“Yes, please.”
“Give me fifteen minutes, okay?”
“Okay.”
Sam has slept twelve hours at a stretch for the past several nights and is beginning to feel the energy returning to her body, the elasticity to her skin. She has started drinking water again, and stopped drinking alcohol. In New York she had sort of forgotten about water as a beverage option. (Turns out, water is delicious!) Her parents have been welcoming and hospitable and delighted to have her; they asked only one question, on the first day: What happened?
“I don’t really want to talk about it,” Sam said. “I’m just happy to be home.”
Her parents are hopelessly uninformed about and uninterested in social media, which, in Sam’s current situation, is a blessing. They must know that simply googling her name would bring a wealth of information, that if they cared to join Twitter and searched for mentions of Sam they’d find entire bathtubs’ full of vitriol directed against her and, yes, some support too, but an unbalanced amount of vitriol. Her mother has long resisted social media because she never liked the idea of students following her (or, in some cases, as other teachers have reported, asking to be followed!) and her father hardly ever knows where his phone is when he doesn’t need it for work, never mind how to use it formore than calls and email. So when Sam said she didn’t want to talk about it, they took her at her word.
Today, she eats her waffles while her mom sits across from her at the kitchen table, offering her syrup and sliced strawberries and whipped cream and orange juice and a lot of lovely things but sort oftoo many lovely things, if that makes sense—and presenting, along with the food, more questions.
Has Sam thought about her plans? Has Sam considered reaching out to the guidance counselor from the high school—Amy can facilitate the conversation, if that would make things easier!—to talk about reinvigorating some of the applications she’d started senior year? Does Sam know there is no shame whatsoever in collecting a few credits at a community college while she gets the rest of her plan together? Community College of Rhode Island in Warwick, not so far away at all, has some viable options! Sam could use some time there as a springboard to a more prestigious four-year liberal arts college, like the one Henry attends! Has Sam thought about getting a job, and if so, what kind of job, and how does she expect to get there—they don’t have an extra car? (Her parents don’t know how much money Sam brought in at the collab house, and she’s not about to share numbers. They’d find it suspicious, even though it was all quite aboveboard. Replacing the waterlogged phone was merely a drop in the bucket. So to speak.)
Sam eats her waffles faster and faster, not just because they are delicious (they are; her mom makes them from scratch, with actual buttermilk) but because as long as her mouth is full and she’s chewing she can point unapologetically in the direction of her jaw without answering.
Amy brings out the college catalogs next, a thick stack of bright colors, fall foliage, happy, engaged young people.
Sam swallows. “How’d you get so many of these so quickly?”
“I’ve had these right along. You got oodles of them your juniorand senior years. I just put them aside in case we needed them. And look! Good thing I did.”
“Good thing,” says Sam. “Where’s Dad?”
“He had to run out and take care of an emergency at the Backman house.”
Sam wishes her dad were here to provide reinforcement: he might be on her side. Greg didn’t go to college—and see, he’s doing just fine! He loves his work as the owner of a small HVAC company; he’s a well-respected member of the community; he makes a fine living, if not quite enough to enjoy all the luxuries that someone like Uncle Timmy enjoys. Her dad never even complains about going to work.
“Thank you for the waffles,” says Sam. “They were good, really.”
“Do you want more?” Her mom is so eager that it sort of breaks Sam’s heart. “I made a lot of batter. Probably too much!”
“No. Thanks, Mom. I’m stuffed.”
Like a ghost, Kona is there fixing Sam with his big sad brown eyes. He puts his head in Sam’s lap and sniffs around a little bit.
“Um...” says Sam.
“He’s just showing his affection for you,” her mother says. “He and his littermates had a really rough start. They were found on the side of a highway in rural Tennessee.”
“I feel like he’s trying to date me,” says Sam. She moves Kona’s head out of the way and rises from her seat to rinse her plate and put it in the dishwasher, but before she gets a chance her mother says, “I’ve got this, sweetie,” and takes the plate from her.
This kindness starts to feel like a trap, as Amy continues, “Do you want to go for a swim later? Your friends must be home from college; have you been in touch with any of them? I think I saw Catie Connolley getting out of her car at the Coast Guard House last week. Like she was going to work. Maybe you could get a job there! Wouldn’t it be fun to see more of Catie?”
Sam feels like she might suffocate under the focus. It’s likewalking around with a weighted blanket on her shoulders—a weighted blanket that is made only for deep sleeping. It would not be fun to see more of Catie. Catie Connolley is studying biology at the University of Virginia, and she and Sam have about as much in common as a unicorn and a Maine coon cat. Their friendship pretty much ran its course senior year—maybe even before that.
And then, like it’s an afterthought, Amy delivers the most relevant piece of information of the day—in fact, the most relevant piece of information of the week, and, as it comes to be, the entire summer: “Did I tell you about Uncle Timmy?”
Hearing her uncle’s name causes a little blipin Sam’s heart. She used to love her uncle so much. She still loves him, of course. But she doesn’t know him anymore. Just his name makes her think of the dressing room at the Golden Theatre on Forty-fifth, the smell of backstage, the fading light outside the stage door after a matinee.
“No,” she says. “Did he get married again?”
“No! I mean, I don’t think so. He’s spending the summer on Block Island! Directing a Shakespeare play.Much Ado About Nothing.”
“They do summer theater on Block Island?”
“Not typically. But this summer, yes. And you’ll never believe who’s starring in the play.”
