Page 47 of As a Last Resort
SAMANTHA
My tiny city apartment refrigerator was stocked with fancy waters and prepackaged lunch and dinner containers. The fern in the corner of the kitchen looked livelier than when I left.
This was the right decision. I belonged in a world where honking and yelling drifted up from street corners below, where white and gray dominated color palettes with clean lines and angles. Where things were as they seem. And where there wasn’t a godforsaken starfish in a ten-mile radius.
I didn’t need homemade breakfast. I had a five-star chef just down the street who did that for me whenever I wanted.
He cooked bacon too. Painted white wicker and sea creature sculptures didn’t belong here.
Neither did splashing waves or palm fronds rustling in the wind.
No drunk dials in the middle of the night from some guy asking me to come get my inebriated mother.
And people wore shirts .
I took a breath. This is what I had worked my whole life for. To get here . Not to be stuck there .
ME: I’ve got an idea
IVY: does it involve burying a body
ME: Close.
You mentioned before
you’ve got a board connection
IVY: i said that?
ME: I need a 10 min slot with the entire board
at the meeting next week
to discuss the resort proposal.
Has to be before Glenn and the team
pitch their whizz calamity.
IVY: BEFORE glenn???
ME: Yes
IVY: i luv where this is going
ME: If I’m going down,
I’m going down in flames.
IVY :
There was a fierce kick at my door ten minutes later. I looked through the peephole and saw Ivy’s eyeball peeking through a fern branch at me.
“You’re a sight for sore eyes.” I pulled the door open to let her and her entourage of bags and drinks come in.
She piled her stuff on my kitchen counter. “I brought you a venti vanilla latte with oat milk, Celsius for later, and a turkey-cheese wrap from Delco’s.”
“What’s the fern for?” I asked, pointing to the one she held in her hand.
“That’s a fake.” She nodded to the perky one on my kitchen counter. “The other died of natural causes.” She walked over and put the new live fern on the counter and threw the fake one in the garbage can. “There. Now it’s alive.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“We have the presentation slot scheduled for four p.m. on Monday. The entire board has RSVP’d yes.”
“Wow. That was fast. The entire board?” I asked.
“All twelve of them. You have ten minutes. And you’re scheduled before Glenn, but heads-up, he’ll be in the room. I’ve already requested an extra trash can for when he shits his pants when you start talking.”
“How’d you pull that off?”
“I’d tell you but I’d have to kill you. So, we’ve got one day to blow their minds with your ideas. Office or apartment all-nighter? Your choice.”
I just stared at her and blinked. Was I really going to do this?
“Let’s reacclimate.” She stepped in front of me, grabbed my shoulders, and slowed her voice.
“You are no longer in Florida. You are in New York City, at your apartment. You are Samantha Leigh, kick-ass resort developer with a score to settle. Do you know who the president of the United States of America is?”
“Yes, but does that actually matter?”
“Aaaand she’s back. Here, drink this, it’ll help.” She handed over a mixed green smoothie out of her Mary Poppins bag that tasted like grass with a tiny bit of metal stirred in.
She stared me down until I drank the entire thing. “Okay, now out with it.”
“I’m fine. I just need to get back into the swing of things, that’s all.” Jet lag was a real thing. Most of the time.
“I’m going to ask you one more time, and if you don’t want to talk about the guy yet, I get it. I will switch the conversation back over to work and how we nail Pugly Duckling and his harebrained ideas to the wall and prove you are master of all things beach town development. Now, are you okay?”
“Yes. I am fine. I promise. It’s just going to take me a moment to shake the sand from my brain. Pun intended.”
“Noted.”
“An office all-nighter. This place is too sterile.” I looked around and wondered why the monochromatic tone of the room never bothered me before.
“I’ll buy you another plant. And a colorful vase.”
“Good plan. And maybe a key dish.”
“What in the hell is a key dish?”
I paused. “A dish for keys.”
“That’s completely impractical.”
I nodded. “Right, yeah, exactly.”
Ivy went ahead as I packed up to head into the office for the next twenty-four hours.
I walked out the front door of my apartment building into the flow of people.
Heads were down, paces were quick. I caught a lady’s eye and smiled.
She grunted and stepped to the side. She was probably just late to get somewhere important.
Thunder cracked above and a tiny droplet of rain landed on my arm.
But it was fine because I loved the city when it was wet and shiny.
It’s like it washed away the moments of yesterday and made a way for something new and bright.
This was not the predictable movie moment where the heroine walks through a rainstorm without an umbrella, the downpour indicative of her waterfall of sad emotions.
It started to really come down, so I scooted into an alcove of an apartment building and my foot squished into something.
Please don’t be poop. Please don’t be poop.
I looked down and my shoe was cradled by an old hoagie sandwich, puffy and slimy from the rain. I leaned against the concrete wall and looked out. People scurried under umbrellas and jackets. The sky was gray and bleak. Black clouds moved around ominously looking for a target to dump on.
Austin’s face was everywhere I looked, burned into my mind like when I looked at the sun too long as a kid. But I didn’t have time for that right now. He was just a distraction. A tan, salt water–scented distraction that wrapped around me like well-worn cotton.
For a second, I tried to picture it. I looked out into the flow of people and imagined him walking by, with his worn-in jeans, flip-flops, faded high school T-shirt, and backward baseball cap.
Everyone knows you can’t wear flip-flops in the city.
I tried to picture him in Central Park drinking a green smoothie.
He’d make fun of me for it and said it tasted like grass, which it did.
I’d take him to the Hudson and look out over the water.
He’d ask about fishing and I’d tell him people were allowed, but there were rules. It was catch-and-release only.
I couldn’t see him in a cubicle at some nine-to-five job, wearing closed-toed shoes and a button-down that itched his neck. I could see him pulling at its collar already.
He’d miss the sand. The salt water.
He’d miss sitting outside his parents’ house in homemade Adirondack chairs.
He’d miss Florida sunsets and Sunday night dinners.
He’d have to give up everything.
It couldn’t work. There was no way I’d go back and he didn’t fit here.