50
Katie
The following morning, twelve hours into our walkie-talkie sworn vow to take things slow, Tyler and I were back in town, grabbing
coffees from a bakery we liked off Main Street. There were a few tables out front, but it was high season now, and downtown
was swarmed, so we settled for the sidewalk’s curb instead.
Tyler’s knee was brushing against mine, and I was drawing little swirls on his skin, trying to talk him through the next sequence
of Henry and Willa’s story. After all, it was Monday, and the past thirty-six hours did not change the fact that our deadline
was only six weeks away. But I could not keep my mind on the fiction. I could not think about anything other than us—than
him. Than how he’d moved through the world before this summer brought us back together and how he’d spent his Saturday nights
all the years we’d been apart.
“Can I ask you something?” I said. Tyler nodded, and I glanced again at our connected knees. “If you don’t do this, how do
you . . . ?”
“Have sex?”
I shook the ice in my drink, suddenly aware it had been a stupid question to ask.
The answer was to take one good look at him.
The summer before his sophomore year of high school, a final growth spurt had left Tyler two perfect inches over six feet tall.
But even if he’d been forced to live out his days at a completely average height, it would not have mattered.
His cheekbones were chiseled, his smile was crooked, and his hair had always been a brooding mess.
You have to understand: Developing a crush on Tyler McNally was about the least original thing a girl in our town could do.
In middle school, he’d stumble home with so many Valentine’s Day carnations shoved into his backpack my mother made floral
arrangements for her open houses with them. By the time he was in tenth grade, two senior girls had gotten into such a massive
fight over him that one had to switch schools. When the principal called him in to discuss the drama, Tyler wasn’t entirely
sure which girl was which. And I cannot even begin to count the number of classmates who—from ages seven to sixteen—befriended
me, begged for a sleepover, and then spent the entirety of our Saturday night parked in my living room, laughing a little
too loud, hoping Tyler, who was upstairs doing god knows what with Mikey, might hear.
And I knew all that as I pushed my knee deeper against his, as he traced my free hand with his index finger, as we sat there,
sweltering under the late July sun, our weekend still written all over our flushing skin. And so when he shrugged, toed a
loose bit of gravel, and said nothing, I decided to let him off the hook.
“You don’t have to answer that,” I said. “I didn’t—”
“My dad,” he said, but in this strange and distant way. He was still kicking the ground, and his eyes were focused only on
that. On whatever faraway place he must’ve imprinted onto those rocks. His response, of course, was not an answer to my question.
Not to the one I’d actually asked. But I did not steer him back on track. “When I used to go see him, before . . .”
Nobody knew where Tyler’s father was. Sick or well, sober or drunk, alive or dead.
I was six when he disappeared for good, and I didn’t know anything about him other than he’d grown up in the same town as the rest of our parents but was a few years older.
Other than what I’d pieced together from a few late-night conversations I was too young to completely comprehend, the kinds you stole from the top of a stairwell.
Things like: Marcy’s picked up an extra shift, Tom hasn’t sent any money in months, so Tyler’s going to stay here a few nights a week.
Can you move the extra mattress into Mikey’s room? And We’d better get a stocking for Tyler this year, honey. They can’t find Tom, nobody’s heard from him since October. Marcy’s going to take the overtime at the hotel, or so she says, but I think she might
have another boyfriend. She really can’t pick a good one, can she? And I think the boys are doing drugs, Paul. My mother’s earrings—I can’t find them anywhere. I have this horrible feeling. Don’t
you remember what it was like with Tom?
“He just . . .” Tyler had let go of my hand and, instead, had folded his arms around his elbows.
His body was bent. “He used to take me to that diner in Dix Hills. You know, the one that looked like a railcar, right off the turnpike? And I remember the waitresses—well, the servers, he’d call them waitresses, sorry—they’d always think it was so cute.
Some dad and his son on a breakfast date.
Me eating a thousand silver dollar pancakes while he drank black coffee.
They’d smile at him, and he’d smile back, and then he’d pay the check, and then we’d wait outside for my mom, who was always running late.
And then, after a few minutes, he’d say he’d forgotten something at the table, and then my mom would finally pull up, and she’d say, ‘Where’s your father, Tyler?
’ And I would point inside, and there was my dad, that same server pinned up against a counter, laughing.
My dad, already, touching her wrist, writing something down for her.
And then my mom would close her eyes for a second, help me into the car, and say, as we drove away, ‘She’s lucky, you know.
She’ll only have to deal with him once.’ And I would just shrug as if that was the kind of thing a six-year-old could understand. ”
I frowned. Tyler stabbed an ice cube and then laughed, but it was not a real one. It was heavy. It was foolish, and it hurt.
Him, I imagined, but also me. It all just hurt.
“My parents loved you,” I said. It was not even relevant. But I had to add something. I couldn’t let that story hang there,
shrinking him. “You were like a son to them.”
He stabbed at an ice cube again.
“I know,” he said. “Trust me, I know.”
That night, when Tyler was out at his meeting, I decided to indulge in a little bit of girl time. I painted my nails pink.
I listened to a few chapters of a very good Kennedy Ryan novel. I called Lola and told her absolutely everything. And then,
around nine thirty, I wandered downstairs to make a cup of tea and set up my collage supplies on the breakfast table.
I was in the middle of pasting a picture of the Eiffel Tower to my poster board when Meredith walked into the kitchen. Pinot,
as usual, was a half step behind her.
“Meredith, oh—hi!” I had not seen Meredith since the blueberry muffin nonconfrontation yesterday morning.
It did not matter that she’d been shipping Tyler and me for weeks and would probably buy us a lifetime supply of condoms if we asked nicely.
She was still my boss, and I’d still lost my underwear in her pool.
“How was the rest of your weekend? Did you get a chance to review our pages yet?”
She did not answer either of my questions. Instead, she took a few steps closer and put a hand to my collage. “This is lovely,
Katie. Do you do this often?”
I nodded, returning to my default setting of yapping about arts and crafts. What did I think Meredith was going to do? Grill
me about my sex life? “My roommate and I are pretty into it. We put on music, order pizza, drink wine. I like making something
nobody’s ever made before. I know books are like that, but it takes so long. This is more like a poem. All mine, and done
in a night.”
Meredith touched the poster again. “Like a poem. I quite like that.”
I smiled, cutting away a few big, chartreuse letters from a headline, still babbling. “I make them for my characters too—it
helps me see them. I have one for Willa back in the city. She was extra fun because she has so many beautiful things, you
know? All this Zimmermann stuff, all this Chloé. But then she’s really sad, so I added all these blacks and blues. It came
out really nice. I have a picture of it on my phone. I could show you, if you wanted? I . . .”
Meredith just stood there there, tears streaming down her face.
“Meredith?” I put down my scissors. “Are you okay?”
For a moment, there was silence.
Long, thick silence.
And then, she spoke.
“I was a horrible mother, you know.”
I jolted. I glanced around, looking for a trigger. A framed picture of her daughter, maybe. A dumb piece of preschool art.
Something. Anything. But there was only Pinot, in her arms, and half-asleep. All while the words she’d spoken hung there,
sharp and irrefutable and heart-wrenchingly sure.
“I, uh . . . I don’t think that’s true,” I said. “You’re so kind to us. All summer, you’ve made us feel right at home. And
Pinot, he—”
“I thought,” she said, “a baby would fix me. Fix my mistakes. But it only made everything a thousand times worse.”
There was a decent amount of information about Meredith’s daughter online, but almost all of it centered around her horse
shows in Europe. Juliet, now twenty-four, had been one of those cool celebrity babies, raised far from paparazzi-ridden cities
and by parents who’d been very rich for a very long time and thus required no external validation from the media. There were
a few pictures of her out and about in London with fancy friends she’d met at her posh university, but that was about it.
She was, for the most part, a private citizen.
“What do you mean?” The words practically fell out of my mouth. I was in a trance, almost—and so was she. “What happened?”
Meredith, at that, walked toward the open window. She did not turn when she spoke. “Being a mother did not come naturally
to me. I never bonded with my daughter the way I should have. The life I chose, the life I’d wanted for myself, it was not . . .
I did not . . .”
I held my breath at her pause. She was keeping a slice of the story to herself, and I knew it because I did the exact same thing all the time. A few seconds later, she continued, but she never circled back to that—to the life she did not live. Some chapters, you just kept closed.
“You must understand, Katie. We do not stay young forever. And when I became pregnant with Juliet . . . I thought it was time
for me to grow up. I thought it would be the noble thing to do. To be present, to be doting. After all, how hard could it
be? I understood people better than anyone. Surely, I could figure out what it would take to be a good mother and behave that
way.
“But no. I could not fake it. I did not want to nurse her, and I did not want to play with her, and I did not want to read
to her, and I did not want to do any of the things I knew a mother was supposed to want to do for her child. What I wanted
was to relive my twenties. What I wanted was a way to turn back time. And in absence of that, I did the only thing I knew
how to do when the pain became unbearable. I wrote. I sent Alan and Juliet away, and I stayed in this house, and I wrote.”
I hated the way her voice sounded. How crisp and clear it was. How deeply she understood her own wounds and how fully she
embodied her own trope. How much texture—how much suffering—she could stuff into a single sentence. And yet, I could not look
away. Could not stop trying to understand how a mother could change her mind about her daughter or how Meredith Bradford became
whatever she was today.
“Did you ever get help? Did they ever come back—your husband, your daughter? Why’d you quit writing? Did the pain ever stop?”
Meredith was quiet for a minute. She was still facing the open window—facing the sea. A breeze swept in, rustling my magazines and sending a shiver down my spine.
“I just kept trying,” she said, “to turn back time.”
An hour later, once Meredith had disappeared to the carriage house and I’d set my collage on a drafting table in the pottery
studio to dry, I tiptoed onto the front porch, sat down on the bottom stair, and wrapped my hands around my knees, waiting
for the familiar crunch of gravel, for the certain sound of Tyler making his way home.
His shoulders straightened at first sight of me. “Hey, you. What’s going on? You all right?”
“Nothing, yeah. I’m fine, I just . . .” I sighed, and he pulled me into his arms. “Would you maybe make a peach cobbler with
me? I checked, and we’ve got everything we need. Even ice cream.”
His mouth quirked. “Do you mean, will I make a peach cobbler on behalf of you and me?”
I nodded, laughing. He drew me closer, and my strange encounter with Meredith melted away. “Yes,” I said. “Exactly that, please.”
Another smirk. And then, the tug of my hand. “Come on, Nutmeg. Grab my apron from the laundry room. Let’s get you fed.”
I laughed again, and then, tucked under his arm, the two of us made our way inside.
I hopped up onto my little spot on the island, and Tyler preheated the oven, and I told him about the book I was listening to, and he told me about the teenage newcomer he’d met that night, and he diced six tablespoons of cold butter with a pastry cutter, and I ate half the peaches he’d peeled and sliced while he’d disappeared into the pantry to search for a new roll of parchment paper.
When he returned, eyes narrowed, he stepped between my knees.
“Why am I missing a pound of peak season stone fruit, Katherine?”
“Pinot was hungry! It wasn’t me! It wasn’t—”
He shoved a dish towel in my mouth. I faked a gag, then spat it out and bonked him in the biceps with whatever spatula-thing
was closest to me. He snatched it away and then kissed me hard.
When he finally pulled back, smiling wide, I took a picture in my mind.
“What are you thinking?” he said, looping his arms around my waist.
“That summer is magic. That this place is magic. That this, here, is perfect to me.”