Evie’s eyes widen and her hand shoots to her heart. “This was yourdream!”
“It was a nightmare to get there. A lot of hard work. A lot of rejection,” Bree starts explaining. She’s always been transparent about her success.
“Please tell me I helped you through that …” Evie says, leaning toward Bree. She’s going to be disappointed.
“Make it a double shot, Drew?” Bree asks, letting go of Evie’s hand to readjust the cushions.
Evie, once again, looks worried. And Bree is wary, the way I am. It’s like Evie’s wearing a bomb and the two of us are SWAT operatives attempting to dismantle it. We know where the wires go, but we don’t want to trip something and have the whole thing explode.
“I’m sorry about Oliver,” Bree says.
“I don’t know Oliver,” Evie replies bluntly. “I don’t miss him. I don’t know anything about us. I sat there and watched the slideshow at the funeral and didn’t recognize any of it. I didn’t like it, Bree. How in hell did I end up here?”
“I’m not on social media much anymore,” Bree explains. “We’ve been deep in rehearsals. We’re doing one of thoseStar Warsmovie screenings, playing the soundtrack live, you know?”
Evie doesn’t know. She looks confused.
“So I didn’t hear about the accident.”
“Would you have come to the funeral?” Evie asks. She looks at me, knowing that I almost made it up those steps but didn’t quite, and that her parents were similarly defeated.
To her credit, Bree holds it together, while years of hurt flash through her eyes and diplomacy floats to the surface.
“I’m here now.”
age TWENTY-THREE
55
Drew
After Evie’s graduation, I spend the next two days writing and deleting a text message to her. The basic gist is, “Why are you so unhappy?”
It’s not my role to intercept her mistake. But I keep flicking through those photos on my camera and all I see is my former best friend, trapped.
Walking past that behavior is as bad as doing it.
It’s her annoying line, but it’s apt in this instance. I can’t walk past her making a mistake of this magnitude without trying to sow even a small seed of doubt in her mind. What if she’s just waiting for one person to question everything? This whole thing reminds me far too much of the way Mum described her relationship with Anderson. Suddenly, it’s Mum who I really want to ask for advice.
Her blue Mazda is parked in its usual spot under the carport. The bins are empty and still on the road—the last ones left in the street. I drag them in, before clearing the mailbox and tossing the catalogs in the recycling. She never reads them, and theNO JUNK MAILsign doesn’t seem to deter the ten-year-old pamphlet deliverers.
I knock on the door to warn her I’m here, then let myself in.
“Mum?” There’s no immediate response as I walk across creaking floorboards through the hall into the laundry, where a load of washing is waiting to be taken out of the machine and hung on the clothesline. On autopilot, I pull out the clothes, dumping them into a basket. She has a caretaker in twice a week to do this stuff for her, and I check in several times a week myself. It’s still not enough, but she’s too proud to consider full-time care.
“Mum?”
She’s not in the kitchen, either, but I finally see her in the garden, lazing in the bright blue easy chair I gave her last Mother’s Day. There’s a book on the wrought-iron coffee table beside her, the pages flapping in the breeze, along with a half-empty glass of water.
The clouds have come over and she’s in short sleeves. I head out the back door and down the steps past her prize roses and fragrant jasmine, onto the lawn.
“Mum!” I say again, before I realize she’s asleep.
I touch her arm, gently, so as not to startle her. She’s freezing. And I look toward the blanket box she keeps under the wrought-iron pergola.
I feel like I’ve been looking for blankets to cover Mum for most of my life. Nothing is ever warm enough. Everything I do to try to help her falls short. But even as I’m searching for something to wrap her in, part of me knows the deep truth that my subconscious mind is scrambling to protect me from.
Something wasn’t right, just then, when I touched her.
