My father and Paige and I drove home from Concord on Saturday afternoon, and we stopped for gas at the midway point, which was roughly Warner, New Hampshire. We had taken my mother’s Pathfinder because it was roomier and more comfortable than my father’s Accord. He was behind the wheel and pulled into the gas station and convenience store just east of the interstate exit. I hopped from the passenger side to open the gas tank and fill up while my father and Paige wandered into the store to use the restrooms and get snacks. It had snowed here the night before, but little more than enough to glaze the trees and dust the brown grass. None had stuck to the roads, and now the sun was out once again. I thought of Paige’s team on the ski slopes without her. It was, I knew from experience, a glorious day to be on the mountain.
As I was walking around the front of the vehicle after replacing the nozzle in the pump, I noticed it: A modest dent. A pucker. It was on the bumper, near the right headlight. About six inches higher, between the grill and the light—just below the hood—was a second concave ding. A strip of blue paint not quite the width of a pinky had peeled away inside it. I wondered if another car had backed into the SUV in a parking lot at some point that autumn and I hadn’t noticed, or whether the dings had occurred when my mother had been behind the wheel and thus had been there for months. The damage was in a spot I was unlikely to notice, and obviously I had other distractions that fall. I wasn’t annoyed by the nicks because they were minor, and I might not have thought much more about them if my father hadn’t emerged from the store that very moment. He was pulling his black leather gloves back on and at first was oblivious to me. He was squinting up into the sky and enjoying the sun on his face. But then he saw me hunched over by the right headlight, and he came rushing over.
“Look at this little dent,” I said, and I pointed. “And here’s another.”
“I did that,” he said.
I stood up straight. “You? When?”
“Oh, months ago. Spring semester. I pulled in too close to a streetlight at the college. One of the ones in the lot near the library.”
“I never noticed.”
He smiled in a way that I am sure he thought was conspiratorial and funny. “Fortunately, your mother never did, either.”
“You never told her?”
He brought his gloved index finger to his mouth and pretended to shush me. I think he thought he was being funny.
I THINK MOSTLY of her eyes. They were open.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
I WENT TO see Gavin when we got home from Boston late that Saturday afternoon. “What do you know that you’re not telling me?” I asked him that night.
Two days earlier, on Thanksgiving, a young drug dealer had been shot in his squalid little apartment in Burlington’s old North End, and Gavin had been working around the clock ever since. We were sitting on his couch eating takeout kebobs from a Middle Eastern restaurant around the corner from his building. We were both having juice instead of wine or beer. In his case, it was because of his sleep sex; in mine, it was because the simple thought of alcohol after the Boston cab ride the night before made me queasy. He had bags under his eyes, but he was happy because they had arrested someone late that afternoon. The TV was on because there was news from Florida as well: that day Broward County had completed its hand recount of the presidential ballots. The sound was almost but not quite off, and I felt oddly grown-up. Paige knew I was with my detective—my “super trooper,” she was calling him, often with a roll of her eyes—but our father presumed I was spending the night once again with Heather Prescott.
“I don’t know anything I haven’t told you,” Gavin said, wiping his fingers with a paper napkin.
“You’re lying.”
“Of course.”
“Are you ever going to tell me?” I wanted to be angry with him, but I was so content to be around him that I couldn’t. It had been a revelation in Boston, but the truth was that ever since my mother had died, I really was happiest when I was with Gavin.
He knitted his eyebrows at me, but he was smiling. “I don’t know what you think I know that I’m not telling you.”
“It seems like I only learn things from you when I’ve already started to figure it out and you fess up.”
“Like the fact I saw your mother a few days before she died.”
“Yeah,” I said, not trying to diminish the facetiousness in my tone. “Kinda like that.”
With the remote he muted the sound on the television. “And yet you’re here,” he said, regarding me.
“I am.” I thought back to my mother’s phone conversation more than three years ago on the Amherst quad over Parents Weekend. “Do you remember a phone call with my mother in October 1997? It would have been on a Friday afternoon, a day when my mom was going to see you, but she canceled. It was my first Parents Weekend at college.”