But maybe now that Conrad wasn’t standing in the way, she’d see me there too.
chapterthirty-threeJULY 5
“Belly.”
I tried to roll over, but then I heard it again, louder.
“Belly!” Someone was shaking me awake.
I opened my eyes. It was my mother. She had dark circles around her eyes and her mouth had all but disappeared into a thin line. She was wearing her house sweats, the ones she never left the house in, not even to go to the gym. What in the world was she doing at the summer house?
There was a beeping sound that at first I thought was the alarm clock, but then I realized that I had knocked the phone over, and it was the busy signal I was hearing. And then I remembered. I’d drunk-dialed my mother. I’d brought her here.
I sat up, my head pounding so hard it felt like my heartwas hammering inside it. So this was what a hangover felt like. I’d left my contacts in and my eyes were burning. There was sand all over the bed and some was stuck on my feet.
My mother stood up; she was one big blur. “You have five minutes to pack up your stuff.”
“Wait… what?”
“We’re leaving.”
“But I can’t leave yet. I still have to—”
It was like she couldn’t hear me, like I was on mute. She started picking my things up off the floor, throwing Taylor’s sandals and shorts into my overnight bag.
“Mom, stop! Just stop for a minute.”
“We’re leaving in five minutes,” she repeated, looking around the room.
“Just listen to me for a second. I had to come. Jeremiah and Conrad needed me.”
The look on my mother’s face made me stop short. I’d never seen her angry like this before.
“And you didn’t feel the need to tell me about it? Beck asked me to look after her boys. How can I do that when I don’t even know they need my help? If they were in trouble, you should have told me. Instead you chose to lie to me. Youlied.”
“I didn’t want to lie to you—,” I started to say.
She kept on going. “You’ve been here doing God knows what…”
I stared at her. I couldn’t believe she’d just said that.“What does that mean, ‘God knows what’?”
My mother whirled around, her eyes all wild. “What am I supposed to think? You snuck out here with Conrad before and you spent the night! So you tell me. Whatareyou doing here with him? Because it looks to me like you lied to me so you could come here and get drunk and fool around with your boyfriend.”
I hated her. I hated her so much.
“He’s not my boyfriend! You don’t know anything!”
The vein in my mother’s forehead was pulsing. “You call me at four in the morning, drunk. I call your cell phone and it goes straight to voice mail. I call the house phone and all I get is a busy signal. I drive all night, worried out of my mind, and I get here and the house is a wreck. Beer cans everywhere, trash all over the place. What the hell do you think you’re doing, Isabel? Or do you even know?”
The walls in the house were really thin. Everyone could probably hear everything.
I said, “We were going to clean it up. This was our last night here. Don’t you get it? Mr. Fisher is selling the house. Don’t you care?”
She shook her head, her jaw tight. “Do you really think you’ve helped matters by meddling? This isn’t our business. How many times do I have to explain that to you?”
“It is so our business. Susannah would have wanted us to save this house!”
“Don’t talk to me about what Susannah would have wanted,” my mother snapped. “Now put your clothes on and get your things. We’re leaving.”
