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Oh shit.
No need to brace myself for a Birdie-launch hug. My original instinct of shielding my face was definitely spot-on. So much for having a tiny sliver of hope for exactly one-point-two seconds when she turned around that enough time had gone by for her to have forgiven me and be happy to see me.
“Well hey there, Putz, you absolute piece of dog shit. Long time no see.”CHAPTER 4Birdie
“Asking fore a friend.”“Holy shit, Putz is on the island!” Tess shouts at the top of her lungs as soon as I come around the front corner of the Dip and Twist to the covered picnic table area.
My feet stutter to a stop a few tables away, and I huff.
“How in the hell do you already know that?” I mutter, forcing my feet to move again, even though just thinking about Putz makes me want to curl up into a ball on the ground and never move again. “I just found out fifteen minutes ago and came right here.”
I finish my complaint as soon as I get to our purple picnic table located in the far back corner next to the small building. Tess and my older-by-four-years sister Wren slide apart so I can squeeze in between them with our butts resting on the tabletop and our feet perched on the bench beneath us. It’s almost ten at night and pitch-dark outside all around the ice cream stand downtown, but thankfully the bright florescent lights with a yellowish tint under the table area can be seen from space.
“Adam was out on the driving range in the range picker collecting the last of the golf balls before closing and saw you two talking,” Tess tells me as Wren gently bumps her shoulder against mine in a silently greeting. “Adam called Cal at Summersweet Grocery, who called Steve at the pharmacy, who saw Wren when she stopped in to pick up Owen’s allergy medication right before they closed, who immediately called me.”
When she finishes, I slowly turn my head to glare at my sister.
“Et tu, Brute?”
Wren grimaces and shrugs guiltily, shoving a wayward lock of dark-brown hair back up into her messy bun. No matter how hard I try, I can never be mad at her. Wren pretty much only wears her hair in a messy bun, because it’s quick and easy. As a single mom to a fourteen-year-old boy who also helps run the Dip and Twist with our mom full time so she can eventually take it over, I get why she needs quick and easy, but I miss the Wren who could let her hair down every once in a while, literally, and have fun.
Wren suffered the same fate as our mom by falling for a tourist’s charm at the age of twenty who made a bunch of promises he couldn’t keep. Where our sperm donor left and never came back when I was two days old and Wren was four, my sister’s momentary lapse in judgement keeps popping back up into her life every so often like a bad case of herpes. Wren’s hair is long and naturally wavy like mine, and up until six months ago, it was the same shade of golden-blonde with caramel highlights as mine and our mom’s. She colored it a shocking shade of chestnut six months ago, the last time sperm donor decided to grace the island with his presence and had the audacity to tell her she was looking old.
Clearly, we hate sperm donor and hope he chokes on a dick, although the new hair color has livened Wren up just a tiny bit more recently.
“Sip and Bitch!” Tess shouts as Wren starts to reach behind us to the small, hard plastic red-and-white cooler she was in charge of bringing tonight.
“It’s too early. There are still customers,” I remind her, even though I take the cold bottle of beer Wren thrusts into my hands and twist off the top as she reaches around me to hand one to Tess.
“There is one customer,” Tess says, leaning forward to clink her bottle against mine and then Wren’s. “Ed is sitting in his golf cart in the parking lot on the other side of the building, taking ninety-seven hours to finish his butterscotch milkshake just like he does every single night. “Sip. And. Bitch.”
With a sigh, I bring my bottle of beer up to my mouth, not realizing how much I desperately needed a drink until the cold barley and hops hit my tongue. I chug half the bottle before I bring it back down to find Tess and Wren staring at me expectantly.
“I don’t know what to tell you. Nothing happened. He showed up when I was doing my I hate people therapy at the end of my shift. I was too shocked that he was standing right in front of me—after not seeing him in almost three years and after not speaking to him for two years—to do much of anything. I bolted out of there and came right here.”
