“Fair enough,” said Shelly, playing it cool. Inside, though, she was dying. (She was adistraction? This whole time, she had considered herself anasset.) “I totally get it.”
“I’m impressed by how you’re handling this,” said Ryan. He gave her a friendly arm tap that had a definite guys-in-the-locker-room vibe. “I’ll be honest, it’s not what I was predicting.”
When he was leaving she couldn’t resist, though. She grabbed his sleeve and pulled him back. “But we had fun, right?” She could hear the note of pleading in her voice and she hated herself for it.
“Sure,” he said. “Lots of fun.”
Could she help it that she called him a couple of times after nights out? Okay, more than a couple. Among her many traits, some good and some bad, is the fact that Shelly Salazar is an incurable drunk dialer.
It was after one of these calls that he hit her with a whopper so hard it still stings when she lets herself think about it, which she doesn’t do often. “Your problem, Shelly, is that you don’t know when things are over. You never pick up on the end of the party.” He said this to her gently, and that’s what gutted her. He wasn’t trying to wound her. He was trying to educate her.
Shelly was, in a word, bewildered. How did other people know when things were over? What was she missing? She’s bewildered by this still.
The third Mudslide goes down like water. It’s practically evil, how good these things are. She pays then heads toward the door. Though she’s been in Poor People’s many times, she’s never before noticed that the floors are uneven. They must be, because she stumbles a bit on the way out the door.
There’s a twentysomething couple on their way in, the guy in a Sox cap and a T-shirt, the woman in a pretty pink beach cover-up and flip-flops.
“Whoa, hey, you okay?” says the guy. He catches her by the elbow.
“Fine,” she says breezily.
“You’re not driving, are you?”
“No,”says Shelly. Why do people keep asking her this? She can feel the couple’s eyes on her as she crosses the street, so she gets out her phone and studies it while she waits for their attention to shift back to their own day.
It’s just after 6p.m.There’s still a lot of the evening to fill.
This is why I don’t like Mondays, she thinks. This, right here. This is exactly why I don’t like Mondays.
When she gets in her car, she points it toward Spring Street and drives as slowly as a great-great-grandmother. The sidewalks in town are teeming. She slows down so much that the car behind her honks. Two mopeds by the statue of Rebecca almost throw her off her game, but they swerve just in time.
In her mid-twenties, when she was first living in New York Cityand working for a small PR firm, Shelly Salazar briefly saw a therapist named Eleanor. Eleanor was the first person Shelly ever talked to—reallytalked to—about her family.
Shelly’s father left when Shelly was ten years old and her brother, Tyler, was fifteen. At the time she remembered everyone talking about what a devastating event this was for Tyler. Such a precarious age for a boy! Just entering the most difficult of the teenage years, and having to navigate them without a father present!
“Meanwhile I was like,hello?” Shelly told Eleanor. “It was not a great situation for a ten-year-old girl either. Let me tell you. But nobody cared.” All people could focus on was the fact that Tyler had made the varsity football team as a sophomore and his father, who’d moved from the family’s home on Long Island to McLean, Virginia, would not be able to attend his games.
Her fingers hover over her phone screen. Should she text Jack Baker?
Your problem, Shelly, is that you don’t know when things are over. You never pick up on the end of the party.She sees now that this is—has always been—her Achilles’ heel. If you please, Jack Baker isn’t the only one with an Achilles problem.
What did she expect, anyway? That he’d want to take Shelly on the PGA Tour with him? Obviously not, although she did think she’d be pretty good at coming up with spectating outfits. White denim skirt, pastel top (sleeveless?), cute white sneakers.
She pulls into the small parking lot at Mohegan Bluffs. She gets out, takes her phone and her keys, locks the car, starts down the stairs. It’s 6:43. Sunset is—what? Maybe an hour away. The day is waning, and summer itself is waning too. She’ll go down to the beach, and she’ll engage in something that is not always her forte. That thing is Introspection.
Finally she reaches the bottom of the stairs. The beach is completely deserted. The sight of so much water, the rocky, unpeopled sand, fills Shelly with a sudden, piercing loneliness.
When Shelly’s parents divorced, Tyler, Shelly, and their mother stayed on in the family home in Plainview; it was the only place Shelly and her brother had ever lived. It emerged sometime later—when Shelly was entering her own precarious teenage years!—that Shelly’s mother had had an affair with a client at the real estate office where she worked. She’d sold this man a three-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bath house with an “exquisite gas fireplace” and a “generous backyard, perfect for weekend barbecues with the family.” And then she’d slept with him.
This was why Shelly’s father left, you understand. But nobody told Shelly for three years. When she confronted Tyler about it—by then he was a senior, a veritable giant in shoulder pads with eye black perpetually smeared along his orbital bones—he shrugged and said, yeah, he’d always known but they’d asked him not to tell Shelly. She’d been so young, and had so many more years to live under their mother’s roof.
“Can you freaking believe that?” Shelly told Eleanor.
It was Eleanor who helped Shelly understand that by trying to shield her from the truth her parents damaged her in an irrevocable way.
Soon after what Eleanor called Shelly’s “significant progress,” Shelly changed jobs, which necessitated changing health coverage, and Eleanor was no longer part of her network. Shelly could have found another therapist, but the thought of starting all over again with someone else wasexhausting.How was she supposed to re-excavate the past when the shovel was so heavy the first time around?
Why is she thinking about all of this now? Eleanor hasn’t crossed her mind in years.
