Chapter Thirteen
Fourth of July weekend sweeps onto the Cape like a crashing wave, dumping traffic, parades, and a swarm of beachgoers. Route
Cape has grown three times overnight. Even Wellfleet is crowded with cars.
Dina rumbles up the gravel drive in her truck as I’m pulling grocery bags out of my car.
“Harlowe! Perfect timing!” She climbs out, and for once, there’s no caftan in sight. She’s wearing loose jeans and a tie-dyed
T-shirt, her wild hair held back under a bandanna. “I’ve been meaning to ask if you have any plans for the Fourth.”
I close the trunk of my car with an elbow. “Uh . . . no. Not really.”
I had thought, briefly, of going back to Boston for the weekend. I’d even texted Rika and Yasmin about the idea—only for them
to text back that they’d already made plans to see the fireworks over the Charles River in Cambridge with Jackson.
They clearly felt bad about it. They offered that I could come anyway; Yasmin could hang out with Jackson, and Rika could hang out with me. It was nice of them, and sounded completely awful. I quickly said it was just an idea and they shouldn’t worry and we could plan another visit.
And then I did my best to forget about July Fourth completely.
“Well, in that case . . .” Dina takes one of the grocery bags from me and starts up the brick steps toward her front porch.
“Any interest in hitting P-town? We go to the fireworks there every year, down by the harbor. Me, Sharon, Dave, Bill, Meryl,
Yan . . .” She glances over her shoulder. “Nathan too.”
It’s been a few weeks since the cookout, and most of my interactions with Dina have been limited to running into her as she’s
leaving for Queer Punx, or as I’m coming back from a walk on the beach or another swim at the pond with Nathan, Katy, and
Marcus. Except for the time she texted me last week because Sir Duke had gotten himself stuck on top of her refrigerator and
she needed help getting him down. It took twenty minutes. There was a lot of hissing from Sir Duke and a lot of swearing from
Dina.
I find myself wondering, vaguely, if she knows how many times I’ve been out swimming with her nephew. Or that last week, I
drove all the way to Provincetown for a cup of coffee (I told myself I needed a change of scenery and brought my laptop to
get work done) just because Nathan had mentioned he was working that day.
“Yeah, sure,” I say. “Fireworks sound great. What time do they start?”
“Oh, I never remember,” Dina says. “After dark.” We reach her front porch, but she continues on up the flagstone path with
my grocery bag. “We always get there early, though, and set up on the beach. I’ll give you a ride. Meet by my truck at six
thirty?”
“Sounds great.”
“Good, good.” She sets the grocery bag down on the steps of the little cottage and gives me a slightly amused smile. “I’m glad to see you’ve moved on from olives.” And she turns away, heading back down the path to her house.
The Fourth itself dawns sunny and hot. A muggy haze hangs over the beach when I take a walk in the morning, carrying my sandals
in my hand so I can let the waves swirl around my ankles. The water is still far from warm, but it’s no longer as frigid as
it was that first day I arrived. It’s easier to wade now without my toes turning numb in five minutes.
By noon, though, it’s warm enough that I’m starting to wish the cottage had AC. I open all the windows, but the mugginess
has my hair sticking to my forehead and my shirt sticking to my back. It also makes me grumpy, even before I decide I better
take a shower ahead of meeting up with Dina, which of course means dealing with Jackson in the bathroom again.
I have no idea if he can feel the extra heat, but he seems grumpier than usual too.
“I was just about to take a shower,” he says. “I told you that. Can you seriously not wait ten minutes?”
I probably could, but I don’t want to. It’s my bathroom. “You don’t take ten-minute showers,” I say. “You take twenty-minute
showers. And I need to run out to something, and I’d really like to shower before then.”
“What are you running out to?”
“It’s nothing. Just . . . an errand,” I lie.
I’m still grumpy and annoyed when I get out of the shower, despite the change into fresh clothes. I push around my dad in
the kitchen, stubbornly ignoring every attempt he makes to ask me about coffee, pulling out a leftover salad and shoving some
bites in my mouth while I throw together a tote bag to bring to the fireworks. Water bottle, bug spray, sunglasses, a sweatshirt,
because even though it’s hot now, I learned my lesson after Dina’s cookout.
I wind up ready to go a little early and decide maybe I should just go sit outside, since even with the windows open, the air in the cottage is stifling. I pick up the tote bag and try to close the bifold door behind me, but it sticks in its tracks.
“Harlowe.” Professor MacAndrew sets her book down with a slap. “You’ve been walking in and out of here all day, and I’m getting
a little tired of waiting to have this conversation.”
“This really isn’t a good time, Professor MacAndrew.” I tug on the bifold door, but it won’t budge. “I kind of have somewhere
to be.”
“Yes, I’m getting the impression you always have somewhere to be,” she says in clipped tones. “You’ve had somewhere to be
all day.”
I give the door a wrench and it moves, squeaking closed. “Well, I’m saying it because it’s true. I really don’t need to talk
about my thesis or my future.”
“I don’t recall asking if you needed to talk about it,” Professor MacAndrew says. “I recall emailing you and requesting that
you come by.”
I have a very unhinged urge to tell her she’s not the boss of me. “In that case, I’m going to have to decline your request.
I have somewhere to be.”
“Harlowe.” Her tone has become even more clipped, which I didn’t think was possible. “We need to talk about your future because
I’m not sure you’re going to have one.”
That tips me over the edge, and all the weeks of walking past her, all the weeks of her stubbornly asking, over and over,
if we can talk about something I’ve been trying to forget for two years . . . it all catches up with me, and it’s far too
much.
And suddenly I’m shouting. “Would you please shut up!”
She stares at me, her eyebrows arched very high. My heart hammers. I never raised my voice to Professor MacAndrew. Or really
any university faculty members. I certainly never told any of them to shut up. Even though there were times when I really wanted to.
Professor MacAndrew takes a deep breath through her nose. “Excuse me?”
I swallow. I’m suddenly breathing too hard, and there’s a heat coursing through me, right under my skin.
“I’m quite aware of everything you’re about to tell me,” I say, my voice shaking. “Because all of this”—I wave a hand at the
space between us—“already happened. You already read my thesis. You already asked me to come by your office to talk. You already
told me that you were going to do me the kindness of recommending that I get my degree, because I’d held up my end of the
deal, and I’d done the best work I could.
And it wasn’t my fault that the best work I could do was actually only average, because you were the one who admitted me to the program.
So actually, you told me, you were the one who should feel bad, because you had made a mistake.
You thought I could rise to the occasion, when apparently
I couldn’t. You told me that I should probably start thinking about a backup plan, because in your opinion, I wasn’t likely
to get many interviews.”
Professor MacAndrew folds her hands on the table. And for the first time ever, I actually think she looks a tiny bit uncomfortable.
“I wouldn’t say I feel bad,” she says. “I feel responsible.”
“Oh, great.” I can’t keep the sarcasm out of my voice. “That makes me feel so much better.”
“I don’t make decisions like this lightly.” There’s a defensive note in her tone now. “I consider every candidate very, very
carefully. And most of the time I’m right. But there’s a piece of every decision that’s just about potential. Guesswork. And
I . . . guessed.”
“And you guessed wrong,” I say. “I know. Again, we don’t need to go through all of this. I didn’t live up to my potential.
I’m not as smart as you hoped. I get it.”
“I never said you weren’t smart,” Professor MacAndrew says. “I said I wasn’t sure you were cut out for this.”
“Because I’m average,” I say. “I’m not sure there’s a difference.”
She sighs in frustration. “I am trying to do you a favor, Harlowe. Wouldn’t you rather I tell you this now than after you’ve been trying to find a job for five years, or you’re stuck adjuncting at community colleges for a decade?”
I open my mouth to say I’m not sure there’s anything wrong with teaching at a community college or with adjuncting, and then
change my mind, because that’s what I said last time, when we had this conversation two years ago.
And she only sighed and said she couldn’t tell me what to do, but she thought I had more ambition than that.
Instead, I say, “So you really think ruining my life was doing me a favor?”
“I am not ruining your life,” Professor MacAndrew insists. “I am giving you some hard truths. It’s up to you what to do with
them.”
“I already know what I’m going to do with them!” My voice rises again. “I’m going to try to prove you wrong, and then I’m
going to fail, and I’m going to feel like absolute shit while I watch my boyfriend get his dream job and become a rising star
in his field. I’m going to get a job I don’t really care about, and then I’m going to spend the next two years hanging on
to my thesis for who knows what reason and wondering if you were really right or just an asshole, until I finally break up
with that rising-star boyfriend and junk my thesis in a dumpster. And I know this because all of this already happened.”
Her eyebrows arch again. “I see. And it’s all my fault?”
“Well, you’re the reason I quit looking for an academic job, so . . . yeah.”
She pushes her glasses up on her nose with one finger, her clear-painted nail glinting dully. “Did you really want to be a
professor?”
I open my mouth, and then close it again. And finally, I say, “I don’t know.”
Which is the truth, more or less. It’s not like I had some lifelong dream to wear tweed and deliver fascinating lectures to halls full of students. I just liked history. And writing about history. So grad school seemed to make sense. A natural next step.
I sit down, too quickly, in the chair across from Professor MacAndrew.
Maybe she’s right. I was never sure, after all, was I? Not in the way Jackson was so sure that academia was the right path for him.
But so what? Plenty of people weren’t sure about their careers. That wasn’t the same thing as lacking ambition. It was just . . . being unsure.
I lean my head in my hands. That’s it, I realize. I may never have been sure of what I wanted, but when Jackson told me we could move in together, and we could
both be high-powered academics, and soon we’d be flying off to conferences, leading our fields—everything he dreamed of . . .
Well, I started to dream of it too. And I told myself, once again, his confidence was big enough for both of us.
“This is why I wanted to have this conversation,” Professor MacAndrew says. “Because I think you should consider what you’re
going to do next.”
“I already know what I’m going to do next,” I say, suddenly tired. “I just told you. IT job. Huge breakup. Dumpster.”
“I see,” she says. “And do you want that?”
I stare at her. “Are you joking? No. Obviously not.”
“So you regret this breakup?”
“No, I . . .” I squeeze my eyes shut, rubbing my forehead. “No. I don’t know. It’s complicated.”
She peers at me over her glasses. “I’m beginning to see your issue. You need to figure out what you want.”
I glower at her. “Thanks, Professor MacAndrew. Very helpful.”
She ignores me. “You’re here now. Your thesis defense is coming up and then you’ll graduate. Maybe you’ll have a backup plan or maybe you won’t. But time goes fast, Harlowe. You don’t have forever. So what is it you want to do?”
I run a hand through my hair and push myself up. “I want to stop reliving this conversation. And I have to go.” I pull out
my phone. It’s 6:32. “And now I’m late.”
“I’m not sure we’re finished with our conversation,” Professor MacAndrew says.
“Well, then, we can finish it when I get back,” I say, grabbing my tote bag and jogging for the front door.
Dina is waiting for me next to her truck, tapping her foot impatiently, still in her jeans and T-shirt and bandanna, a pair
of oversize bright orange sunglasses on her face.
“There you are!” she says. “Got worried that house had eaten you. Ready to go?”
“Yeah, sorry.” I tug open the passenger door. “Got a little sidetracked.”
“Not to worry.” She climbs into the driver’s seat and starts the engine. “Happens easily around here.”