Ashley had claimed the front passenger seat as her rightful place in Jeannie’s vehicle. Hope, all bedraggled and sleepy, had merely stared at her blonde blow-out in the kitchen and muttered a fervent “Oh dear Lord, no.”
She’d had other things to contend with.
“Surely you’re not leaving the house like that!” Christian had barked at her when she’d appeared in the outfit she’d obviously slept in: pajama shorts and a skimpy T-shirt, with her hair haphazard atop her head. And aged flip-flops to round off the ensemble.
“It’s this or I’m going back to sleep,” Hope had responded in a tone that was actually mild. From exhaustion rather than any attitude readjustment, I was pretty sure. “Your choice, big brother.”
Now Hope was lying down in the backseat, her head on my lap with her eyes closed. In the front, Jeannie and Ashley were shrieking about a mutual acquaintance and might as well have been waving a banner that announced that they were BEST FRIENDS FOREVER. It was so deliberate, and yes, it stung a little bit.
“What’s what deal?” I asked Hope, shaking off junior high school.
“Travis,” she said around a huge yawn that showed off her molars. “He’s looking a little annoyed. You know, for him.”
“I told him I couldn’t possibly sleep with him in my parents’ house and made him sleep in Christian’s old room,” I confessed quietly. “He’s not too happy about that.”
Hope opened her eyes and looked up at me. She didn’t look sleepy at all.
“I don’t get it.” Her gaze was narrow. “Do you want to be with him or not?”
“It’s not that,” I said helplessly. “I just don’t . . . I just think . . . We ran into Scott in town last night.”
“Oops.” But she sounded amused. “And here I said that would never happen. Shows you what I know.”
“It was fine.”
Even though I thought that look on his face might have shattered something in me. Even though I’d wanted to chase after him, and the hell with Travis.
I coughed, and continued in a low voice. “He just glared and walked away, but I can’t be this kind of person. This two-timing, cheating person. I hate myself and it’s getting worse and I don’t know what to do.”
In the front seat, Ashley was telling a very loud story involving the trials of employing Eastern European maid services, pitching her voice over the strains of a guitar anthem on K-Rock.
“And like I believe that whole ‘no English’ act,” Ashley brayed. “Like I was born yesterday! Katya knows enough English to say ‘no windows’ every week, doesn’t she?”
They couldn’t have heard us if we’d been shouting.
“Look,” Hope said, swinging herself around and sitting up. “Cheating is the symptom, not the problem. There’s a reason you’re stepping out on Travis. If everything was good with him you wouldn’t even think about it.”
“I think that’s what people tell themselves.”
“I think they tell themselves that because it’s true,” Hope argued quietly.
“Or because they want to make themselves feel better about being terrible, deceitful people,” I retorted.
Hope gazed at me for a long moment.
“You’re not a terrible person,” she said. “You’re having a rough time. We all are. I am too, I just go out more and ignore it.”
“Is that my excuse?” I asked miserably. “Is that what I should tell Travis? Because I don’t think he’d really buy that.”
Hope looked at me closely, then shut her eyes again and tipped her head back against the seat.
“I don’t think it’s Travis you have to convince,” she said.
“My feet are killing me,” Hope muttered. Not for the first time.
She reached over and snagged a french fry from my plate, also not for the first time. I swatted at her hand, but more out of principle than with any desire to hit her. In any case, I missed.
“I don’t know why we have to participate in this group charade,” she said, chewing. “We were in that place for hours.”
“Jeannie wants it both ways,” I said. I shrugged. “She wants to force us to wear something she’s pretty sure we won’t like, but she also wants that scene where everyone squeals and jumps up and down and someone cries. That’s why Ashley’s here.”
“Ugh.” Hope swiveled around to make sure Ashley was still involved in the fractious debate she’d kicked up with a food court employee. “That gorgon. I thought you got rid of all those evil girls when you left town.”
I sighed. “You and me both.”
Jeannie herself was taking a cell phone call some distance away from our table. She gestured a little bit aggressively into the air, and though her words were inaudible, her tone came across loud and clear. Pissed off and tough.
“She’s hard core,” Hope whispered. She sounded admiring. “No wonder Christian loves her—she’s the only woman alive who can keep his maharajah ass in line.”
“You make a good point,” I agreed. “The girl teaches tenth grade. That requires a thick skin.”
“Jeannie Gillespie, walking body armor,” Hope mused.
“Exposure to Ashley has forced me to reassess Jeannie,” I continued. “Comparatively speaking, Jeannie is fabulous.”
“A very good point.” Hope wrinkled her nose in thought. “Bridezilla she’s not. Unlike Miss Ashley, who, I’m pretty sure, holds the title. One more reference to her ‘special day’ and the ‘absolutely darling flowers’ and I’m taking her down.”
“I’ll help!” My voice took fervent to a whole new level.
“Back in the day, Christian definitely would have gone for the Ashley type,” Hope continued. “We should count our lucky stars.”
“In fact, they went out for about three weeks in the eighth grade,” I said, licking salt from my finger.
“That’s a terrible thing to say about our brother!”
“It’s true,” I assured her. “I was there.”
“The people who work here are repulsive,” Ashley announced, flopping into her seat.
Hope immediately frowned and inched away from her on the plastic bench, actions speaking louder than words.
“Really?” I asked, for lack of a better response.
“Repulsive!” Ashley said, with unnecessary emphasis, and sniffed. That snotty little sniff of hers that she used as punctuation. She’d had that since the seventh grade. It had been equally obnoxious then.
“I’m sure they’re all big fans of overly entitled fake blondes who order them around,” Hope retorted. At Ashley’s glare, she shrugged. “I’m just saying we all have issues.”
Ashley poked at her salad with unnecessary force. She glared at the forlorn piece of tomato she speared with her fork as if she’d meant to harm it. She looked up and met my gaze, and it was exactly the same look. I was suddenly transported back in time to any number of uncomfortable cafeteria meals in high school, with Ashley the Wonder Bitch gunning for me.
For some reason, the déjà vu made me calm.
“So,” I said almost merrily. “What have you been doing all these years?”
“Other than getting married,” Hope interjected hurriedly. “Because I think we’re all up to speed on that.”
“My wedding was the most beautiful day of my life,” Ashley snapped. “Doug and I are as in love today as we were then. More so, as a matter of fact!”
A lovely sentiment, but I knew enough about girls like Ashley to interpret that to mean that Doug was a jerk and probably unfaithful, and Ashley had better hurry up and get pregnant.
“That’s really sweet,” Hope said around her Big Mac. “And your tone there was really convincing, too.”
Ashley wrinkled her pert little nose, but obviously thought better of taking Hope on directly. A wise choice.
“I don’t know how you can eat junk like that,” she trilled instead, looking down her nose at Hope’s meal. “Aside from making you fat, it’s just so unhealthy.”
Hope rolled her e
yes and took another messy bite.
I wished immediately that I had gone with something even more fat-laden than fries, just to annoy Ashley, who—unless her metabolism had miraculously changed for the better—had to engage in a Herculean daily battle with her body to keep herself an emaciated size four. I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if that was one of her wedding vows: instant divorce should she balloon up beyond a size six for anything other than pregnancy. There was a reason girls like Ashley married young, rich, and had lots of babies. It was the only time in their lives they ate.
“I saw John Ericho the other day,” Ashley continued when it was clear neither Hope nor I was going to burst into tears at her roundabout fat reference.
“My Lord, talk about ancient history.” Hope groaned. “I bet he’s fat.”
“He’s very good-looking, actually. He’s in venture capital.”
“So, fat and broke,” Hope retorted.
“Are we really talking about John Ericho?” I asked, slightly bewildered. “I haven’t thought about him since the tenth grade.”
When Ashley “stole” him from me in a huge drama that rocked the entire high school and was completely forgotten within a week.
“It was just so nice to see him again, after so long,” Ashley cooed.
I could only stare at her. Was she serious? Did she think I had been secretly harboring the pain of John Ericho’s defection for all these years?
Hope looked from Ashley to me, and then back again.
“Am I missing something?” she asked. “Wasn’t John Ericho the hairy one with the monobrow who you went to the sophomore semi-formal with?”
“Yes,” I said, frowning a little bit. “He really did have a monobrow, didn’t he?”
“He was one of the most popular, best-looking guys in our class!” Ashley snapped.
I leaned closer to Hope. “Ashley should know, since she fooled around with him behind my back and then got him to break up with me so she could date him.”
“Scandalous!” Hope murmured in feigned shock.
I eyed Ashley. “Why would you even want to bring that up?”
“Seriously,” Hope agreed. “I mean, everyone has terrifying high school stories, but most people try to forget them. In fact, that’s pretty much the rule—the minute you graduate, you get to pretend high school never happened.”
“You guys have turned into a tag team,” Jeannie said.
We all turned to see her standing at the end of the table. Ashley actually jumped a little bit. I noticed that Jeannie was watching Hope and me with an odd, arrested look on her face.
“We’re talking about John Ericho,” I told her, grinning up at her as if sharing a delightful secret. “And the scandal. Ashley ran into him.”
Jeannie rolled her eyes and looked from me to Ashley.
“Yeah,” she drawled. “About four years ago in some Red Lobster. What a loser.” She glared at Ashley. “Can you act like tenth grade is over now, do you think?”
“I feel like I barely saw you,” Travis said, but with a smile. It was Sunday afternoon and we were in Newark Airport, awaiting his plane. “You’re definitely deep into this family stuff.”
“I guess I am,” I agreed. “But no more than you are. You just happen to live in the same place as your family all the time.”
“Don’t remind me.” Travis groaned. “Diana is driving me insane. She keeps getting in these huge fights with my parents and then expecting me to deal with them. What am I supposed to do? I can’t keep her from choosing bad boyfriends.”
“Your sister is something else,” I agreed. What Diana was, I knew better than to say, was a spoiled brat. She’d been spoiled rotten since the day of her birth, never forced to take any kind of responsibility for herself or anything else, and it was a great big shock to her parents that at twenty-five she was the pretty and feminine version of shiftless and irresponsible. Not that anyone minded, especially; they just wanted her married and settled with an appropriate southern boy—preferably one of her mother’s choosing from the family’s social circle.
The fact that Travis seemed to have chosen me was a subject his parents found a bit distressing. As far as Yankees went, they liked me more than most. But I was still a Yankee.
Stop trying to make him the bad guy, I told myself, sounding weary even in my own head.
“Why so sad?” Travis asked, smiling down at me.
“I’ll miss you,” I whispered. And detested myself.
“It won’t be long now till you’re home where you belong,” Travis assured me. “Your dad’s on the mend, and you won’t need to be there, right?”
“I guess,” I agreed, even though I didn’t exactly agree.
I didn’t want to get into it, especially not with Travis. I knew that he wouldn’t understand the reasons I suddenly felt so tied to my family—not least because I couldn’t understand it myself.
It was what it was: obligation, frustration, and mixed in with all of that, buried in the cracks, that automatic, baffling love. I’d missed the madness of it in Atlanta, even though I’d deliberately moved that far away to escape it.
I really do miss it, I thought in a kind of wonder, but pushed the thought aside.
We kissed and hugged and I waved him off with the big smile he expected. I watched him as he went through the strict security check, and grinned each time he looked back. I watched until he was long gone and the white corridor was filled with strangers. I watched until I realized there was nothing at all to do with the desolate feeling in my stomach except live with it.
Dad woke up a few days later in possession of his former energy level—which was to say, he was boisterous and happy. This wasn’t just pre-accident energy. It seemed a lot like pre-retirement energy.
I found it more than a little bit alarming—even if it was kind of nice to see Cheery Dad in the place of Distant and Annoyed Dad. Cheery Dad could sometimes be dorky, but was more . . . Dadlike.
“Dad,” I ventured, over a spate of manic whistling at breakfast. “Not that I’m really complaining, but why are you so happy?”
“Why not be happy?” he boomed. I stared at him. He grinned. I continued to stare. “It’s been six weeks,” he reported, as if I’d missed that. “The goddamned cast is coming off.”
He didn’t actually let out a rebel yell, or pump his fist in the air, but I think we both knew it was a very close call.
“Now I know how the parents of teenagers feel,” Hope said out of the side of her mouth when she observed the change. It was already afternoon—breakfast, if you were Hope—and Dad had graduated from whistling to the a cappella singing of top Billboard hits from his youth. I could hear him belting one out from his room, and I was downstairs in the kitchen.
“We should be more supportive.” But as I studied the ceiling, through which I could hear the strains of “Louie Louie,” I was doubtful.
“You be supportive,” Hope suggested. “I’m going to stick with creeped out.”
“The cast is coming off,” I reminded her. “I can see why that would please him.”
“He’s been much nicer lately, I grant you,” Hope said. “But this is bordering on the manic. You should have the doctor prescribe something for the inevitable downswing, if you know what I mean.”
“It’s definitely the cast,” I said, frowning, and went to feed the fish.
He was actually helping me help him down the stairs, instead of the spate of complaining that usually accompanied any excursion that involved the stairs.
“You’ve really developed some upper body strength in the last few weeks,” I told him. Because positive reinforcement is everyone’s friend.
Hope wandered out from the kitchen to watch.
“In another week or two you’ll be able to walk up the stairs on your hands,” she said.
“I’ll be a regular circus performer,” Dad agreed, and let out a belly laugh.
Hope and I grinned at each other.
We all froze when the front
door opened.
Mom deposited her suitcases inside the door with a modicum of fuss and struggle, and then straightened. She was wearing a linen suit that seemed impervious to the heat and humidity outside, not to mention the plane ride across the Atlantic.
But if anything described my mother, it was this: even linen didn’t dare disappoint her.
“Hello,” she said as if she’d just nipped out to the store. “I’m home.”
She swept the three of us with a swift look, and her gaze lingered only slightly on her husband. Her husband who was, I saw with surprise, smiling at her. Tenderly.
I was sure she was about to make one of those speeches—the sort people were always making in movies, the sort that made sense of everything and might even be a little poetic.
Mom smiled.
We all leaned forward.
“I hope,” she said, “that someone can tell me why Gladys Van Eck was lying in wait for me on the sidewalk, carrying on about the state of the front lawn. Surely someone in this house knows where we keep the lawn mower?”
Chapter 11
Christian pushed his way into Hope’s room, already frowning, with Jeannie behind him. He’d been summoned to a homecoming family dinner for Mom, and looked annoyed that Hope and I had dragged him upstairs for an additional summit meeting.
“I thought we knew when Mom was coming home,” he said without preamble. “I did, anyway.”
“Obviously you paid more attention to that itinerary than I ever did,” I said, surprising myself. I hadn’t meant to say that out loud. “It’s worse than Dad’s fish flowchart. I could only get through the first page and then I had to throw it away.”
“You were the one putting her life on hold to be here.” Jeannie shook her head. “If I were you I would have been counting down the days.”
“Mom’s finally doing what she’s supposed to,” Christian said, with only a slight frown at his fiancée, who shrugged. “So why do we have to have a war council?”
“This isn’t so much a war council as a meeting of the minds.” That was much more the sort of soothing thing I expected me to say. I shrugged. “Just to make sure we’re all on the same page.”