The Vow

Chapter 5

Annie

They all forget to say thank you. Every single kid who walks through the door manages to remember we have an unlimited sample policy, though. Sometimes a mom will squeeze out some gratitude with a nudge or a What do you say? after I’ve handed over twenty or so mini spoonfuls of custard, but in general, the adults don’t do much better.

And in general, I just smile and keep scooping.

But right now the smile is slipping. The arches of my feet ache, and my arm is burning, and I’m still several hours away from the end of my shift.

Reed warned me when I clocked in this morning that it would be nuts. “Swim camp starts today,” he said.

I continued wrapping the apron straps around my waist, double-knotting them in the front. “Okay.”

“That means right after three it’ll get crazy.”

“How crazy?” I stood watching him peel the brown wrapper from the coins, waiting to see if he’d say more, and noticing his paint-speckled hands. For a moment I thought he was an artist and felt almost giddy. I even opened my mouth to say something stupid, but then I remembered he’d mentioned painting his grandma’s house.

“Really crazy,” he said, and let the curl of paper fall into the trash. The nickels clattered as he dumped them into the register.

“Got it. Really crazy.”

And right when I thought he was going to say more than a couple of words to me, he left to go turn the OPEN sign around and sweep the porch.

A week of working side by side, and he still isn’t looking me in the eye.

He was right about the crazy. Since 3:07 we’ve had a steady stream of overtired, undersupervised middle schoolers who reek of chlorine. The one in front of me now—a tubby little freckle-face with bloodshot eyes—looks unnaturally swollen, like he’s swallowed a gallon of pool water.

I hold out his mint chip double scoop, and he stares at me like my head is on fire. He won’t even take the cone, but I keep my hand outstretched, smiling.

“I said waffle cone!” he whines.

He didn’t.

His lip quivers, and I wonder for the thirtieth time today why I’m here and not answering the phone at my dad’s office, or even better, organizing the tubes of acrylic paint on display at Myrna’s Country Craft.

Why did Lena choose this job? Wouldn’t she have rather worked for Dad too? But she and Dad argued a lot. That much I do remember. So maybe she didn’t want to make his coffee and take his messages and buy his socks. Their arguing—that was why the police spent so long calling her a runaway.

Maybe she liked how custard makes people happy.

The lips stops quivering, and the kid glares.

Okay, makes some people happy.

I exhale, grip the lip of the countertop with my free hand, and hold the smile. Soup is pretty chill, but the one thing he rants about is customer service, and I’m not losing my job over this little turd. Freckle-face sticks his lip out a little farther and sniffs. I blink, waiting with my arm out. If I stand here long enough, maybe he’ll take it or at least ask me to make him a waffle cone. Maybe even say please.

I don’t hear Reed come up behind me, but suddenly he’s got one hand on my shoulder, the other prying the cone from my grip. I let him take it. His hand slides down over my shoulder blade and stays there for a second before he dumps the sugar cone into the trash and begins scooping more mint chip into a waffle cone.

“Sorry,” I mumble, feeling scolded. “I was sort of in a daze there.”

“It’s okay,” Reed says.

Freckle-face gives me a smug smile.

I turn to Reed, my back still burning where his hand was. I start to explain that it wasn’t my fault, that I didn’t actually screw up the order, but stop myself. It doesn’t matter. We both know the customer is always right even when the customer is a lying, chlorine-marinated brat, and I’m not so sure Reed wouldn’t rat on me if he thought I was being rude to the customers.

“Yeah, I’m sorry,” I repeat and wipe my hands on my apron even though they’re not wet.

Reed gives his glasses a nudge upward. “You get used to it. The kids, I mean. The noise.”

I nod. I doubt it. My house is quieter than death, and I hate it, but it’s a madhouse in here. Right now I just want to be alone in my room, listening to bluegrass and painting sea anemones.

“Where are the tickets?” an elderly woman barks, tapping the old-fashioned ticket dispenser. It’s a glossy red box with rounded corners and slots like a vintage toaster. Soup calls it the Relic.

“It’s broken, ma’am,” Reed says. “The line is there.” He points to the end of the snaking procession of people.

The Relic busted an hour ago, right as the hordes descended from swim camp. The three of us—Reed, Flora, and I—have been shouting “Next in line” instead, trying to keep shoving matches from breaking out.

I glance over at Flora. She’s older than my mom and looks like an aging showgirl, but I like her. I like how she teases Reed. Her hair is a metallic burgundy, the exact same shade as her lips, and she’s wearing gold hoops the size of CDs that stretch her holes in her lobes into half-inch slits. It’s hard not to stare at them.

Flora winks at me and chews her gum, unfazed by the chaos. According to Soup she’s a lifer: scooping at Mr. T’s for decades and perfectly happy to keep at it until she dies. Or retires, I guess. She told me last shift that she goes straight from Mr. T’s to the Lucky Lil’s slot machines every night, so I’m guessing her retirement plans involve some luck.

Reed hands freckle-face the waffle cone, and the kid turns and leaves without a word.

“Next in line!” he calls, then to me, “Do you need a break?”

I shake my head. It’s not my turn, and even if it was, it doesn’t seem like a good time to leave them with the low-blood-sugared mob.

He squints at me for a moment, and I almost think he’s actually going to hold my gaze and not look away.

“Next in line,” Flora’s phlegmy voice rattles, and his head jerks around before either of us can acknowledge the moment with I don’t know what—A nod? A smile? Probably not.

He takes a banana-split order from a girl with dripping pigtails, and I call, “Next in line,” but my voice gets swallowed up. Nobody steps forward, so I do it again. This time a sunburned girl wearing a towel like a toga steps forward and asks for samples of watermelon, mango, lime, and tangerine sorbet.

I won’t be admitting it to Mo any time soon, not with the I told you so waiting for me, but working here is harder than I thought it would be. The aching biceps, cold-cracked knuckles, swollen feet, sore back. I wonder if Lena’s back hurt too.

At the end of every shift I’ve dragged myself home and curled up in bed with a romance novel. Mo, of course, makes fun of them, calls them Novocaine for the estrogen-hampered soul, but I don’t care. I love them anyway, and not for the sex, either. It’s the stories. They’re full of perfect people and chivalry, and at the end, the right thing always happens.

The crowd thins until it’s the usual weekday evening trickle. Flora leaves for Lucky Lil’s an hour before closing, rubbing the Mr. Twister mustache on her way out. “For good luck,” she calls over her shoulder.

I nod. I kind of envy her for the superstition. That takes optimism.

I’ve spent the week imagining talking to Flora about Lena. She must remember her. She’s the only employee still around from seven years ago. But each time I work up the nerve, something happens. She takes a smoke break. Or the place fills up and we’re too swamped to see straight. Or Reed’s there, and I definitely don’t want him to know. Or it doesn’t feel right. I haven’t actually said Lena’s name in . . . I don’t know. Years.

Why would I? Nobody wants to be reminded of Lena. She’s a symbol of horrific truths—that unthinkable things can happen in our quiet town, that a beautiful girl can disappear and be gone forever. People don’t want to think about that. It’s easier to pretend she just never existed and that there isn’t a gaping hole where she used to be, so big an entire family could fall into it.

I’ll talk to Flora another time. Maybe tomorrow.

Closing time comes, Reed flips the sign, and I start wiping things down.

“How long is swim camp?” I ask, pushing my rag over the countertop in big, circular sweeps.

Reed holds up a finger. He’s cashing out the register, counting change.

“Oh, sorry.”

“It’s okay. If it’s like last summer, it’ll be three weeks of insanity.”

I nod and keep wiping. I don’t think I came to Mr. Twister once last summer. Or the summer before. Actually, I know I didn’t. Mo hates it, and who else would I go with?

Not my parents.

They used to take us to Mr. Twister when there was an us to take. Lena and Mom and I would get cones, and Dad would get a milk shake. Unless we were celebrating something, and then they’d let us order one of the Colossal Twister Towers or a Triple Banana Split Supreme to share.

Over the years, my memories of Lena have gone from razor-sharp to blurred to nearly vapor, but I do remember her here. In the corner booth. Me sitting next to her, and Mom and Dad sitting across, and all four of us devouring a mound of custard like lions over a kill. Lena let me have the cherry, but I don’t know if it was because she didn’t like them or if she knew I loved them. Seems like I should know that.

There’s a lot I don’t know. Mom would have answers, but I can’t ask. Was that family trip to Mr. Twister after one of her flute recitals? Or was it a good-report-card event? I can’t remember.

And her face. I can barely remember that, either. Waves of dark-blond hair, brown eyes, freckles—but the correct elements don’t always add up the right way. It makes me nervous to try, so I don’t let myself unless I’m at home and can stare at the silver-framed picture I keep on my desk. It’s her last school picture. Junior class.

To my knowledge, Mom and Dad haven’t been to Mr. Twister in eight years, since the night Dad swerved into the parking lot, tires squealing. We were on our way home from my fifth-grade Thanksgiving production. I’d been the perfect pilgrim, but I knew we weren’t stopping for banana splits.

Dad went inside “to get some bloody answers.” Mom and I waited in the car, as instructed, watching our breath fog up the windows. We didn’t talk. We were like zombies or whatever paranormal creatures have brains and lungs but no hearts.

It’d been three months already, but nothing had been added to the case since the first day. She was last seen walking on the shoulder of Highway 22, the stretch between Mr. Twister and the library. She’d been going from work to her SAT prep class. It wasn’t too far—fifteen minutes, maybe—but the trees on both sides made it dark. And that was it. The end that we knew.

The police had stopped coming by the house to give Dad updates long before that night. According to conversations not meant for my ears, they’d interviewed half the population of Hardin County and still had nothing. It happened this way with runaways, they said.

For Mom, finding nothing meant hope, a reason to brush her teeth and remulch her flower beds.

But for Dad, it was unacceptable, evidence of half-assed police work in a backwoods hole of a community that needed to catapult itself into this century before he sued every last law enforcement officer in the county. I’d heard it more than once. It was usually shouted into the phone, though I remember hearing it delivered to an unfortunate detective who stopped by the house to deliver the latest batch of nothing.

That night while he interrogated everyone in Mr. Twister—probably standing right where I’m standing now—Mom and I sat silently, me still wearing my stiff pilgrim’s bonnet that smelled like glue, Mom gripping a cornucopia of plastic vegetables.

When he came out twenty minutes later, Dad wasn’t shouting anymore. I guess he was done. He was silent all the way home, but from my spot at the top of the stairs, with my face pressed between the banisters, I heard him telling Mom what he’d learned: no secret boyfriends, no wild behavior, no motives, no runaway plans. Nothing.

I was too young to be told what nothing really meant and too stupid to guess. Mo calls it naive, but he wasn’t there. It was trickier than that. It was wanting to know, being on the edge of understanding, then backing away intentionally.

Ten should have been old enough—I’d been taught not to talk to strangers because there were bad people in the world who kidnapped children and did bad things to them. Bad things. Those words made my stomach twist and my skin tingle, even though I didn’t know what they meant.

But that didn’t have anything to do with Lena. Those warnings were strange and thrilling, like ghost stories and the psychopath-on-the-loose tales told at sleepovers, but I knew those weren’t real. The gaping hole where Lena used to be—that was real. The color and smell of her that was only a smudge now, the roar of silence in our house where she used to be, the tragic stares that followed me around—that was all real.

Once the investigation was over, the police stopped coming by, which meant the steady flow of curious neighbors with their cashew chicken casseroles and their gentle, probing questions dried up. Understanding came in tissue-thin layer over layer: whispers, sad smiles, shoulder squeezes from teachers I barely knew. People reached for their children like they couldn’t help it when my family shuffled into our church pew. Girls at school got quiet when I joined them.

The shame was chilling. Lena was missing, and even if I didn’t know how it was my fault, the rest of the world did.

Eventually, TV dragged from the shadows what I was refusing to see. There was that CSI episode I watched at a friend’s house, then a story on the evening news before Mom could scramble for the remote. And then that Amber Alert for a thirteen-year-old girl in Louisville screamed over every channel and radio station in Kentucky and seemed to ring in my ears for days. That one ended with a naked, broken body found on the banks of the Ohio River, my mother locking herself in her room and sobbing loud enough that I couldn’t sleep, and my father going on a week-long hunting trip to Tennessee.

But that was somebody else’s sister. Not mine. Wasn’t it?

And finally. It clicked, like machinery sliding into place, an old-fashioned key with notches and grooves. Lena was the first half of one of those stories. Half an episode, half a thirty-second news report, half a tragedy. Nothing didn’t mean nothing at all. There was something horrific waiting at the end of this story, just like all those others. Nothing just meant we didn’t know which grotesque ending was hers. Ours. Yet.

Striking a deal with God seemed like my only hope. So I stopped eating. I told Him I’d start again when He brought Lena back. Back then he was still worth a capital letter at the beginning of his name.

I didn’t know then that already-skinny nine-year-olds aren’t allowed to go on hunger strikes. Four weeks and twenty-three pounds later, my parents yanked me out of fourth grade and checked me into the psychiatric ward of Hardin Children’s Hospital. A nurse put a tube into my neck, and I had to watch the calories pour into my vein all day long, wondering whether God considered the tube a deal breaker or not.

The child psychiatrist tried to get me to confess to hating my body, then pursed her lips and gave me soft, sad eyes when I wouldn’t.

But why would I hate my body?

Her attention-seeking-behavior theory made even less sense. It was the opposite. I wanted to disappear, but that fact didn’t have anything to do with my deal with God either.

Then she tried to convince me I was punishing my parents for giving up on Lena. I already disliked her, with her frizzy bun and coffee breath, but now I had a reason to hate her. She wasn’t allowed to talk about my parents like she knew them. They weren’t moving on. They were moving into themselves—away from each other and me and the world. Mom was sure that Lena was still alive, living with hippies or polygamists or devil worshippers or whoever. And Dad had transformed from a man who built birdhouses for Mom’s garden to a man who kicked holes in walls. Why would I want to punish them more?

I would die, the shrink finally told me, if I didn’t start eating.

I pretended not to hear her. I didn’t tell her that God would save me. I knew he would, though. Not because I needed saving, but because he was going to bring back my sister.

It wasn’t until spring that I started eating again. Hunters found Lena’s body in the woods only forty miles south. Of course nobody told me the details, but I read them years later online. Naked, raped, strangled, discarded, frozen, thawed, and gnawed on by wild animals. That was how god brought her back to me.

The frizzy-bunned shrink took full credit for my recovery, and I never told her or my parents about my pact with god. Just Mo, when we were fourteen.

He listened, then asked who won.

“Won? It wasn’t a contest, Mo. It was a deal.”

“A deal? But what does God have to gain from you not eating?” he asked.

“I don’t know. That’s not really the point.” I’d expected sympathy, not a critique. But I’d forgotten that Mo thinks first and feels later. “It made sense at the time. I was ten, Mo.”

“So you started eating again because you realized God doesn’t make deals?” he asked.

“No. I started eating because there is no god.”

He said nothing. Then finally, “Hmm.”

“What does that mean?”

“What if you’re wrong? What if there is one and he just doesn’t make deals? Or what if he does make deals and the feeding tube was breaking it? What if you lost?”

“It wasn’t a contest.”

“Sounds like one to me.”

“Forget it.”

But he didn’t forget it. The next day he slid an envelope into my locker with a bumper sticker inside—one of those Christian fish symbols with feet and DARWIN written across it. The accompanying note said: Sorry. I’m an ass. You’ve totally earned atheism.

That’s something Mo can do better than anyone else: apologize. It isn’t that easy for most people to say sorry and mean it, but I knew he meant it.

At the time, I didn’t have a car, and I was pretty sure Mom wouldn’t let me use her Tahoe to mock Christianity, so I put the sticker on my bathroom mirror instead. My parents never asked about it.

“Why don’t you head out,” Reed says. My head snaps up and into the present. “I can finish,” he adds.

I stare down at the rag in my hand. How long have I been wiping circles with this same dirty rag? He must think I’m crazy. I glance at the clock. “It’s okay. My ride won’t be here for another ten minutes.”

Having Mo pick me up is the only thing keeping Mom and Dad from freaking out completely about the fact that I’m working here.

Reed tosses me a fresh rag. “You want to do the booths then?”

“Sure.” I drop my mine into the murky-watered blue bucket and take the warm rag to the first booth. “So, how many summers have you worked here?” I ask.

“Last year was my first.”

I give him a moment to elaborate or ask me a question, but he doesn’t. Not surprising since so far I’ve learned only what I can see:

He drinks his already-too-sweet Mr. Twister iced teas with two packets of sugar.

He listened to Flora gripe about her landlord, then let her make fun of his geeky glasses.

He cleans the geeky glasses with the corner of his apron, and for just the moment that his face is bare I think his eyes could tell stories. But then he puts them back on, and he’s closed again.

He looks vaguely uncomfortable when Rachel or Clara or one of the other college girls tries to flirt with him.

The cookbooks he reads during his break aren’t the kind that my mom has, with pictures of bubbling casseroles, promising meals with five ingredients in less than ten minutes. The one he left on the table in the back had recipes with a zillion ingredients, half of which I’d never heard of, and whole chapters on the making your own cheese and discerning the quality of truffle oil.

“What’s culinary school like?” I ask.

“It’s hard. Harder than I thought it would be.”

“Do you like your classes?”

“Yeah.”

“My mom always says she wishes she went to culinary school,” I say. “She watches Top Chef like it’s her job.”

“Does she work?”

“She used to teach Victorian Lit at U of L.”

“Really?” Suddenly he’s interested, and I’d kill for something intelligent to say. Our eyes lock. He’s wondering if I’m more than just some dumb blonde. I look away.

“She doesn’t teach anymore?” he asks.

I tuck the hair that’s escaped my ponytail behind my ear. What to say?

She went on sabbatical after Lena disappeared and then just never went back. She was always going to. I can’t remember exactly when we stopped hearing next year, but it was no longer a question we asked.

“She’s working on a book,” I say, though I don’t actually believe this. She talked about writing some poet’s biography a few years back, but unless planting peonies is research for the book, the biography project is on hold.

“I think your ride’s here,” Reed says.

I hadn’t noticed the sound of the truck pulling in, but I can hear the familiar grumble now. I pull back the blinds and peer out into the dark parking lot. Sure enough, there’s Mo. He was stoked about the chauffeuring arrangement since he’s without wheels otherwise. Who knows what he’s been up to since he dropped me off this morning, but judging from the bug carnage on my grille, it was far away. Last shift he drove out to Mammoth Cave with Bryce.

Mo flashes his brights, my brights, into the shop, then lays on the horn, two long blasts. Nice. Heaven forbid he have to wait for a whole minute.

“Go,” Reed says. “I’ll finish up.”

“You sure?” I’m already untying my apron.

“Of course.”

I glance up and he’s watching me. My fingers fumble with the knot at my waist, but I can’t seem to wriggle my thumbnail into the center. How did this thing get pulled so tight?

He squints, gives a half smile. “You need some help with that?”

“I’ve got it,” I say, finally looking down.

I chuck the apron in the dirty linens bag and give him an awkward wave good-bye, but he’s not looking anymore. He’s moved on to fiddling with the ice machine.

“All right,” I say. He’s elbow-deep in ice. Maybe if he looked at me again I could see the amber flecks in his brown eyes, and maybe I could say something clever enough to make him smile again.

The horn blares and Reed raises an eyebrow.

I shake my head. “I guess I’m going home.”