Page 10 of The Summer I Destroyed You

When I’m trying. I’ve been trying.

Sort of. My phone vibrates in my back pocket and yeah, there’s a fucked up part of me that wishes it was one of Emerson’s demanding, funny, interesting texts. I was treading water, waiting to see what would happen when she got to town.

Now we know. So why does it feel like I’m still treading water?

* * *

Stella calls with the new ceiling tile selection just as I’m getting home.

“It’s nine on the East Coast,” I point out. “Shouldn’t you be off work?”

“Nine o’clock isn’t late when you work for Emmy,” she replies. “She’s lucky I adore her.”

“I’m struggling to believe that any employee of Emerson’s actually adores her,” I sigh, hanging my keys on the hook by the door.

“Don’t let her fool you,” Stella says with a smile in her voice. “She wants to scare people, but if she loves you, she’ll fight to the death on your behalf.”

That is exactly the kind of person I imagined Emerson was until I actually met her. Because she was demanding and often unreasonable, but anytime I had a genuine issue, she folded like a deck of cards. Hiccups in the schedule, delivery issues…she never gave me a moment of shit.

“Are you sure she just doesn’t happen to enjoy a fight?”

She laughs. “Let me tell you how I wound up working for her: my boss hit on me, I told a friend who then told Em, and two days later he was being escorted out by security because they’d found inappropriate materials on his computer.”

“That sounds like a lucky coincidence.” Or unlucky, given she wound up with a boss who’s making her work nights.

“You don’t know her well if you believe that was a coincidence. She paid someone in IT to check the guy’s search history. She’ll pay for the cleaning lady’s kid to get braces and buy a plane ticket for the security guard downstairs to visit his dying mom, but she makes me take the credit for it so nobody knows.”

“Yet you’re telling me,” I reply.

“Yeah, and she’d hate that,” she says. “But I just get the feeling you need to know.”

I wish I didn’t. My dislike was simple and uncomplicated five minutes ago.

Now, once again, it’s not.

7

EMMY

The problem with only having two living relatives is that you don’t feel you can afford to lose them, no matter how badly they treat you. That’s why my mother can treat me like crap as I drive her to the pre-surgical checkup and mostly get away with it. Why she can complain about my driving and what I’m wearing and tell me Jeff’s car is so much nicer than mine without me pulling over to the side of the road and telling her to walk. Because she’s all I’ve got.

“I’m not sure who you thought you were showing off to, renting a BMW,” she adds, though I imagine she already knows the answer: I wanted to impress her.

It’s fucking pathetic that I hoped for it in the first place. She was never going to be impressed. I could save the earth from an approaching asteroid, cure cancer, and win the Nobel prize, and she would not be impressed. She’d still manage to tell me how Jeff could have done it better.

Just give up, Emmy. I hear it over and over in my head. But what do I have left in the entire world if I do? And what does it say about me if I can’t convince the two remaining family members I’ve got to simply like me? Even if half the stuff my mother says is batshit crazy, I can’t seem to shake off this sense—one I’ve had since childhood—that she’s wiser than me, that her hatred of me must have some merit.

And Liam seemed to confirm it yesterday. Good to know my initial assessment of you wasn’t overly harsh. I don’t know where he gets off acting like I’m the villain here. He knows he seduced Julie into making an idiotic decision. But it left me feeling, just as my mother does, that there’s something awful inside me, something that can’t be cured.

After I drop my mother off, I drive back to Elliott Springs and park in front of the town’s dismal administrative offices. My steps slow as I near the diner, a place that holds more bad memories than good. This is where Bradley Grimm once held court. On the rare nights when my mom would send me here to pick up dinner, laughter would explode from the back of the room. “How many burgers do you think she eats at once?” Bradley would ask her posse. “God, if I were that fat, I’d have my mouth sewn shut.”

I push the memory out of my head as I force myself toward the booth where the mayor eats lunch every single day with his cronies.

“Mayor Latham,” I say with a wide smile as I walk up. “I didn’t mean to interrupt. I just saw you sitting here and wanted to say hi.”

“Emerson!” he cries, with what appears to be genuine pleasure. “Just the person we were discussing. Fellas, this is Emerson Hughes. She’s with the company that’s putting in the new storefronts and has some plans for Lucas Hall as well.”

He introduces me to his two dining companions, members of the town council who are significantly older than me, thank God—they don’t know or care about who I once was. “Nice to meet you both,” I reply. “I assume I’ll be seeing you all at the Lucas Hall hearing?”

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