If she let this moment go by without mentioning that Mac Coltrane himself was responsible for how pretty that garden was, it meant she was still keeping him a secret, which meant whatever she felt about him was still raw.
Surely she could handle an offhand mention.
Funnily enough, she let the moment go by.
“I was just thinking about that poor child on the way here.” Her mom fingered the doorknob on the kitchen door that led to the garden, her face alight with wistful delight. Brass, carved in scrolls of flowers. She turned it; it came off in her hand.
Her mom shrugged and handed it to Avalon.
“Who, Mac? Poor was the last thing he was.”
“Avalon, I think you know what I mean,” her mom said with the faintest hint of reproach, which Avalon rather liked, because she frankly liked being known well enough to be called on her bullshit. It perversely made her feel loved.
They both toed at the kitchen linoleum where it was peeling up near the back door. Avalon made another note in her phone.
They heard another flush and the thrum of water rushing through pipes as her dad progressed with thumping feet through the upstairs rooms. Mac’s mother’s taste was enshrined up on that floor in the form of that hideous black-and-gold metallic wallpaper in the master bedroom and light fixtures on chains, that sort of thing.
“We can ask Truck and Giorgio to help bring the mini-fridge and the sofa from the rec room for you to use in the short term. Oh, and the twin bed from your room and the bean bag chair.”
Truck Donegal sometimes played bouncer for the Misty Cat, and Giorgio was the grill savant.
“That would be awesome, thanks. I’m going to sleep in the turret.”
“Of course you are,” her mom said.
Avalon grinned. She fetched the clinking box to unpack (plates and glasses, potholders, that sort of thing) while her mom wandered back into the laundry room behind the kitchen. Her dad’s footsteps thumped directly overhead now. Thud thud thud creak.
Scraping that wallpaper off the walls in there was going to be cathartic.That’swhere she was going to start. After she washed the walls downstairs.
“Mac was sweet.” Her mom’s voice was kind of muffled because she was peering into the dryer. “And kind of fundamentally lonely, even when he was with you kids. A mom notices these things. I always wanted to hug him but I don’t think he would have stood for it. He and his brother were so close, even with the age difference. They always struck me more as allies.”
Don’t worry, Mom. I hugged him kind of a lot, she thought.Horizontally, vertically, you name it.
But there was something satisfying in hearing she hadn’t imagined that sweetness. Despite his crackling personality and the half foot in height he had on her, there was a vulnerability in him, a haunting gentleness that was the thing she loved most and made her want to protect him.
She’d written to Mac once or twice during those years, in between the summers. He’d gone to a private boarding school. He was a pretty bad correspondent. Now she thought she knew why.
Avalon suddenly felt the need to defend the girl she once was. “He thought pretty damn highly of himself.”
“He did turn into rather an insufferable teenager practically overnight,” her mom agreed, equably. She was looking at the washing machine dubiously now. “The way he drove that Audi of his through town! A kid’s first car should be at least ten years older than the kid and smell like generations of his family members inside.”
Avalon’s first car had been a Plymouth Duster that smelled like her grandfather’s cigarettes and her brothers’ feet. The back seat had been chewed through by her uncle’s Boxer, Maxine, and even though they’d stretched a cover over it, at high speeds pieces of fluff would escape and circulate in the car cabin.
The very last time she’d seen Mac Coltrane in Hellcat Canyon he’d been a collection of glints: the shiny Audi his parents had given him for his sixteenth birthday, the flash of his sunglasses, the gleam of the blond hair of the girl next to him. His arm had been slung around her. He’d been eighteen.
She’d made sure he hadn’t seen her that day. Part of that was shame and shock over what he’d said. But another wiser, crueler part of her knew the best way to punish him was to take herself away from him.
Her mom pulled open a long narrow cupboard and they found inside a cunning little ironing board. “Avalon, would you look at this!” her mom said. “Isn’t this cute?”
“Almost makes me want to wear clothes I have to iron.”
Her mom snorted.
They went upstairs, and discovered the fourth stair groaned like a dying person. They found her dad studying a charming little flight of stairs suspended on a set of chains, leading to what looked like an attic door.
Avalon could see at once that his earlier tension had dissolved into a sort of smug satisfaction. “Boy, they don’t make them like this anymore,” he said. “This place is a beaut. You’re going to need to replace at least one of those window frames down here, though, and that’s an ugly job. Grout in the bathrooms needs redoing. I’ll get Doug out here to check the foundation and have a look at the roof tonight, but seems okay to me. You can get this done by the first of the year, easy, if you plan it right. Maybe sooner.”
That was a little over a month away.
