“That’s Nick and Kat Karras’s kid?” Mom says. “Josie’s Lucky?”
A warmth zips up my chest. “He wasn’t mine. We were just friends.” Good friends.
“Did you recognize him?” Mom asks without giving me a chance to respond. “I don’t think he recognized you.”
“He did,” I say, a little dazed.
“He’s been camped out here, watching the window for your U-Haul,” Evie murmurs, giving me a suggestive smile behind my mom’s back.
“Really would have liked to be warned about this before we showed up,” I say through pinched lips.
“Last time I saw him,” Mom muses, oblivious to Evie’s comment, “he was a snotty-nosed little punk with a head full of black curls. When did he grow up into a dark and disenchanted Holden Caufield?”
Evie snorts a short laugh. “A couple years after you guys left town? I call him Phantom of the Bookshop, because he’s in here all the time, brooding in the back.”
“I thought the Karrases moved?” I say, still stunned.
“They did,” Evie says. “Like I said, their business moved across the street.”
That’s not what I meant. I thought they moved out of town—gone. I had no idea he still lived here. All the times we’ve been in and out of Beauty for the occasional weekend over the past few years, I’ve never once seen him or heard about the Karrases.
“He was in that fire before we left town,” Mom says. “At the lake house.”
“His scars … ,” I murmur. The last time I saw him, it was about a week after the fire, and he was bandaged up, in the hospital, awaiting news about surgery. I remember his parents being worried, whispering with doctors when I’d come see him every afternoon at Beauty Memorial during visiting hours, but they said he’d be fine.
Mom and I left town in such a hurry, I never got to say goodbye.
“He had a lot of skin grafts,” Evie says. “I don’t know … I think it changed him, because he sort of withdrew after that. He’s been in and out of a little trouble ever since, but—”
“Whoa. What kind of trouble?” Mom interrupts.
“This and that. You know Beauty,” Evie says with a shrug. “Hard to know what’s gossip and what’s fact.”
“This town eats you alive, one way or another,” Mom says. “Hope he keeps his trouble out of this shop.”
“Don’t worry,” Evie assures her. “He just reads and sulks.”
I stare out the bookshop window, watching Lucky straddle an old red motorcycle parked across the street in front of a building with a sign that says: NICK’S BOATYARD. REPAIR AND MAINTENANCE. Matching his tattoo, an actual black cat sits in a patch of sunlight inside the boatyard’s office window.
How could that be the same boy I knew? Impossible.
As he straps on his Lucky 13 helmet, Mom clears her throat, catching my attention.
“Nope. Don’t even think about it,” she warns me.
“I was just looking out the window, jeez.” Is my neck warm? Grandma Diedre needs to invest in some modern AC in this stuffy, old shop.
“The Saint-Martin love curse is stronger here,” Mom insists. “Look at our record in Beauty. My grandfather kept three mistresses in a hotel across town. My dad left my mom for a business deal in California. My sister Franny … well”—she turns to Evie—“you know what happened to your own mother.”
“Mom,” I say sharply. Ugh. Talk about foot-in-mouth disease, my mom has it.
“It’s fine,” Evie says.
But is it? Evie’s father died of a stroke last year. He spent a couple of days in the hospital but didn’t make it. The funeral was awful; that was the last time we were in town, in fact, just for a short time. Evie coped, but her mom kind of had a nervous breakdown and never really got over his death—and Mom thinks that’s why Grandma encouraged her to rent out their house and run off to Nepal, leaving Evie to move in with us in the above-shop apartment. Mom says Evie’s mom was always Grandma’s favorite. You would think two adult sisters with kids of their own would be long past the Petty Jealousy phase, but I guess it’s something you never grow out of.
“Regardless,” Mom says, a little embarrassed, “everyone in Beauty knows I got hit by the Saint-Martin curse too. Tried to leave town to outrun it and ended up a single thirty-six-year-old mom of a seventeen-year-old. Now just imagine what the curse will do to you here, Josie. Heartbreak city, that’s what.”