Tegan was saying, “I don’t get why your mom and dad would be calling it a kitty,” when the cousin’s mom returned to the table.
That, I’d always thought, had been the most painfully awkward experience of my adult life.
That is, until I took a car ride from Chattanooga to Pensacola.
Six hours of almost-silence.
Six hours of everyone mad.
It’s nearly midnight now, Tegan’s asleep in our room, and I’ve escaped to a place where at least the quiet feels less heavy: the hotel’s pool area, which is technically closed but also the kind of closed where there’s poor signage and no lock on the gate. Plausible-deniability closed. It’s so humid that the slats of the lounge chair I’m lying on stick to my legs, but there’s at least a faint, if warm, breeze. The rise-and-fall sounds of crickets and frogs and cicadas aren’t as recriminating as Tegan’s cold shoulder or Salem’s barely leashed frustration.
As Adam’s careful, contemplative quiet.
I shouldn’t feel guilty about what happened at Curtis MacSherry’s house. I shouldn’t feel guilty for wiping that sleazy smile off his face; I shouldn’t feel guilty for not trusting him to give Tegan a straightforward answer about anything. I knew, deep down, that if she’d asked him questions about Mom, he would’ve kept up with his slick, dodging answers. He would’ve made her feel confused and unsure of herself.
He wouldn’t have told her anything worth knowing.
But I can’t help wondering if I should’ve just let her see that for herself.
I thought about telling her. I thought about saying that I was sorry, thought about telling her how it made my stomach feel queasy to hear Curtis MacSherry say Mom was funny and charming, that she was a nice companion for his elderly mother.
It wasn’t that I thought he was lying.
It was that I thought the opposite.
Shewasfunny and charming. When she paid attention to you—really paid attention to you, for however many moments you could catch her attention—you thought you were the most important person in the world.
It hurt to be reminded that she was still all of these things to other people after she left. That other people had always been able to catch her attention for longer than I ever had.
When I tried, though—when I opened my mouth to make my apology, my explanation—I felt a stone lodge in my throat. I’ve spent so many years never talking to Tegan about how I feel about Mom that I don’t know how to start, and anyway, I don’t know if I should.
It’s Tegan who hurts the most from what Mom did, not me.
I run my hands over my face, part of me wishing I could let out a great big, gusty“Argh!”to the sky, same as my sister did in Curtis MacSherry’s backyard.
When I hear the quiet clink of the unlocked gate, I’m so annoyed by the interruption to my solitude that I contemplate pretending to be a hotel employee in charge of policing the joint. However, since I’m lying on this chair in my pajamas, I guess it’ll be a tough sell. Instead I lower my hands from my eyes and hope whoever it is won’t notice me.
Of course, it’s Adam Hawkins.
And he notices me.
“Oh,” he says, stilling where he is. “I’m sorry.”
I push myself more upright so I can see him better. He’s wearing athletic shorts and a soaked-through T-shirt. He’s sweating. Breathing harder than normal. His hair is damp and sticking up in all directions, windblown. He’s the in-real-life version of every movie star who does some cheesy magazine cover story about how they bulked up to play a superhero, except in real life, it’s not cheesy at all.
This is terrible news.
“The pool is closed,” I blurt.
“I was just cutting through.” He gestures to the bank of rooms beyond us.
Then I think he . . . I think he maybe . . . laughs? Quiet and low and brief. A chuckle.
My pajamas are normal, shorts and an old T-shirt. I don’t think I have anything on my face, not that he could see it in the dim, watery light. I don’t see what there is to laugh about.
“What’s funny?”
He shrugs those big shoulders. “You sound like you’re working security.”
