Page 81 of Waking Olivia

Although, with the way Olivia looks right now, that might be the safest course of action.

Peter doesn’t takemy father’s seat at the end of the table. Instead, he sits next to my mom and leaves the seat for me. I guess he’s just trying to be respectful, but I wish he hadn’t. I’d kind of banked on talking to him about sports and ignoring Olivia entirely, but now he’s talking to my mom and Olivia’s beside me, so pretty that my eyes trip over her, stutter, stall, every time I look up.

Peter and my mom have an endless stream of things to talk about, things I didn’t even know they had in common. He’s in her book club, which I’d always thought was some female thing, and their mutual friend Tina, apparently, drinks too much wine and thinks her husband is having an affair. I guess I should have realized my mom had a life outside of us and the farm, but it’s weird to realize that her outside life overlaps to the extent it does with my boss’s.

I don’t like it.

“How’s school, Brendan?” Peter asks. “You gonna graduate on time?”

Brendan shrugs as if doesn’t matter when most of my salary is what’s paying his goddamn tuition. “I don’t know. Don’t see myself using that degree anyway.”

“Oh?” says Peter. “Why’s that?”

“I got a buddy who’s trying to line us up jobs with a bike tour company next summer. I’d rather do that than anything I could do with my degree.”

“Bike tours?” I ask. “If you’re going to piss away your time, why don’t you piss it away by helping around here?”Jesus I sound exactly like my father,bitter and demanding and unfair. I hate it and yet I’m still angry.

Brendan laughs.Laughs.“Right, because working on a farm is just as rewarding as biking through Europe.”

Even before Olivia, I’d have been angered by his response. But now I’m enraged, and it has far less to do with the farm than it does the fact that he has choices. If he wanted to, he could take Olivia out tonight. He could sit across from her in a restaurant and feast on the sight of her in that dress and wonder how the hell he got so lucky. He could be the one who takes that dress off of her when they get home. And most importantly, he could be the one to follow her when she leaves here next year.

I want those things. I want them so badly that when I imagine them, the way I am now, I feel a little unhinged. I lower my head, thinking about the busted engine I still need to fix and the climbs I’ll never climb and the girl across from me that I’ll never have, and it feels entirely possible that I may explode in a fit of rage, right here, at the unfairness of it all.

Brendan says something I don’t catch and he and Olivia exchange a look. He looks at her like he knows things, as if he’s privy to her secrets. If he ends up with her, I won’t be able to fucking stand it. I won’t.

I hear my text tone chime across the room and practically leap from the table. I just need to get away from all of them for two seconds, away from the idea of Brendan with Olivia, oranyonewith Olivia, before I lose it.

I walk slowly to the other room with my phone, checking the text mostly for show. It’s from Jessica, her tone breezy as if Tuesday night never happened. She wrote several times yesterday, asking if we could talk, which I ignored. I assumed she’d gone to Denver, but nope. Her text now says she’s on her way here.I have a little gift for your mom, she says,and then maybe the two of us can have a chat.

And here I thought my evening couldn’t get any worse.

56

Olivia

Will’s beenweird all through dinner. He seems angry, though at whom I’m not sure. And I’m a little angry at him too. Or actually, I’m just hurt. I knew me getting dressed up would change nothing, but I thought maybe … I don’t know what I thought. Will is as blind to me in a dress as he is to me in anything else, and it shouldn’t come as a surprise.

“Jessica’s coming over,” he sighs as he comes back to the table. “Apparently she got you a gift, Mom.” He looks at me warily.

“What’s the matter?” I ask.

“When I broke up with her, she made some accusations involving you.”

“Then I’ll just go home.”

“No,” says Dorothy hastily, “absolutely not. You’re not running off just because Jessica got the wrong idea.”

“There’s not time anyway,” Will says. “She’ll be here any minute now.”

“Let’s just tell Jessica she’s dating me,” Brendan says with a grin.

A flicker of anger crosses Will’s face. “No,” he says, his voice hard.

“I’ll go to the stables,” I suggest. I jump to my feet. “I can groom the horses a bit.”

“You’re in a dress,” Will objects, but I’m already on my way out the door.

What a disaster.

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