Straight Up by Lisa Samson

Author:Lisa Samson [Samson, Lisa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-55054-5
Publisher: The Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2011-08-10T04:00:00+00:00

Georgia

For some reason the sight of my cousin on her cell phone to some rich client—the way she pushed back her sunglasses atop her head, the way her feet looked so pretty in those shoes—sent me over the edge.

“You’re wearing your mother’s clothes, aren’t you, Fairly?”

I don’t know why I just let it fly out of my mouth like that when the realization struck. Fairly flinched. And I kept going. “You go on and on about vintage, but I recognize that dress. Aunt Bette wore it at my mother’s funeral.”

I pointed at it like it held leprosy within its weave, and Fairly blanched to a shade so white, so eerie, I shivered.

Then she ran out of the room, half the person she had been.

I honestly hated myself in that moment. I saw what I had become, my own rude pettiness a spotlight on the true state of my pathetic existence. Scum.

Ten minutes later she returned with a man.

The little brat. I didn’t know she had that much fight in her, and if I wasn’t so frustrated, I would have admired her pluck. But there he stood on the porch, a mere screen door separating us.

He gently pushed in the handle, and yes, I could have run, but my feet were smarter than their owner. He dipped his head into the room first, the dreadlocks now gone, the curly hair cut close to his scalp. But the eyes shone just the same. Blue like a summer sky above towering pine trees.

“Georgia?”

I couldn’t speak. And no words came to mind. These people all knew what a washout I was. Fairly standing there with her hands on her hips, Uncle Geoffrey looking up from his documents at the dining room table, tortoise-shell reading glasses low on the bridge of his nose. And Sean. Sean knew the truth.

“Hi, Sean.”

He walked over, and he wanted to hug me, even reached out his hands, but settled for a small rub on my upper arm. “Thanks for agreeing to see me.”

I daggered Fairly with my eyes. She shrugged like a little girl trying to make up, apologetic smile pinching her mouth, eyebrows raised.

Aged afternoon sunlight spilled across the floor and traveled up to pool on the couch. I fell into it. What? What? Speak? Cry? Run? What?

“Nice shoes, Sean.”

“They’re practical.”

“You look good.”

He blushed, burning the caramel of his skin. He inhaled in soft, windy eighth notes. He seemed in a perpetual flinched state, hands crammed in his pockets, head pushed down between his shoulders.

And I saw it. I saw what I had done.

I took something so beautiful and treated it like a rarely used item in the back of the kitchen drawer. Like a rolling pin. A nutmeg grater. An extension cord or a pastry brush. Stay in the drawer until I take you out. Come back when I say so and not before. Only this wasn’t some object, this was a man with a beautiful heart and an extraordinary gift—a one-in-a-million man—a rare pearl. I always said, in my darkest moments, “But I’m only hurting myself.

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