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Every summer we used to get cones at the little pop-up ice cream shop during the summer.Thankfully, we still had the snack shack at the town beach, so we weren’t completely ice cream deprived.
“Yeah, Leslie and Bill retired, and I guess no one wanted to invest in it. I read in the paper that someone wants to start up an actual ice cream truck to ride around Castleton, but who knows,” I said.
“Huh,” she said, sucking down her milkshake. “I guess that would be fun.”
I filled her in on more Castleton news. Gretchen was more concerned with the kind of gossip about who was sleeping with who, and less of which businesses were closing, or if they were putting in a new parking lot or debating adding an actual traffic light to help with summer congestion.
“That is never going to work,” Natalie said, slamming her hand down on the picnic table when I told her about the last thing. “They have tried and tried, but that’s just the way it is in the summer. Take the back roads if you don’t like it.” She made a disgusted sound.
“I didn’t know you were so passionate about traffic lights,” I said.
“I’m not, I’m just annoyed at people who want to change things that aren’t broken,” she said. “Castleton isn’t like other places and that’s why we like it.”
I hadn’t known she had loved Castleton. When we were kids, all she’d wanted to do was get out. She was desperate to sign up for any school or extracurricular trip that took us somewhere else, especially if it was out of state.
“So you didn’t find greener grass?” I asked.
“Not in Arizona,” she said.
“Not a whole lot of grass there,” I said.
“Not for me, anyway.”
She frowned.
“I don’t want to think about Arizona anymore. I just want to start over in Castleton.”
“So you’re giving it a second chance.”
“Exactly,” she said. “Exactly.”
* * *
“This is not happening again,” I said, when I walked into the hotel room and there was a king-sized bed and nothing else.
“Let’s just get you another room,” Natalie said.
I could afford to get another room, if they had it. That would be no problem. I’d also learned that most hotels had portable beds that you could ask for.
But I was tired, and it seemed like such a hassle.
“No, it’s fine. We’ve shared already. Two friends can share a bed, right?”
She looked at me for a moment and didn’t speak.
“Nat?” I asked.
“Right,” she finally said.
I’d dunked myself under the showers at the lake, but they hadn’t been adequate enough, so I washed the lake water out of my hair and thought about everything that had happened in the past two days. This trip seemed to be speeding everything up. I still wasn’t sure if it had been the right thing, to stop being so angry at Natalie. I did feel better, after my little revelation about second chances, but only time would tell if that feeling continued.
The bracelet on my wrist kept distracting me. It was cute and made with pastel rainbow beads. Not my style, but that didn’t matter.
I spun it around a few times before I turned the shower off and got out.
“That lake water is not doing much for my hair,” Natalie said, frowning at her hair in the mirror above the desk in the room.
It was true, her hair had frizzed everywhere, but she still looked gorgeous. Natalie could always pull off having a mane of hair.
