Laurel got quiet, her mouth a little wavy. “Some people never do. I don’t really know why.” She looked away. “We never had an easy time. We both had a way of retreating. Though we did do some things. And we did have you. That’s not nothing.” Then her expression changed, and she asked, “What happened down in New York, darling?”
In the passenger seat beside her mother Greer choked out the story about the fake mentor program in Ecuador, and about Loci, and Faith. “I had to leave. I couldn’t stay. I don’t know; was I being too pure? When I told her I was leaving, she just turned on me, Mom, I couldn’t believe it. It was humiliating. I was so destroyed.”
“No you weren’t. And you’re not. But that must have been very upsetting; I can see that.”
“She was upset too. We both were.” Greer shook her head. “What am I supposed to do now?” Greer asked. “Mom, I’ve quit my job.”
Her mother looked at her. “Do you have to know what to do immediately?”
“Well, no.”
“Don’t you have some money saved up?” Laurel asked, and Greer nodded. “Then take a little time. Go slowly.”
“But I hate that,” Greer said.
“What? Going slowly? Why, what’s the rush?”
“I don’t know,” said Greer. “It’s not the way I’m built.”
“What, you’re afraid that if you go slow you’re going to become like Dad and me?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“I know you didn’t. But you’ll never be us; that’s not going to happen. And you don’t always have to feel the compulsion to keep striving toward something for the sake of striving. No one will think less of you. There are no grades anymore, Greer. Sometimes I think you forget that. There are never going to be grades for the rest of your life, so you just have to do what you want to do. Forget about how it looks. Think about what it is.”
Greer nodded again. “And take a little time doing what now? I don’t have anything.”
“That’s just it,” said Laurel. “Who knows? You don’t have to know yet. Can’t you just wait and see?”
They were silent for a while, and then Greer blurted out, “But it isn’t just what happened down in New York. It’s also Zee. I betrayed her.”
“What?”
“I don’t know why I did what I did. And I don’t know how to undo it.” At that point she began to sob.
Laurel fiddled with the sticking lock on the glove compartment, got it open, and pulled out a flattened packet of tissues. “Take one,” she said. Greer blew her nose endlessly, until it was probably as red as a clown’s. “You will work on this,” said Laurel. “You work so hard on everything.”
They drove home from the library in a state of quiet recovery, and as they pulled up in front of the house and Laurel leaned down over the backseat to get her bag, Greer saw Cory through the car window. He was letting himself out of the front door of his house. She had known she would see him while she was here; it was just a matter of when.
The sight of him always shocked her and broke her down a little each time she visited: that he was right there, but not connected to her anymore. That they were growing older separately, now in their mid-twenties, this period of peak hope, which wouldn’t last that long. He had been changing physically, gradually; the longer the time passed between visits, the more obvious it became. He was still handsome but entirely grown, and he looked to her now like a young suburban dad. Skinny as always, neatly and plainly dressed in a down vest and jeans. It was startling how Cory had fully inhabited the life he led here and didn’t look anymore like someone pretending.
Her mother got out of the car, waved to him, and then went inside. Greer went over to him and they hugged in that only upper-body way they’d done since the breakup. His hair was slightly longer than she remembered. That’s new, she wanted to say, but maybe it wasn’t new; maybe his hair had been long for some time.
“You want to go somewhere?” she thought to ask, and he looked hesitant but then said okay, just for a little while, he had to be somewhere; and so they walked to Pie Land. Kristin Vells no longer worked there, or at least wasn’t working there now. Over pizza and plastic cups of soda Cory asked her, “So what’s the deal with your being here? Traveling for work?”
“No.”
He looked more closely at her, tilting his head the way he used to do on Skype. “You okay?”
“Not really. I quit my job.”
“Oh, wow,” he said. “You want to say more?”
“No. Thanks, though.” It would have been such a relief to tell him, a relief to feel the information passing from her to him, planted in his brain, where he would think about it too. “Tell me what’s going on with you,” she said.
“Deflection. You do it so deftly.”
“I try.”
“Okay,” Cory said. “Some things are new with me. I’ve been working at Valley Tek, the computer store in Northampton.”
“Do you like it there?”
“I do, yeah. And I’m still cleaning houses.”
“Ah.”
“You’d be amazed at how filthy people are. I mean, amazed. They shed their skin, and the floor of everyone’s house is basically like the floor of a forest. Flakes. Droppings. I know, that’s a lovely image. But it’s interesting. And Valley Tek is interesting too. Every day is sort of like, what particular weird problem will someone bring in today? And some of us get together after work and play video games.” Then he added, self-consciously, “I’ve actually been writing a game myself. A guy at work was encouraging me to do it so we could develop it together. He’s a programmer.”
“Really? What is it?”
He took a second. “It’s called SoulFinder. Sort of a corny name, but I’m not great with names. What it is, is you try to find the person you’ve lost. But I can’t describe it well. It’s not ready for human consumption yet. I don’t know if it ever will be, but I like to think it will.”
“I hope it will. How’s your mom?” she asked finally, needing to find something to say. “What’s going on with her?”
“She’s okay,” he said. “I mean, she takes her medication when she’s supposed to, which is really good. For a while there she wasn’t compliant, and that was hard. But it’s kind of calm in the house these days, actually.”
“You think you’re here for the long run?” Greer asked lightly.
“If this isn’t the long run, I don’t know what is.”
Greer knew that it was. Your twenties were a time when you still felt young, but the groundwork was being laid in a serious way, crisscrossing beneath the surface. It was being laid even while you slept. What you did, where you lived, who you loved, all of it was like pieces of track being put down in the middle of the night by stealth workers. Until a few days earlier, Greer had had a crowded life that she believed in and was frustrated by. Cory in his twenties was someone who had come to the rescue of his broken mother and stayed.
“If you ever get down to the city,” she said casually when they stood to go, “you could stay with me in Brooklyn. I have a sleeper sofa.”
“Thanks,” he said. “That’s nice of you. I might get there.”
“Okay. I’ll see you when you do,” she said. She wanted to say to him: Once we were twin rocket ships.
They walked back to their street and stood in the neutral zone between their houses. “How’s Slowy?” Greer suddenly asked.
“Oh, he’s good. Well, I mean, I don’t really know if he’s good. There’s no way to know. But anyway, he’s basically the same.”
A few days later, on her last night there, when Greer and her parents found themselves in the kitchen at the same time, getting ready for dinner—they had eaten together each night, her parents seeming to understand that Greer wouldn’t want to eat alone now—her father said, “You saw Cory? Anything new with him?”
“He works at the computer store in Northampton,” Greer said. “And he’s inventing a computer game or something. But mostly, you know, he still lives here with his mother. He even still cleans a couple of the houses she used to clean. So, I guess that’s what he’s up to. Not that much.”
“Greer,” said Laurel, “what are we supposed to do, shake our heads and say that he’s accomplished nothing?”