There’s no room in the first fridge.
“Second fridge, sweetheart,” my mother says, and then she catches sight of what’s in my hands. “Oh — did you make a pie?”
“Stanley did,” I croak out.
The second lie of the day. The first was walking in here at all.
“He did?” She presses a hand to her chest, delighted by him. “I can’t wait to try it.”
I put the pie into my mother’s second refrigerator, and I get out of the kitchen before she can see my face.
Robert Ermington is on the couch in the den with a glass of something dark, and he stands the second I come through the door.
“Aspen.”
“Mr. Ermington.”
“Please. Robert.”
“Robert.”
He opens his arms, and after a moment, I step into them, and he hugs me the way a man hugs his son’s girlfriend for the first time — gentle, brief, a little careful with me, like I might be fragile — and then he holds me back at arm’s length.
“You look well.”
“Thank you.”
“Stan around?”
“He’s changing.”
“Good.” He gestures at the couch, and because I don’t know what else to do, I sit, and he lowers himself into the chair across from me.
“I wanted a minute with you before the day runs away from us.”
My stomach goes down an elevator shaft.
“Your father and I have been friends a long time. Longer than you’ve been alive. I knew you before you were born.” He looks at the glass, then at me. “So when I heard about the two of you, it was the best news I’d had in years.”
Great.
“I’m not going to put weight on it. You’re young. You should just enjoy each other and let it be whatever it’s going to be.” His eyes don’t move off mine. “But I wanted to say it to you once, in a room with nobody else in it. You have a home in the Ermington family. Today, and after today. Whatever the two of you decide down the road. You have always had one with us, Aspen. I just wanted to make that clear.”
I want to cry. I open my mouth to do the only decent thing left to me — to tell this kind man, before he gets any further out, that none of it is real —
“Oh —” I start.
A woman laughs in the next room, bright and close, and it stops me dead.
I close my mouth. I swallow the truth back down where it lives. “Thank you, Robert.” I make my face into something that holds. “That means a lot.”
See. I can do this.
“Aspen, sweetheart.” Margaret Ermington is in the doorway, and my heart goes off like a drum, but I smile.
“Mrs. Ermington.”
“Margaret, honey.” She crosses to me and folds me into a hug that smells like expensive shampoo and lavender, and she holds it for four full seconds, and when she lets go, she keeps her hands on my shoulders and looks at me the way her husband looked at me. “Let me look at you.”
