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“Saturday,” he says after a minute.
“What about it?”
“I will go on a date with you Saturday. You pick your favorite restaurant, and I’ll pick you up at five thirty.”
“Yes sir,” I tease.
“But for tonight, go home, Lucy,” his voice is gentle as he adds, “and try to find a way to make it feel like home again.”
“Okay,” I whisper before hanging up.
My mom’s car isn’t in the driveway when I pull in. I reach for my phone and see an unread text.
Mom:I’ve got a lot of work to do, honey, I’ll probably be home late. There’s leftovers in the fridge. I love you.
Me:Okay, love you too.
I sigh and toss my phone in my bag, pulling my keys from the ignition.
“Well,” I mutter, “at least I won’t have to worry about an awkward dinner conversation tonight.”
Inside, I look around the dark house and blink rapidly. I don’t know how Wyatt does this—how he lives in that big house all alone. Maybe Mom and I don’t have the best relationship right now, but she’s usually at leasthere.There’s usually soft jazz playing in the kitchen while she cooks, lamps on in the living room and lights on in the kitchen and the hall. This darkness, this silence . . . it’s nearly unbearable. I walk through the hall, turning every single light on as I go.
I flip the light switch in my room, already unbuttoning my blouse. As I walk around my bed to set my phone on the nightstand, my foot connects with something and I barely catch myself from tripping.
“What the—” I grunt.
A box is jutting out slightly from under my bed. I bend down, pulling it out, and my breath catches in my throat when I see the notebooks. The notebooks I spent almost all of my childhood filling. I open one blindly, flipping through the pages until I find an entry that makes my heart jump.
August 16th, 2014
I’ve been thinking about love a lot. Mom and Dad have this insanely beautiful love story, one that’s even better than the cheesy books I read. Sometimes it can be a little intimidating, their love. And I wonder if I’ll ever have anything like it.
Dad always likes to say that he took one look at Mom and he just knew she was it for him. I asked him one time if Mom was the first woman he ever loved, but he told me she wasn’t. But he said when he looked at her, he knew she’d be the last.
I think about that a lot, how so many people focus on their first loves, but not a whole lot on the idea of their last love. The last pair of eyes you’ll see before you fall asleep. The last hand you’ll squeeze in a dark movie theater. The last laugh you’ll hear when you tell a cheesy joke. The last smile when you walk into a crowded room. The last pair of arms you’ll crave after an awful day. Sure, your first love is memorable and important and full of butterflies . . . but that last love? That sounds magical.
But I think right now I’d like to have a first love. I’d like to have a boy look at me with stars in his eyes.
The writing stops and I feel my hands shaking, my breathing fast. I don’t even remember this. Idoremember that conversation with Dad about last loves, though, and I remember the empty feeling in my stomach. The longing for a love like that. More than that, though, I remember how much I had used to write. I remember pulling out a journal, almost every day after school, and writing something in it.
I grab my phone from my nightstand and call my mom.
“Lucy? Is everything okay?”
“Do you remember my journals?” I ask.
“Oh, yeah. You were always scribbling in notebooks. Every year for your birthday and Christmas, your dad bought you a new one. You rarely filled one up—you got too excited to use the new one. And if you weren’t writing in one, you had your nose stuck in a book. Just like your father.”
“I . . . I don’t even remember when I stopped writing,” I whisper.
“A few months before your dad . . . before he . . . before he passed. You were applying for medical school and trying so hard to be sure your grades were good enough to get accepted. You weren’t reading much around then, either.”
“You remember?” I ask.
“Yes, Lucy. I remember. Your dad was worried about you. So was I. We thought you were being too hard on yourself with school. I thought about suggesting you and Allie take a girl’s trip somewhere but then, well, you know.”
“Then Dad died,” I say, my voice sounding hollow and far away.
