For the next hour, I didn’t do anything except cuss and move cards from one pile to another. Unsuccessfully, of course. The cards, not the cussing. I was adept at that, a real natural.
Gray won—as he had most games of every year—which made him totally insufferable. He was a beast when it came to competitive things. With Max in the picture, insufferable meant unbearable. I used to think he was cute when he became so determined, working the top button of his shirt and demanding cards as if we were playing Go Fish.
As Gray sat across the boat deck from me, tossing cards on piles and claiming them, I remembered other Pirates and Paintball weekends and how, during all of those, we were together. Even with that thick neck, he was a sweet riot, and awfully cute with that crooked ear.
Not as cute as Max, but I saw Gray’s good side again.
The elusive number three on the list—Forgive Gina and Gray. And tell them the truth—could happen this weekend.
Would happen, I determined. Well, at least the second part. Forgiveness itself was like training for an Ironman: so many moving parts.
I still had a stack of cards when Gray screamed, “Nertz!” ending the game.
Gina dropped the f-bomb.
“Language!” three of the parents yelled.
“Sorry,” she peeped like a bird.
Max nudged me. “You still with us?”
“I’m hungry,” I said.
“Food break?” Max suggested to the group.
Everyone agreed. We left our cards on the deck and stormed the galley. Lucky for us, Mom was the keeper of all things carb. She piled Cheetos, chips, potato salad, and burgers onto fancy Chinet and sent everyone outside but me.
When they were safely on the other side of the door, she asked the question I expected. “You doing okay?”
“I am.”
She pushed a little further. “Cross your heart?”
I swiped an X over my chest.
It wasn’t a lie; I felt pretty good. But it made me wonder about the truths I’d kept to myself. If my life had been in the blender at the very moment Mom asked me, I would have given her the same answer. Was that wrong?
I imagined a world where my mother believed I was undeniably happy. She’d had that for sixteen, almost seventeen years. That was a long time.
“You seem better,” she said.
“Getting there.”
“Are you comfortable with Gray? Gina? Is it weird that you and Max . . . I mean, with Gray here?”
“Yes. No. It’s weird,” I answered, and repeated what I’d started with: “I’m okay.”
Mom and I hadn’t talked about Max and me seeing each other since that day in the bathroom when she’d fixed my hair, but she was smart enough to know I wasn’t going over to his house for mac and cheese.
I knew her opinion, though. Because I lived in a constant war with sleep, I’d overheard my parents’ late-night discussions of Max and Sadie’s love life. They were cautious, but pleased. Dad worried our ties with the accident could be dangerous or unhealthy. Mom said there was a reason for all of it.
I’d stopped listening after that.
“Where did your brain just go?” Mom asked, frowning. “You zoned out.”
I took a sip of Mountain Dew, the syrup thick and sugary, and gave her another honest answer. “You don’t want to know.”
“Oh, go eat.” She popped me on the butt. “Play cards.”
I loved my mom so much in that moment that I almost dropped my plate and threw my arms around her. We were the kind of family who said I love you, so I said it then. Just so she’d know.
“You’re the best,” she told me. “And stop cussing at cards.”
“Mom, you cuss at cards.”
“Do as I say, not as I do, or whatever bullshit saying that is.”
As usual, Mom was a clown factory.
I laughed all the way up the steps and onto the deck.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
We docked the McCalls’s boat next to their moored Jet Skis at a beach campground a few miles away from the little island.