“Too bad you chose white. One drop of red wine and it’s ruined,” Suzanne said. They were out on the steps now. Short as their visit had been, it seemed like the right thing to walk them to the car. The scene felt so awful, I thought I’d help.
“Jilly loves her new doll,” I offered.
“I wish they’d make a Black one,” Jilly said. I would not have expected this from Jilly. She was definitely trying to get a rise out ofher grandparents. Maybe visits from the Cabots brought out the bad girl in all of us.
“Those dolls are expensive.” Suzanne again. “They make them for the type of people who can afford them.” Meaning white ones.
“Bill Cosby could afford to buy his kids American Girl dolls,” Hayward said. “Same with Michael Jordan, if he had a girl someday. Or Mr. T.”
The grandparents had taken their seats in the Lincoln by this point. The six of us stood lined up in the driveway, watching. Regina in her oversized housecoat. Forrest in his towel. Jilly was still gripping her bear, whose recording device appeared to be malfunctioning in such a way that he kept saying the wordsspecial friendover and over. Even Prudence was there, holding the refill Colson would not be needing.
Suzanne flipped down the passenger-side sun visor to check her reflection. Something must have caught her eye in the rearview mirror. She rolled down the windows. Her voice—which had seemed, for the entire duration of her visit, like that of a person in a commercial—took on an utterly different tone for a moment.
“What’s that you’ve put up in our old maple?” she said. She must have noticed the tree house Forrest had been building for Jilly. Unfinished.
“I thought we took that down years ago,” she said. “After—”
“It’s a different one,” Regina said. “This one’s for Jilly.”
“I can still remember the tea parties you used to have up there,” Suzanne said. “You and—”
“That’s enough, Suzanne,” Colson said. His wife rolled up the window on her side.
Regina went back into the house without further comment. Forrest and I stood there, watching the Cabots’ Lincoln disappear down the long driveway. When we stepped back in the house ourselves a moment later, Regina had gone back to bed.
37
What a Man Looks Like After He Has Sex
Jilly and I were up in her room, playing with her dolls. She was Molly, her most recent acquisition. I was Samantha, the one whose hair she had cut a while back, before she understood what a bad idea it was, giving a haircut to an American Girl doll.
The dolls were having a fight. Molly had just accused Samantha of being mean. The voice Jilly employed when being Molly was higher than her normal one, the words delivered in something approximating an English accent. Jilly’s idea of one.
“I’m not mean, I just have a stomachache,” I said, trying to come up with an alternate voice of my own for my doll—Southern, maybe—and having a hard time at it. It wasn’t a very inspired response, but I wasn’t into the game. I was thinking about Forrest, though not in the happy way I had in the early days of summer. I was thinking about Forrest as he was now. A version of him I still loved, though I wasn’t sure I liked him.
That night he took us all out for fried clams. We were sitting at an outdoor table, a giant bowl of clams in the middle. French fries, tartar sauce. All my favorites, with my favorite person at the table. Even now, in the Post-Brenda World—even now that he didn’t seem to be toointerested in hearing about my life the way he had been previously—I couldn’t help feeling good just being around him.
Forrest looked distracted—a little like the way I got, it occurred to me, when Jilly wanted me to play tea party with her and her dolls, and I wasn’t really into it. But I told myself this wasn’t so bad. He might be cheating on Regina, but he wasn’t cheating on me. Our relationship could still be the same. One thing remained the same, anyway: I could still be who he’d told me I was. A girl with an amazing life ahead of her. A girl he considered part of the family.
This was the night I decided I’d tell the Emersons about my tennis lessons. Not that it was the group of them that mattered to me. I just wanted to tell Forrest.
“You remember that girl, Olivia,” I said, dipping my clam in the sauce. I wanted to tell Forrest about how she’d walked off the court, and the free lessons Jonathan had been giving me, and what he’d said about my potential as a tennis player. I wanted to tell him how it felt when I was running after the ball so hard I thought my heart might explode, actually connecting with it at the last second—and not just connecting but returning it. Hearing Jonathan’s voice calling out from across the net, “Good get.” The high five afterward.
I didn’t get that far into my story. I was just getting to the part where Olivia walked off the court. Forrest checked his watch.
“I hate to cut things short,” he said, “but we’ve got a full moon tonight. I’m going on a nighttime ride with the guys.”
He wasn’t fooling either of us. Regina and I both knew where he was going.
Forrest got up from the table. As he often did, he lifted his bike from the back of the Jeep. “You take the car, honey,” he told Regina. “I’ve got my ride.”
Jilly protested, of course. Jilly was the one who gave voice to what the rest of us were feeling and not saying.
“Daddy!” she wailed. “Why don’t you ever stay home with us anymore?”
“I’ve got some steep hills to tackle tonight, Jilly Bean,” he told her. “You don’t want your old man to drop out of the triathlon because he can’t keep up with the young guys, do you?”
“I don’t care about the triathlon. I just want you,” she told him. For once I agreed with her.
