Two
Two
The drive from the airport to the condo is hell.
Their hired driver, who won’t stop talking or playing with the radio dial ( Look up, look up, look up ) is either new to the world of driving or is training for a career in NASCAR. It’s hard to say, but based on the way he swerves from lane to lane, like a child behind the wheel of an arcade game, Ellie feels confident it’s one of them.
“How are we doing with the air?” Jonah asks from the front seat. The sunlight through the window catches his dark hair, all brushed with silver, like the scales of a fish. The gray only adds to his looks, which is complete garbage. Ellie pays $200 every three months so some twenty-eight-year-old can paint her head with chemicals and help fuel the cultural belief that women should not age.
“More,” Ellie answers, slamming her foot on an imaginary brake pedal. The sweat keeps on pouring, like an enthusiastic bartender. “We definitely need more.”
Air shoots through the vents, billowing Ellie’s straight, shoulder-length (dyed and highlighted, definitely not natural) honey-brunette hair. Jonah picks up a conversation with the driver about some construction project they’ve driven past as naturally as if they’ve always been friends. Ellie once loved this trait of Jonah’s—his ability to talk to almost anyone about the most mundane topics. Now it just makes her sad. They rarely talk like this together anymore.
In the early days, both of them in their midtwenties, they’d stay up late every weekend night fueled by wine and romance and youth, talking about—what, exactly? Life. Dreams. Childhood memories. Before they left for the airport this morning, they’d conversed about the carbon monoxide detectors, which they both agreed were probably due for new batteries.
Beside Ellie, Maggie stares through the window, still gnawing her way through steak-size slices of dried mango. You know how you’d be less hungry? Ellie thinks. If you put aside these foolish new politics and actually ate a steak.
Just a year earlier, Maggie would have gladly devoured a thick cut of grilled meat. Maggie, who served as the vice president of her high school class and who constantly pleaded with her mother to purchase her whatever new preppy blouses or straight-leg jeans were in the window display of the J.Crew in the downtown shopping district of their agreeable, midsize suburb. Apparently, up at Middlebury, where Ellie and Jonah are paying more than some people’s annual salary for Maggie to hang out and drink locally brewed craft beers for four years, someone has convinced their daughter that her comfortable upbringing is why the world keeps catching on fire. Probably the same individual who stabbed a needle and silver stud though her nostril. Ellie imagines that this person drives a bumper sticker–marked Subaru.
When Maggie was growing up, she and Ellie were always close. Sure, they had typical mother-daughter tension, though mostly they got along well. But midway through Maggie’s junior year, things quickly changed. It started on the night the high school hosted an informational college event. The gym was nothing but folding tables and fanned-out brochures. Together, their family browsed the offerings, collecting literature from every imaginable campus. Ellie just smiled and went along with things. Her whole life, Maggie had expressed her desire to stay close to home, stick with a good state school, maybe even try her luck with Princeton. Ellie had never tried to hold Maggie back. If her daughter wanted to be nearby, who was Ellie to talk her out of it? She pictured hand-delivered care packages and frequent visits home. It’d be college, yes, but not with so much distance that Ellie would completely stop being needed.
“So, California sounded cool,” Maggie half mumbled once the three of them were in the hallway. “A bit far, but that’s the point of college.” She cleared her throat. “Right?”
Ellie stopped walking. “California?” She looked to Jonah, who appeared entirely unfazed. “You’re kidding. Is she kidding?”
Jonah shrugged. “Nice weather.” He’d gone out west for college, too.
Maggie and Jonah exchanged a glance. “It’s just, Dad and I have been talking, and—I don’t know—there’s just so many choices out there. Maybe I ought to take more of a risk.”
“Wh-why wasn’t I included in this conversation?” Ellie stammered.
“Come on, Mom,” Maggie said, her tone condescending. “I mean, you’ve lived here forever.” She glanced at her father, something private hovering between them. “No offense, but you’ve never even left the East Coast.”
Back in Florida, the car races forward.
“How’s school, Mags?” Ellie asks, her tone intentionally even—not too high, not too low, like some maternal Goldilocks. This is a safer segue into conversation than How are you? or How is life? or anything that might unlock real emotion.
“It’s fine,” she says, like always. No details about friends (even though Ellie knows she has them) or a romantic interest (with a face like this, she’s never struggled here, either) or classes (a hodgepodge of philosophy and botany and Eastern religion, as if she might go on to establish some particularly spiritual pot dispensary). “Finals start in two weeks.”
Ellie wishes she could ask Maggie something deeper. What are you thinking? Are you happy? Why are you so mad? But she can’t. She and Maggie aren’t the same, due to reasons Ellie doesn’t understand. It’s something more than Maggie growing up. Ellie misses her daughter, even though she’s right here. She knows this isn’t logical—how can you miss someone who’s seated beside you? But with the passing of time, you learn you can. And Ellie does.
At the start of Maggie’s senior year, the PTA organized a breakfast for the parents—this group of adults who, ever since their children had entered their town’s kindergarten program, had watched together from the sidelines as their babies learned how to read and to solve equations and to navigate heartache and puberty and friendship and a million other things. Naturally, it was mostly the mothers who showed up to the school cafeteria to eat dry pastries and talk.
The other women seemed so excited. They were thrilled their children had reached this next stage. Some had begun to plan trips with their spouses. Others had already drawn up renovation plans for the soon-to-be-empty spaces in their homes. Ellie spent most of that morning picking apart a danish and nodding along, wondering the whole time if something was wrong with her for feeling so sad about this next chapter, especially now that Maggie had decided to go somewhere—anywhere—far away.
It was Ellie’s choice to stay home and raise Maggie. Not once had Jonah ever pressured or guilted her. Ellie, who’d studied English at a state school in Pennsylvania—electing to move home after graduation—left her short-lived career as a bookseller in town when Maggie was born. Early on, Ellie had felt satisfied with her choice. She loved full-time motherhood. It was exhausting, and busier than most people likely imagined, but she adored it. That morning, however, she began to consider how it might leave her feeling in the end.
Later that night, Ellie and Jonah found themselves tangled up in the first of a long string of arguments. They were in the kitchen, winding down from the day and sipping wine while Ellie sorted through an endless stack of beginning-of-the-year school forms.
“You should have heard them all, Jo.” Ellie licked a finger so she could flip through the pile more efficiently. “It’s like half of them can’t wait for their kids to leave.”
Jonah leaned back in his kitchen chair. “Do you really think that’s what they meant?”
Ellie shuffled the papers into an orderly tower, placed them in Maggie’s book bag. “I—I don’t know.” She spritzed the counter with disinfectant spray. “What do you think?”
Jonah moved across the room. “I think people are just making plans. Next steps.”
“While we’re on the topic, I wish you would stop trying to influence her to go to a completely different time zone instead of staying—”
“I’m not trying to influence her,” Jonah interjected. “But when she comes to me and asks how I enjoyed going away for school, I’m going to tell her the truth.”
Jonah was a great father, very engaged and hands on. Still, when it came to the big topics, Maggie had always come to Ellie for advice. These recent conversations—the ones Ellie was never invited to be a part of—felt like a betrayal.
“Look.” Jonah set his empty wineglass in the sink. “I don’t think any of the other mothers meant anything by what they said this morning. Everyone’s just getting ready to let go.”
A dropping feeling formed in Ellie’s stomach. “So you think I’m not letting her go?”
Jonah’s face morphed into an unnatural, scrunched-up expression. “I never said that.”
“But you were thinking it.” Ellie tossed the soiled paper towel into the trash. “I could tell by the tone of your voice. That’s what you meant.”
“You’ve been tense ever since she told us she wants to go away.” He nodded at Maggie’s bag, which hung from a wall hook like a piece of incriminating evidence. “I mean, you’re still packing up her things for her. She’s nearly eighteen.”
“Of course I am,” Ellie noted. “It’s my job to make sure she has what she needs.”
“Well, yeah, but—”
“But what?” Ellie posed, a tight feeling creeping into her throat.
“But not forever,” Jonah added, then lifted a brow. “Right?”
Ellie shakes away this memory. Through the window, International Drive is a showpiece of everything terrible. Fast-food joints. Name-brand hotels. Outlet malls. Chain restaurants. To arrive at the theme parks or her parents’ small community or any place else desirable, one must navigate this road first. It’s like flying to a sketchy island and having to drive through its upsetting third-world section before you reach your all-inclusive resort—a visual reminder of what has been sacrificed so you and your family can relax.
“I still don’t understand why we’re here,” Maggie probes, working hard to grind up the fibrous slices. “Why now?” Finally, she turns, looks at Ellie. Her skin is makeup-free, showcasing the pattern of pale freckles on her nose. She twirls a piece of her sandy-colored hair around her finger, all stacked with silver rings. “I know it’s only one weekend, but shouldn’t I be up at school studying?” Beyond Maggie’s head, towering palm trees stretch toward the blue sky, like an illustration from a Dr. Seuss book. “Is Grams sick or something?”
“What?” Ellie’s voice catches. She jerks—a physical reaction to Maggie’s comment. Her muscle tenses up again. “No!” In the rearview, Jonah meets her eye. “We j-just ...,” she stammers. That one stretch of her back is somehow both frozen and quivering. “Dad and I thought it would be nice to have everyone together for a few days.” The car stops at a red light, idles. Beside it, another car with blackout-tinted windows vibrates with bass. The driver revs the engine, as if the whole line of cars—tourists and locals alike—is about to race. The light changes. Ellie ignores the throbbing in her back, takes a chance, reaches out, and squeezes Maggie’s hand. “It’s nice, right?”
“They’re here!”
Ellie’s mother, whose actual name is Rose but who for Ellie’s entire life has gone by Bunny (some inside joke from before Ellie was born), stands at the edge of the terra-cotta-colored walkway outside her condo. She’s waving a white dish towel above her dyed-from-a-box blond bob of hair, as if she’s watching a ship come into port. Just like always since her migration to this place, Bunny wears a pair of sensible khaki shorts and a punch-colored cotton top, as well as a visor stamped with the word Florida , like she might forget where she now resides. When she lived in New Jersey, her entire wardrobe was black, as if she were in a constant state of mourning. Now? Every shirt she owns is the color of fruit juice, like her stylist is the mascot for Hawaiian Punch.
Jonah settles up with the driver, and their little family of three piles out of the car, clumsily pulling their own luggage from the trunk—a courtesy said driver is apparently not interested in adopting. They wheel their baggage across the parking lot. It’s past lunchtime, though they didn’t stop to eat, and the air is thick and damp, like the inside of a sauna. Ellie’s scratched-up suitcase clunk-clunk-clunking behind her, she wishes she were inside a sauna—anything to help relieve the now-persistent tremble alongside her spine. Actually, come to think of it, Ellie wishes she were almost anywhere except here.
“Frank! Frank!” Bunny yells out for her husband, even though he literally stands behind her. He’s dressed in his retirement wardrobe, too: golf shorts (he doesn’t golf), sandals, and an aqua-colored T-shirt, a far cry from the neat collared shirts, crewneck sweaters, and tan boat shoes he favored up north. Ever since their relocation down here, Ellie has wondered if her parents buy their clothes in the tchotchke section of the local Publix supermarket. Probably. “Quick, Frank, get a picture!”
Frank fumbles with his phone, even though he’s owned it for years and should absolutely know how every bell and whistle on it works. “Hang on, hang on,” he’s shouting while he pats the neckline of his T-shirt ( Florida! ) in search of his drugstore reading glasses. He locates them, slides them on his face. “Okay, okay, everyone huddle together!”
Ellie, Jonah, and Maggie, all glossy with perspiration, pause. Frank snaps a dozen pictures, then looks at his phone screen, confused. Without the need to see the device for herself, Ellie knows her family appears decapitated in every shot. “Later, Dad,” Ellie begs and starts to move with her suitcase again. “Please. It’s so hot. We all just need to sit.”
The inside of the condo is nice. White tile floors. A decent-size kitchen. A spacious living room, wide enough to fit a sectional, as well as both Bunny’s and Frank’s old reading chairs. At the far end of the first-floor unit is a small sunroom that looks out onto their petite square of private grass, as well as the communal neighborhood pool beyond it. All over the walls are framed pictures of Ellie and her family, her parents’ home-decorating style rooted almost entirely in memory.
“Sit! Sit!” Bunny herds everyone into the living room while she hustles into the kitchen, opening and closing every cabinet like she’s concurrently hosting guests and trying out for a drumline. “You can change that!” Bunny shouts in reference to the television, which is tuned to the Game Show Network—one of her parents’ favorites. On the screen, an old 1970s episode of Family Feud airs. A dapperly dressed Richard Dawson makes an overtly sexual comment to a female contestant. The whole studio audience laughs at the woman’s expense. Things were different then. “Here.” Bunny races into the living room, where Ellie, Jonah, and Maggie appear to be melting into the couch while Frank sits comfortably in his reading chair and flips through a newspaper. Bunny sets down a circular platter of rolled-up lunch meat. Maggie takes one look at it and closes her eyes. “Everyone, eat.”
Seventeen years earlier, when Bunny and Frank first told Ellie and Jonah they were finally ready to pack up their belongings and move forward with their longtime retirement plan, Ellie wasn’t sure they’d actually like it. It’s easy to fall in love with a place when you’re only visiting, but to live there—to go food shopping and on doctor’s visits and to the drugstore to pick up your blood pressure medication—is something else. Ellie was wrong. Her parents love it. If they have their way, they’ll never see an outside temperature that dips below fifty degrees again.
“You can keep Christmas!” they often say, and every December first they send Ellie a picture of the multicolored string lights they wrap around their palm tree out back, their gifts for the family arriving a week later via UPS. Ellie is happy for them. Really. She misses them all being together, though.
Bunny and Frank raised Ellie in New Jersey, in a quiet suburb right on the New York City train line. Not that her parents held jobs that required the commuter rail. Prior to her retirement, Bunny worked as a part-time administrative assistant at her church. Frank owned a small deli near the train station, a place that mostly catered to the men and women in desperate need of a coffee or a newspaper (back when they still mattered to the masses) or a breakfast sandwich before they rushed off toward the tracks.
“We want to give you both the house,” Frank had said at that family meeting. They were seated around Bunny and Frank’s wooden dining room table, eating spaghetti and meatballs, Maggie propped up in a high chair. “I know, I know,” Frank added, already putting up his hands in his defense. His hair, a pale shade of brunette at the time—still a few years away from turning white—was neatly combed back. “I know you don’t need it. But you’re our only child, Ellie, and this has always been our plan for your inheritance.”
Ellie, in her early thirties then, had set down her fork, stunned—about the house, about the move, about the fact that her parents were suddenly old enough to talk about such things as an inheritance, like they were already dead. “Dad, I—” She stuttered over her words, looked at Jonah, who appeared equally as confused. “We can’t—”
“But you can,” her father had insisted and placed a hand on the chest of his pressed button-down. He smiled proudly at Bunny. “We paid the house off years ago.” He lifted his hand, waved it in the air. “I know we’ve never held glamorous jobs, but we’ve made good decisions,” he continued, hinting at their finances. Bunny nodded her agreement, neither of them expressing an ounce of hesitation. “We’ve already talked to our attorney about getting the title transferred to your names. If you really don’t want it—or don’t want to live in it—then rent it out to a nice family, and one day you can give it to Maggie,” he said, which made them all turn and look at her—a chubby baby covered in sauce and bits of ground meat—and try to imagine her ever being old enough for such a thing.
The truth, which her father had touched upon, was that Ellie and Jonah did not need the house. They were comfortable—not wealthy, though probably a pace ahead of middle class. Jonah, who grew up in a different part of New Jersey, was the only one of them who actually did work in the city, where he spent his days analyzing numbers in a way Ellie simply did not understand. They owned a small, charming house not far from her parents (“charming” being code for the fact that it was in constant need of repair), though with Maggie getting older, it was no secret to anyone that they’d soon require additional space.
While Frank talked through his offer, Ellie allowed herself to daydream. She’d always adored her childhood home. It was spacious but not too big. It had a perfect amount of flat yard where Maggie could play. It was not cookie cutter, but also not quite so “charming” as their current money pit. The home boasted a certain quaintness: a covered porch, nostalgic black-and-white kitchen floors, a picket fence, and exterior windows arranged in such a way that it looked like the whole house smiled at you when you arrived on the front doorstep. You couldn’t buy homes like that in town anymore. They’d all been bumped out or built up or refurbished in some severely time-stamped way, like someone had power washed them with the renovation equivalent of retinol. Worse, unlike when her parents had bought their home there decades earlier, every property came with a nearly heart-stopping price tag.
“What? What is it, sweetheart?” Frank had asked, observing the mixed bag of emotions on his daughter’s face. “Someone say something. We didn’t offend you, did we? We know you don’t need —”
“It’s—it’s wonderful.” Ellie smiled and turned to Jonah, who, based on his expression, shared her belief. “Everything is just—it’s perfect.”
Back in her parents’ Floridian living room, Maggie nibbles on a sprig of parsley and some raw broccoli—accoutrements from the deli platter tray.
“What are you doing, Maggie?” Bunny asks, spearing a tube of turkey onto her paper plate. “You need to eat. You can’t just have broccoli.”
“I’m fine, Grams,” Maggie says, setting down her parsley stem. “I’m not all that hungry.”
Jonah, his gaze half-focused on his phone (likely checking a sports score or skimming some nonurgent news article), helps himself to more ham, not at all annoyed by his daughter’s new dietary preferences. Not at all annoyed, it seems, by anything.
“Maggie doesn’t consume meat anymore, Mom,” Ellie announces. “Apparently, it’s bad for the planet.”
“Bad for the planet?” Bunny repeats, as if personally offended. “That’s ridiculous.” She drops a piece of turkey and a slice of orange cheese onto Maggie’s plate. “Here, sweetie,” she says. “Enough with the herbs. You’re not a rabbit.” She kisses Maggie’s head, and, when she does, Ellie notices that her daughter does not budge or visibly scoff. “You’re all skin and bones.” She pats the girl’s—the woman’s —hand. “Have something real to eat.”
After lunch, Ellie decides to take a short walk through the condo development by herself. The heat, she knows, will be awful, but she hopes the movement—the stretching that is required in order for her body to propel her feet in stride—might help to release something, both emotionally and muscularly.
Ellie slips on her brown leather sandals and oval tortoiseshell sunglasses—she’s still wearing her jeans and T-shirt from the flight (she doesn’t have the energy to start sifting through her damaged suitcase)—and then moves through the sunroom, the screen door slapping shut behind her as she takes a step onto the pebbled walkway. She glides past the gate at the edge of her parents’ small piece of tropical property, her forehead instantly wet. She doesn’t care. The heat is the least of her concerns right now.
Ellie just walks, past the stucco community clubhouse where, once a week, her parents play cards with their retirement friends, along the winding paths near the shuffleboard court, where they participate in a round-robin-style tournament every other Tuesday evening, beyond the palm trees and neat squares of thick, blue-green blades of Florida grass. Every few feet, a lizard darts out of the lawn and onto the walkway—dinosaurs in miniature—before it scurries, confused, and disappears back into it.
The neighborhood isn’t large, and so it’s only a few minutes before Ellie is looping her way back to her starting point. She’s not ready yet to go inside. Instead, she swings open a fence, slips off her sandals (her toenails, just like her fingernails, ballet pink, as ever), cuffs her jeans up her slender calves, and sits on the edge of the pool. The water is heaven—cool, but not too cool—the bubbling from a nearby hot tub almost enough to make her fall asleep. In the water, two senior citizens—one male and one female, both donning yellow bathing caps—are busy doing some sort of aquatic aerobics.
“You’re Bunny and Frank’s girl, right?” the woman shouts out, a trace of a New York accent evident in her voice. Ellie nods, drags her fingers through the water. “I’m Shelia!” the woman exclaims. “I’m new! I’m three doors down!” She smiles as she begins her underwater arm circles. “They’ve been excited for days!” she proclaims. “Nothing better than a last-minute visit!”
But nothing about this trip was last minute. Their frustrations with each other have been building—a slow burn—for months.
Prior to Maggie’s senior year, Ellie hadn’t realized it was possible to envy her husband. They were a team, a partnership, what’s mine is yours, blah, blah, blah. But as their only daughter’s graduation drew nearer, it turned out that was exactly what—and how—Ellie felt.
“You don’t get it,” she shouted at Jonah one night that autumn while they cleaned up from dinner, Maggie off at one of her many activities.
Earlier that afternoon, Ellie had had lunch with her book club, a group of other stay-at-home women whom she’d met with monthly for a decade. Over the years, they’d become friends, but in a casual way. The occasional lunch during school hours. Morning walks through the park now and again. Their relationships remained on a surface level, like swimming in the shallow end of a pool but never bothering to dive in deep. Ellie understood. Their friendships were built on convenience. They all had too many other commitments to keep.
Mostly, their relationships centered around their books. Plot. Character. Maybe a bit of fun gossip in between. That day, they’d been chatting about the historical novel in question when the conversation took an unexpected detour. What did everyone plan to do with the next chapter of her life once the kids went away? Maggie was the oldest among the women’s children, and so the attention shifted to Ellie. Would she rejoin the workforce? Or volunteer? Maybe take some classes?
“What, Ellie?” Jonah spat back and slammed the dishwasher shut. They’d been fighting like this—and always about some variation of this topic—for weeks. “What don’t I get now?”
“No one is asking you this,” she pointed out. “Nothing about your life has to change.”
Jonah moved to the sink and started to scrub a pan. “That’s a little unfair, seeing as Maggie—the one who’s leaving—is also my child.”
But it wasn’t the same. Yes, he—like Ellie—would come home to a quieter house, too. He’d miss her, of course. But everything else—his career, his day-to-day sense of purpose, his whole identity—would all remain intact.
In the pool area, a sturdy shadow emerges.
“Did you make some new friends?”
She shields her eyes with her hand before she turns and discovers Jonah positioned behind her. He waves to Shelia, who is dipping her body in and out of the water like a tea bag into a mug, and then takes a seat beside Ellie on the lip of the pool.
“Here.” He hands her one of her mother’s palm-leaf-stamped acrylic tumblers. “I brought you something cold to drink.”
“Thanks.” Ellie accepts it, then gulps down a long, refreshing sip. “This heat,” she says. “I feel like I’m dead. I have no idea how my parents do it.” She shrugs. “They insist it keeps them young.”
Jonah smiles, nods in a knowing way. His parents, who are of a similar age, claim to like the heat now, too. But then again, who knows. Jonah hardly talks to them. After they retired and sold their home, they embarked on what Ellie has begun to gather is a never-ending river cruise. With the exception of a brief FaceTime call every few weeks, they haven’t seen Jonah’s parents, actually face-to-face, in over two years.
“How are you doing?” he asks, his feet swaying through the water, like he’s a kid and not a forty-nine-year-old man.
He steals a look at her through his hazel eyes, and when he does it occurs to Ellie that Jonah has aged nicely. A few well-placed lines around his lips. A couple of subtle sunspots along his cheeks—enough to serve as a reminder that, no , he’s not old, but he’s also not twenty-five. Jonah is just the right amount of handsome.
Ellie has not aged poorly, either. In fact, if pressed, she’d give herself credit and admit she’s aged well, too. A naturally slender waist (save for the loose pregnancy skin). No signs of a sagging neck or crease-marked décolletage yet. Still, it’s not the same for women. The world views them differently, like canned pantry staples that are a few months past their expiration dates—the contents still fine, but perhaps better to toss them, just in case. Now, thanks to this new circumstance, Ellie wonders how people will view her, if they’ll figuratively trash her, too. Or if she’ll still hold any real worth.
“You know,” Jonah continues, “just with—well, with everything, I guess.”
It isn’t his fault—the intentional vagueness in his words enough to make it seem like they’re both new to the language. But really, what else is he—or she—supposed to say? The life they thought they knew is officially over. Well, not yet, but soon. Despite the sun and the lush vegetation and their loved ones a few feet away inside—all the elements needed for them to have an enjoyable weekend trip—they are both in distress. All they can do now is their best to be kind to each other, small gestures like a cup of water hopefully enough to get them through.
“We don’t have to tell them, Ellie,” Jonah says and then smacks his thick lips, already parched. A strand of his neatly trimmed hair falls across his forehead, giving in to the unrelenting humidity.
“Don’t be ridiculous, Jo.” Ellie hands over her glass, offering him a sip. He takes it, relieved. As he does, she pulls her (dyed) hair—already frizzing—away from her face. It catches on her classic gold huggie earring. She tugs it off, twists her highlighted strands back into a low bun with the black hair band she forever wears on her wrist. Ellie will probably be buried wearing a hair band on her joint. At the very least, there will be a deep-red indentation in her skin from it. “That’s the whole reason we’re here. To tell them.”
“I didn’t mean not at all,” Jonah clarifies, handing Ellie back her cup. “I mean we don’t have to tell them right away. It’s not required that we do it tonight.”
Nearby, Shelia wraps up her exercise routine and exits the pool. She towels off, gives Ellie a big, enthusiastic wave. “Have fun!”
Fun, Ellie thinks, waving back. Right.
“No, Jo,” Ellie insists and finishes off her drink. “We can’t stall any longer.” She sighs, her breath a cloud of humidity. She is every emotion. Mad. Sad. Angry. Nostalgic. Furious. “We’re telling them.” She pulls her feet from the water. “Right after dinner.” Ellie stands. It takes only seconds for her skin to dry. “I—no, we—can’t put this off another night.”