Gabe stopped off to see some school friends in Rhode Island on the way back from Boston; he gets back in the morning and texts to say he’s going to come meet me at work at the end of the day. I spend my entire shift dreading it, guilt and shame eating at my insides like somehow I swallowed a mouthful of the chlorine we use at the pool. Thoughts tumble around in my brain, wild and overheated like clothes in a dryer—by the time I punch my time card and pull my purse out of my locker, I feel like I’m legit about to be sick.
Then, though—
Then I see Gabe.
He’s standing outside in the parking lot, all tan summer skin and a soft blue T-shirt, car keys dangling lazily from one hand. “Hey, Molly Barlow,” he says, grinning across the blacktop slow and easy.
I launch myself right into his arms.
It’sinsane, the effect Gabe has on me—like a storm at sea clearing, like a hurricane calming down. The churning in my stomach disappears the moment he catches me and all of a sudden everything seems so enormously obvious. He seems so enormouslyright. There’s nothing tortured or painful about being with him. Everything about him is easy and good.
“Hey, you,” Gabe says, laughing, lifting me off my feet a little. His arms feel like a life preserver, feel safe. “Missed me, huh?”
“Yeah.”I clamp my hands over his ears and stamp a kiss on his mouth, decisive. “How’d it go?”
“It went okay, I think,” Gabe says, setting me down gently and lacing his fingers through mine. “Actually, I think it went really, really well.”
“It did?” That makes me smile. “Think you’re gonna get it?”
Gabe shrugs, grinning mischievously. “We’ll see.”
“We will,” I agree. I can picture it now, just like I could before he left but somehow forgot while he was away from me—the two of us sitting in coffee shops or huddled in dark Harvard bars, riding the T over the Charles River with the city lights winking in the distance. What was I trying to do with Patrick the other night, prove that I didn’t deserve this?
I tilt my face up to Gabe’s, his hair gleaming golden in the late afternoon sunlight. “I’m really glad you’re back.”
Day 61
The florist we use for the lobby screws up and sends two dozen extra gladiolas, which are Connie’s favorite, so I bundle them up in paper towels and bring them by the Donnellys’ after work. I’ve been thinking about her, about all of them, the secrets they keep from one another. They used to feel like such a solid unit of measure, the ideal family. They used to make me feel so safe.
“My God, Molly,” Connie says when she answers the door in her mom jeans and her work shirt, the baffled smile turning her face young and pretty. “What are these for?”
I shrug, feeling shy and awkward—I purposely picked a time I was pretty sure none of her offspring would be around, but I feel caught out and exposed anyway, like possibly this was a giant overstep. Back whenDriftwoodfirst came out and everything unspooled around me like somebody dropping a ball of yarn, I used to imagine Connie calling or coming to my house to take me out for coffee and waffles with whipped cream, to dispense some kind of sage motherly advice. She didn’t, of course—close as we were I was never actually a blood daughter, and it was her real kids that I’d screwed with.I don’t even know my own mom’s favorite flower, I realize now.
“Oh, Molly,” Connie says, sounding pleased and resigned in equal measure. The flowers are a bright, screaming pink. “You shouldn’t have.”
“I know,” I say quietly, and we both know I’m not talking about the flowers. I think of the tourist from the Lodge:It’s heartbreaking stuff. “But I did.”
“You did, didn’t you?” Connie agrees, looking at me with something like kindness. “Thank you.”
I’m about to say good-bye and go when Julia appears in the doorway behind her in denim shorts and a plaid button-down, wearing her glasses, which she never does outside the house. “Who is it?” she asks. Then she sees me. “Oh. Hi.”
“I was just going,” I assure her, taking a step back on the crumbling stoop. “I just—” I motion to the flowers. “Have a good night.”
Julia nods but doesn’t make any move out of the doorway, looking at me for a long moment like she’s considering something. I brace myself, a thousand unpleasant possibilities cycling through my brain.
“You should stay for dinner,” she announces.
For a moment I just blink at her, baffled. I hallucinated, I must have. “Ishould?”
“Sure,” she says, turning around and heading toward the kitchen, the long sharp column of her spine. “The boys’ll be home soon; we’re having tacos. Right, Mom?”
Connie glances from Julia to me and back again, uncertain—wondering, probably, if this is some kind of elaborate plan Julia’s got to murder me and hide the body in the barn under some old camping gear. “Right,” she says eventually, stepping back with her armful of flowers. “Come on in, Molly.”
Which is how I wind up eating tacos at the long farm table in the Donnellys’ dining room like somehow I’m thirteen again, only this time it’s Gabe sitting beside me on the bench. He grinned a surprised, tickled grin when he came in through the back door and found me chopping onions with his sister,Rubber Soulon Connie’s bulky, old iPod docked on the counter. “Sneak attack, huh?” he asked, yanking me back against him by my belt loops and kissing the base of my neck when nobody was looking. “Glad you’re here.”
Patrick ambled in a few minutes later, Julia setting the table and Gabe gone into his bedroom to change. Patrick stopped for a moment in the doorway and stared at me like possibly he’d never laid eyes on me before, like I was strange and potentially dangerous. I hadn’t seen him since our messy, confusing middle-of-the-night kiss in the doorway.
“Hey,” I said, eyes on his, steady.
