Page 9 of Catch and Release
Shawn felt stuck. He loved his best friends. He wanted to spend time with them. The truth was, he missed them as much as they missed him. But it was hard as fuck to sit with them through dinner and watch them hold hands and not feel overwhelmed with the ache of loneliness. And he didn’t know how to say it—how to tell them how jealous he was, how sad he was, how desperately he wanted what they had.
Because even though he was man enough not to lie to himself, it was unimaginable to say something like that out loud to the people he loved most in the world.
He pulled into his driveway, shaking away the self pity he’d started feeling on the drive home.
The smell of chocolate wafted through the foyer as Shawn walked in the door.
“Grams?” he shouted, tossing his keys on the front table.
“Kitchen.”
His grandmother was arranging brownies onto a paper plate, donning black leggings and a red flannel shirt. Her hair was unruly; she’d clearly been out on the wharf earlier that day, where she liked to go to pray or watch the sunrise. He looked out at the waterfront from the kitchen window. The sun still shone brightly out above the water, and there were white caps on the waves. Maybe he’d try to go wind-surfing before dinner, if he could muster up the energy.
Shawn grinned, his mouth watering at her special, homemade brownies. As he reached from behind her to grab one, she smacked his hand.
“Hey!” he tugged his hand back.
“Not for you, Scooby,” she said sternly.
Shawn sighed. He’d never escape the nickname he earned as a 5-year-old when he dressed up as Scooby Doo for Halloween. It probably wouldn’t have stuck, but he refused to take off the costume for two weeks, and Grams called him Scooby ever since.
“Can’t I just have one?” he asked. “They’ll never know.”
She turned around to face him, placing one manicured hand on her hip and raising her eyebrows.
“You don’t even know who these are for,” Grams said.
“The ladies at church?” he guessed.
“Hmph.”
She turned back around, covering the brownies with tin foil.
“C’mon, Grams,” Shawn continued. “It doesn’t matter, anyway. Nobody will know if one brownie is missing.”
“I’ll know.”
Shawn sighed.
“They’re not for the church ladies, anyway,” Grams continued. “They’re for our new neighbor.”
“New neighbor?”
That was news to him. No houses on their street had been put up for sale recently, and everyone knew each other well enough to know if anyone was considering it. Most people who lived in their neighborhood had retired here. When they died, most of them passed the property onto someone else in their family—their kids or grandkids.
“One of the Greene girls moved in.”
Interesting. Shawn didn’t know the Greenes all that well.
The grandparents had died several years back, within a few months of each other. He tried to recall their names… Robert and Betty, perhaps? Robert died of a heart attack, and Betty died of heartbreak a few weeks later. They’d left the house to their kids and grandkids, split equally among them with a trust to pay the bills.
Nobody lived there full-time, but people were always staying there for weekends and holidays. Since they were never here for long—and since Robert and Betty died long before he moved in with Grams—he never got the chance to get to know the family.
“Moved in?” Shawn asked.
“You heard me,” Grams said, crossing her arms. “I don’t know the whole story, but Barb told me this morning. I think it was pretty sudden. So I thought you could welcome her to the neighborhood with some of my famous brownies.”
“So she’s here for good? That’s unusual for the Greene house.”