Chapter Three
Nora smoothed the final photo onto the collage, her fingertips lingering on the corners like she could press the memories into permanence. A memory already slipping, soft around the edges—like a Polaroid left too long in the sun.
A snapshot of her and her friends, sunburned and half drowned from their graduation canoe trip, grinning like they’d conquered something bigger than just high school.
They’d just spent a few days pretending the next step toward the real world wasn’t waiting right around the corner, ready to slap them with tuition bills and disappointing boyfriends.
At least they had the entire summer to savor before college and adulthood had them bowing out of a party at the lake in favor of a decent bedtime.
The entire summer was planned out for her and her friends. Beach time, shopping, convincing their parents to let them attend a music festival, and plenty of girl time gossiping about celebrities and swooning over Dustin Hoffman and Bobby Sherman.
In the background, the Beatles’ Abbey Road played on the record player she’d gotten for her sixteenth birthday, and she hummed along.
Her mom had come along on the graduation trip, labeled the designated “cool parent”—meaning she brought bologna sandwiches in wax paper and kept to the sidelines with a quiet, practiced smile.
Nora appreciated that her mom understood her need for independence.
But sometimes, just sometimes, Nora wished she didn’t.
Wished she’d stepped in a little more, asked a few extra questions, and acted like she actually wanted to know what was going on in Nora’s life instead of just standing at the edges, looking… tired.
Not a tiredness sleep could cure, but one that settled deep in the bones—like carrying something heavy for too long without knowing how to set it down. God, she hoped she never ended up like that.
Had her mom even realized this was Nora’s last summer at home? The last summer before she was supposed to go off and become someone entirely new—someone smarter, bolder?
Nora flopped onto her bed. Absent-mindedly, she traced the soft floral pastels of her bedroom wallpaper.
The delicate pattern was a relic of her childhood, peeking out from behind tacked-up posters of rock bands she loved and magazine clippings of movie stars.
The whole room felt like a silent tug-of-war between the girl she used to be and the woman she was trying to become.
She’d suggested redecorating once, floating the idea like a test balloon, but her mom had just given her a look—not quite a no, but something even heavier.
Like the thought of changing Nora’s room was too much, as if tearing down the girlish wallpaper and repainting would make her leaving all too real.
And so, the flowery wallpaper remained, along with the unspoken weight of her mother’s sadness.
Without considering why, Nora got up and began taking down the faded bits of celebrity-worshipping newspaper.
There was a postcard on her wall, a snapshot of her and Grandma from that trip they’d taken together.
They’d gone to London for her sixteenth, and Nora remembered the excitement of traveling abroad—how the air smelled like adventure, and rules felt optional.
Nora plucked it down, flipping it over to reread the message scrawled in her grandmother’s tight, looping script.
For my fearless girl—always choose the scenic route.
A grin tugged at her lips. Grandma’s words were always sharp and clever like she was letting you in on some secret joke. She wasn’t a rule follower.
If only her mother had inherited even half of that free, peregrine spirit.
Nora had brushed off her mom’s suggestion that Grandma had gone anywhere more exciting than out to run an errand.
But now that Eleanor still hadn’t turned up, Nora hoped she was wrong.
That Grandma was off gallivanting on a fabulous solo adventure—drinking wine in Italy, riding camels in Egypt, or attending a concert for that new band Led Zeppelin.
Wouldn’t that be a hoot? Meanwhile, her mom was downstairs, wringing her hands, acting like a sixty-nine-year-old woman needed a permission slip to live her life.
Classic Leanne Miller, trying to control what was never meant to be contained.
Nora put the postcard back on the wall. Grandma would be fine. She always was.
Fall was coming; then she too could escape. Leave this wallpapered suburban fishbowl and begin her freshman year at Yale.
Yale. As in centuries-old, buttoned-up, boys’-club Yale.
For the first time in its storied, pipe-smoke-scented history, they were admitting women into the undergraduate program. A handful. A whisper of estrogen in a sea of testosterone and tweed.
She was fully aware she’d be one of the few. One of the first. And she was so ready for it. She could practically taste the dry, musty air of Sterling Memorial Library.
Nora had the grades, the ambition, and a bookshelf lined with Austen, Baldwin, and Simone de Beauvoir to prove she could hold her own.
She’d clawed her way into the Ivy League with nothing but determination, a dictionary, and the lingering sting of every boy who ever told her she talked too much while she silently corrected their grammar in her head.
She wasn’t scared. Not of being the only girl in a lecture hall full of men. Not of professors who might pat her on the head instead of taking her seriously. And not of going it alone, with no best friend from home to soften the edges of the unknown.
She was ready. Thrilled, even.
But until then, there were the long, humid days of summer.
One more season of borrowed time with Kelley and her other friends.
A summer to get sunburned noses and tell inside jokes.
Kelley was planning another trip to the lake that Nora didn’t want to miss—skinny-dipping optional, sneaking boys in, stealing cigarettes from older siblings, maybe sipping her first beer sitting in the sand.
She’d been too focused on grades to try it on Friday nights.
One last epic summer trip before everyone shipped off to college or, in the case of some boys, overseas to fight in Vietnam.
Below, a door slammed, pulling Nora from her fantasy of a shirtless older boy, sitting beside her on the dock offering her a sip of his Miller High Life.
Nora listened to the rhythmic staccato of her mother’s heels clacking against the foyer tile—purposeful, perfectly timed, like a dozen punctuation marks.
Nora picked up her journal and pen, twirling the pen cap between her fingers, the blank page glaring back.
The paper was slightly warped from the summer humidity.
She flipped through older entries. Most of them were rants, partial poems, or lines she swore she’d one day use in a novel no one would be allowed to read until after her death.
Going back to today’s page, she tapped the pen against her chin, then scrawled:
Summer of 1969. Still stuck in suburbia.
As a student at Yale, she officially planned to go into marketing like her father, though she wanted to write copy for shiny ads rather than sell them.
That’s what she told her parents, anyway.
It was the easiest way to explain the minor in English she planned in addition to her major in business and communications.
But the truth was, she wanted to write fiction. Invent lives, rewrite endings. Create female characters who didn’t smile when they didn’t want to.
She wasn’t sure her parents would understand that—or, worse, they would understand and try to kill the dream slowly with phrases like “backup plan” or “don’t get your hopes up.”
So, she told them what they wanted to hear, because placating them had become a second language.
A soft knock, followed by the door creaking open, and her mother’s face appeared, eyes heavy and posture tight.
“Did Grandma call while I was out?” Leanne’s voice was barely above a whisper.
Nora lowered her pen. “You mean while you were at her house again?”
She didn’t mean to sound sharp. Okay, maybe she did. Her mother had been spiraling over this for days now, and Nora couldn’t decide if it was genuine concern or another way for Leanne to control things that didn’t want to be controlled.
“She’s still not home, Nora. It’s been three days.” Leanne stepped into the room fully now, arms crossed. “I called the police. They didn’t seem particularly interested.”
Nora rolled her eyes. “Grandmothers are allowed to disappear if they want to. She probably just needed space. She’s kind of a free spirit, ya know?
” Nora recalled afternoons of dancing barefoot in a patch of dandelions, followed by singing sessions around a campfire with marshmallows crisping on long sticks foraged in the yard.
Her grandmother had always seemed to be so free and yet so… trapped.
Leanne let out a long, uneven breath. “It’s just that—” But her mother’s lips tightened as her demeanor shifted.
Nora sat up straighter on the bed, the sarcasm draining from her throat. “What is it?” she asked. “Is there something wrong with Grandma?”
Her mother rubbed her temple, pressing her fingers hard into the skin like she could force coherence into her thoughts. Then, slowly, she looked up.
“She’s not well,” Leanne said. “Not mentally. I found a note from the doctor’s office at her house. She’s been diagnosed with dementia. I think…I think we need to find her.”
Panic pressed against Nora’s ribs. Dementia? “Where would we even start?”
“California. I found this note crumpled in the trash at her house.” Leanne’s voice was tight. She held up a torn scrap of paper, the margin jagged like it had been ripped from a larger thought.
Nora scanned the slanted, unmistakable handwriting. The identical looping cursive that Eleanor had signed her name within every hand-painted birthday card and the postcard on her wall. The Pink Flamingo.
Nora wrinkled her nose. “What’s the Pink Flamingo?”