The Girl Who Chased the Moon: A Novel - By Sarah Addison Allen Page 0,39
my daughter did to you. But you can’t have Emily.”
Chapter 9
Late Monday afternoon, Julia was walking home from the post office, a bundle of mail in her arms. She was reeling from the news she’d just received.
As she turned the corner to Shelby Road, she lifted the postcard from the top of the bundle again.
She still couldn’t believe it.
The postcard was from Nancy, one of her best friends in Baltimore. Because Julia couldn’t afford a phone in her apartment while living here, once a month or so Nancy would write with what was going on with Julia’s old group of friends—a rowdy group of young professionals who drank cocktails and talked a lot without saying very much. Julia had suspected that they’d been popular kids in high school, and she liked that they thought she was one of them. This particular postcard had thrown Julia for loop. On it, Nancy—whom Julia didn’t even know was seeing anyone—had written that she had suddenly gotten married. She’d also written that their friend Devon had moved to Maine and their friend Thomas was taking a job in Chicago. Nancy promised to give Julia all the details as soon as she got home from her honeymoon in Greece.
Her honeymoon.
In Greece.
Julia hadn’t expected everything to remain static while she was away, she just didn’t think things would change so much. And all at once. She thought there would be more to come back to. But now, when she left Mullaby and moved back to Baltimore, there would be hardly any friends to reconnect with. That had been part of the plan, part of what had been keeping her going.
She tried to rally. She still had her Blue-Eyed Girl Bakery dream. The bakery, after all, was the whole reason she was doing this, the reason she had confined herself to this hell for two years. Growing apart from her friends had always been a risk. Blank-slate friendships were thin and temperamental. She knew that. There was no history there to cement people together, for better or worse.
So she would just deal with this.
She’d dealt with losing much worse.
She heard a splashing sound, and looked down the sidewalk to see Emily in front of Vance’s house. There was a sudsy bucket by her feet, a sponge in her hand, and a large old car at the curb, a car that was steadfastly refusing to get clean despite Emily’s effort. And it was a lot of effort. Work-off-your-frustration effort.
Julia tucked the postcard into one of the catalogs in her bundle of mail, then walked over to Emily. She hadn’t seen her since Saturday and wondered if she and her grandfather were communicating any better, if Vance had finally told her everything. She stopped a few feet away from her. “Nice car.”
Emily looked up. Her fine blond hair, as usual, seemed suspended in midair, half up in a ponytail, half hanging down around her face. “Grandpa Vance is letting me drive it. His mechanic is picking it up tomorrow morning, but I pushed it out of the garage so I could wash it first.”
“I didn’t know Vance still had this.” Julia walked over to the car and leaned down to look in a dusty window. “It belonged to his wife, didn’t it?”
“Yes.”
Julia watched Emily scrub the hood for a few moments. “Have you talked to your grandfather?”
“Yes.” That one word conveyed all Julia needed to know. Emily used her forearm to push some hair out of her face, then resumed scrubbing. “I didn’t know it was going to be like this. But my mom knew. I’m sure that’s why she never came back, and why she never told me about this place. I’m beginning to think she wouldn’t want me here.”
Julia looked from Emily, to the car, and back again. If Julia had had a car at Emily’s age, she knew exactly what she would have done. Hell, she was even thinking about it now. “Planning to leave?”
Emily looked surprised that Julia had caught on so quickly. She shrugged. “I don’t have anywhere to go.”
“Well, if you’ll hold off for a little while, the Mullaby Barbecue Festival is this weekend. It’s a pretty big deal around here. Do you want to go with me?”
Emily didn’t look at her. “You don’t have to do this, Julia.”
“Do what?”
“Try so hard to be friends with me. My mom was cruel to you. You don’t have to be nice to me.”