AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Interesting.
The women searched through the various jewelry bins as hollow wooden wind chimes reverberated through the canopy. Mack’s fingertips glided across the smooth bangle, and she slipped her hand through it. “So, Ben’s your family?”
Charlie held up an oversized hoop earning to her ear and angled her face towards a mirror. “Yep. He’s my person.”
“What drew you to each other?”
“Probably equally terrible upbringings. We bonded over mochas and misery.”
The level of disassociation in Charlie’s voice, combined with the words she used, was a fascinating juxtaposition. Mack took out her phone and texted herself:
disassociation and voice.
She stuffed the cell back in her pocket before Charlie could notice.
Mack followed Charlie as they left that booth in search of other vendors. She tiptoed closer to Charlie and leaned in more than once to discreetly inhale the hint of lavender that wafted off her.
“How did your parents end up in Seattle from New York?” Charlie asked.
“I was actually born here in Seattle. We lived with my grandparents until my parents turned eighteen.” Mack shook her arm to soothe her twitching forearm muscle, an annoying but common nervous tic, then shoved it in her pocket to calm the spasms. “I asked my dad once why we didn’t stay in Seattle. He basically said my grandpa was furious when he got my mom pregnant. So, as soon as he could, he packed us up. Thought there’d be more opportunities in New York.”
“God, that’d be tough. Can you imagine being a teenager and moving your family across the country?” Charlie tugged Mack into the next booth to look at handcrafted, leather-bound journals with burned inscriptions and various pens. She traced her fingertips across the edge of a journal and glanced at Mack. “I want to admire your dad for sticking it out but also hate giving men credit for what women do all the time.”
A beautiful, hand-painted ballpoint pen caught Mack’s attention and she held it to the light. “So true.”
“What do they do for a living? Seems like a hard place to try to ‘make it’ with a young family.”
“Agreed. I think he wanted to get away from my grandpa ’cause he’s kind of a dick. In New York, my dad was a maintenance person for an apartment building.” Mack ran her palm over a velvety, leather-bound book and sniffed the binding. “The apartment was in a decent neighborhood. He worked in exchange for a two-bedroom apartment for us. And my mom was a waitress.”
Charlie softly clanked an antique bell. “Maybe that’s not a bad gig, getting free rent for your family. Why’d they come back?”
“My grandpa retired from his construction company and asked if my dad wanted to take it over. So that’s what they do now. Dad’s the muscle and Mom works on the contracts.”
Charlie nodded but remained silent, her eyebrows furrowed as they moved a few spots to accessories. She dug through a cedar box filled with multi-colored agates and rolled one in her fingers. Her mouth opened and closed until she finally said, “I’m so curious about what it was like to be raised by teenagers.”
Mack wasn’t sure if it was a question or statement, almost as if Charlie kept it respectfully open-ended. No one had asked Mack that before. Raised by teenagers meant cereal for dinner. Her parents swinging right alongside her in the park. Game nights. Brutally loud screaming matches with her mom. Being old enough to remember her mom earning her GED at twenty-five.
“Honestly, I didn’t know any different. When I got a little older, and other kids pointed out how young they looked or mistook them for my siblings, it got a little weird, I guess?” Mack stopped to swipe through a rack of silk scarves, tugging on the fabric to make them all hang evenly. “And they were so overprotective, especially when I went through a super rebellious phase when I was thirteen. It was like they took all the hopes and dreams they had for themselves and drowned me in it. And I had this… burden, I guess, to live up to these unattainable expectations. I think they worried I’d make the same mistake as them. Not that they’d call me a mistake, but you know what I mean.”
Good God. Overshare much?
“I totally know what you mean.” Charlie set the rock back down. “A fine balance between suffocating and overprotectiveness, right? I’m sure they tried their best.”
“My parents have good intentions but can be so damn misguided. They always pushed me to hyper-hustle. My mom would say stuff like ‘apply yourself more,’ ‘work harder,’ and ‘if you’d only tap into your potential.’ I try not to let it get to me, but… it still stings sometimes.”
Outside the tent, a welcomed breeze with perfumed oils and funnel cake whooshed around them. Mack twisted her body to avoid smacking into bystanders, thinking back to a time when a therapist mentioned that her parents had covered her in a pressure cooker blanket her entire life and she’d need some serious deprogramming to believe she was sufficient.
“My dad’s kind of funny,” Mack continued. “He used to put the fear of God into me about boys. When I came out at fourteen, he slapped his palm on his chest and said, ‘Oh, thank God my lectures worked!’ Like he actually took credit for me being queer.”
Charlie’s chest lifted. “I love that. Everyone’s coming-out story should include excited parents.” She bit the side of her lip with a deep grin. “I thought you might have been part of the Rainbow Mafia, but I didn’t want to assume.”
“You mean my haircut didn’t give it away?” Mack chuckled and brushed her hand against her undercut.
Mack never opened up like this, always preferring to be the bystander in conversations, observing from a quiet, dark spot away from the spotlight of discussion. But Charlie had this nonjudgmental aura about her, like Mack could say anything from she slept with the neighbor’s wife to she has fifty cats and feeds them with baby bottles, and Charlie would give her a comforting nod and make her feel like it was the most natural thing in the world.
As the golden-hued afternoon faded into a fuchsia evening, Mack inched closer to Charlie and shared more than intended as a rush flowed through her from releasing tidbits of her past. As they turned the block to the food-vendor area, someone bumped into them and sent Charlie crashing into Mack.
“You good?” Mack gripped Charlie on her waist to keep her steady.
