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 when Driftwood first 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. “I should?”
“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 Soul on 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.
“Hey,” Patrick said to me, then turned around and walked away.
“Any word from Mass General?” Connie asks Gabe now, spooning some black beans into her taco. All the Donnellys fix them the same way, with a soft shell wrapped around the hard one to keep the whole affair from falling apart once you bite into it. It’s an old trick of Chuck’s he taught us all when we were small.
Gabe shakes his head and swallows. “Not yet,” he says. “They said it could be a couple weeks; I think the other kid was interviewing after me.”
My eyes cut across the table at Patrick, the sleeves of his hoodie shoved to his elbows and his freckly forearms, his serious face. He’s looking at his taco, not at me. He must know what it’ll mean, if Gabe spends this fall in Boston.
Right now he seems totally unbothered, though; when he lifts his head and gazes around the table his eyes are clear. “Boston seems like your kind of place,” he tells his brother blandly, then reaches for a serving spoon and refills his plate.
Day 62
Penn wants me to train a couple of new front desk girls on the database software, so I’m clicking around in her office while she looks over my shoulder periodically, making sure there’s nothing I don’t understand well enough to explain. “Do we send thank-you cards?” I ask, scrolling through the records and snapping off the end of my Red Vine. Desi is perched quietly on my knee, her dark head bent over a Little Mermaid coloring page. “Or, like, could we? At the end of the summer, maybe, a postcard thanking people for staying and inviting them to come back—or, like, a coupon or a discount code or something for in the fall when it’s slow?”
Penn’s eyebrows shoot up, a grin spreading over her smooth brown face. “Look at you with your thinking cap on,” she says, nodding. “Wanna cost it out?”
“Sure,” I say, smiling back at her enthusiasm, shifting Desi to my opposite knee. She’s been sticking pretty close lately, hooking her small fingers in my back pocket as I walk the hallways in the morning and buckling herself into the backseat of my car when Penn sends me into town to run errands. I like her spry, quiet company. I like the skinny-but-solid weight of her little-kid body in my lap. “I’ll get it to you tomorrow.”
“Sounds good. You’re feeling better, then?” she asks, leaning against the edge of the desk and studying me. “That didn’t get past me, all that weirdness with you last week.”