Chopper or the passing of my sister. Chopper, I realize instantly. I don’t know my sister. I haven’t since I was nineteen, which is more than half my life ago. But Chopper, the sweet young man on my phone, has a new set of loss to deal with in life.

“She died this evening. Crystal called me.” Chopper swallows so loudly I hear it through the phone. “I didn’t get to see her.”

“Chopper, honey, where are you, baby?”

“I’m just driving around.” He swallows again, and suddenly, I’m worried he’s drinking and driving.

“And where’s your dad? Does he know?”

“I called you first. He’s at the shop.”

“Why don’t you come here? Let’s talk.”

“I don’t really want to talk,” he says gruffly.

“Okay, let’s just hang out. I can teach you to make cupcakes,” I tease. He isn’t a child, but I need to distract him somehow. Making cupcakes always works for me.

Silence follows a moment before he whispers, “Why didn’t she love me enough?”

My heart has no answers. I want to say it shouldn’t matter. He had Brut, and an uncle and his late grandpop, but I know that won’t be enough. A boy wants to know why his mama didn’t keep him. Brut certainly had those questions about his mother, who ran off when he was still young but old enough to remember her. It’s another reason I wanted Chopper to know me. I was a woman who would stick with him, if he wanted me.

“I don’t know, honey. I’m sure she did in some way. But you were better off without her.” I pause, hoping I’m not overstepping with what I’m about to say next. “Her dying is sad, but this might be a sign. You weren’t meant to reunite or make amends or whatever she was hoping would happen. It wasn’t on you what happened to her. She’d already been gone from your life.”

I’d like to think he was nodding as if he agreed, but I couldn’t see him, and he remained too quiet through the phone.

“So, you’re coming here, right?” I close my eyes, hoping he’ll say yes. Getting drunk is certainly an answer but drinking and driving isn’t.

“I’ll get there, eventually,” he says, but I don’t like his answer.

“I’m open all night for you, honey.”