ADDIE
OF COURSE, Kenzie’s house is much larger than mine. It’s practically a mansion.
I’m pretty sure two or maybe even three of my houses could fit into Kenzie’s. Even her lawn looks prettier than ours—green and lush, even though everyone else’s grass seems to be wilting as the fall goes on. Does she have fake grass on her lawn? Is that a thing?
I hover by the walkway of her house, still on my bicycle. The windows of her house are dark. Her parents both have some high-powered jobs, like lawyers or CEOs—I’ve heard her bragging that they are never home as she plans parties that only her exclusive guest list of friends are allowed to attend. Only the school’s elite have been inside Kenzie’s house. Hudson and I used to make fun of those parties. Now he’s probably, like, the guest of honor.
I pull off my backpack. I fish around in the small pocket until I pull out the house keys I’ve been carrying around since I swiped them from her bag. What I’m contemplating is risky. Kenzie’s parents might not be home, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have some sort of elaborate alarm system. Or perhaps a pit bull will leap out at me the second I cross the threshold. That sounds like the kind of luck I usually have.
No. It’s not worth it. My life won’t be better if I get mauled by a pit bull.
Instead, I continue on my way home. When I get there, my mom is sitting on the sofa, reading. She loves to read, which was something that drove my father wild. You like spending time with your books more than you like spending time with me. I don’t think it was true, but if it was, could anyone blame her?
“Addie.” She looks up when she sees me, and she sticks a bookmark inside her book. I always dog-ear pages, but she hates doing that. She treats her books so delicately. “You’re home early. Are you ready to go visit your dad?”
Somehow I almost forgot her plan to drive out to the cemetery today to visit that asshole’s grave. This day just keeps getting worse and worse. Especially when my mother stands up from the sofa, looks me up and down, and says, “Did you seriously dress like that today at school?”
“Yep,” I say, because I just don’t want to tell her the story about what happened to me. It was embarrassing enough to live it, I don’t want to share it with anyone else—even my mom.
She rolls her eyes. “You can’t dress like that at the cemetery. Why don’t you go change your clothes?”
I dump my backpack on the floor. “No. I’m not changing.”
“Well, you’re not going like that.”
“Fine, then I won’t go.”
“Adeline!” she exclaims. “That’s a terrible thing to say!”
“I mean it.” I tug at the hem of my sweaty gym T-shirt. “He was always drunk, and he hit you. He doesn’t deserve for us to visit him.”
My father was terrible. For most of my childhood, he was drunk. Even though people made fun of Hudson for his dad, I would’ve taken his embarrassing father over mine in a heartbeat, Polish curses and all. My dad never even held down a job—even as a school janitor. Every time somebody gave him a chance, he would show up drunk for work and get fired. My mom supported us through my whole childhood.
I was at Hudson’s house studying when I got the call from my mother that they found my father at the bottom of the stairs, not breathing. And I didn’t even feel the slightest bit sad.
“Addie,” she says quietly, the lines under her face deepening, “he was still your father.”
I don’t budge from my spot in the living room. I’m not going to change. Not for him. If she forces me, maybe I’ll go, but once I turn eighteen, that will be the last time ever.
“Fine.” Mom’s shoulders sag. “We don’t have to go.”
I’m shocked. My mother is super stubborn, and I thought for sure we were going to be arguing about this for the next hour. I can’t believe she just let it go like that. “Really?”
“Really. But please get changed. You smell terrible.”
“Okay…”
She offers a smile. “And let’s go out to dinner tonight. We could both use a night out.”
I can’t disagree with that sentiment.
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Chapter Twenty-Four
EVE
FOR MY BIRTHDAY DINNER, I put on my Louis Vuitton pumps and a red dress that clings to my body. I may not be the curviest woman in the world, but I’ve kept in good shape, and this dress accentuates my figure—Jay would appreciate it very much. But when I march into the living room, where Nate is watching television, he barely looks at me.
“Ready to go?” he asks. He hasn’t changed out of the dress shirt and slacks he wore to work, but in his defense, he always looks incredibly handsome.
“I’m ready.” I grab my purse from where I left it on the table next to the front door. “I thought we could go to Maggiano’s tonight.”
Nate looks at me like I just suggested we dash off to Italy to have dinner tonight. “Maggiano’s? That’s kind of far away, isn’t it? And pricey.”
“It’s my birthday,” I start to point out, but I don’t feel like arguing. And the truth is, I’m not excited to be sitting in a car with him for the next forty-five minutes either. “Fine. Do you want to go to Piazza?”
Piazza is a popular Italian restaurant about ten minutes away from here. It’s cheap and fast. Not exactly the kind of place I dream about going to on a special occasion, but I have a feeling nothing about this night is going to be anything special. May as well make the picture complete.
“Sure,” he says.
As always, Nate drives. He turns up the classical music station to a high enough volume that we don’t need to speak to each other. When we first got married, I thought about what future birthdays would be like with this man. He was so affectionate, I used to think that at thirty or forty or even eighty, we wouldn’t be able to keep our hands off each other. I never imagined we would be driving to a birthday dinner at a cheap Italian restaurant, struggling to find something to say.
“We have some good talent this year on the poetry magazine,” he says.
“Oh, that’s great,” I say, even though I literally could not possibly care less.
“Those raw emotions are so intense. Only a teenager could write something so utterly compelling.”
I nod. “All those hormones. I can’t even remember what it was like to feel everything so strongly. But I know I did.”
My husband is quiet then, lost in thought. He always seems like he’s a million miles away these days. We have the same job, so it seems like it should be easy to come up with something to say to each other, yet we can’t. We have become strangers to each other.
Maybe this is my fault. Maybe I need to try harder to connect with him. When we were first together, we used to sit in the park together, curled up under a tree, and he would read poetry to me. If he suggested such a thing now, I would roll my eyes at him. I liked the poems he wrote for me, because they came from his heart, but I never enjoyed poetry in general. It all seemed so silly—especially the ones that don’t even rhyme. I mean, I’m a math teacher. I would sooner sit in the park with him and solve quadratic equations.
Maybe I should suggest it now. Maybe this weekend, we can go to the park and share some poetry. And maybe I need to cool things down with Jay. As much as that tryst has meant to me, if I have any interest in saving my marriage, hooking up with another man is not the best way to go about it.
I’ve decided—tomorrow, on the second day of my fourth decade of life, I’m going to make things right. I’m going to spend more time with Nate, and I’m going to tell Jay that it’s over.
When we get to Piazza, Nate pulls into a spot at the end of the parking lot, as far as he can get from the restaurant. He does that all the time. There are plenty of parking spots right next to the door, and yet he parks half a mile away.
“Can you park a little closer?” I say.
He throws the car into park and frowns at me. “What are you talking about? I’m already parked.”