I can’t hear her sigh, but I know it’s there. My mother’s signature move, a low exhalation that’s almost a groan—as if she’s seventy instead of newly forty, and plagued by arthritic knees, failing vision, a lifetime of bittersweet memories. Mom is nothing like she sounds in those moments. First of all, she’s gorgeous. The boys in my class have always made sure I understood that I’ve fallen short of the family standard. I’m cute, in a freckled, girl-next-door sort of way, but Rebecca Baker is capital-S stunning. A raven-haired, dark-eyed classic beauty. Of course, she doesn’t realize it, and that just makes her all the more appealing.
Mom wears the same trend-blind clothes she wore when I was little, wide-legged pants when the fashion is skintight, and dresses that hide her slender figure instead of accentuating it. I’d kill to dress her just once. I’d put her in a pencil skirt that hugs her waist and some low heels. Her hair loose and just a little wavy. My mom wears her hair in a knot at the nape of her neck, bobby pins ensuring that no face-framing tendrils will ever escape. I’d have to hate her a little if I didn’t love her so much. And when I look in the mirror, I can’t help but wonder why Jonathan is all her, and I’m made up of the bits and pieces of a stranger.
Lawrence isn’t my real dad. I don’t know who is.
“Mom,” I call, reaching for the shampoo. “Can I have some privacy?”
“I’ll be in the kitchen,” she says.
I don’t answer.
* * *
When I come downstairs, freshly showered and feeling slightly more human, Mom isn’t in the kitchen. She’s in the laundry room folding towels—or at least I think she is. I tell myself she’s busy, and instead of picking up the conversation like she so obviously wanted me to do, I pour myself a glass of orange juice and grab a blueberry muffin from the basket on the counter. I swallow the juice quickly and tuck the muffin in a paper towel, then go wait for Ashley from the protection of the covered porch. It’s not long before she’s pulling down the driveway.
“Ashley’s here!” I shout through the screen door, grateful for my friend’s punctuality. “We’ll talk when I get back!”
There’s a muffled reply from inside the house, but I’m already running down the steps into the pouring rain. For a moment I can’t hear anything except the roar of water as it falls in sheets around me and explodes against the stone path. Then I’m wrenching the passenger-side door open and collapsing inside with a giggle.
“Some beach weather,” Ashley says wryly. I can tell she’s still irritated that I overruled her plans for the day. I’ll make her change her mind. I’m good at that.
“Got a towel?” I grin at her, offering up my dripping arms as evidence of my need.
“You didn’t take one?”
I shrug, but she reaches into the backseat and hands me a beach towel printed with multicolored popsicles.
“It’ll pass.” I squeeze the excess water out of my hair with Ashley’s plush towel. It’ll dry in a riot of dark blond curls, but I don’t care. I rather like my lion’s mane. It fits me.
“Are you even wearing your suit?”
I flash her, exposing my favorite green bikini top with the little white flowers.
My muffin is damp, but edible, and I tear off a corner with my teeth. A plump blueberry bursts against my tongue. “Thanks for getting me out of here,” I say around a mouthful.
“What happened this morning?” Ashley’s softening already, warming up to our comfortable chatter and the promise of a juicy story. “Did Law tear you a new one?”
“He’s not even home.”
“You dodged a bullet there.”
“Look,” I say, pointing in the rearview. “It’s clearing already.” There’s a patch of sky behind us where the clouds have torn that looks exactly like the swirl in the blue peppermints my mom used to take to church. They cut my mouth, but I sucked them anyway, yearning for something sweet. I feel like that a bit right now, hungry in a way that’s inexplicable and undefined.
“Spill,” Ashley demands. “Where were you this morning?”
My story is thin, bare bones, though I’m not exactly sure why I’m hiding things from her. It just seems to me that there are too many loose ends, and I know exactly how my best friend feels about my prime suspect.
“Their dog was poisoned?” Ashley’s nose wrinkles in revulsion.
“It was probably an accident.” For some reason, I don’t want to tell her what Jonathan said. Maybe I misheard him.
“Sure.” Ashley laughs dryly. “Just like it was an accident when someone hit their car in the grocery store parking lot.”
“Are you serious?”
“You didn’t know?” Ashley shoots me a sidelong glance as she slows for the corner that will take us to our favorite beach. “My dad had to file the incident report.”
Ashley’s dad is the manager of the Pantry and has a better grasp on local gossip than most. Maybe that’s one of the reasons I’m hesitant to share just how upset Beth was. How Jonathan seemed oddly calm about the whole affair. No, not calm. Accepting. As if he suspected what had happened long before Calvin told him. There’s simply no need to add fuel to this new development—and Ashley’s family is a bit like gasoline. The Pattersons love to talk.
“Why would someone do that?” I’m talking more to myself than to her, but Ashley answers anyway.
“It’s harmless.” She shrugs one shoulder. “The Murphys make things hard for themselves, and then people like to tease.”
“Tease?” I bristle, suddenly chilled in the blast of cold air pumping from the open vents. “Intentionally hitting their car in a parking lot is more like property damage.”
“It was a scratch.”
My anger is a sudden, solid thing, icy and unyielding. But I don’t want to fight with Ashley. Not now, not when I’ve orchestrated this outing, and the countdown to my departure has officially begun. I can feel the future tugging at me as I sit miserably in the front seat of her car. I don’t want this—any of it. Not the bickering or the dead dog or the conspiracy theories that blow around Jericho like the tumbleweeds that occasionally waft through town on sweltering August days. So I swallow my snappy retort and focus instead on the fact that the blacktop beneath our tires is chalky gray and dry.
I could say, I told you so. Not only has the storm passed right over us, it looks as if it never even rained in Munroe. This happens sometimes in our corner of the Midwest. A tornado cuts through a cornfield tearing one stalk from the ground and leaving its neighbor tall and unscathed. It pours on the south side of town, but there’s a mark on the pavement where the rain abruptly ends. Neatly drawn, impossible to miss. Life between normal and a life-changing tempest separated by a hair’s breadth.
“Looks like we’ll catch some sun after all,” I say, bumping Ashley with my elbow as she pulls into the gravel parking lot on the north shore of Lake Munroe. There are other beaches, but this is where the boardwalk starts, where crowds of people stake rainbow-colored umbrellas into the sand and walk barefoot to buy hand-scooped ice cream cones and questionable corn dogs from Sweet Pete’s. The north shore is also where GL Gas has pumps on the water. I can’t help it—I love the way the boats coast toward the two long docks and guys come running out to catch the mooring lines. Sullivan is one of them, and he’s the reason Ashley and I are both here.
He likes me. I’ve known that for a long time now, but Ashley’s my best friend and I would never. Besides, it’s impossible to know if Sullivan’s thinly veiled attraction to me is sincere or if he’s playing some sort of game. His friendship with Jonathan is strange, to say the least, and I’ve never quite been able to determine if I’m a conquest because he’s genuinely interested or if it’s all a ruse to get under my brother’s skin. There are a dozen reasons why Sullivan isn’t right for me, not the least of which is that I suspect he’s a despicable human being.