The Last Thing He Told Me, Laura Dave [graded readers txt] 📗

“Who’s Bailey?”

I didn’t expect the answer to be yes. There is an ocean between twelve and sixteen. But I can’t piece this together. Why hasn’t Owen just called me? Why is he involving this girl? My first guess would be that something has happened to Bailey, and Owen couldn’t break away. But Bailey is at home, avoiding me as she usually does, her blasting music (today’s selection: Beautiful: The Carole King Musical) pulsing all the way down the stairs, its own looping reminder that I’m not welcome in her room.

“I’m sorry. I’m a little confused… where did you see him?”

“He ran past me in the hall,” she says.

For a minute I think she means our hall, the space right behind us. But that doesn’t make sense. We live in a floating home on the bay, a houseboat as they are commonly called, except here in Sausalito, where there’s a community of them. Four hundred of them. Here they are floating homes—all glass and views. Our sidewalk is a dock, our hallway is a living room.

“So you saw Mr. Michaels at school?”

“That’s what I just said.” She gives me a look, like where else? “Me and my friend Claire were on our way to practice. And he asked us to drop this off. I said I couldn’t come until after practice and he said, fine. He gave us your address.”

She holds up a second piece of paper, like proof.

“He also gave us twenty bucks,” she adds.

The money she doesn’t hold up. Maybe she thinks I’ll take it back.

“His phone was broken or something and he couldn’t reach you. I don’t know. He barely slowed down.”

“So… he said his phone was broken?”

“How else would I know?” she says.

Then her phone rings—or I think it’s a phone until she picks it off her waist and it looks more like a high-tech beeper. Are beepers back?

Carole King show tunes. High-tech beepers. Another reason Bailey probably doesn’t have patience for me. There’s a world of teen things I know absolutely nothing about.

The girl taps away on her device, already putting Owen and her twenty-dollar mission behind her. I’m reluctant to let her go, still unsure about what is going on. Maybe this is some kind of weird joke. Maybe Owen thinks this is funny. I don’t think it’s funny. Not yet, anyway.

“See you,” she says.

She starts walking away, heading down the docks. I watch her get smaller and smaller, the sun down over the bay, a handful of early evening stars lighting her way.

Then I step outside myself. I half expect Owen (my lovely and silly Owen) to jump out from the side of the dock, the rest of the soccer team giggling behind him, the lot of them letting me in on the prank I’m apparently not getting. But he isn’t there. No one is.

So I close our front door. And I look down at the piece of yellow legal paper still folded in my hand. I haven’t opened it yet.

It occurs to me, in the quiet, how much I don’t want to open it. I don’t want to know what the note says. Part of me still wants to hold on to this one last moment—the moment where you still get to believe this is a joke, an error, a big nothing; the moment before you know for sure that something has started that you can no longer stop.

I unfold the paper.

Owen’s note is short. One line, its own puzzle.

Protect her.

Greene Street Before It Was Greene Street

I met Owen a little over two years ago.

I was still living in New York City then. I was living three thousand miles from Sausalito, the small Northern California town that I now call home. Sausalito is on the other side of the Golden Gate from San Francisco, but a world away from city life. Quiet, charming. Sleepy. It’s the place that Owen and Bailey have called home for more than a decade. It is also the polar opposite of my previous life, which kept me squarely in Manhattan, in a lofted storefront on Greene Street in SoHo—a small space with an astronomical rent I never quite believed I could afford. I used it as both my workshop and my showroom.

I turn wood. That’s what I do for work. People usually make a face when I tell them this is my job (however I try to describe it), images of their high school woodshop class coming to mind. Being a woodturner is a little like that, and nothing like that. I like to describe it as sculpting, but instead of sculpting clay, I sculpt wood.

I come by the profession naturally. My grandfather was a woodturner—an excellent one, at that—and his work was at the center of my life for as far back as I can remember. He was at the center of my life for as far back as I can remember, having raised me mostly on his own.

My father, Jack, and my mother, Carole (who preferred that I refer to her as Carole), were largely uninterested in doing any childrearing. They were largely uninterested in anything except my father’s photography career. My grandfather encouraged my mother to make an effort with me when I was young, but I barely knew my father, who traveled for work 280 days a year. When he did have time off, he hunkered down at his family’s ranch in Sewanee, Tennessee, as opposed to driving the two hours to my grandfather’s house in Franklin to spend time with me. And, shortly after my sixth birthday, when my father left my mother for his assistant—a woman named Gwendolyn who was newly twenty-one—my mother stopped coming home as well. She chased my father down until he took her back. Then she left me with my grandfather full-time.

If it sounds like a sob story, it isn’t. Of course, it isn’t ideal to have your mother all but disappear. It certainly didn’t feel good to be on the