“I couldn’t even if I wanted to!” he said. He exhaled. “And that’s just my point. Despite everything,youare okay. My one job is to protect you. I tried to do that by building our lives in Lakeview. There just wasn’t room for anything else.”
“You can protect me without keeping secrets,” I said. “She was my mom. And this, here, it’s part of my life. And you kept it from me.”
“We both did,” he replied, sounding frustrated. “Look, Emma. Your mom never went back to the lake because by then it meant nothing but tragedy to her. It was where her problems started, the drinking, the addictions. Her bad choices led to the death of her best friend. She never got over that.”
“Then why did you guys bring me that summer?” I asked. “What was the point?”
“We were trying to save our marriage,” he said. I could hear the fatigue now in his voice, although whether it was literal or just this subject was hard to say. “Nana couldn’t help with you and we had no other options.”
“Just like this time,” I said. “So they’re family when you need a babysitter, and strangers when you don’t. That makes sense.”
He was quiet for what felt like a long time. As for me, I felt sick: I rarely, if ever, argued with my dad. Finally, he spoke.
“It’s not my intent to take you away from your family.” He said this last word slowly, as if it was difficult to pronounce. “But if we’re talking about what’s fair, you’ve spent three weeks there with her experience. It doesn’t seem wrong to ask you to do the same with mine.”
“You?” I said. “You’re not a lake kid.”
“No,” he agreed. “But I did spend summers working at the Club and met your mom there. It was a big part of my life, too.”
Not the same, I thought. But I didn’t say this aloud.
“How about this,” he said now. “You agree to come stay at the Tides. But you can still visit Mimi’s, as long as you make time for us as well. Get a bit of both worlds. Is that fair?”
“You’re staying at the Tides?” I said, remembering the ritzy resort Bailey had pointed out to me on my first trip to Lake North.
“It’s your grandmother,” he said helplessly. “And it’s not like we have a lot of choices.”
So that’s what it comes down to. Choices. Good and bad, right and wrong, yes and no. Like being behind the wheel, there are some that are instinctive, others you have to think about. It was only three miles to the other side, a distance I’d covered by foot already. Before I went back, though, there was one more trip to take. Luckily, it wasn’t far.
Fifteen
When I got to Roo’s, the Yum truck was parked outside, an extension cord stretching from it to the small garage. As I passed and heard the coolers humming, I thought of all that ice cream inside.
I went around the house to the screen door and peered in, but didn’t see anyone. There was a pair of sneakers kicked off on the floor, though, as well as a phone and some keys on a nearby table. When I heard a shower running, distantly, I sat down on the steps to wait.
It had only been a day since the conversation with my dad, and the fact that I was going to be moving to Lake North was just beginning to sink in. Partly this was because I hadn’t exactly told anyone about my dad’s directive. Yet.
First, Gordon went back to the doctor, who said she needed another round of antibiotics, making day camp still off-limits. Since I was the only one without a full-time job who wasn’t hugely pregnant, I’d offered to keep an eye on her. I hadn’t imagined it being that big of a task, until she attachedherself to me like a shadow. If I was cleaning rooms, Gordon, her own spray bottle in hand, was right there. At lunch, she waited for me to make her a quesadilla after my own, then sat beside me at the table, reading her Allies book until we were done, at which point she followed me back to the motel. In the evenings, while Bailey worked late at the Station—since the breakup with Colin, she’d focused on making money and not much else—Gordon sat next to me on the couch as I watched house remodeling shows with Mimi, cheering when the hard hats came out and demos began. The only time we parted ways was when she went to bed, and I was pretty sure she would have stayed in my room if I’d offered. Which I didn’t.
“I think it’s cute,” Trinity had said that morning as we sat eating toast together in her room. In a rare moment, we were alone: Gordon had gone with Mimi to open up the office, although I knew she’d find me as soon as I started cleaning. “She looks up to you.”
“Yeah, but why?” I asked. “She barely knows me.”
Trinity shrugged, slathering butter onto one of the four pieces of toast I’d brought her. Her bed, which was basically her home until the baby came, was piled with magazines, dirty plates, and her laptop, which she used to alternately HiThere! with the Sergeant and watchBig New York, her favorite reality show. Although I’d managed to quell a lot of my organizing urges, I was dying to get her out of the room just long enough to do a deep clean.
“Well, think about it,” she said. “Her mom’s out of the picture. So is yours.”
“My mom is dead, though.”
“True. But if you’re ten and live in another state from your only parent, it probably feels like a death, right?”
I thought about this. “What’s Amber’s story, anyway?”
She finished chewing. “Grew up here, followed some deadbeat guy to Florida, where she got hooked on pills. Social services was going to take Gordon until Mama and Mimi got involved.”
I thought of Gordon, so small in her glasses. My heart just broke for her. “Sounds kind of familiar.”
“You’re more alike than you know,” Trinity continued, shifting herself and rubbing a hip. “There’s also the fact that you both have two names but only go by one.”
