Her current project was the townhouses, and for my mother they were especially important. She'd taken a risk by going for luxury, adding all kinds of fancy accoutrements like heated garages, marble bathrooms, balconies, and high-end appliances, all for the discerning, affluent professional. But just as she began building, the economy took a slide: there were layoffs, the stock market plummeted, and suddenly everyone was tentative with their dollars, especially when it came to real estate. Since she'd already started, she had no choice but to keep going, but her nervousness had driven her to work harder at making contacts and sales. Considering how many of her waking hours (i.e., all of them) were devoted to this already, it seemed close to impossible. Hence stress. Lots of it.
"I'm fine," she said to Caroline one morning a couple of days after my late night with Wes, as the three of us sat at the kitchen table. My sister was spending most of her time shuttling between her house in Atlanta, making sure Wally was eating enough vegetables while he battled some corporation in his law case, and the coast, where she conferred with the carpenter, dickered over fabric and paint chips, and, by the looks of the receipts I'd seen, bought up most of the inventory at Home Depot. In between, she'd taken to dropping in to show us pictures of the progress, ask for our opinions on decorating decisions, and tell my mother, repeatedly, that she needed to relax and take a vacation. Yeah, right.
"Mom," she said now, as I took a bite of cereal, "you're not fine. Are you even sleeping?"
"Of course I am," my mother said, shuffling through some papers. "I sleep like a baby."
That is, if she was sleeping at all. More than once lately I'd come downstairs at two or three a.m. only to see her in her office, still in her work clothes, typing away, or leaving voice-mail messages for her contractors or subs. I didn't know when she went to bed, but by the next morning when I was getting up for work she was always in the kitchen, showered and dressed in new clothes, already talking on her cell phone.
"I just want to be sure that when the house is done, you'll commit to this vacation," my sister said now, opening one of her beach-house folders and sorting through some photographs. "It looks like it's going to be August, probably the second week."
"Anytime after the seventh is fine," my mother said, moving her coffee cup aside to make a note on something with the pencil in her hand. "That's the gala for the opening of the townhouses."
"You're having a gala?" I said.
"Well, it's a reception," she told me, picking up her cell phone, then putting it down, "but I'm planning for it to be nicer and bigger than the sales events we've had here before. I'm renting a tent, and I've found this fantastic French caterer… Oh, that reminds me, I've got to call about the kitchen faucets if I want to change them from ruby to diamond class."
And then she was up, pushing back her chair and starting across the kitchen, still muttering to herself. How she'd gotten from caterers to faucets was hard to say, but it was hard keeping up with her these days.
"So the eighth?" Caroline called after her. "Of August? I can write that down, it's firm?"
My mother, halfway through the door, turned her head. "The eighth," she said, nodding, "firm. Absolutely."
Caroline smiled, pleased with herself, as my mother disappeared down the hallway. She picked up her folder, tapping it on the tabletop to straighten its contents, then put it down in front of her again. "So it's set," she said. "The eighth to the fifteenth, we're officially on vacation."
I put my spoon down in my now empty bowl, finally realizing why this date had been ringing a bell in my head. It was the day after Jason was returning from Brain Camp: by then I'd know whether we were together or really over. But now it was only the end of June. The townhouses still needed windows, fixtures, landscaping. The beach house was going to be painted, the floors sanded, the new decor installed under my sister's watchful eye. The new would be new, the old, new again. What I'd be, on a break, broken, or otherwise, I had no idea. Luckily for all of us, though, we still had time.
Wes and I were friends now. And really, no one was more surprised than me.
Initially, the only thing we shared, other than working for Wish, was that we both had lost a parent. This was a lot to have in common, but it wasn't just about that anymore, either. The truth was, since our night stranded together, I felt comfortable around Wes. When I was with him, I didn't have to be perfect, or even try for perfect. He already knew my secrets, the things I'd kept hidden from everyone else, so I could just be myself. Which shouldn't have been such a big deal. But it was.
"Okay," he said to me one night, as we sat on the back deck rail at a party in the Arbors, a neighborhood just down from my own, "what's that about?"
I followed his gaze to the open sliding glass door that led into the kitchen, where three girls I recognized from my school—the sort of girls who hung out in the parking lot after late bell, wearing sunglasses and cupping their hidden cigarettes against their palms—were staring at us. Or more specifically, at me.
"Well," I said, taking a sip of the beer I was holding, "I think they're just surprised to see me here."