99 Days (17 page)

The florist we use for the lobby screws up and sends two dozen extra gladiolas, which are Connie’s favorite, so I bundle them up in paper towels and bring them by the Donnellys’ after work. I’ve been thinking about her, about all of them, the secrets they keep from one another. They used to feel like such a solid unit of measure, the ideal family. They used to make me feel so safe.

“My God, Molly,” Connie says when she answers the door in her mom jeans and her work shirt, the baffled smile turning her face young and pretty. “What are these for?”

I shrug, feeling shy and awkward—I purposely picked a time I was pretty sure none of her offspring would be around, but I feel caught out and exposed anyway, like possibly this was a giant overstep. Back when
Driftwood
first came out and everything unspooled around me like somebody dropping a ball of yarn, I used to imagine Connie calling or coming to my house to take me out for coffee and waffles with whipped cream, to dispense some kind of sage motherly advice. She didn’t, of course—close as we were I was never actually a blood daughter, and it was her real kids that I’d screwed with.
I don’t even know my own mom’s favorite flower, I realize now.

“Oh, Molly,” Connie says, sounding pleased and resigned in equal measure. The flowers are a bright, screaming pink. “You shouldn’t have.”

“I know,” I say quietly, and we both know I’m not talking about the flowers. I think of the tourist from the Lodge:
It’s heartbreaking stuff
. “But I did.”

“You did, didn’t you?” Connie agrees, looking at me with something like kindness. “Thank you.”

I’m about to say good-bye and go when Julia appears in the doorway behind her in denim shorts and a plaid button-down, wearing her glasses, which she never does outside the house. “Who is it?” she asks. Then she sees me. “Oh. Hi.”

“I was just going,” I assure her, taking a step back on the crumbling stoop. “I just—” I motion to the flowers. “Have a good night.”

Julia nods but doesn’t make any move out of the doorway, looking at me for a long moment like she’s considering something. I brace myself, a thousand unpleasant possibilities cycling through my brain.

“You should stay for dinner,” she announces.

For a moment I just blink at her, baffled. I hallucinated, I must have. “I
should
?”

“Sure,” she says, turning around and heading toward the kitchen, the long sharp column of her spine. “The boys’ll be home soon; we’re having tacos. Right, Mom?”

Connie glances from Julia to me and back again, uncertain—wondering, probably, if this is some kind of elaborate plan Julia’s got to murder me and hide the body in the barn under some old camping gear. “Right,” she says eventually, stepping back with her armful of flowers. “Come on in, Molly.”

Which is how I wind up eating tacos at the long farm table in the Donnellys’ dining room like somehow I’m thirteen again, only this time it’s Gabe sitting beside me on the bench. He grinned a surprised, tickled grin when he came in through the back door and found me chopping onions with his sister,
Rubber Soul
on Connie’s bulky, old iPod docked on the counter. “Sneak attack, huh?” he asked, yanking me back against him by my belt loops and kissing the base of my neck when nobody was looking. “Glad you’re here.”

Patrick ambled in a few minutes later, Julia setting the table and Gabe gone into his bedroom to change. Patrick stopped for a moment in the doorway and stared at me like possibly he’d never laid eyes on me before, like I was strange and potentially dangerous. I hadn’t seen him since our messy, confusing middle-of-the-night kiss in the doorway.

“Hey,” I said, eyes on his, steady.

“Hey,” Patrick said to me, then turned around and walked away.

“Any word from Mass General?” Connie asks Gabe now, spooning some black beans into her taco. All the Donnellys fix them the same way, with a soft shell wrapped around the hard one to keep the whole affair from falling apart once you bite into it. It’s an old trick of Chuck’s he taught us all when we were small.

Gabe shakes his head and swallows. “Not yet,” he says. “They said it could be a couple weeks; I think the other kid was interviewing after me.”

My eyes cut across the table at Patrick, the sleeves of his hoodie shoved to his elbows and his freckly forearms, his serious face. He’s looking at his taco, not at me. He must know what it’ll mean, if Gabe spends this fall in Boston.

Right now he seems totally unbothered, though; when he lifts his head and gazes around the table his eyes are clear. “Boston seems like your kind of place,” he tells his brother blandly, then reaches for a serving spoon and refills his plate.

Penn wants me to train a couple of new front desk girls on the database software, so I’m clicking around in her office while she looks over my shoulder periodically, making sure there’s nothing I don’t understand well enough to explain. “Do we send thank-you cards?” I ask, scrolling through the records and snapping off the end of my Red Vine. Desi is perched quietly on my knee, her dark head bent over a
Little Mermaid
coloring page. “Or, like, could we? At the end of the summer, maybe, a postcard thanking people for staying and inviting them to come back—or, like, a coupon or a discount code or something for in the fall when it’s slow?”

Penn’s eyebrows shoot up, a grin spreading over her smooth brown face. “Look at you with your thinking cap on,” she says, nodding. “Wanna cost it out?”

“Sure,” I say, smiling back at her enthusiasm, shifting Desi to my opposite knee. She’s been sticking pretty close lately, hooking her small fingers in my back pocket as I walk the hallways in the morning and buckling herself into the backseat of my car when Penn sends me into town to run errands. I like her spry, quiet company. I like the skinny-but-solid weight of her little-kid body in my lap. “I’ll get it to you tomorrow.”

“Sounds good. You’re feeling better, then?” she asks, leaning against the edge of the desk and studying me. “That didn’t get past me, all that weirdness with you last week.”

“I—I’m sorry,” I say, embarrassed. “It was personal stuff; I was trying to keep it separate. Were there things that didn’t get done?”

Penn shakes her head. “You were fine. You just seemed a bit off, was all. Like you didn’t want to be spending a whole lot of time outside this office.” She cocks her head to the side, eyes narrowing. “Those two girls who work in the dining room, Michaela and what’s her face, the other one. They giving you a hard time?”

I shake my head. Actually, the truth is that since Elizabeth’s little drawing they’ve pretty much laid off lately, leaving me mostly to my own devices with only the occasional nasty look to deflect. There’s no way I can tell Penn that I actually spent all of last week dodging
Tess
. “It’s fine,” I promise. “It’s all resolved now.”

“Okay.” Penn nods, brushing her hands off like they might have some dirt on them, case closed, then. “Good. You wanna go run by the kitchen, make sure the guys all got their breaks?”

“Sure thing. What do you say, Des?” I ask her, easing her off my lap and onto the carpet. “You wanna go for a walk?” Desi hops up piggyback, and we head out into the lobby. When we round the corner there’s Tess in her red lifeguard bathing suit and a pair of mesh shorts, whistle hooked on a long nylon cord she’s spinning around two fingers. “Oh, hey, there you are,” she says, “I was looking for you this morning. Hi, Desi.” She grins at the forty pounds of kid peering over my shoulder curiously. Then, to me: “I have to tell you something, and I feel stupid about it. Or, like, I’m actually really happy about it? But I feel stupid.”

“Okay . . .” I say uncertainly, boosting Des up a bit higher on my shoulders. She’s slipping. “What’s up?”

“Patrick and I kind of got back together last night.”

“Ow!”
I flinch as Desi catches a hunk of my hair in the elastic of her shiny plastic bracelet, yanking hard. “Easy, kid.” I set her down while we get untangled, eyes watering at the sting in my scalp, though in truth I’m grateful for the distraction and the half beat it gives me to rearrange my face into something more appropriate than my gut reaction.

Back together.

Patrick and Tess.

“Sorry,” I say, standing upright again; Desi scampers across the lobby after Virgo, the Lodge’s cranky orange cat. Tess is looking at me expectantly. “That’s . . . great!” I manage. I think of how strange it seemed that Patrick was so unbothered about Gabe going to Boston—about Gabe and
me
—at dinner last night. I guess it wasn’t actually strange at all.

“I feel like the Girl Who Cried Breakup,” Tess explains, shaking her head a little. “Or a traitor to the sisterhood or something.”

“What sisterhood is that?” I ask, trying to sound jokey and cool about it. “The International League of Patrick’s Ex-Girlfriends?”

“Exactly.” Tess smiles. “I made him suffer, for what it’s worth. But he showed up and said all this amazing stuff about, like, the future, and I just . . . I don’t know. It felt good, you know? It felt right.”

I twist my face into a smile I hope looks genuine. Because this is a good thing, isn’t it? What happened with me and Patrick while he and Tess were broken up was an aberration, the worst kind of self-sabotage, and I want to put it behind me forever. Here’s solid, unequivocal proof that Patrick does, too. I made my choice, and so did Patrick. “I do.”

It’s Imogen’s birthday, so we wolf down a truckload of pizza at Donnellys’ and then head for the woods beside the lake, a cooler of watery Bud Light hidden under a blanket in Gabe’s station wagon and Tess’s iPod sitting in a red plastic Solo cup to amplify the sound. Handsome Jay made cupcakes, which strikes me as incredibly freaking dear.

It’s a pretty big crowd, us and Jake and Annie and a bunch of Imogen’s French Roast girlfriends; Julia and Elizabeth were hanging out at the pizza place and deigned to tag along for the ride. “I like those jeans,” Julia tells me, popping the top off her bottle and nodding at my holey Levi’s. Then, off what must be my vaguely stunned expression: “No, Molly, I’m not hitting on you. You can relax.”

“That’s not what—” I begin, shaking my head quickly. Julia only smirks.

I’m headed to the cooler for a beer of my own when Patrick grabs my arm like it’s an emergency. “What?” I demand with alarm. He doesn’t answer, just yanks me back behind a giant oak where no one can see us, dark enough that I can barely see
him
.

“What the hell are you doing?” I open my mouth to say but never get the words out because right away he’s kissing me hard just like the other night on his doorstep, hot and messy, his tongue sliding into my mouth. He tastes like beer and like Patrick. His hands burn like brands through my shirt.

I should push him away. Oh my God, I
need
to push him away, Tess and Gabe are twenty feet from where we’re standing, on top of which it’s wrong, it’s
terrible
, but it’s like I’m outside my body watching myself do this horrible fucking thing and I can’t stop, the bark of the oak tree scraping roughly at the skin of my back and the sting as Patrick bites down on my bottom lip. In some enormously messed-up way, the pain almost feels good.

Not almost. It
does
feel good.

Patrick doesn’t say anything, just keeps on kissing me, nudging his knee between my thighs and rocking a little, all this heat bleeding through his clothes and mine. He reaches up and cups the back of my skull so it doesn’t hit the tree trunk, surprisingly gentle, then tilts my head back and sucks my neck so hard I’m almost sure he’s going to leave a mark. It feels like there’s a series of bombs going off one after another inside my body, like somehow he improvised a chain of explosions along my spine when I wasn’t paying attention.

I don’t know how long it goes on for—it feels like hours, like time’s bent backward on itself, but in reality it’s probably less than a minute or two before Patrick pulls away from me fast and all at once, leaves me gasping. “We gotta get back,” he says quietly, reaching up and wiping his hand across his mouth. “You ready?”

“I—” I’m breathing so hard I don’t know if I can stand fully upright. I have no idea what just happened here—what I just
let
happen here. “Seriously?”

Patrick looks at me for a moment, unreadable. “Come on,” is all he says, tipping his head in the direction of the party. I can hear the high, tickled trill of Imogen’s laugh. I close my eyes and count to ten, try to collect myself. When I open them again Patrick’s gone.

The house is quiet when I come downstairs for a snack, but there’s my mom, watching
Tootsie
on the couch with our old blue quilt piled over her, a bowl of garlic-Parmesan popcorn in a ceramic bowl in her lap. I haven’t thought about that popcorn in a full year, but my mouth waters at the smell of it—it’s a Diana Barlow specialty, one of my favorite foods from when I was little. She used to let me eat it for dinner sometimes, for a treat.

I stall out in the doorway for a minute, watching as Dustin Hoffman wobbles around on-screen in a pair of high heels, not wanting to talk to her but not really wanting to go back upstairs, either. I don’t even think she’s noticed me standing there until she holds the bowl out in my direction.

“You want to come and have some popcorn?” she asks me, sharp eyes still trained on the TV. “Or you want to just stand there and lurk?”

I open my mouth to tell her I was planning on lurking, then shut it again just as fast. Suddenly, I am so, so tired. My mouth feels like it’s burning from the kiss Patrick branded there. My chest aches like my legs after yesterday’s run.

“Popcorn could be good,” I admit finally, shuffling into the living room, the knotty floors creaking noisily under my feet. My mom nods her curly blond head without comment. I perch on the edge of the slouchy leather couch, trying without a ton of success not to get swallowed by the cushions. When she offers me the blanket, I take that, too. The TV chatters quietly. I breathe.