Free Sweet Caroline by Rachel Hauck

J. D. to see if he wants to go fishing or down to the beach. I don’t want to sit home all day, thinking, fretting.
    “I’m working, babe,” he says, “filling in for Lem Becket.”
    Babe ? The intimate reference makes me feel googly. “Guess I’ll talk to you later, then.”
    “I’m glad you called.”
    After a twittery good-bye, I absently dial Mitch’s cell, but hang up before the first ring. Do I want to risk my securely closed heart doors by hanging out with his easy, familiar manner? Being good friends is what caused me to trip and fall in love in the first place. It was all Mitch and nothing but Mitch for far too long.
    I smile at the memory. Hard to believe my friend and first love was voted by People magazine “The Man You Want to Be Stranded with on a Desert Island.”
    Oh, how wrong they are. If Mitch can’t shower at least once a day, he considers it barbarian living.
    No, if I’m stranded in the middle of the ocean on some two-by-four island, it best not be with Mitch. Not if I want to survive, anyway.
    Heart: We should give him a call.
    Head: No, we’re moving on. Just like he’s done.
    Heart: But it’s Mitch—best friends and all that.
    Head: But it’s Mitch—left us high and dry without so much as a “how do.” Let the past be the past.
    Heart: You . . . are no fun.
    Head: Yeah, and when you get hurt and bruised, who has to relive it over and over? Me.
    I dial Elle. “You up for a movie or something?”
    “Meet me at my place. I’ll drive. Last time I road-tripped with you, I was picking bugs out of my hair until the next morning. Really, you should get Matilda’s top fixed, C.”
    “I’ll get right on it.” Picking bugs. She’s crazy.
    We choose a Drew Barrymore romantic comedy playing at the Plaza. During the drive over and in between buying tickets, popcorn, and large sodas, Elle rattles on about ways to find a good, decent, marriageable man, and when she pauses to breathe, I fill her in on Jones’s will and the opportunity with Carlos Longoria.
    She’s appropriately stunned—“No, I didn’t see Melba’s article in the Gazette ”—and gawks at me with wide, round eyes while nabbing a kernel of popcorn from the top of her ginormous bag. “Carlos Longoria. He’s on the cover of Forbes , like, every other month. Look at me; I’m green with envy.”
    She whips her arm in front of my face. In the dim light of the movie theater, I can’t make out the color of her skin, but I’m pretty sure it’s not green. Elle is doing what she loves: photography and art. Owning an art gallery is her passion. A week—no, a day—as any businessman’s apprentice and she’d pull out her hair. His too.
    “Elle, O wise one, I’d love your thoughts on this.” The theater lights fade to black and advertisements roll across the big screen.
    “No-brainer. Barcelona.”
    “Really?” Why can’t I have her confidence?
    She turns slightly toward me. “It’s your true Tarzan vine.”
    I snort-laugh. “Oh, brother, Elle, my Tarzan vine broke and dropped me face-first in the dirt.”
    Elle covers her laugh with the back of her arm, popcorn pinched be-tween her fingers. “But you believed. You climbed that live oak, grabbed a handful of Spanish moss, and with a rebel yell, leaped.”
    “And hit the ground like a sack of dumb dirt.”
    “I’ve been waiting twenty years for you to believe in yourself like that again.”
    “Death would’ve been sweet relief that day.” I slide down in the chair, propping my foot on the row in front of me.
    The Tarzan experiment was a defining moment in my life. The entire third-grade class watched me plummet twenty feet to the ground, finding it all too hilarious that I believed and preached Spanish moss to be as strong as Tarzan’s vine. When I went home to Mama for sympa-thy and Band-Aids, she said, “Good grief, Caroline, don’t you have a lick of horse sense?”
    “Caroline, go to Spain,” Elle whispers.
    “Even if it means the Café