17
My parents’ aging Ford Explorer pulled into the parking spot next to my car in front of Wentworth. It felt so strange to welcome them to Rockwood, especially considering the odd circumstances. Although, given my unconventional relationship with them, having a task was probably a good thing.
I opened the passenger door for my dad to help him out. He could walk just fine, but he was slow and careful. He had suffered a traumatic brain injury from a motor vehicle accident while serving as a reservist in the Persian Gulf War. I was only three years old at the time, and given the extent of his injuries, he hadn’t been able to return to his job as a postal carrier. His overall condition improved greatly over the years, but beyond puttering in the garden and watching documentaries on TV, he didn’t do much—besides make whiskey sours. He loved his whiskey sours, just like I did.
“Hi, Sugar,” he said, giving me a somewhat awkward hug. The tension that always existed between my mother and me weighed heavily on everything, and she ultimately overpowered him. It was easier for him to hang back.
“Welcome to Rockwood,” I said. “Either of you want anything? Mom, a Diet Coke?” She drank them like most people drank water.
“Got one,” she said, holding up her twenty-ounce bottle. “Well, this is fancy .” Fancy was not a compliment coming from her; it generally meant something she felt was superior to her, and that caused her resentment. I was ready for her reaction and to hear that word a lot throughout the day.
“It is,” I agreed. It was better to work with her, when I could, than against her. “Dad, anything for you?”
“I’m all set,” he said. “Mom brought me some water.”
“Okay, we’re not here to be tourists,” said Mom. “Let’s get to work.”
We made our way over to the library, as I figured there would be things for both of my parents to do. Adrienne was hauling a very full garbage bag outside when we got to the building.
“Hi, Adrienne,” I said. “What are you doing here?” Part of me was still worried that she had been involved in the pranks, and perhaps she was working in a mandatory clean-up crew as a consequence of her actions. But I also knew there was an investigation underway, and my best guess was those students were either confined to their dorms for the time being or had been picked up by their parents. And the last thing I needed was a showdown with Adrienne’s mother at that moment. My thoughts were spiraling.
“Ms. Lark put out a call for volunteers to help clean everything up, and it’s counting toward our community service hours for graduation. Since I just started here this year, I am a little behind, so I figured I would join in.” She looked at my parents, obviously a bit confused. “Hi,” she said.
“Oh, my apologies. Adrienne, these are my parents, Camille and Billy Paige. They’re going to help today, too.”
“That’s cool,” she said. “Nice to meet you. I’m going to work on the Collections room next. That’s where the worst of it is.”
Mom perked up. There was no mess too great for her to tackle, and I think she relished the challenge. It was always hard for me to understand. “I’ll do that, too,” she said. “I’m used to cleaning motel rooms after bachelor parties. This can’t be much worse.”
“That sounds awful,” Adrienne said, holding the door open for her. “Come with me.”
I looked at my dad, who softly chuckled and shook his head. “You know your mother. The worse it is, the more she wants to clean it.”
“It’s strange,” I acknowledged. “Okay, Dad, let’s go inside. We’ll find a project.”
There were books strewn everywhere. It made me sad, thinking of the authors who had written these volumes, the editors and publishers who had painstakingly checked every line and formatted every page just right. And now their work was chucked all over a boarding school library because a group of hooligans had decided to trash the place as part of a prank night.
“Hey, Dev.” Kyle was picking up a book when we walked into the room. He had a table in front of him where there was a small stack.
“Kyle! I thought you were gone this weekend. I mean, never mind. Kyle, this is my dad, Billy Paige. Dad, this is Kyle Holling. He’s a history teacher and soccer coach here. We, um, we went to college together.”
My dad reached out his hand to shake Kyle’s, and a strange feeling washed over me. I had never once brought a guy—even a platonic one—home to meet my parents, so the idea of introducing one to my dad felt different and incredibly weird. But seeing the ease with which my dad and Kyle launched into small talk filled me with relief.
“History, huh?” Dad asked. “I just finished the Ken Burns documentary about the Dust Bowl. Do you teach that?”
“Every year,” Kyle said. “Have you ever seen Dorothea Lange’s photographs from it? Incredible work. I always show them to my students.”
“I think those are in the documentary.” Dad squinted. “I would imagine teaching history is fascinating. I used to just watch shows about war, but I felt like I needed to branch out more. I want to watch the one about jazz next.”
“The baseball one is great, too,” Kyle said. “Hey, Dev, if you’ve got work to do, you can leave your dad with me. It’s totally fine.”
I had told Kyle about my dad’s injuries and limitations, but I wasn’t sure how much he remembered. I didn’t want to embarrass Dad by mentioning anything, so I gave Kyle a look, searching his eyes for any kind of understanding of the situation. He glanced at my dad and then back at me, nodded slightly, and smiled. I felt a rush of warmth envelope me from head to toe from this unspoken communication. I wasn’t sure why Kyle and I were as connected as we were, but I felt comfortable leaving. “Okay,” I said. “I’m going to go check on dinner preparations and the overall condition of the dining hall. Kyle, text me if you finish or need me to come back. You okay, Dad?”
“You bet, Sugar. So, Kyle, which presidents do you like teaching about the most?”
I suppressed a laugh, knowing Kyle loved nothing more than to go on and on with presidential stories. My dad would be well-entertained.
I couldn’t stop smiling on my walk to the dining hall, thinking of Kyle telling my dad the story of Andrew Jackson getting a bullet from an old duel removed at the White House. Then I remembered that I had just left Heath earlier that morning, warm and happy in his bed. “I like you a lot, Devon Paige,” he had said . What am I doing? My introspection was cut short when I saw a TV crew outside of the administration building and Tam speaking into a microphone while production staff filmed her.
I watched and waited until she broke away and came over to see me. “I was going to text you as soon as I was done recording this piece,” she said, giving me a big hug. I had missed the Tam hugs. “This place is so gorgeous, even in November. Some of the leaves are hanging on. Such a great backdrop, I’ve gotta say.”
“How on earth did you hear about last night?” The campus already looked better than it had just a few hours earlier, but there were still remnants of toilet paper in the trees that would likely be there for months.
“We got an anonymous tip, so we followed up with Andrea. I feel so badly for her. She’s been through a lot this fall.”
“You can say that again,” I concurred. “I don’t know what she’s told you, but I think this is going to be complicated.”
Tam nodded. “She didn’t give me details, but she did say there are aspects of it that are making it tough for her to deal with. Plus, I would imagine the Connelly aspect isn’t helping. He’s gotta be pissed. Hey, you don’t think Adrienne Preston is involved, do you? Because that definitely gets messy.”
I shook my head. “I was worried at first about that possibility, but no, I highly doubt it at this point. She’s helping with the library cleanup right now for community service hours, and if she was in trouble, I don’t think she’d be doing anything like that. And get this—she’s cleaning with my mom. ”
Tam gasped. “They’re here? Dev, what’s going on? I thought you weren’t really seeing them much these days. After you spoke with her amidst all the Bentley fallout…”
I groaned. “And she inquired yet again as to why I hadn’t just gone to law school after college instead of doing all this fancy cooking. Yeah, I’ve been staying clear of Camille. But Andrea offered fifty dollars an hour for cleanup help, and I know they always need the money. And let’s face it, the grosser the situation, the more my mom wants in. She gets some sort of perverse pleasure out of cleaning the nastiest things. So, giddy up. You get to clean some high school senior’s J?germeister-filled puke from the corner of the Collections room of the Rockwood library.”
Tam laughed, holding her nose. “And your dad? Can he do much to help?”
I couldn’t help but smile. “He’s helping Kyle reshelve books. It’s very cute, actually.”
Tam’s eyes widened. “Kyle’s around? I can finally meet him?”
“Yeah, you can,” I replied, looking around to make sure no one else was in earshot. “But it’s gotten much muddier.” I told her about the karaoke episode from the night before and how I tried to look for him afterward. “And when I couldn’t find him, I texted Heath. Remember how I told you that things hadn’t progressed much with him?” She nodded. “Well, now they have. And I left him this morning to come back to this mess. And now Kyle is looking adorable and telling my dad historical stories, and I can’t stop thinking about how maybe that’s where I should be.”
“Why shouldn’t you be?”
I sat on a bench, and Tam sat next to me. “Everything with Kyle is hard. He’s complicated. We’re complicated. Everything with Heath is easy.”
“Sometimes the hard things are the right things,” Tam said.
I shook my head. “I don’t know; he didn’t even want to talk to me for the last couple of weeks. He was literally hiding from me. And it got to the point where it became too challenging. So, I went with the easy thing. The fun thing. Am I reading too much into all of this?”
“Maybe,” Tam acknowledged. “But I think you need a few more opinions, not just mine.”
“Yours matters the most.”
“Of course it does,” Tam laughed. “But I think you know what you need to do.”
I thought about the two people who were working in the library, my own flesh and blood, who I had such an unusual relationship with. “Not that. Not them. I’ve never brought a guy home, not once in my entire life. My prom date picked me up at a friend’s house, for God’s sake. Why do I care what they think about Heath?”
“You’ve already commented on your dad interacting with Kyle, and a huge smile came over your whole silly face. I think it would be very revealing to get their take. And then David.”
“You think David Anders should weigh in on Heath? Why? We need the Celtics’ perspective?”
“I think he knows you better than you realize.”
Maybe that was true. “I don’t want to hurt Heath. He’s a good guy.”
“You might not hurt him. But right now, you have no idea what you want.”
“Do you know what you want? With Professor Plum?’
“Yeah, I do. He’s the one. Hopefully, he’ll get off his ass and get me a ring. I want to have little plum babies, and I’m not getting any younger.”
“You and me both. What would a little plum baby be called? A plummy?”
“Eww, that sounds like something nasty. I don’t want to think about that. Please don’t say that ever again.”
“We’ll come up with something else.”
“Definitely. But think about Sleepless in Seattle .”
“How does that apply here? Walter? Heath is not Walter.”
“Okay, what about You’ve Got Mail ? I’m trying to think of the right rom-com analogy here. He can be Frank in You’ve Got Mail . Greg Kinnear’s character. Meg Ryan—excuse me, Kathleen Kelly—is with a guy, and it’s good, and it’s fine, and it’s comfortable. But then there’s Joe Fox…”
“I’m not sure Frank is that great of a guy. He ate all the caviar garnish, remember? Or was it Joe Fox? And you think Kyle’s Joe Fox?”
“You’re right. It was Joe. How am I getting my characters mixed up? I’ve only seen this movie a million times. But can I please go meet Kyle?”
I sighed. “Okay, let me just run into the dining hall and make sure we’re on track for dinner. I’ll be out in five minutes.”
After checking in with Marnie and the rest of the staff, I felt comfortable leaving again—for enough time to bring Tam to the library and check on my parents. Tam had met them before, and luckily, my mother kept it together and didn’t call her the fancy TV reporter or anything like that. Tam made small talk with Kyle about how she had been Andrea’s college classmate and how she and I met in Boston a few years earlier. I had told Kyle plenty about her, and he genuinely seemed excited to meet her. The sullen Kyle from the last few weeks had been replaced by the Kyle I knew, the enthusiastic, all-in Kyle. It made me both happy and even more confused.
As I walked Tam back to the news van, she linked arms with me and said, “I really like him, Dev. I know I’m meeting Heath this week, and I’m excited about that. But there’s a way that he looks at you out of the corner of his eye… I can’t describe it. It’s just there. Know that it’s there, and I see it.”
“I love you,” I said, giving her a hug. “Thank you for being here today, even if it’s for work. You have no idea how much I needed you.”
“And anytime your campus is trashed by spoiled brats, I’ll be here.”