Chapter 18

The hardware store aisles are empty of customers. I must have been the first one to chime the entrance bell this morning.

"Do you need some help with this stuff?" The girl's fingers are tucked into her apron, her arms bent at an awkwardly high angle to make this position possible.

I settle a tin of wood stain back onto its shelf. "Is Kim here?"

"He's off today."

Initial disappointment gives way to relief. I would have liked his help to nudge me in the right direction, but really, only I can get myself started, only I can figure out which direction to go.

"Just looking," I say, and she leaves me to it.

Squares of wood are mounted on the wall, samples of the different stains and varnishes available. I understand the rationale behind sticking to neutrals, but I'm left feeling uninspired, bland.

In the next aisle I pick up some floral stencils only to slide them back on their hook. I'm not Maggie.

I pull a few paint sample cards from their holders: lilac, a soft aqua, a yellow so vibrant it seems if I scratch it I'd release the scent of lemons. I swipe my thumb over a deep red I'm sure I wouldn't use.

"Or maybe I would," I say to the swatch of red. If anything is the opposite of bland, it's this red.

I slip my phone from my pocket and google "picnic table upcycle colorful." I scroll through image after image of bright tables. Some are crazy-wild; some are far too complicated for me to attempt; some must be meant for children's playrooms. But what's clear is that anything goes.

I grab a can of that red, another of the aqua, and I bookmark the tutorial on how to create a "distressed" paint look.

Edward's truck is at my curb when I get home. I welcome the trouble my screen gives me, anything that will buy me time before I approach him. I hope for some revelation to rain down on me—the right words to start a conversation with him in a way that would feel organic, not stinted or forced.

In the kitchen I open my laptop and read over my article one more time. A few more edits, and I send it off to Senna. It doesn't matter, I tell myself. If they accept it, great. If not, fine. I tell myself this several times until I maybe believe it.

Avoidance can't last forever, so I step outside with my sander. Cool wind hits my face.

"Edward."

He looks up from his crouched position by my fence. "There you are." He rises, holding a blossoming plant. "Your car was gone early." He walks toward me and I meet him halfway.

"Just running errands." I push hair over my shoulders. "It's windy out." And so I'm back to pointing out the obvious. I don't let the embarrassment show in my face.

He nods and I nod, and we're just nodding.

"You're planting more lilac."

"It's the ground cover." He holds the plant up to my nose. "Ceanothus gloriosus."

My body sighs. "Yeah. You brought them to me when I wouldn't listen. I thought you knew me better than I did." I clear my throat and find I'm toying with my pendant. I lower my hand and hold my sander in between both, like it's the center of a prayer.

"You loved them at the nursery." He sits the lilac down by his feet.

"No Garrett today?"

"He's in school."

"Oh, yeah, it's still early." I lift my arm but I'm not wearing my watch. A band of pale skin wraps my wrist. My shadow is short and squat. It's not even midday yet.

"No reason to keep track of time when you're off work."

Mr. Crowley's hat appears before his face does. He peeks over my fence. "Looking good out there."

I start to introduce them but Edward says they met a long time ago. "He keeps me on the right track."

"You're telling him how to do his job, Mr. Crowley?" In mock-admonishment I wag a finger at him.

"The young man can learn a thing or three from me."

"Everyone can learn a thing or three from you," I say.

Mr. Crowley touches the side of his forehead and draws his finger out to point at me.

When he moves farther into his yard, I mouth an apology to Edward.

"It's all good. He cares about you. He's... protective."

Now I really wonder what Mr. Crowley has been saying to Edward.

"When I stay late, he sticks pretty close to this fence. Must have a lot of weeding to do over there."

"I hope he's nice to you."

"I cut him some slack."

"Oh, God!" I cover my face.

"It's okay." He touches my shoulder and I drop my hands. "I've heard worse about the way I work."

Gianna's face flashes behind my eyes, and all of Edward's words, the ones I've tried so hard to submerge, float back to the surface. She left him. He slammed the door. She said he was too content in his mediocrity.

I look at Edward. Dirt stains his hands and sweat shines on his forehead. The smile he aims at Mr. Crowley's fence is patient and takes me back to yesterday's game. Edward cheering on his Dodgers, advising Garrett on his skateboard trick. My mind stretches back further and I remember that first image he drew of my garden, how it felt when I saw everything I could have sketched out on paper. There's nothing mediocre about him.

We stroll to my patio.

"I guess I'm going to have to invite my mom over. She'll want a picture of this."

"Are you close?"

"I wouldn't say that." I drop to the bench at my half-sanded table. "Sometimes I think we could be? I mean, we started out good. I remember as a kid, practically worshipping her. She's the reason I had you put strawberries in. She's always had them." My gaze drifts off toward the strawberry patch, no strawberries yet, just tiny leaves. "But now, I don't know if she's close to anyone. She's okay, I guess, when she's not with my dad. But together... It's depressing."

"Why's that?" He takes a seat on the opposite side of the table and I turn, pulling my leg over the bench, to face him.

"Because they shouldn't be together. They shouldn't have been together for the last fifteen years, and when I think about..." I pause as Edward's gaze falls to his hand wrapped around his fist, resting on the table. He appears to have stopped listening.

"Go on."

"That's it. We're not close. My mom and I. Or my dad. None of us are close. We're like people who occasionally get together because we have to. Out of obligation, I guess. I guess that's why they're still married. Obligation." I try to picture my mother walking out, my father slamming the door behind her, but the image eludes me.

"After a while it's just..."

"It's just what?"

"It's..."

This is a different side of him, unable to complete a thought, but also unable to smile and change the subject. "It's...?"

"Nothing. I'm gonna go back to—"

"No." I hold a hand out to stop him from getting up. "Tell me what you were going to say."

With a sigh, he leans forward again. His lips barely move. "Whenever I talk to you—" his voice sounds like he's speaking over a telephone line with a bad connection "—it's like I'm confessing something."

I swallow. The air between us thickens. Edward traces the wood grain, circles a knot.

"So confess something."

His finger stills. "Not that. I won't talk about that."

"Then something else."

"All right." He looks up and fastens his eyes to mine. "Remember when we went to the nursery and you said it was weird how we knew each other but didn't? I knew what you meant. I've been remembering things." The near-indistinguishable falter in his voice and his pause trip my heart. "From back then. Things with you." He doesn't so much as glance away from me. "I can't really stop, and I've been wondering... if I'd done things different."

"Done what?"

"Like..." He cracks a half-smile. "I wimped out at asking you to prom." Now he drops his eyes. I think I do, too. I don't know what I'm seeing.

I lose my breath. "Wait..." My limbs stiffen. My arms are branches, my legs a trunk, rooting into the ground. I'm buried under his confession, in his version of our past.

"I couldn't do it. I wanted to, but..."

A rock that feels the size of a boulder forms in my throat and it hurts going down. Its rough edges scrape the insides of my chest. I can confess to him that I would have said yes, that I had a crush on him back then and since he's been around again, my crush has returned. It's under my skin and whenever he's nice to me it stings, but when he says things like he just did, it consumes, my reality rearranged with one sentence.

Even with all these feelings in my chest, my head, behind my eyes, I push out, "No, you didn't." My skin all over is static. If he were to touch me, I could shock his finger.

"Why would I make that up? It's embarrassing."

"Well, but... then, why didn't you ask me?" My heart is the biggest thing in my body, pounding away at every inch of me, my fingertips, my toes. I'm that teen again, that teen with a crush. And I'm adult me, too. I'm both variations of myself at once, across from Edward.

"You would've rejected me."

I close my eyes and shake my head. "What—what makes you think I would've rejected you?"

"You were... aloof."

"Aloof? Why, because I didn't fawnall over you like everyone else? Because I didn't touch you every time I saw you?"

He sighs and backs away a little. "You hardly ever looked at me. You, like, avoided me. And whenever we talked, I started the conversation. And then you'd shut down or just disappear."

"Because I was nervous. You made me nervous."

"Well, so was I."

My eyes must widen. I bring a hand to my neck, then slide my fingers to my face and bite on my pinky nail.

"But, I'm right," he says. "You would've turned me down. I tried to ask. Too late"

The past deceives. It's a mangled mix of everyone I've been around, our memories ever-reshaping, never solid. Interactions and experiences I thought I'd known so well, that played the same with the same outcome every time they'd paraded through my mind, I hadn't really known at all. And with what I say next, I might be doing the same to his memories.

"I... wouldn't have."

His mouth opens. His eyes morph from circles to a squint, darts aimed directly into my soul. "Bella." He sort of laughs, then falls serious again. I hold his gaze, waiting for his next move, his next question, thought, declaration.

He stands up. "I have a job to do for you." He leaves me with an out of control head and heart.

This is how it happens, mixed up memories. Someone does something they don't mean to do, like leave a reeling table. If he hadn't confessed what he had, I would think he wanted to walk away from me. But now I know, he's walking away to collect his thoughts. The same reason I let him go, so I can collect mine.

A newly-changed art room memory crashes into me with a voice. Edward's voice. "Are you going to prom?"

"Mike asked me."

Edward nodded, slow and distant-eyed.

"Mike Newton." I thought his pause meant he was trying to figure out which Mike.

His eyes came back to me, still distant. And then he swept his gaze away and down to his drawing tablet, more distant than ever.

That was it, the moment, the second, the heartbeat, that, like a confession, could have changed everything. If I hadn't mentioned Mike, if I'd answered with a Why do you ask? then my past, my future, my present would be something else.

I remember Edward's "I used to like you" on his first day here. He really did mean like, that kind of like, my kind of like. His words had made the hairs on the back of my neck stand tall, but I'd laid them to rest with the rationalization that he'd merely meant he'd liked me as a friend.

My head spins as I bring my sander to the nearest patch of peeling paint. I scrape back and forth, old wood made new again. My mind does the same, sloughing the dirt off old memories and searching for new truths.

Going to prom with Mike hadn't been awful, not even close. It wasn't the momentous occasion I'd sometimes let myself dream about in those dark, quiet moments before sleep, but it had been fun. No pressure, no expectations. I was relaxed with him, maybe because he'd hardly crossed my mind until the day he squatted down beside my table in the cafeteria, pushed his hair out of his eyes, and asked if I'd go with him. That would have been at least a week before Edward raised the subject.

If Edward had asked me… A dose of relief seeps through me, numbing the shock.

I already had a date. I would not have had, at eighteen, the boldness to cancel on Mike and go after what I really wanted. I would have felt compelled to honor my commitment.

If Edward had asked me, I would have had to turn him down. All those years of imagining that very moment, only to say, "I'm sorry, I can't…" It would have crushed me.

I get to my feet and keep sanding. My wrist, elbow, and shoulder ache. Sawdust coats the patio floor. Sweat pastes my tank top to my back.

Edward moves into my line of sight. He stands at the opposite end of the table, a sheet of sandpaper in hand. He holds it out to me and I give him a small smile and a nod. He gets to work.

The breeze is cool but the sun fierce. My shoulders and the back of my neck burn. We sand until we meet in the middle, our knuckles bumping as we scrape away the final streaks of color.