“You want to come with?” Imogen asks now, her voice high and uncertain. “We’re probably just going to the diner or something, but you could . . . come with?”
God, that’s a non-invitation if ever I’ve heard one. “I’ve got some stuff to finish up here,” I tell Imogen, shaking my head. I miss her, though. I can’t deny that. When we were little we always wore our hair exactly the same. “But maybe we could get dinner sometime, just you and me, catch up? I’ll get cake, you could do my cards?” Imogen’s mom has been crazy for tarot for as long as I’ve known her; Imogen got a deck of her own for her thirteenth birthday. She used to read for me all the time, laying out the spread slow and careful on my fluffy duvet, the quiet flipping sound as she turned them over: four of swords, seven of pentacles. The hanged man. The sun. I always repaid her in German chocolate cake from the diner on Main Street, which I maintain is dry and crumbly and gross—cake and diner both—but which Imogen loves beyond all others.
She shrugs at the invitation, though, blunt bangs swinging as she shakes her head. “I’m not really doing that so much anymore,” she tells me. “Cards, I mean. But sure, let’s get dinner, absolutely.”
I’m about to suggest a day when we both spot Tess coming in across the lobby, holding a piece of watermelon. Imogen’s gone so fast I don’t get a chance to say good-bye.
“I gotta go,” she calls over her shoulder. The door to the Lodge thuds shut.
Day 9
I’m wiped when I get back from the Lodge the next afternoon, having spent the better part of my shift helping clear the old furniture out of the dining room so the ugly old carpet can get ripped out in the morning—work I liked a lot, actually, because it meant nobody could talk to me. All I want is a shower followed by a face plant directly into my bed, but my mom’s in the kitchen, cutting up lemon slices to float in the iced green tea she drinks by the gallon whenever she’s working on a book, wearing jeans and a silky tank top, barefoot on the hardwood. She grew up in this house, has walked these same creaking, wide-planked floors since she was a baby. She was born in the master bedroom upstairs.
I was born in a county hospital in Farragut, Tennessee, to a couple younger than I am now who couldn’t keep me: The night Molly came home was a staple bedtime story when I was a kid. “I chose you,” my mom liked to tell me, both of us tucked under the duvet, my small feet brushing her kneecaps and my hair a tangled mess over the pillows. She never was much for braids or bows. “I chose you, Molly baby. All I wanted in the whole world was to be your mom.”
Diana Barlow, if nothing else, has never lacked the imagination to craft a tall tale.
Okay, possibly I’m editorializing a little. Still, for somebody who wanted a baby so badly, it’s always been kind of funny to me how emphatically not maternal my mom is. Not in an ice-queen, TV, Flowers in the Attic kind of way—she was never mean or cruel, she always told me she loved me, and I believed her—but in a way where she was just kind of bored by kid stuff, Patrick and Julia and me yelling our heads off in the yard all day long. It was like she’d woken up one day to find some foreign storybook creature living in her house with her and she wasn’t entirely sure what to do with it. Maybe that makes sense, though—after all, she wanted a baby.
And that baby turned into—well. Me.
“You’re filthy,” she observes now, dropping the lemons into the pitcher and sticking the whole outfit into the refrigerator. “What do they have you doing over there, huh?”
“Hog wrestling, mostly.” My muscles are aching. I probably smell. I fill a glass of water at the tap, waiting for it to run cold as I can get it. She’s done work on the kitchen since I left, different appliances and countertops, and I pull the peanut butter from the pantry with its new sliding barn door. My mom hadn’t written a book in five years when she stole my worst secret and turned it into a best seller. The novel she put out before that, Summer Girls, was a giant flop. Not writing made her angry, had her stalking around the house like a zoo animal in a too-small cage; I remember how glad I was when she disappeared into her office again my junior year, how happy she seemed to be back at work. “I cleared the block!” she crowed, toasting me with her coffee cup one morning over breakfast. I had no idea she’d used me as the dynamite to do it.
“Oh, you’re funny,” she says now, shaking her head and smirking at me a little. “I mean it; I thought you were doing a personal assistant thing over there, not physical labor.”
I shrug, taking a big gulp of my water and fishing a spoon out of the drawer. “I do whatever she needs me to do.”
“You don’t have to be doing it at all, Molly.” My mom turns to look at me. “You don’t have to spend this summer working, I told you that. It’s your last summer before college; you should be spending it relaxing, not making hotel beds for ten dollars an hour.”
“I’m not making hotel beds,” I argue. “But even if I was—”
“You don’t have to work at all,” she counters, and I have to make an actual effort not to roll my eyes at her. She used to ring this bell all the time when the book came out and all holy hell broke loose, as if somehow her cannibalizing my darkest secrets was some generous act she did for my benefit. It never seemed to occur to her that the last thing I wanted was her payoff. “That money is yours.”