Page 44 of The Wedding Favor

“Why?”

“Because I like it and I guess it made me sad to see how lonely so many of the residents were.” I paused. “And it made me mad. We throw old people out when they aren’t useful enough anymore. Imagine that’s how you spend the last years of your life, stuck in a nursing home, and no one comes to visit you ever.” I shook my head. “It’s not fair.”

He studied me as I scrubbed a glass. “You’re pretty passionate about it, aren’t you?”

“Sometimes I wish I could wave a wand and make things better for them.”

“Ali was right. You are nice.”

“Stop calling me that.”

He grinned. I handed over a glass and ignored the fluttering of my pulse when our fingers brushed. Again, we fell into silence.

“So, Austin in the fall, huh?” Abe asked.

I laughed without humor. “That’s the plan.”

“Just not the plan you want?”

Slowly, I turned to him, my hands dripping water on the tiled floor. Was he living in my head? How did he pick up on this stuff when even my family didn’t seem to? My chest tightened with the desire to blurt everything out. Maybe I could? He was like a neutral party so he wouldn’t give me commands under the guise of advice. He wouldn’t be disappointed in me. More than that, he was easy to talk to. There was a quiet steadiness to him that appealed to me far more than I was willing to admit.

“I was accepted into a counseling program. It’s what I always thought I wanted to do but…” I shook my head. “I turned it down.”

He grabbed a dishtowel, wiped the water up by my feet, and stood. “Did you have another offer somewhere else?”

“No. Mainly because I have no idea what I want to do with my life.” I handed the last plate to him to load and dried my hands on a dishtowel.

Silence followed, but there was an edge to it that hadn’t been there before. To distract myself, I wiped down the counters. Abe stuffed his hands in his pockets and stared down at his shoes.

“So, you could be anywhere in the fall?” he asked quietly.

“Yeah.” I paused. “I guess so.” I didn’t want to be anywhere else, but he wasn’t wrong.

“And Mae doesn’t know?”

“Mae was basically my second mom growing up and, I don’t know,” I said, staring into the sink. “I always felt like a burden. She didn’t really get to do all the teenage stuff that other kids did. She always had me to watch over. I don’t want to disappoint her.”

“Hey,” he said softly and waited patiently for me to meet his gaze. “I understand what that feels like.”

I thought of the stories I heard about him and his father. “I guess you probably do.”

“Something I learned about ten years too late is that I was too much in my own head to talk to my dad back then, really talk to him. I was too stubborn to go to him first and apologize for being a stupid kid. Maybe he would have admitted he was sorry for making me feel like a disappointment. It probably still would have ended with us yelling at each other but at least I’d have been honest.” As he rubbed the back of his neck with a hand, the black images on his arm moved as he flexed.

“So, what you’re saying is that I should expect a lot of arguing when I tell her? This is not making me feel better.”

“You’re only in charge of how you act, not how other people act.”

“Okay, now that had to have been from a fortune cookie.”

His grin was quick and deadly. That dimple… “Probably.”

SIXTEEN

“Those early days, I shared an apartment with four other girls.

I learned very quickly how much I didn’t like to share.”

—excerpt from the unpublished memoir,