September 21, 2009 Potter B&B
“You’ll never believe who emailed me,” Joey said as she helped Bessie wash the lunch dishes.
“Random House? Did they have an opening after all?”
“I wish. No, Pacey sent me an email.”
Bessie’s eyebrows shot up. “Pacey Witter?”
“You know another Pacey?”
“Point.” Bessie turned her attention back to a plate as Joey hung a coffee mug in its proper place under the cabinet. “What’s he up to? I thought he was out east working on a fishing boat.”
“He’s working on a yacht now. I think.” Joey realized that Pacey never actually confirmed that in the email, and frowned. “Currently he’s in Mauritius, but I have no idea if that’s permanent or whatever. Probably just a temporary port of call.”
“Where?”
“It’s near Madagascar.”
“Oh. Uh-huh.” Bessie nodded, seeming a little distracted. “Did you remember to put the extra towels up in the Lavender bedroom? And what did Pacey have to say?”
“Not much. Sailing, living his life. Eating mangoes.” Joey waved a hand when Bessie gave her a surprised look. “I don’t know either. I guess I’ll email him back but I have even less going on, so I’m not sure what I’m going to even say.”
Bessie laughed. “Like that’s ever stopped the two of you before.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You forget that I remember your high school days. ‘You hang up first.’” She pitched her voice lower in an imitation of Pacey. “‘No, you hang up first.’ For hours. It was nauseating.”
Joey dropped her chin to glare at her sister. “It’s unfair I’m too young to remember your awkward high school days so I can’t throw these things back into your face.”
“Oh, my high school days were nowhere near as eventful as yours. Thank god.” Bessie shoulder-bumped her, still laughing. “But seriously, did you lay out the extra towels or not?”
“Yes, bossy, I did.”
“So does this mean anything?” Bessie asked. “Are you and Pacey friends again?”
“We were never not friends. We just…didn’t talk for a few years, is all. I still consider him to be…” Her extensive vocabulary failed her entirely in that moment. “Let’s stick with ‘a friend’ and leave it at that, please.”
She expected Bessie to launch another onslaught of teasing, but the sympathetic look her sister sent her way was almost worse. “Are you going to write back?”
“Yes,” Joey said, as she’d already decided that. “Not sure I have anything to tell him. ‘Good morning, Pacey, I hope you’re enjoying a beautiful island paradise probably surrounded by scantily clad women. Let me tell you all about my day! Today I woke up and changed all the sheets in the house. And then I sat on the dock and stared at the creek for an hour and tried not to think about how it’s been six months and nothing about Capeside has changed and I’m never going to find a job ever again and that beautiful career I built up in publishing is probably just somewhere in a dumpster by this point, and oh yeah, student loans suck. Then I had a muffin. The end.’”
“You forgot the bit where you helped me with the dishes,” Bessie said dryly.
Joey dried a plate and gazed emptily at the faint reflection she could see on its porcelain surface. “Scintillating.”
“You’re the writer of the family. You’ll make it sound better than that. I have faith in you.” Bessie gave her a half-hug, laughing when Joey grumpily toweled away the wet patch Bessie had left on her sleeve. “Scantily clad women, hm?”
“What?” Joey’s head snapped up. Had she said that bit out loud?
“Maybe leave that part out if you don’t want him to know you’re jealous.”
“I’m not—ugh.” The phone rang, offering an escape. Joey scrambled for it. “Potter B&B.”
Over at the sink, Bessie smirked.
Bessie’s guilt-trip, a skill she had honed to a fine point over many, many years and many of Joey’s tantrums, worked. After dinner, she reluctantly collected her laptop and flopped down on her bed. She forced herself to close all of the social media tabs and anything that might be a distraction and, perched on her stomach with her feet kicking in the air, her favorite position to write, she hit Reply and began to type.
To: [email protected] From: [email protected]
Hey, Pacey,
There, that much was easy to write.
Really surprised to hear from you. She paused with her fingers on the keys. Was that too standoffish? Impersonal? It wasn’t like they’d talked much in years. Whatever. She wrote on: But it’s nice. You’ll be pleased to know that I’m not writing this at 3:30 in the morning. It’s—she glanced at the clock—only 9:15 p.m., a respectable hour. I’d have to look up what time it is there for you.
There. A full paragraph. Not bad.
Speaking of where you are, could you please send some of that nice weather my way? It’s stupidly cold already, which is unfair for September. Just a couple days of warm sunshine should do us fine. Go ahead and send that when you can and I’ll pay you back for postage when I get a chance.
And you have to tell me more about this boat and the deckhand life. Yacht? Sailboat? Tugboat? Rowboat? Bessie asked and I couldn’t even tell her. Do you realize how embarrassing that is?
Now, to answer your questions: nothing much is happening so there’s nothing exciting to write about.
Joey tapped her fingers against the keys, considering. He’d asked about New York. So he didn’t know. No way in hell did she want to tell him about being laid off and going from living her dream job one day and being back in her old bedroom as a jobless loser the next. And she definitely didn’t want to think of the months trying to find a job, any job, in a world where jobs no longer seemed to exist for anybody, watching her self-esteem slowly circle the drain the entire time.
But if they were pen pals, he would probably find out sooner than later.
New York’s fine, I think? I wouldn’t know. I moved back to Capeside a few months ago to help Bessie out with the B&B.
Jack’s back in Capeside, too, but his coaching duties keep him pretty busy so I usually only see him when Jen swings through, which isn’t often lately for good reasons. Bessie is good, still as bossy as ever. Things are slow at the restaurant, so Bodie’s home a lot to help out. And yes, Alexander IS driving, but only in Mario Kart. He’s the current reigning champion of the Potter-Wells at the moment, but I intend to steal his crown very soon.
But that’s enough about me. Write back and tell me all about your seafaring life, Deckhand Witter. Let me live a little vicariously.
She stopped, not sure how to sign the email. At work, she’d just ended every email with “Thanks.” But that definitely felt generic. “Sincerely” was too formal. “Love” was right out of the question. Same with “Yours.” She cheated and scrolled down to read how Pacey signed off, and scowled. Just a hyphen. Absolutely no help there.
In the end, she decided to go with a statement.
From the once and future queen of Mario Kart,
Joey
She checked Pacey’s email one more time and reread his postscript message, so she added her own.
PS – Wouldn’t you like to know.
And before she could second-guess herself, she hit Send. It’d probably be weeks before he was back in port. And that was if he even decided to write back at all. Maybe he’d been out in the sun too long and forgot that they didn’t talk anymore.
The thought that he might not write back depressed her a little more than she wanted to examine.
Joey pushed off her bed, grabbed her ever-present blanket, and wandered to the kitchen to make a cup of tea. While the water heated up, she wandered over to the bookshelf. They’d originally planned to fill it with pamphlets and flyers for things to do in the area, but the middle shelf had morphed into something of a library where guests could leave or take a book. Joey poked through until she found a paperback of some sort of historical romance. Not her usual genre, but it wasn’t like she had anything else to do. She grabbed her tea and curled up in the big armchair, opening the book to the first page.
