Chapter One Medford, OR Present Day #2
Chrissie peeked at the picture and immediately wrinkled her nose. “I don’t even want to think about what kind of men would be attracted by two floating cow heads. Look. No matter which way you move, it feels like their eyes are following you.”
“It’s called trompe l’?il,” Scarlett said matter-of-factly. One year abroad in Paris, and she could have moonlighted as a tour guide at the Louvre. “And believe me when I say those aren’t the two things men will be focusing on in that picture.”
They’d agreed to switch places for the next leg of the trip, so Chrissie opened the passenger door while Scarlett adjusted the driver’s seat to accommodate her shorter stature.
“Admit it,” Scarlett added as the pair of them settled in. “You haven’t been on a date in the last decade, have you?”
Chrissie’s response came with knee-jerk speed. “Yes, I have! I went on one a few weeks ago.”
Scarlett coughed.
“Okay, a few months ago.”
She coughed again.
Chrissie gave in by flinging up her hands. “Fine. It’s been years. Are you happy now?”
“Not really, no. That’s the most pathetic thing I’ve ever heard.” Then, “How many years?”
Chrissie had to do some quick mental math.
“Three, I think? I remember it was right before Kat had her tonsils out. The poor thing. She refused to let me leave her side even to sleep because she was so uncomfortable. We ended up bunking in her bed and watching every single episode of Supernatural back-to-back.”
She still carried with her the memories of that week—up to and including the sickly sweet smell of her then-thirteen-year-old daughter’s breath as her throat healed from the surgery—but she didn’t regret them. If anything, she missed them. Kat hadn’t needed her like that in very long time.
She hadn’t wanted her in even longer.
As if reading her mind, Scarlett cast her a sideways glance. “You’re a good mom, Chrissie. A great one, in fact.”
“Say that to the text I got from her a few minutes ago.”
“Uh-oh. Was it all in caps?”
“No. It was lowercase, which is worse.” Chrissie dug out her phone and flashed the screen at her friend.
lily didn’t kill me in my sleep but she did give me every bottle of acne cream she owns. she says i obviously need them more than her. hope your little trip is worth the future therapy bills.
Scarlett’s signature laugh filled the car again. “Uh-oh. Lily is the frenemy?”
“Just enemy. No f-r.” Chrissie tucked the phone away again, but not before texting back a GIF of a wide-eyed puppy looking remorseful.
According to her daughter’s superior wisdom, GIFs were woefully outdated and cringey in the highest degree, but Chrissie liked them.
They made her feel fun. “Lily’s the volleyball coach’s daughter, and I can’t say that I blame Kat for hating her.
She looks like a young Tyra Banks and spikes like a doped-up Misty May. ”
Scarlett had yet to start the car, opting instead to turn toward Chrissie with the full force of her attention.
That trait had always been both one of the best and the worst things about Scarlett.
She cared, but she did it in such a way that it made Chrissie feel like she was standing naked on an empty stage.
“I’m assuming that second one is some kind of volleyball reference?”
Chrissie splayed her hands helplessly. “Welcome to my world.”
“And this Lily girl… She’s who Kat is staying with while you’re away? You gave your only daughter into the care and keeping of a person she hates?”
An acidic pang of guilt took up residence in Chrissie’s gut.
It cozied up well with the nausea she was feeling from one of Scarlett’s free gas station meat sticks.
She shouldn’t have eaten the thing so early in the day, but she’d never been one to let food go to waste.
When her daughter had been a toddler, most of Chrissie’s meals had been the last vestiges of macaroni and cheese or dinosaur chicken nuggets, the discarded crusts of sandwiches long gone stale.
In fact, she still ate like that—hunched over the sink, picking the mushrooms and onions out of takeout containers so Kat wouldn’t have to be confronted with their horrors.
“Technically speaking, she’s being cared for by Walsh. The coach. His daughter is just an unfortunate side effect.”
“Hmm,” Scarlett said. Just that—just hmm.
“Look, it’s not like I had a ton of options. Two weeks is a long time to ask anyone to take care of a sixteen-year-old. Her best friend is on the trip to New York, so staying with her isn’t an option, and it’s not like I can leave Kat on her own with Rufio the whole time. And my mom and dad—”
But here she cut herself off. If there was one person in the world she didn’t need to explain her parents to, it was Scarlett.
The rest of it Chrissie had explained—or attempted to, anyway—though she doubted Scarlett understood just how much her daughter hated her right now.
The only reason Chrissie had agreed to this road trip in the first place was because Kat had been invited on a tour of the United Nations in Manhattan with her history class for the same two-week period, an aligning of the stars that had seemed so fortuitous at the time that she almost suspected a trap.
There hadn’t been a trap, but there had been a fall.
A vaping incident in the bathroom at school and the principal’s strict no-smoking policy had ruined all of Chrissie’s carefully laid plans.
She’d had no choice but to ground her daughter, both literally and figuratively.
Her airplane privileges had been revoked, the trip refunded, and alternate arrangements made.
And Chrissie, with a conscience pricked so many times over it felt like a sieve, had done nothing to change her own plans except to beg Kat’s volleyball coach to take her in while she was gone.
“I’m doing the best I can,” she said, though she wasn’t sure if she was convincing Scarlett or herself.
“Whoa, babe.” Scarlett threw up her hands in a gesture of surrender. “You know I’m not judging your parenting choices. I’m just trying to figure out how I can bring this Lily girl down a peg or two. Do you think Kat would be willing to switch out her shampoo with Nair?”
Chrissie laughed, but that was quickly replaced by a frisson of alarm. With Scarlett, you never knew how far she’d push things.
“Please don’t encourage Kat down that path.
There’s already a mean-girl streak in her a mile wide.
It’s so strange. I was prepared for every other aspect of adolescence—the heartbreak and the struggles, the cruelty of kids that age and how it can break you down inside—but no one ever told me that Kat might be the one to make everyone around her miserable. ”
“Maybe you should schedule her for another minor surgery,” Scarlett suggested in a tone that indicated she was only half joking. “No one really needs an appendix these days, do they?”
“No way. A hospital is the last place I’m taking her for bonding time.”
“Why not? It worked for us, didn’t it?”
At this, Scarlett triumphantly started the car. That was another one of the best and worst things about her. Once she won an argument—or at the very least, assumed she had—nothing could drag her back into it again.
“Your problem, Chrissie, is that you’re not willing to think outside the box. You never have been. You like it too much in there, all cramped and beige.”
“I’m not beige,” Chrissie protested, but in vain. Her friend might be the one dressed in head-to-toe camel and sporting a Burberry scarf over her pixie-cut hair, but they both knew that Scarlett was the one who brought color into the world.
Color and laughter and life.
Life most of all.