Page 15 of Now to Forever (Life on the Ledge Duet #2)

Ten

Wren returns a mute. She pets Molly, sits quietly on an upside-down five-gallon bucket, and watches me like a creepy owl while I struggle to rip up the shag carpet. She’s wearing an oversized sweatshirt. In a T-shirt, I’m sweating like Vince the real estate agent.

As much as I want to, I don’t force conversation. I sat with too many counselors and people “trying to help” after my parents were so predictably them and my brother started blasting off the rails, I once thought of sewing my lips shut. I get how she feels: people who don’t know, don’t know.

June, as it turned out, was the only one who took a hint, which is why our friendship has lasted.

When we were kids and I was in stained and secondhand Bongo jeans and ate free school lunches without a parent in sight, she never asked.

Even now, when I don’t want to talk about it—which is ever—we don’t talk about it.

I struggle to get the carpet up; Wren’s quiet. Tom Petty’s voice sends an echoed “I Won’t Back Down” through the house; she leaves.

It’s the same the next day.

And the next.

And.

The.

Next.

I don’t talk to her; she doesn’t talk to me.

When Wren’s in the house, Molly lies beside her with her chin resting on her crossed front paws. When Wren leaves, Molly chews everything that isn’t nailed down and barks like she wants my ears to bleed.

I’m peeling wallpaper off the living room wall when she walks in, silent yet again as she drops her backpack and claims her usual perch.

Contrary to the home renovating blog that called this a job so easy it’s more relaxing than work , I’d prefer getting a pap smear with a meat cleaver than doing it a second longer.

Vince told me in his email this wallpaper had to go for us to get the biggest bang for our buck, so it’s going.

I drag a wet sponge across the wallpaper, wedge the blade of a scraper under a corner, and pull. Praying for a big satisfying piece like the peeling skin of a sunburn, I swear when it’s only a sliver. The size of the ridiculously sloped wall seems to multiply with every too-small piece.

“Fucking wallpaper,” I mutter, wiping my forehead with the back of my arm.

Wren watches me from her upside-down bucket as she pets Molly.

She’s quiet, staring at me with big blue eyes—which I now see are very much Ford’s—through a ridiculous curtain of hair as I chug water.

She looks so much like Ford’s kid it stings like saltwater in a cut. Like I always imagined it would.

I roll my eyes, turn the music up, and get back to work, trying my best to ignore the fact that she’s sitting there like some kind of paralyzed mime.

And while it’s the kind of conversation I usually prefer with most people, after an hour of me scraping and swearing and her staying silent, I’m a twig ready to snap.

I can’t do this.

Climbing down the two rungs of the stepladder, I drop the scraper, sponge, and gloves to the floor. With a pen on a yellow legal pad, I scribble a note and hand it to her.

Wallpaper

Ruins

Every

Nice day

She reads it and gives me an uncaring look.

“I wrote an acrostic poem with your name.” She rereads it, softening slightly but staying quiet. “You want to go for a drive, or just sit there and mope all day?” For the first time in days, her eyes light up. “Text your dad on that dorky watch and tell him I’m taking you out to get a tattoo.”

She pounds away at her wrist then follows me to the Bronco, Molly right behind her .

“Aren’t we the trio of bitches?” I ask with a smile as I start the ignition.

Wren cuts her eyes to me, a silent scolding for calling us bitches , but her lips lift slightly enough I know she’s coming around.

With Molly’s head out the rear window, Wren rolls hers down and props her elbow on the opening.

I pick up the speed once we’re on the main road and her hand reaches into the air, dancing in the breeze the way people seem just drawn to do.

As her palm rises and falls with the force of the air, the fabric of her sweatshirt flutters like a kite in the wind and her brown hair whips around her face.

“What kind of music do you like?” I shout over the wind.

“Lindsey Stirling,” she says, without looking at me, hand riding the waves. My eyes catch on her arm. Two Band-Aids slash across her forearm. She sees me looking and pulls her arm in the car, pinching her sleeves in her fingers and glueing them to her lap.

At the next stop sign, I fumble with my phone to find the unfamiliar musician. “You get hurt?” I lift my chin toward her arm.

“Just a cut.”

I look at her. She looks at her hands in her lap. I drop it.

When the music fills the speakers, it’s an explosion of the unexpected: Chords of a violin rip through the air without a single lyric. I can’t tell if it’s lovely or lonely, but by the second song, I realize it’s maybe both.

At a red light, the familiar downtown and the colorful town mural welcoming summer tourists to the lake with obnoxious cheer greets us. Life on the Ledge. I almost laugh: mission accomplished .

The buildings run into each other in two parallel strips as we cruise through town.

Faded bricks that are now home to modern shops, cafés, and even an art gallery line the street.

It’s as small as it was when I was a kid, just newer.

A little more sparkly, a little less sleepy.

One thing untouched: the timeless mountains painting the backdrop.

Out of town and away from the lake, the views are magnified.

Summer’s refusal to relent to fall is evident by the still mostly green rolling hills around us.

The roads wind by picturesque farms until the houses get farther between and more dilapidated; the music seems to know.

Shifting from sharp riffs to something more subdued. Melancholy.

When we get to the lane that hasn’t changed in the years since I’ve lived there, I pull onto the edge of the road and cut the engine, letting the abrupt silence envelop us. In the absence of the music, the droning buzz of cicadas is thick.

In the distance: a door slams, a kid laughs, a motorcycle revs.

A faded sign for Mountain Acres sits at the front, a row of run-down trailers in a staggered line behind it. The lane running alongside is littered with cans, bottles, and one lone Dollar General bag skirting around in the breeze.

“I grew up here,” I start, staring out the windshield and feeling like I’m looking at a picture in a banned book.

“In that second one”—I point in the general direction and she angles her head to see—“the greenish one with trash and boxes on the porch? That’s where I did homework—or didn’t do homework.

” I chuckle softly and a faint smile lifts her lips.

“My mom—Glory—didn’ t want the job of raising kids—or any job for that matter.

Sometimes she was there, most of the time she wasn’t.

She’d stay out at the bars all night doing God knows what.

” I heard rumors, of course. Kids never can keep a secret about what the parents of their peers were doing.

I heard my mom had boyfriends, but her infidelity was the least of my concerns.

All I knew was she never showed up when I asked her to.

When I needed her to. “My dad was a trucker, Lyle was his name, on the road more than home. Probably better that way.”

The dynamic always shifted for the worse when he was home. Glory was around more, and the results were unpredictable. Them in that tiny trailer was like two sticks of dynamite being held to a match. They’d drink, they’d fight, they’d fuck. It was the epitome of toxic.

“I spent a lot of time at my best friend’s house. June’s her name. And with your dad. Though I’m pretty sure your grandma didn’t love that.”

Her expression stays unreadable.

At the trailer I once lived in but still pay the rent for, the rickety door opens and out walks a woman in cutoff jean shorts and a spaghetti strapped tank top, so thin she could pass as a skeleton wrapped in skin with stringy dark brown hair.

She drops a bag of trash on the small porch next to the one I put there last time I visited.

She pulls a cigarette out of her pocket and pinches it between her lips.

There’s an old-model, blue SUV in the driveway. If it’s hers, I have no clue where it came from or how she afforded it .

Our gazes hook, hold, and I start the ignition as she cups a hand around the lighter at the end of the cigarette, tilting her chin skyward to blow out the smoke.

Wren looks from the woman to me.

“Yep,” I say, reading her mind as I shift the Bronco into drive. “That’s Glory.”

Without another word, I turn up the volume of the blaring violins as loud as it will go and floor the gas, causing an abrupt jolt that jerks us back as the speed climbs to a number higher than Ford would approve of.

As the wind rips through the windows, Molly barks, head out the window, and Wren lets out an unexpected laugh.

We don’t talk the entire drive home, but the tension that filled the air in the house all week has lessened. When we pull into the driveway, Ford’s there, filling up the stupid bird feeders, and we watch him through the windshield after I park.

“Your car is old,” Wren says.

“It’s not a car,” I scoff, bristled by her first words after days of none. “It’s a Bronco. And it’s not old, it’s a classic. 1989—it’s older than you!”

She looks at me like this does not impress her, eyeing the tape deck and wind-up windows. Though I had it reupholstered and added a Bluetooth option to the stereo, there’s no hiding the fact it’s vintage. “Where’d you get it?”

“It was my brother’s.”

“You only listen to your dead brother’s records and drive his car? ”

I blink, my silent and get to your fucking point, you little shithead.

“Well, do you even like it?” Even her eyeliner fails to hide the disgust in her eyes.