Lauren Blakely - Every Second With You

Then he prescribed folic acid and told me he’d see me again in a month or so. Weird that I was simply sent on my way. But maybe it’s not so weird. Maybe it’s normal.

But maybe it’s the pregnancy weirdness that makes me pick up the phone when my mom calls a few nights after my visit with Cam.

“Hello darling. I wanted to check in and see how things are going with school,” she says, making small talk. As if this is what we do.

“It’s great,” I say crisply.

“Learning anything fascinating about literature through the ages?”

I glance at Kristen and mouth my mom, and she pretends to run a knife across her throat. I nod, and laugh at Kristen. “Yes, everything is fascinating. What can I do for you?”

“I wanted to invite you out to sushi dinner. I thought we could talk about things, and that book.”

“I don’t know, Mom. I’m pretty busy. And I honestly don’t care about that book anymore,” I say, though as the words come out, my curiosity gets the better of me, and I grab my laptop and quickly search for the book I wrote. It’s on pre-order status on Amazon and releasing in December. I wait for my blood to boil, for anger to lodge in my chest. But I feel nothing, and it’s wonderful. This book doesn’t matter anymore. It truly doesn’t. Miranda is a cold-hearted bitch, and I have no clue what she’s going to do with the money, but I don’t care.

“Then can we talk about us?”

Us. There isn’t even an “us.” But there’s no time to answer because the most beautiful name in the world flashes across my screen.

My former pimp.

“I have to go,” I say to my mom and I click over.

“Who takes care of you?”

It’s that bold brash voice I miss more than I would ever admit to Trey.

A match lights in me, so quick and fast I can nearly smell the flint as anticipation ignites. I am a kid on Christmas morning. “What did you find out?”

“Got Google in front of you?”

“I do,” I say, my fingers poised above the keys as I cradle the phone, crooking my neck.

“I had my people track down the card maker, and there’s a business that places regular orders from Violet Delia Press for these cards every few months. The business uses them in its sandwich shop in San Diego. Their names are Debbie and Robert Kettunen, and just to make sure it’s your grandparents, I checked the name of their kids. They have a son named John.”

My father’s first name.

The earth stops its orbit, stalling to this moment in time. Taken as a speck of cosmic dust, this data point is no more significant than tomorrow’s expected temperature. In and of itself, Kettunen is simply a name. It’s not as if I learned I have a long-lost twin, or that I was secretly adopted. But still, it feels important to me, because a piece of my life that was missing has resurfaced.

A family I didn’t have.

“And check this out. The cafe they run? It’s on the beach and it’s called Once Upon a Sandwich. That’s just a damn good name for a sandwich shop, isn’t it?”

“It’s a great name,” I say, and when Cam gives me their number, I write it down, even though I’ve already Googled their cafe, and I’m clicking through pictures.

I thank Cam profusely then wave Kristen over. “Look!”

It’s all I can say, all I can manage as I stare, mesmerized, at the screen. On the website for the cafe there are pictures of all the cards they sent me over the years. The cards must have been used for menus, too. Then there’s a photo of my Nan and Pop standing on the front steps of the cafe they own, beneath a red and white awning. His arm is draped over her shoulder, his hand skimming her curly blond hair. She has lines on her face, her eyes crinkle at the corners and I can’t tell what color they are, but she looks happy as she smiles for the camera, a short red apron tied at her waist. He’s balding and has a sharp nose, but he has the same tanned, weathered and delighted look.

I point to the screen, but I can’t speak, because the memories spring free, set loose from the dark corners of my mind, colliding in a carousel of images—spending days upon days at their house in the summers, my parents nowhere to be seen, as I ran along the beach, and swam in the ocean, and told stories after I made sandcastles with them.

These people.

I’m back in time, and the salty ocean breeze skims my arms, the warm rays of the sun beat down, and their voices fill my ears.

Voices I haven’t heard in years. Faces I haven’t seen since I was young.

It’s not as if I repressed the memories. I simply had no way to access them. The key was missing, and I couldn’t open the drawer where they were kept. Now, the drawer spills over with images, with voices, and laughter, and breezes, and nights eating pizza on their deck, and learning to swim.

That’s what I remember. And I remember this, too—no one was fighting, no one was fucking, and no one was asking anything more of me than I could give.

“They’re adorable,” Kristen says, wrapping her arm around me, and pulling me in close. “They look like totally cool people. Not just weird creepy grandparents with blue hair and smelly clothes. But they look like real people. The kind I’d cast to play the cool grandparents in a movie where the girl reconnects with them,” she says, brushing a strand of hair behind my ear as she reaches for my phone. She presses it into my palm. “Call them.”

I swallow tightly, trying to contain the lump in my throat. “I don’t know what to say,” I croak out.

“Start with hello.”

It’s eight in the evening here, so it’s five in California. I dial, and for some reason I feel like my future hangs in the balance as I wait for the first ring.

Then someone picks up, and in the background I hear the bustle of a restaurant—plates being stacked, cooks shouting orders, and the chatter of patrons. In a bright and happy voice that sounds like sunshine, a woman speaks. “Welcome to Once Upon a Sandwich. This is Debbie. How may I help you this fine Tuesday evening?”

I open my mouth to speak, but words don’t come. Kristen squeezes my hand, and that small gesture somehow reconnects my vocal cords. “Hi. This is Harley. I think I’m your granddaughter, and I just got all your birthday cards.”

I hear a crash as the phone clatters to the ground and there’s a shriek, then more noises, and that voice again. “My city girl!”

City girl.

Like the cards said. Like the stories they promised to tell me.

“I guess that’s me? I’m the city girl in the stories?”

“That’s you, oh my god, is it really you? After all these years? I never thought we’d hear from you again.”

And I’m laughing, and crying. “Well, that makes two of us, because I never even realized you were trying to reach me. I didn’t get any of your cards until a few days ago.”

“Happy belated birthday then, Harley. Those are your stories.”

“My stories?”

“You made up all those stories the summer you lived with us when you were six. You used to go to the beach and build sandcastles, and ask us to make up stories with you, so together we created all these tales about living in the city and coming to the sand. And we wrote them all down, and you made us promise to share them with you every year on your birthday.”

“And you did,” I say, and there’s something like reverence in my voice, because it feels like a miracle, in some small way, that an adult in my life kept a promise.

* * *

“You’ll think this is silly. But I think it’s fate,” I whisper to Trey the next night as we lie in bed in the dark, tangled up in each other.

“What do you mean?”

“It just explains so much. My love of sandwiches, and the stories I write about animals.”

He raises an eyebrow, skeptical. “Really? I mean, I think it’s great that you found them, but how is that fate? Sandwiches are just sandwiches.”

I swat him with a pillow. “I’m not saying they’re soul-defining traits. But I also think there are parts of me that were shaped by them. And maybe this is a small part of me—that I like sandwiches. But it feels like something. And that I like fantastical stories about talking animals. And I think it’s the small parts of us that add up and make us who we are.”

I inch closer, my hands tucked together under my cheek. “But I also feel like I’m not just from her. I’m not just from Barb, and the way she tried to mold me. That, somehow, a piece of me held onto something good. Like, I was clutching something precious and fragile, and maybe all I could hold onto was sandwiches and animals, but I held onto them, Trey. Don’t you see? Even in some tiny way. Even though I didn’t know why and I never even thought about it, but they were there. In me. For years. And I never let them go. And maybe I’m more than my mom, more than my love-addicted heart, more than a call girl.”

“Even if you never talked to Debbie, you’re already more. You’re you, and you are everything in the world to me. Every. Single. Thing.”

As he spoons me and snuggles in close I try once more to explain what feels so wondrous to me. “It feels like hope,” I tell him.

Hope.

Harley

As September rolls into October, the colors flood the trees in Manhattan and the change in the calendar erases the heat, replacing it with sheets of chilly fall air. Then we slide into November, and my jeans don’t fit well anymore. I move up a size, hoping to stave off maternity clothes because those belly panels aren’t ugly beautiful. They’re just plain ugly.

Over the last few months, I’ve aced my English classes, helped Kristen find a new roommate—hint, it was easy, her boyfriend Jordan is moving in—and managed to attend several SLAA meetings each week, sharing victories and challenges each time.

Victories—not looking at that wretched book’s Amazon page again. Not caring about it. Donating to Goodwill the dress I wore to the gala with Mr. Stewart. Falling deeper in love with Trey Westin. I even meet his parents, and I’m surprised by how pleasant they are. They ask me all sorts of questions about school, and what I’m studying. I don’t think we ever discuss anything beyond school, but they smile and they’re cordial, and all things being equal, I don’t want to hurl my shoes at them like I would if I brought Trey to meet my mom.

Then there are the other things that happen.

Like learning that my grandmother’s favorite books are the Harry Potter series, that she loves big epic swoony movies that make her cry, that she was born and raised in San Diego, and that’s where my mom met my dad. But she doesn’t talk about him much, which is fine with me. Because he never tried to find me and she did try, so I don’t want to know him, I want to know her. She asks me if I’m eating healthy for the baby, and I say I am, and then she whispers in a hushed tone that if I want to feel the baby kicking I should drink a Coke. “The doctors won’t tell you this because they act like Coke is the worst thing in the world, but my oh my, does that get a little bugger jamming around in your belly.”

I laughed when she said that. “I haven’t felt the baby kick yet.”

“Soon, soon. And it’s like your whole world tilts on its axis. And time splits—everything that happened before the first kick and everything after.”

She’s had two babies—my dad, of course, and a daughter, who lives an hour away from her.

I never knew my dad had a sister.

Debbie and I talk several times a week, and we email, and we text, too. Which is the oddest thing. She’s sixty-two, and I know that’s not old, and I know that’s not unusual, but it’s odd for me to find pictures on my phone late at night of the sunset over the ocean, or of their dog chasing tennis balls, or just of the sandwich she made for dinner with the caption yum.

I know, too, that she likes to name her sandwiches after stories and animals—The Raccoon’s Tale, The Aardvark’s Fable, The Fox’s Yarn—and that we’re going to see them in two weeks.

Yes, we as in Trey and me. I’m leaving New York for the first time in years, after Trey finishes his last college class ever. But before I see them, I am seeing the person who kept me from them because I want to know why.

* * *

Trey

Harley shivers. The wind is fierce today, and late November is punishing us with frigid temperatures that are like ice lashing our skin. She wears a thick coat, and has a scarf wrapped around her neck, some kind of purple fluffy thing that Joanne knit for her.