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With that, she’d learned that words could take you to other places, other lives, other outcomes. They could give voice to the emotions eating her raw inside and make her feel better at the same time. For a kid as strange as she was, they could give her friends—not the kind she went shopping or to movies with, the kind who knew everything about her, but online friends who lived elsewhere, who didn’t know her real name or where she lived or how old she was or if she was even a girl, but they chose to take her on faith.
They’d given her a way to start coping with her nightmares—catharsis, her psychologist called it—and now she wondered if they might give her a way to cope with the new issues in her life.
Sam Douglas in particular.
Don’t you want a boyfriend someday? Mila had always said no. She had always lied. More than anything in the world, she wanted to be normal, and that meant friends and best friends and boyfriends and dating and falling in love and getting married and having kids.
The thought of all that made her skin tingle and her lungs tighten. She couldn’t handle that many people, that much complexity, that many opportunities to hurt or be hurt. But everything in life started with one step. Choose a plant. Dig a hole. Put it in. Water. Water. Water. Watch it grow. Feed it. Clip the blossoms to enjoy inside. Deadhead it. Water it more.
Friend–best friend–boyfriend–dating–love–marriage–kids surely must be the same way. There was only one step she had to take first, before any of the rest of it could become even a remote possibility.
She had to open herself up. Gramma told her so. Her psychologist told her so. Common sense told her so. Granted, Gramma, her psychologist and common sense didn’t know how incredibly difficult a first step that was, and she did, because she’d been trying and failing for fifteen years. It was so much less scary alone in her little house with Poppy. If she let no one in, then no one could hurt her. If no one saw how vulnerable she was, no one would take advantage of her. If she didn’t ask anyone to trust her, no one could expect her to trust them.
No one could be disappointed in her. No one could ever see how damaged she was. How afraid she was. How lonely she was.
She sat on her front porch, the sun barely lighting the Monday-morning sky, with a cup of iced coffee in one hand, her feet propped on the porch railing and a notebook leaning against her knees. It was a cheap spiral notebook, bought at Walmart in a back-to-school sale. She’d filled a few pages this morning with her jumbled thoughts, trying to find some order.
She hadn’t found it by the time Ruben pulled up, but her mind was calmer. Sliding to her feet, she set the book and ink pen just inside the door on the end table, called goodbye to Poppy, and locked up before hurrying to the truck.
In her mind, she practiced words that came naturally to everyone in her world except her. She climbed into the front seat, yanked the door shut and balanced her coffee, breathed deeply, stared straight ahead and said, “Good morning.”
A moment’s silence, then Alejandro muttered something, and Ruben grunted.
Again she breathed deeply. That wasn’t as hard as she’d thought it might be. If she’d learned it when she was little, like most kids, it would have been as easy as breathing.
They’d gone a mile or so when Ruben flicked his gaze her way. “Good weekend?”
If she hadn’t seen him look at her, she wouldn’t have considered he might be talking to her. “Yes,” she said. “Uh, yeah.”
How about that? She’d made small talk.
Their second client on Mondays was the worst one. Mr. Greeley had invested wisely and retired at fifty. With Mrs. Greeley long since moved on to husband number two and having taken the kids with her, he didn’t seem to have anything to keep him busy besides harassing the help. He told his housekeeper how to mop the kitchen floor, argued the pH of the water with the pool service, insisted Mila deadhead at a precise forty-degree angle and pestered every other soul who set foot on his property.
She’d once overheard Mario tell Alejandro that what the man needed was a woman. What he needed was a purpose in life. He should go back to work, volunteer at some charity, give himself a reason to get out of bed in the morning so he didn’t have to berate others to feel useful. Who retired at fifty—in this case, quit living at fifty—just because he could?
