“It looks like Christmas,” Bailey, continuing her role as the dark shadow of the evening, observed. “Which is also depressing.”
“Bailey. Enough with the gloom and doom, okay?” April said.
“Yeah, listen to your party planner. They’ll be great once we turn them on,” Taylor said. Bailey, unconvinced, looked out at the water again. “Wasn’t Roo supposed to be finding a power strip?”
“He was,” April replied. She walked over to the open door. “Roo!”
Outside, he turned his head. “Yeah?”
“Power strip?”
“Oh. Right.” He put down his beer on the bench. “Coming.”
As he jogged up the dock, then came in the back door, brushing his feet on a mat, I took another look around me.Where Mimi’s house was big, airy, and full of windows, the place where Roo lived with his mom was small and cozy. The tiny kitchen, with its metal countertops and collection of sea glass lining the windowsill, opened into a bigger space, which held the couch (now outside) and a worn leather recliner, both facing a small TV. The table where Taylor sat, plain wood with four chairs, made up the only dining area somewhere in the middle.
Normally, small spaces made me anxious. But I felt different here. I had since the moment I’d stepped inside, following April with Bailey dragging along, complaining, behind me. There was just a comfort to it, even before I saw the fridge.
It wasn’t the appliance itself, which was white with a few rust spots. What drew me were the pictures that were scattered among the receipts and lists also adhered to the surface. Unlike the counter in the Calvander’s office, there were only a handful here, which made each of them seem that much more important.
The first I saw was a school picture of Roo, from what looked to be maybe second grade. Smaller and skinnier, he was still unmistakable, with that same white-blond hair, cut short and sticking up in the back. The grin on his face showed he was missing a top tooth, a gap in its place.
A little over from that one was a shot of who I assumed were his parents. Chris Price, shirtless and with the same blond hair and squinty smile, was sitting on a bench on the dock, a pretty girl with short red hair in cutoffs and a bathing suit top on his lap. He was looking right at the camera,while she had her head thrown back, caught in the middle of what looked like a big belly laugh.
Picture three, a little lower down, was of Roo and his mom, and more recent. Dressed in a gray EAST U sweatshirt, he was taller than her. She had on a black dress, her hair shorter now, one hand resting on his chest as she smiled proudly.
The last one was the oldest of the group, stuck high in one corner of the fridge door with thick brown tape. There are those pictures that are clearly posed, where the subjects were told to stop what they were doing and gather together. Then there were the ones when the photographer just aimed and shot. This had to be why Roo’s dad, in shorts and a baggy T-shirt, was slightly blurred: he’d been in the process of moving. The girl in the picture, though, was still facing him, and in profile, one hand held up as if making a point. She had blond hair spilling down her back and blue eyes with long lashes. My mom.
I leaned in closer, startled and not sure why. She was everywhere at the lake so far, so why not here as well? Maybe because you never think, leaning into a snapshot in a stranger’s kitchen, that you’ll see the person who probably knew you better than anyone. Like she’d been waiting there for me all this time, and now here I was.
“That’s one of my favorites,” I heard someone say. “It’s such a lousy picture, but so real.”
I turned, facing Roo, who was now standing right behind me, a power strip in his hands. “That’s your dad, right?”
“Yep.” He squinted, leaning in a bit closer. “My momsays it was at a cookout at someone’s house. She’d just gotten into photography and was driving everyone crazy snapping pictures. That’s why Waverly isn’t even looking. She’d had enough.”
I looked at my mom again. She had on white shorts and a blue halter top, drugstore flip-flops on her feet. “Mimi said they were inseparable, her and your dad.”
“Yeah.” I watched as his gaze flicked to the other pictures, then came back to the one of our parents. “But our moms were actually super close as well. When mine moved here senior year, Waverly was the first person she met. She introduced her to Chris.”
“Where’s your mom now?” I asked.
“In the bedroom,” he said.
I looked at all the beers on the table in panic, not to mention the mess we’d made moving things around. “Seriously?”
“No.” He grinned at me. “She’s an ER nurse in Delaney and works nights. She’ll be back in the morning.”
“Ah,” I said. I looked at the shot of Chris, the redhead in his lap. “It must have been hard for your mom, losing a husband and one of her closest friends.”
“Yeah.” He was quiet for a second. “It was.”
I looked at the picture again. It seemed crazy that after all these years, I had never known about the accident until this summer. For so long I’d questioned why she was in such pain, what could have been so awful that haunted her. The answer, like this picture, had been here all along. I’d just had to come find it.
“You going to wear that?” Roo asked me now.
I blinked, unsure what he was talking about until he nodded at the corsage I was somehow still holding in my hand. “Well, it is a dance,” I said.
“You don’t put on your own corsage, though.” He placed the power strip on the kitchen counter, then reached out, taking the gardenia bundle from me. “Stand super still so I don’t stick you, though. I can’t take the sight of blood.”
