“Waylen?” I murmur, touching his face, tracing my finger over his lips.
“Yes,” he says. It’s not a question, but a profession.Yes. I’m yours, whatever it is you need. Yes.
“What did you do to my car to make it break down?” I ask, still talking softly to him. “I’m not mad, but I need to know the truth.”
“I didn’t.”
“Waylen.”
“You’re the smooth liar, not me.” His fingers tighten around my hair, giving it a firm tug that gets my attention. “Why would I have to mess with the car, my love?” he says. “Wherever you go, I always want you to have a way back home to me.”
Sixteen
Collette, smart girl that she is, can sense that something has changed in the air. She doesn’t comment on the fact that Waylen and I pick her up together, in his car. She doesn’t even comment that we’re late, because I made Waylen stash away the Honda in a parking lot until it can be returned.
I’m the first one to speak when I glance at her in the mirror and ask where she got the glittery purple lip gloss she’s wearing.
“Finnegan,” she says matter-of-factly. “We wanted to do makeovers at lunch, but her ColourPop palette got taken by the cafeteria monitor. It was so dumb. But she had lip gloss in her other purse.”
Of course Elodie Blevins’s kid would take two purses to school.
“Be careful, kiddo,” Waylen says from behind the wheel. “You shouldn’t be sharing that stuff. Germs.”
She only nods.
“I’m glad that you’re making friends with her,” I say. “I know it hasn’t been easy.”
“She’s okay, I guess,” Collette says. “Actually, she’s kind of nice when she’s not with her other friends.”
I could say the same thing about Elodie, come to think of it. I think again of her odd offer of friendship. I’ve seen other groups of friends and wondered how they started—if they met in college, or at a bar, or if they made small talk while standing in line at a store somewhere. It never occurred to me that it would be as simple as just asking, “Would you like to be my friend?”
By the time we get to the house, I’ve gotten a text from the mechanic that they’ve received my towed car and they’ll give me a call tomorrow morning.
“What did they say it was?” Waylen asks.
“They’ll look at it and get back to me.”
He smiles, as cheerful as the sun that’s starting to peek through as the rain clouds disperse. “Since you don’t have your car, we should take a family trip.” He turns to look at Collette, who is shouldering her backpack and about to step out into the driveway. “What do you say, ’Lette? We could go to the grocery store and get the stuff to make one of those famous TikTok recipes you’ve been talking about.”
“I have math homework,” she says, clearly confused by the break in our routine. Waylen isn’t exactly known for his spontaneity.
“We’ll get to it!” Waylen assures her. “Mom and I will help—not that you need us anymore.” He turns to me. “She’s smarter than either of us, isn’t she?”
“Yes,” I say, cautiously guarding my responses. What is this? What game are we playing?
I decide to let him take the lead. He drives us to the grocery store that we dubbed the “ritzy market” because it only sells select brands, all of which are organic. Collette acclimates to the change in routine and asks us if she can add some LaCroix to the cart.
When we get home, the kitchen is soon filled with the aroma of simmering broth for our homemade spicy pho, to be accompanied by strawberry cheesecake muffins that have to go back into the oven three times because the center doesn’t pass the toothpick test.
We watchWhen Harry Met Sallyon Collette’s iPad as we eat dinner at the kitchen table. Through the bay window, warm kitchen light spills out into the autumn darkness, where the rain has given way to light flurries. Like something Norman Rockwell would paint. And after, as promised, Waylen and I help Collette with her homework. Waylen catches two small misspellings in her book report. I struggle my way through sixth-grade geometry.
But I begin to feel that I’m in a geometry puzzle of my own, driving a car that isn’t mine through the strict confines of a grid drawn by my husband. None of the lines leads to Bertram, or my brother, or the past I’ve been running from. It all just leads back to this.
At eight o’clock, Waylen goes to his office to catch up on a deadline he says he can’t put off any longer. At ten o’clock, I check on Collette, whose bedroom is softly lit by the spinning rainbow of stars cast by her night-light. She’s in bed, breathing softly, her back turned to me.
“Mom?” she whispers as I’m starting to close her door.
“Yes, darling?”
