A/N: Thank you to those of you consistently leaving positive reviews – swiftcity, fereality, willam and jack and jake (are you one person or three?!), and thank you to everyone who has favorited this so far. I appreciate it more than you know.
Short chapter this week but a super-long one next week!
I don't see Mabel for a few days; our shifts don't coincide at the diner.
After digging up treasure under the water tower, we filled in the holes we had dug, to cover our tracks, and she gave me a ride home in her Jeep.
"We should exchange numbers," she said, as I was getting out of the car. "In case we ever need to swap shifts, or anything."
After a couple of seconds I said, "sure."
"Is your number the same as before?"
"Yeah. Is yours?"
"Yeah."
I just had to go into my contacts and unblock her.
The first of Nina's sealed cardboard boxes is now sitting by the door of our apartment. We're supposed to be out enjoying some early July sunshine, but Nina is sticking to a strict packing schedule which spans a couple of days. Her OCD is driving her to run back and forth through the living room, fretting over which of her possessions belong in which boxes, in what order, because Kyle's car isn't too big and she doesn't want to make more than one trip. I'm watching the whole spectacle from the couch. I have offered to help, more than once, but we decided that me recklessly handling her personal belongings is a sure-fire way to drive her insane.
"How's the roommate hunt going?" she asks me, folding shirts on the floor.
"I've already told you. I'm not looking."
She flumps onto the couch and sighs. "Are you sure, though? I don't want you to get lonely."
"I'll be fine, Mom. Really."
"Have you thought any more about living with Wendy?"
"No, because it's a bad idea. Come on, Nina, why are you trying to convince me otherwise? It would be a nightmare."
"She's not that bad."
"No, you're right, she's not. But she is slightly bad, and that's all it takes. Seriously, if she gets drunk here, she's going to try and get me drunk, too. She doesn't think like you do, she doesn't see it as a real problem."
"You're right," Nina says, rubbing my arm. "I'm sorry. I just think that, surely, you're going to be better off having somebody here. I mean, if you... you know..."
"It's been four weeks. And I've never broken our promise, have I? I always tell you after it happens. Worse comes to worst, I can move back home for a while."
Nina's eyes widen in horror. "I thought you hated your mom."
"So did I, but we've been getting along lately. It's bizarre."
"Would you still get along if she knew you were an alcoholic?"
It was a good question. I've never told my mom about the booze - even back when it started, when I still lived at home. I was getting drunk every night, and she was none the wiser. We habitually avoided each other. We never talked except for rare idle chit-chat during the daytime. Her newfound desire to squeeze back into my life has had me all kinds of confused - maybe telling her about my problem would be a shortcut to finding out her ulterior motives; if she genuinely cares, she won't say, "that's nice, dear," and go on to talk about the last salad that she ate.
Speak of the devil, she turns up at the diner the following day, about ten minutes into my shift. Just walks in and sits down, even smiles at me when she passes the counter. I watch, dumbstruck. She has never set foot in what she once called "the town's greasy asshole," and now she is sliding into a booth without even wiping the seat down first.
I glance over at Mabel, who is behind the coffee machine. She looks as shocked as I do. "Is that your mom?" she mouths to me. I nod slowly.
I walk to her table and say, with great uncertainty, "hey, Mom."
"Hello, dear. I was just passing by, I thought I'd stop in for a chat."
I glance around the diner. Lindsay, who has recognized my mother, and who probably sees her as the literal devil considering the stories I've told her, is eyeing us like she's my big brother, gearing up for a fight. Lindsay would definitely win, too. There are biceps behind those blue sleeves and there's fierceness behind that soft face.
"Well I'm working, Mom. I can't really stop to talk."
"Oh, you work hard, don't you? I'm sure your boss can afford to give you ten minutes."
I look up at Lindsay, point at the seat opposite Mom, and shrug. Lindsay nods, almost unnoticeably. "I'll fix us some coffee," I say.
I'm amazed when she asks me how work is going, without reminding me that there are a million other career opportunities across the country that I could be devoting my time to. She even recognizes Mabel, and remembers her name, and calls her over to say hi. Mom probably says more to her in a minute than she ever did over the countless hours Mabel used to spend at our house, in the summers.
"Is that an engagement ring?" my mom asks Mabel, picking up her fingers and inspecting the ring as if she's about to give an appraisal.
"It is, yes," Mabel chuckles.
"It's beautiful. Who's the lucky man?"
"Um, his name's Jason," Mabel says, and I notice tentative eyes flick to me for a second. "We've been together for a few years now. He proposed last summer."
"Oh, I can only hope that somebody buys this one such a pretty ring one day," Mom says, tilting her coffee cup at me. "Actually, how does it work for you, Pacifica? How would you decide who proposes to who?"
"Mom," I growl.
"Oh- I'm sorry, does Mabel not- she doesn't know?"
"No, she- it's fine," I say, scratching the back of my neck. My cheeks go up in flames. "It's fine."
Mabel is quick to say, "I should get back to work," and she zips away.
Mom leans across the table and whispers, "is she a homophobe?"
"No, Mom, she's not a homophobe."
I don't think so, anyway. I don't think she knew I'm still into girls, either. Maybe she was under the impression that it was all a phase.
Like it had been for her.
Mom shoves her phone in my face and I lean back, so my eyes can focus on a picture of a tiny tabby kitten.
"Who's that?"
"That's Toby," she says, "the newest member of the family." She swipes the screen and brings up a picture of the cat in a bathtub, holding a dry sponge in its mouth. "Isn't he the cutest?"
"You bought a kitten?"
"Adopted. A stray cat wandered into Alice's kitchen and gave birth to five kittens behind her trash can. She kept the mother but she didn't know what to do with the babies. I said I'd take one off her hands. That's why I'm here - I was on the way to the pet store to buy him a cage. I hope he's okay out there," she says, glancing out the window at her car.
I frown. "Who?"
"Toby."
"Jesus, Mom, he's in the car?!"
Her eyes widen. "Is that bad?"
"Yes! You can't keep a kitten uncaged in your car, it's not a dog! And it's eighty degrees out, what were you thinking?"
Mom jumps up, overwrought, and hurries outside. I scamper along behind her, much to the restaurant's entertainment. Sure enough, there's a fuzzy little kitten plodding around in the front seats of her car.
"Oh, he's fine, look - he's just playing with the gearstick."
"Yeah, he's also peed on the back seat."
"That's okay," she says. "I'll get the car washed on the way home."
"Right... you'll drop the cat off at home first, though."
"Oh. Yes. That's a better idea."
Mom swings open the passenger door, and I poise myself to catch a flying furball, but it walks into my mom's hands and she hands him to me. The thing mews incessantly in my arms, and I can't understand it, because it's a cat, but it's probably saying something like, take me away from this woman. I imagine that's what I was crying about when I was a baby. Mabel is watching us from one of the windows. I hold up the kitten and shrug, and she grins and clasps her hands together. It takes me a moment to realize I've totally tuned out whatever Mom is saying.
"...and he's already ruined two of my houseplants. He takes a few bites from his food bowl and then decides he'd rather eat leaves instead."
"You need something to keep him occupied. Buy a couple of cat trees and some toys while you're at the pet store," I tell her, setting Toby down on the passenger seat and closing the door. "And be careful driving with him running loose. Drive slowly, and try not to pass out at the wheel from the smell of cat piss."
Somehow, I end up agreeing to stop by the house in a few days time to check up on them. I don't know, I don't want a dead cat on my conscience courtesy of my hopeless mother. It's only when I'm watching her drive away through the windows of the diner that I consider that this whole thing - buying a pet and bringing it to my workplace - could have been an elaborate ruse to draw me back home, and try more of her recipes.
"You two are getting along a lot better," Mabel says to me in passing.
"Yeah. I'm not convinced that was even my mother."
I'll be honest - I don't really give a shit about fireworks.
I think I subconsciously associate them with things I never deemed worthy of celebration, like my dad making a successful investment in some random tech start-up, or my mom turning forty. It never took a lot for my parents to whip out the seemingly never-ending supply of fireworks they kept in the shed at the bottom of the yard. Nowadays, while I admit they are pretty, all I see over the flashing lights are my parents' smug faces, and all I hear over the explosions are their friends' horribly obnoxious laughter. It's a bit like PTSD.
To make things worse, every year Gravity Falls holds a fourth of July carnival, and every year it becomes more and more like a boring nightmare. Failing business-owners from all over town flock to a field to sell their wares behind wooden stands that are falling apart much like their lives. They all look like they've given up hope; one large woman is fast asleep in a plastic chair beside her display of jarred honey.
There's a helter-skelter that kids fly out the bottom of in tears because it burns the skin off their elbows. There's a local band playing some kind of droning experimental music, which has also made one kid cry. And this is all before the sun has even set.
Nina loves all of it though, god knows why, so I plaster on my happy face for her sake as we walk aimlessly around the stalls. "It's the nostalgia," I tell her. "If you weren't leaving tomorrow, you'd be saying the same thing you say every year."
"Which is?"
"That this is just an opportunity for all the local lunatics to come together."
"But the lunatics have character," she sighs wistfully. "I'm going to miss it."
At about five minutes to 10, I lose Nina in the herd of people making their way to the observation area for the fireworks, because - I kid you not - I spot Mabel's fiancé arguing with one of those giant teddy bears. I can't make out a word he's saying; I look around me, but nobody else seems to notice that the man has gone insane.
Of course, when the bear comes to life and swivels around, I can see that, obviously, there is a human carrying it, and I feel like a fucking idiot. I watch Mabel take a few steps in the direction of the fireworks, struggling to keep the bear's giant feet from dragging along the grass, then she turns around and starts yelling at Jason as he pursues her.
I'm ashamed to admit that I derive a great deal of pleasure witnessing a hiccup in their relationship firsthand.
Even though I've had no contact with her for years, I've still heard things about her from time to time. Wendy still talked to both of the twins for a couple of years after their last summer here. And their names will come up sometimes among a group of people, none of whom I thought knew them. Apparently the Pines left a lot of footprints on the town.
I know that Mabel is in college, studying Social Work, and has undergone a year's internship as an assistant teacher at a special needs school. I know that she pursued her interest in theatrics after drama club in high school, and ended up playing a major role in a musical - someone showed me her name and picture in a playbill, but I don't remember the title of the play or the theater it was shown at. And I saw her on national news, once. She had about five seconds of screen time to explain how her and the equally-brightly dressed group flanking her were cleaning up after the ignorant oil companies that had yet again drilled a hole wherever the heck they felt like and wasted a bunch of turtles. I was in the ER at the time - my friend had broken her ankle. I jumped out of my seat and stood directly under the TV, staring up, waiting for Mabel to come back on screen, but she never did.
And I guess because of all that, I always pictured everything in her life going swimmingly, and it's comforting to see the ugly side for once. Don't let the smiley exterior and the social work and the preservation of our planet fool you - she deserves a bit of ugly.
Nina snaps me out of my trance when she finds me, and we walk to the top of the steep hill that juts out of the side of the field. We take a seat in the grass, and gaze into the night sky, waiting for the show to begin. We lean on one another's shoulders. I've given her a sufficient send-off, I think. I haven't fully come to terms with her departure, but I'm in a much better place than I was a few weeks ago.
Like I said earlier, I don't really care about fireworks, so when I happen to notice Mabel sit down with her teddy bear at the bottom of the hill, sans fiancé, my eyes are on her for most of it.
It's strange that I'm even able to empathize with her. From behind, I can see her sat hugging her knees to her chest. Her hair hangs loosely, almost to the small of her back, and lights up whatever color the sky is currently painted.
Considering that she's here without her parents, or her brother, or either of her uncles, I could take a photo of her next to that bear and title it Loneliness.
The trunk slamming shut screams finality, right into my ears.
"Are you sure you have everything?" I ask Nina, totally pointlessly.
"Yes, Mom," she mocks, and we squeeze each other in an aggressive hug.
"Did I ever tell you you're the best friend I've ever had?"
"Yes," she murmurs into my neck. "Lots of times."
We step apart. I'm cold.
"Call me," she says. "Any hour at all. I'm gonna leave my phone on at night now."
"I'll call you later when I'm drowning in whiskey."
She tilts her head and scolds me with her eyebrows.
"Kidding. The only thing I'm gonna be drowning in is babes. Now that you're gone all the rules are abolished. It's gonna be anything-goes in that apartment."
"And on that note, I'm going to leave now," Nina says, stepping around to the passenger side of Kyle's car.
Kyle's leaning on the driver's door. I say to him, "go on, Kyle. Steal my girl away from me."
He smiles, and says, "I'll take care of her," and then he gets into his car. I like Kyle, really, he's nice, but he certainly can't match Nina's standards of banter. Everything he says to me leaves me disappointed by how dull it is. Maybe that's a little harsh. Maybe I'll wait until my Nina-sized wound is healed before I judge him.
"I'll be back in a couple of weeks," Nina says, half in the car, half out. "Not two weeks, three weeks. Three weeks - that's a promise."
I don't say anything else because it feels like everything has been said. I watch them chug along down the street, though I can't see their heads through the bundles of Nina's belongings stuffed into the back seats. Seems ridiculous, now, that she yelled at me last night for stacking the boxes by the door in the wrong order. Kyle stalls the car at the end of the street, and I spoil my introspective moment by laughing, and then they disappear around the corner. I sigh loudly into the morning air and traipse back into my apartment.
I'm all talk - there are zero babes in my apartment that night. By 9 P.M. I'm on my couch with my laptop, scrolling through the highlights of other people's lives on Facebook.
It's scary how quickly the urges kick in. Keeping an alcohol habit at bay can be relatively easy when you're endlessly distracted, and having a best friend as a roommate certainly helped that. But when I'm alone, and I get bored...
I shut my laptop. There's a liquor store two blocks from here. I feel lonely, and bored. But I don't have to. I could feel warm, and fuzzy, and...
My phone rings. A spark of excitement hits me, somebody wants to save me, and I rush to answer it, the sad hermit that I am, until I see the name on the screen. It's been a lifetime since Mabel Pines has called me.
I hit the green button. "Hello?"
"Hey," I hear her say, cheerful as ever. My heart does a little flip when I match the voice to her face. "How are you?"
"I'm good," I say slowly. "You?"
"Yeah, fine. I think I've figured it out. The map."
"Oh," I say, no other words springing to mind.
"I moved the pieces around until they fit together, some of them I had to rotate. Once I'd done that I recognized it right away - it's the lake we used to swim in, with our little wooden dock. The X is on Scuttlebutt Island. You wanna go check it out?"
"Yeah," my mouth says without consulting my brain first. "Sure."
"Where are you?"
"What- you're going right now?"
"Yeah," she says, and I stand up and walk to the window. It's dark, as it usually is at night, but there's no wind, or rain, and it was warm out today. "Have you got anything better to do?"
I frown. "What's that supposed to mean?"
"Nothing. I'm literally asking if you have anything better to do."
"I don't know, sleep?"
"Okay," she sighs. "I guess I'll just... go out in the woods, in the dead of night, by myself... on a spooky island."
"You know, guilt-tripping me might have worked if I actually still cared about you," I say, and when she's silent I realize that was needlessly cruel. "I'm at my apartment."
"Great! I'll pick you up in ten," she says, then her voice is replaced by the flat tone informing me she has hung up.
I need a strong drink much more than when she called, but there's no way I could fix one in ten minutes. I change into some outdoor-suited clothes and smile; maybe at my next AA meeting I'll put everyone in touch with Mabel, the girl who can help people on accident.