Chapter 34
“The river stones were a pain in the ass to find,” Izzy says, letting herself into my kitchen. “But they’re being delivered here this afternoon. Windows and lumber come in the morning.”
It’s Friday morning, six days since I’ve heard Stewart’s voice. I pull a tray of banana muffins out of the oven and place them on a trivet in front of my dad, who leans in and gives them a sniff.
“Good morning,” I say. “And what are you talking about?” Izzy’s been paid in full. Fifty-one thousand dollars in the end, and I have nine thousand in the bank. Won’t keep me warm at night.
“Oh crap,” my dad says, just as Izzy says, “The sleeping porch.”
“They broke up,” he says.
“Jackass,” she says. “Well, it’s paid in full.” She helps herself to a cup of coffee and sits down.
“Dad,” I say. A full sentence and also a question.
“He wanted to surprise you,” he says. “He had those plans, and he knew you’d never spend the money.”
The pressure on my chest is familiar now. He did know me so well.
“Well,” I say, somehow also a full sentence.
“Maybe you could start construction after she leaves,” my dad says to Izzy. “They’re only here another week.”
Lifeguard camp ends and Clay’s parents invite Gus on a camping trip.
I sleep upstairs in my childhood bedroom, which feels like a balm.
No night sounds to imagine Stewart’s footsteps passing through.
No ghost of him beneath me in the daybed.
In fact, Stewart has never stepped foot into Gus’s room, making it a temporary refuge.
After work, I regrout the tile in the kitchen and find myself staring into the middle distance a lot.
Every thought leads to my wanting to tell him about it, which reminds me that he is not here to tell.
Which reminds me that I might be going mad.
I am heartbroken but also disoriented—the things that I believe deep in my heart about Stewart and me are not true.
Naomi becomes, again, a place I go to on my not-so-great days.
She lets me sit in her kitchen, silent if I want.
Or cleaning if I want. She lets me rail against the company who sold me this magic epoxy to reattach her refrigerator shelf.
It doesn’t work. I knew it wouldn’t, but I bought it anyway.
Stupid. She lets me go on and on about it, and she pretends she doesn’t know what I’m really talking about.
On the morning that we leave for Boston, Gus asks if there’s any way we can stay in Whitfield.
We can’t, because I have twenty-two kindergarteners counting on me, but I wish we could.
I would love to see him start high school in Whitfield, where he has friends.
I don’t trust myself to be in Boston and not wander down Stewart’s street to see if the light is on in his den.
I wasn’t prepared to walk back into our apartment.
Fern is alive and well because I have great friends, but any CSI team would immediately conclude that sex was had here.
Two mugs are in the sink. My bed is hastily made, clearly by a person who was too dazed to care about creases.
I stand in my bedroom doorway and stare at that extra bedside table, there for symmetry but totally useless. I might sleep on the sofa tonight.
In the bathroom I unpack my toiletries and catch my reflection.
I’ve gotten some sun this summer. All that yachting.
I feel the ends of my hair, no longer so blunt cut after two months, and I imagine a time-lapse of it growing and growing until I’m exactly who I was before I changed Stewart’s tire.
Before I knew about salting butter and hidden grottos.
Before I knew what it felt like to wake up to a man bringing me tea because his first thought was what I might want.
I don’t have Stewart anymore, but I don’t want to go back to who I was.
I take scissors from the medicine cabinet and trim an inch off my hair and decide to wear my yellow pants to the first day of school.
The night before school starts, Layla and Kim come for dinner. We clear the plates afterward, and they sit with me while I make frog-shaped name cards for everyone’s cubbies.
“Naomi says this Stewart thing is a code red,” Kim whispers. There’s no need. Gus is wearing headphones while playing Xbox on the couch.
“It’s at least that,” I say. “Sorry I didn’t tell you.”
“We know. NDA and all that,” says Layla.
“I had to look it up,” says Kim.
“It’s fine,” I say. “Gus had a great summer. I crashed and burned. So net positive.” It almost feels like it never happened.
For the first ten days I allowed myself one Google search per day.
I told myself it was to arm myself with facts in case Gus saw anything.
I was both relieved and disappointed to see there was no gossip about the Starlight Gala, no news of our breakup.
If I had to guess, I’d say this was Busy’s doing.
“There was a feature on him in the Globe,” Layla says. “Big photo where he looks like Mother Teresa with a bunch of sick kids.”
“What an asshole,” Kim says.
“Saw it,” I say. It actually came up in my email subscription to the Globe. I just saw the top of the photo—his hair recently trimmed and neatly combed—and didn’t open it. I deleted it and then deleted it from my trash.
“Are you going to call him out on it?” Layla asks. “Write a letter? Key his car?”
“Not my style,” I say. “I’m probably just going to get over it.”
Kim leans in. “Speaking of your style, can we see the clothes? Naomi says the green dress would look great on me.”
We go back to Whitfield the day before Thanksgiving.
Christopher is under the crocheted blanket on the porch swing when we pull in to the driveway.
“Dolly!” he calls. We haven’t visited since the summer, partially because we’ve been busy and partially because I’ve been dreading seeing the sleeping porch.
It was my personal space in my personal home.
Now it’s made of plans I approved of in a fantasy time, and it’s the one bit of visible proof that Stewart ever loved me.
The fireplace greets me from the corner, right where I wanted it.
It’s stunning in black stone against the freshly painted white walls and windows.
There are copper fasteners to unhook the windows so I can replace them with screens in the spring.
They remind me of Stewart’s kitchen, and I feel a sneaky wave of grief.
Dad’s on Cook House, and he roasts trout and new potatoes.
Christopher seems good. We talk on the phone pretty often, but I never have a real sense of how he’s doing until I’ve seen him, how focused his eyes are or aren’t.
Gus leaves by bike immediately after dinner to meet up with Clay and his friends.
Tonight will be the first time he’s socialized since starting high school, and I try to imagine what these past few months might have been like if we’d stayed.
I make a fire before bed and leave the door open to the night.
The fall noises are different, more sinister, and the sound of the waves is louder without the din of tourists in town.
I used to like this time of year in Whitfield when I was little, it felt like a coming inward, a rest. My dad would always have a fire going in the living room and we would roast marshmallows and watch movies.
I think I was still under the crocheted blanket back then.
Patsy and her family are coming for Thanksgiving, and everyone acts like she’s doing us a big favor.
We’re so grateful that she’s going to drive a couple of hours and let us cook for her.
We feel terrible that she’ll have to stay at the Whitfield Inn with their fluffy robes and European-made pillow chocolates.
Poor Patsy with her husband, who’s not perfect but who she gets to keep.
On Thanksgiving morning, I sleep late because I was up from three to five a.m., contemplating this injustice.
In the middle of the night there is nothing to clean or paint or care for.
I am a fountain of grief, and it pours in every direction and never runs out.
I wake and it’s already light out. Gus is sitting on the side of my bed.
“Hi,” I say, sitting up. “Wow, I overslept.”
I get out of bed; I need to get the turkey in the oven. But Gus stays there.
“Mom?” he starts. I sit back down because this is unusual. “Was my dad a good guy?”
I put my arm around him, but he squirms away. “That’s a big question. I’m not sure what it means to be a good guy. Pops is a good guy for sure. Your father was friendly and I think mostly kind to people. He was smart and worked really hard. Those are all good qualities.”
“But he didn’t want to be with you.”
“True,” I say. “But we weren’t right for each other.”
Gus gives my hand a squeeze. “I want to be a good guy, I think. Is Stewart a good guy?”
“Yes.” My heart does this thing now, it’s a quick jab of pain. I think of it as the Stewart punch. “He is. It was a fun summer.”
“There’s a race next summer.” He says it like he’s apologizing.
“What kind?”
“Sailing. It’s out of the yacht club and it’s sort of hard to enter, but I want to try.”
God, I love this kid. “That’s great, you should.”
“You need a yacht club member to sponsor you.”
My heart sinks. “And you want to ask Stewart.”
Gus nods. “Is that okay? Is he still someone we can talk to?”
I put my arm around him and pull him in close. Somewhere along the line, my kid learned how to ask for what he wants. “Sure. Text him. And if you don’t hear back, I can text Busy.”
“You think he won’t text me back?”
I know he will. Even if he doesn’t want me, I know deep in my heart that he won’t ignore Gus. “He will,” I say. “As long as he’s on a break from doing whatever he does, fluffing up his rich-guy hair.”
Gus laughs, and if that’s not the most heavenly sound on earth, I don’t know what is.