Most Likely to Succeed (16 page)

“That is so romantic.” I kissed him back, savoring what might be our last seconds together for a while. I truly wanted to stay there forever with him, too. Or, better yet, a hundred
yards behind us, alone on the beach. The thought that finally made me leave was that if I stayed, I would make my punishment worse and, if I got grounded, my time away from Sawyer longer.

When I pulled in to my spot in the driveway, Dad was standing outside the garage in pajama pants and his ancient Columbia T-shirt. He said as I dragged my feet toward him, “I convinced your mother that she’s too angry to speak with you tonight.”

“Thanks.” I sighed with relief.

“Are you okay?”

I nodded.

“You’re wet.”

I swallowed. “I didn’t do anything wrong. I’m pretty sure Aidan called the police to get Sawyer in trouble for nothing.”

“Whether you did something wrong is in the eye of the beholder,” Dad said ominously. “In the morning, the beholder is going to be your mother.”

Then he hugged me close and squeezed me. Immediately he let me go. “Ew, you’re
really
wet.” He took me by the shoulders and pressed his lips to my forehead for a long moment. “I’m glad you’re safe.”

But a conversation with my mother loomed in the morning. I didn’t feel safe at all.

13

“GET. UP!”

Fight-or-flight adrenaline zipped through me. I sat straight up in bed. Morning light flooded my room. My mother, fully dressed, frowned at me with her fists on her hips. She was the definition of a rude awakening.

“Put some clothes on,” she said, “and be in my car in two minutes.” She stalked out.

In a minute and a half, I was at her Mercedes, but she was already waiting with the engine running like I was late and had a lot of nerve.

She didn’t say anything for a long time as we drove through town. When we stopped at the intersection beside Aidan’s house, I craned my neck and saw his car in the driveway. I’d never considered myself a violent person, but I would
have loved to try a Molotov cocktail just then. A gasoline-soaked rag stuffed into a bottle, aimed to roll underneath and explode the car he’d screwed me in three times. I fire-bombed it with my eyes after we’d passed it, until I couldn’t see it anymore.

“The police,” my mother finally muttered as we cruised the interstate. “I get a call at eleven o’clock at night from the
police
, saying my seventeen-year-old daughter is half-naked on public property with the very boy I have told her to stay away from. This is not a poor grade we’re talking about, Kaye, or a position at school. You are associating with a delinquent who has a bad reputation, and who is a bad influence on you.”

“I agree he has a bad reputation.” No arguing with that. “I don’t agree that he’s a bad influence. He’s cleaned up his act lately. Anyway, you sound like you think I’m five, with no mind of my own.”

“Because that’s exactly how you’re behaving, as if you can’t see you’re throwing your future away. Listen to me. I didn’t go to school with anyone like Aidan.”

“Oh,
Aidan,
” I exclaimed. “You still want me to get back with Aidan? Let me tell you what he—”

She interrupted me. “I went to school with
lots
of boys like Sawyer.”

“You don’t know what Sawyer’s
like
,” I said. “You hardly know him.”

“I’ve heard plenty about him. In fact, I’ve heard half of it from
you
.”

She had me there. I put my chin in my hand and stared out the window, cursing myself for repeating the cheerleaders’ rumors about Sawyer over the years to my mother.

I was so angry, and my mind was spinning so fast, that I didn’t even realize where we were headed. But when she turned onto the exit in the seediest section of Tampa, I knew. “Mom.”

She didn’t answer, just kept moving her land yacht smoothly down the ramp. I could see one muscle in her jaw working as she clenched her teeth. She sailed into the slum, deserted of cars except for one 1980s model far down the long, straight street, its axles up on cement blocks. But the neighborhood was busy with young men hanging out in the shadows of the run-down apartment buildings, and riding kids’ dirt bikes in circles. Any sane person
not
looking to buy a dime bag would have recognized what she’d stumbled into and hightailed it out of there.

My mother was not sane. And it was getting worse. In the past she’d only slowed long enough to point out her old apartment building to Barrett and me. This time she actually
pulled alongside the curb, put the car in park, and pushed the button to turn off the engine. She looked over at me and raised her eyebrows.

Instantly the car was surrounded. A guy on a bike hopped down the curb, into the street, and pedaled back and forth in front of the car. A boy in a baseball cap with a marijuana leaf on the front knocked on my mother’s window. She didn’t react.

Watching this in horror, I jumped, startled at a knock on my own window. I didn’t turn, afraid of what I’d see, terrified that I was separated from these people by one pane of not-bulletproof glass.

My mother watched me smugly.

“Fine,” I said. “You grew up in that corner apartment.” I pointed to the second story across the lawn of brown grass and packed dirt, strewn with cigarette butts and trash. “Your brother died at sixteen on this very street, selling drugs. Your dad was robbed and killed coming home from work. At age forty-five your mom died of cancer, which could have been caught early and treated if she’d been able to afford health insurance.”

My mother gave me a curt nod.

“You got good grades, participated in every academic competition available, and snagged a full scholarship to Columbia, so you and your new family could live to their
full potential, and you would never have to face this crushing poverty again.”

She raised her chin to nod again, but stopped when I said this:

“You got out of here. You ensured your children would never have to live here. And yet you have driven your daughter back here, and we’re both about to get shot in the head, because you don’t like my boyfriend!” I was shouting now.

Even if my mother didn’t care, the drug dealers around the car did. The guy at my mother’s window and the guy on the bike said something to each other and took off, jumping the curb and speeding around the far side of the apartment building. I felt rather than saw the shadow of the man at my window moving away.

Another knock sounded on my mother’s side. I started again, and this time she jerked her head in that direction too. A policeman’s tan uniform filled the window. I looked behind us and saw the cop car, blue lights flashing.

“Oh, and
I’m
the one who always gets arrested,” I said.

“You shut your smart mouth.” My mother pushed the button to start the car, pressed another button to roll down her window, and then turned the car off. “Yes, officer?”

“Ma’am, do you live around here?” I couldn’t see his face above the roof of the car, but he sounded young.

“I live at the beach,” my mother said icily.

“What are you doing in this part of town?” came his voice. “Did you know this neighborhood is full of drug activity?”

“I grew up in that apartment right there.” She pointed to the corner. “I like to show it to my children now and again. That is not a crime, not yet, not even in Florida.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “If you ask me, if I grew up here and got out of here, I wouldn’t come back. I definitely wouldn’t bring my daughter to this neighborhood.”

“Young man,” she seethed, “I did not ask you.”

This could not be happening. I was going to sit in the back of a cop car for the second time in twelve hours, because I had a habit of hanging out with people who couldn’t keep their attitudes in check and their big mouths shut.

But cops were more leery of my mother than they were of Sawyer, apparently. “Yes, ma’am,” this one repeated. “Y’all have a safe afternoon.” I watched his uniform pass the back seat window. He got into his patrol car, shut the door, and put his head down as if he was writing something. I suspected he was really waiting for us to leave. I wouldn’t put it past my mother to outstay him just to spite him.

She pushed the button to start the car again with one elegantly manicured finger. Her hand was shaking, but she
didn’t say a word. She pressed the button to roll up the window, flicked on the blinker, looked behind her so as not to pull into oncoming traffic while a cop possibly had her on camera, and headed down the street.

“I learned a lot from that,” I said.

“You are grounded,” she said. “Your father is not going to talk me out of it this time. You may go to school and come home.”

“You just made sure I won’t get into Columbia, then. Nobody’s going to write me a stellar recommendation letter if I shirk my responsibilities for student council. We’re building the homecoming float every day after school next week—”

“You may build the homecoming float,” she said stiffly.

“—and I’ve figured out a place to hold the homecoming dance. Actually, Sawyer figured it out. Do I get to go to my own homecoming dance?”

“Yes,” she said carefully, “but not with that boy. Your father and I will volunteer as chaperones to make sure.”

“Fantastic,” I muttered. I’d gone to all the trouble of saving this dance for my friends. I was rewarded with a date with my parents.

When we got home, Dad was watching a pro football pregame show with his feet up on the coffee table. “Did you bring me a rock?”

“Shut up.” My mother disappeared into her office.

“Hey, my Kaye,” he said. “Get changed and meet me on my boat in five minutes.”

“Really?” I whined. “I just went through this whole thing with one parent.”

“Please,” he said.

Obediently I changed into a bikini and a hat, smeared on sunscreen, and galloped across the yard and down the pier to the sailboat. I was still angry and not looking forward to whatever Dad had to say. But at least his run-up to a scolding was more enjoyable than my mother’s. He’d made me a picnic basket full of breakfast, for one thing. The boat puttered through the lagoon on its impotent motor, but as soon as we hit the open Gulf, Dad unfurled the big sail. We sped through the sea breeze, past the harbor and Harper’s granddad’s beach and the public park that had caused all the trouble. I sat in the bow, enjoying the wind in my face. The late morning sun was warm and kind.

Finally I asked, “Well? When’s the lecture? Let’s get it over with.”

“No lecture,” Dad said. “I thought it would do you good to get out on the ocean.”

Moving with uncharacteristic speed, he wound and unwound ropes until the sails dropped and the boat slowed
to a crawl. He offered me his favorite fishing pole. I shook my head. He baited the hook for himself and skimmed it out over the sparkling water.

I shifted to sit close to him on a lawn chair in the stern. “Can I ask you something?”

He glanced at me like he was very afraid.

“You and Mom both majored in finance at Columbia.”

“Yes.”

“You both worked in Manhattan for a couple of years. Then she got an offer for a great position with the bank here. She grew up here, but you’re from Boston. You didn’t want to move to Florida. She bribed you by buying you this boat, and the house on a lagoon with access to the Gulf.”

“Yes.”

“Why did you give up?”

He gave me a look like that was crazy talk. “I didn’t give up, exactly. Everyone seems to forget this, but I do have a job.”

“I know. I didn’t mean—”

“And in that job, I wrote a headlining article for
GQ
on how the hardest thing about being a writer and the secondary breadwinner and the primary caretaker is that your own kids think you’re a loser.”

I raised my voice, and it echoed back to me over the
waves. “I don’t think you’re a loser. But you and Mom both had these power jobs in New York. She got her own bank. You became a writer. Something happened to you.”

He reeled his line all the way in and flicked it out again before he said, “Being a stockbroker is very stressful. I couldn’t handle it.”

“What do you mean, you couldn’t handle it?”

“I just couldn’t.”

I tried to picture what he meant, and what this had looked like. “Did you go to a counselor?”

He laughed bitterly. “Of course not. Men don’t do that.”

That sounded familiar. I said, “That’s dumb.”

He shrugged, zigzagging the line across the water.

“So what did you do, when you couldn’t handle it?”

“I quit. In the worst, most public way possible, sabotaging myself so I wouldn’t be able to work in the finance industry in Manhattan again for a while.”

I’d never heard this story before. I was dying to know more about his meltdown. But he seemed so traumatized describing it, even now, that I decided to press him for details another day. I only asked, “Did Mom lose her mind?”

“No.” He sounded surprised. I couldn’t tell whether he was surprised at my question, or surprised that my mother hadn’t blown her top two decades ago. “She helped me brain
storm for another job I could get with this degree, a job that wouldn’t drive me crazy. We figured out that I loved writing. I could write books and articles about finance, interpreting the stock market for lay people. And she said I might like living in Florida and slowing down. She promised that if I would let her have this bank, she would let me have this boat.”

That didn’t sound like my mother at all.

“You’ve been traveling a lot more lately,” I said. “Are you trying to get away from Mom? Truthfully.”

He gave me an expression of utter shock. “No!”

“Would you tell me if you were?” I kept on.

“I don’t know, but that’s not why. Your mom and I aren’t having marital problems just because
you’ve
suddenly decided that I feel emasculated.”

“You’ve been gone a lot, that’s all,” I muttered.

“I have a
job
.”

“It’s the same job you’ve always had, but you didn’t travel like this before.”

“I’m doing research for the new book and, at the moment, three different articles. I can accept more projects now that Barrett is gone and you’re old enough to take care of yourself.”

“Oh, it’s all about Barrett,” I sneered. “That makes sense.”

“Don’t go bitter on me. Barrett is a lot more fragile than you are. I worried about him. Still do. I’ve never worried
about you. I thought you didn’t need me around.” He reeled his line all the way in, set the butt of his pole down on the deck, and turned to me. “Obviously I was wrong.” Rummaging in his tackle box for a different lure, he commented, “Thanks to the book deal, I’m going to make more money than your mom this year.”

“You
are
? That is a huge amount of money.”

He nodded. “It doesn’t make up for the last nineteen years, when she made more than me.”

“You’re not in a competition,” I pointed out.

He straightened. “You’re right. It feels that way, though. And I don’t really care. I only care because society cares, and I’m supposed to.” Satisfied with the new lure he’d found, he deftly slung the line out over the water again.

It was soothing to watch him skip the hook over the surface, reel it back in, throw it back out, thinking of nothing, rarely catching anything. Just enjoying the sun and the water and the day. A flock of pelicans, the more common brown ones rather than white, skimmed past us, close over the water. Their wingspans were impossibly wide. I watched until I lost them in the far-off color and movement of the harbor.