The Truth About Forever (39 page)

I went back to my desk and sat down, swiveling in my chair, and punched a few keys, calling up my own email account. While working for my mother kept me busier than the info desk ever had, there was the occasional bit of downtime. It was then that I always seemed to find myself staring at another email from Jason.

The night I'd seen Wes, I'd come home to find Jason's message still on my screen. While my first thought was to just delete and ignore it, I reconsidered. So I sat down, my fingers poised over the keyboard. Being pushed back to this life was one thing. Now at least I felt like I was choosing it. And it wasn't like I had other options, anyway.

I wrote to Jason that I hated the info desk, that I just felt like it wasn't the job for me, and I probably should have quit right away instead of staying. I told him how his other email, announcing our break, had hurt me, and how I wasn't sure how I felt about us getting back together at the end of the summer, or ever. But I also told him I was sorry about his grandmother, and that if he needed to talk, I was here. It was the least I could do, I figured. I wasn't going to turn my back on someone in their moment of weakness.

So now we were in contact, if you could call it that. Our emails were short and to the point: he talked about Brain Camp, how it was stimulating but a lot of work, and I wrote about my mother and how stressed out she was. I didn't worry so much about what he thought of what I wrote, what he might read between the lines. I didn't race to answer him either, sometimes letting a day or two go before I replied, letting the words come at their own pace. When they did, I'd just type them up and hit Send, trying not to overthink. He always wrote back faster than I did, and had even started hinting about us seeing each other the day he got back, the seventh, which was also the day of the gala. The more I pulled back, the more he seemed to move forward. I wondered if it was really because he cared about me, or if now I was just another challenge.

I still thought about Wes a lot. It had been about two weeks now, and we hadn't talked. The first few days afterwards he tried to call me on my cell phone, but when I saw his number pop up on the screen I just slid it aside, letting it ring, and eventually turned it off entirely. I knew what he'd think: we'd just been friends, after all, and we'd always talked about Becky and Jason before, so why not now? I didn't know the answer to this, just as I didn't know why it had bothered me so much to see him with Becky. She'd come back to him, just like Jason had come back to me, and I knew he was probably happy about that. I should have been happy, too, but I just wasn't.

Occasionally I heard from Kristy, who had in this interim gone from smitten with Baxter to positively lovesick. "Oh, Macy," she'd sigh in my ear, sounding so wistful and happy I could have hated her, if I hadn't thought she so deserved it. "He's just extraordinary. Truly extraordinary."

I kept waiting for her to bring up Becky, and her and Wes being back together, but she never did, knowing, probably, that it was a sore subject. She did, however, say that Wes had been asking about me, and she wondered if something had happened between us. "Is that what he said?" I asked her.

"No," she'd replied, switching the phone to her other ear. "It's Wes. He never says anything."

Once he had, I thought. Once he'd said a lot, to me. "It's nothing," I told her. "We just, you know, don't have that much in common." And maybe this was true, after all.

It was a Friday, which was supposed to be a good thing. For me, though, and the concrete guy in my mother's office, things were just going from bad to worse.

"… and I will not be paying any overtime for a job that was guaranteed to be done over a week ago!" I could hear my mother say. This was the fourth meeting she'd had with a subcontractor today, and they'd all gone pretty much the same way. As in, not well.

"The weather," the concrete guy inside said, "was—"

"The weather," my mother shot back, interrupting him, "is something that you, as a professional who deals with it as a factor in all jobs, should take into consideration when submitting a bid for work. This is summer. It rains!"

My mother's voice, so brittle and shrill these days, sent a chill down my spine. I could only imagine how the concrete guy felt.

There was a bit more back and forth, and then their voices dropped, which meant this meeting was almost over. Sure enough, a second later the door opened, and the concrete guy, heavyset and irritated-looking, mumbled past my desk and slammed out of the office, the windows rattling in his wake.

My phone buzzed, and I picked it up. "Macy," my mother said. She sounded exhausted. "Could you bring me a water, please?"

I reached into the small fridge beside my desk to get one, then pushed out my chair and walked to her door. For once, my mother was not on the phone or staring at the computer screen. Instead, she was sitting back in her desk chair, looking out the window at the sign across the street advertising the townhouses. There was a truck parked in front of it, so you could see only the last part: AVAILABLE AUGUST 8TH. SIGN UP FOR YOURS NOW!

I twisted the cap off the water, then slid it across the desk to her. I watched her take a sip, closing her eyes, then said, "You okay?"

"I'm fine," she said, automatically, unthinkingly. "It's always like this at the end of a project. It was like this with the houses, and the apartments. It doesn't matter if it's fifty million-dollar townhouses or one spec house. Everything always gets crazy at the end. You just have to keep going, regardless of how awful it gets. So that's what I do." She sipped at her water again. "Even on days like this, when I'm sure it's going to kill me."

"Mom," I said. "Don't even say that."

She smiled again, a tired smile, the only smile I ever saw from her lately. "It's just an expression," she said, but I still felt uneasy. "I'm fine."

For the rest of the afternoon, I busied myself with the gala guest list. At four forty-five, I sat back in my chair, grateful I only had fourteen minutes and counting before I got to escape. Then, though, two things happened. The phone rang, and my sister walked in.

"Wildflower Ridge Sales," I said, waving at her as she shut the door behind her and walked up to my desk.

"Meez Queensh pleeze es Raffka," the voice on the other end said. Rathka, besides having an accent that made him almost completely incomprehensible, always seemed to talk with his mouth pressed right up to the receiver.

"Right, hold please." I hit the button, then looked up at Caroline, who was standing in front of me, hands clasped together, her face expectant. "Hey," I said. "What's up?"

She took a breath to answer, but then my mother opened her office door, sticking her head out. "Is line one for me?" she asked, then saw my sister. "Caroline, hello. When did you get here?"

My sister looked at her, then back at me. Clearly, she was working up to something. She took in another breath, smiled, then said, "It's done."

There was a second or two of silence as my mother and I processed this. On the phone in front of me, the red light was blinking.

"It's done," my mother repeated slowly.

Caroline was still looking at us, expectant.

"The beach house," I said finally. "Right?"

"Yes!" Caroline clapped her hands, three times fast, like this was a game show and I'd won the showcase showdown. "It's done! And it's fabulous. Fabulous! You have to come and see it. Right now."

"Now?" My mother glanced at the clock, then back at my blinking phone. "But it's—"

"Friday. Quitting time. The weekend." Caroline, clearly, had thought this through. "I've gassed up my car and bought sandwiches so we won't even have to stop for dinner. If we leave in the next half hour, we might even get there for the last of the sunset."

My mother put her hand on my desk. I watched her fingers curl around the edge. "Caroline," she said slowly, "I'm sure it's just wonderful. But I can't get away this weekend. There's just too much work to do."

It took Caroline a second to react to this. "It's just one night," she said after a minute. "You can come back first thing tomorrow."

"I have a meeting in the morning with my superintendents. We're on a very tight schedule. I can't get away."

Caroline lowered her hands to her sides. "But you've been saying that all summer."

"That's because it's been true all summer. It's just a bad time." My mother looked at the phone again, that blinking light, still so insistent. "Who is that holding?"

"Rathka," I said quietly.

"I should take it. It's probably important." She started back to her office, then turned and looked at my sister, who was just standing there, like she was in shock. I felt a pang of pity, thinking of her buying sandwiches, stocking a cooler, how excited she must have been to show us the house. "Honey," my mother said, pausing in the doorway, "I know how much you've put into this, and I so appreciate everything you've done."

I wasn't sure that she did, though. That either of us did. For the past few weeks, my sister had been in constant transit between the beach house and her own, stopping during each trip to give us an update. My mother and I, concerned with our own problems, had given what attention we could, but neither of us was ever as involved as she would have liked us to be.

Now, she stood in the doorway, biting her lip. I'd never thought I had that much in common with my sister, but now, watching her, I felt some sense of solidarity. Caroline, in the last few weeks, had engineered an amazing transformation, one she wanted more than anything to share with us, but especially my mother.

"Mom," Caroline said now, "you're going to love it. Just take twelve hours off and come and see. Please."

My mother sighed. "I'm sure I will. And I'll get there, okay? Just not today."

"Fine," Caroline said, in a voice that made it clear it really wasn't. She walked over and sat down in one of the chairs by the window, crossing one leg over the other. My mother was edging into her office, as if that red light was pulling her closer, when my sister said, "I guess it was kind of spur of the moment, thinking we could do this today. I mean, since we're going next Sunday anyway."

"Next Sunday," my mother repeated. She seemed confused. "What's happening then?"

Caroline was looking at her, and I had a bad feeling. Really bad. "We're going to the beach house for the week," I said quickly, looking from her to my mother, then back at Caroline. "On the eighth. Right?"

I was waiting for Caroline to agree. Instead, my mother said, "Next Sunday? The day after the party? That's impossible. The phase will have just opened. When did you decide this?"

"I didn't," Caroline said, finally speaking. Her voice was level, even. "We did. Weeks ago."

My mother looked at me. "But that's impossible," she said, running a hand through her hair. "I wouldn't have agreed to that, it's too soon. The sales will have just started, and we have a meeting that Monday on breaking ground for the next phase… I have to be here."

"I can't believe this," my sister said, shaking her head. "I can't believe you."

"Caroline, you have to understand," my mother told her. "This is important."

"No!" my sister screamed, the word suddenly just filling the room. "This is
work
, and for you, it's never done. You promised me we'd take this vacation, and I've killed myself getting ready on time so we could have this week together as a family. You said you'd be done, but you're never done. All this summer it's been about these stupid townhouses, and two days after they open, you're breaking ground for something else? God! You'll do
anything
to avoid it."

"Avoid what?" my mother said.

"The past," Caroline said. "Our past. I'm tired of acting like nothing ever happened, of pretending he was never here, of not seeing his pictures in the house, or his things. Just because you're not able to let yourself grieve."

"
Don't
," my mother said, her voice low, "talk to me about grief. You have no idea."

"I do, though." Caroline's voice caught, and she swallowed. "I'm not trying to hide that I'm sad. I'm not trying to forget. You hide here behind all these plans for houses and townhouses because they're new and perfect and don't remind you of anything."

"Stop it," my mother said.

"And look at Macy," Caroline continued, ignoring this. "Do you even know what you're doing to her?"

My mother looked at me, and I shrank back, trying to stay out of this. "Macy is fine," my mother said.

"No, she's not. God, you
always
say that, but she's not." Caroline looked at me, as if she wanted me to jump in, but I just sat there. "Have you even been paying the least bit of attention to what's going on with her? She's been miserable since Dad died, pushing herself so hard to please you. And then, this summer, she finally finds some friends and something she likes to do. But then one tiny slipup, and you take it all away from her."

"That has nothing to do with what we're talking about," my mother said.

"It has everything to do with it," Caroline shot back. "She was finally getting over what happened. Couldn't you see the change in her? I could, and I was barely here. She was
different
."

"Exactly," my mother said. "She was—"

"Happy," Caroline finished for her. "She was starting to live her life again, and it scared you. Just like me redoing the beach house scares you. You think you're so strong because you never talk about Dad. Anyone can hide. Facing up to things, working through them,
that's
what makes you strong."

"I've given everything I have to support this family," my mother replied, biting off the words. "And for you, it's still not enough."

"I'm not asking for everything you have." Caroline put her hands to her face, breathing in, then lowered them. "I'm asking you to allow me, and Macy, and especially yourself to remember Dad—"

My mother exhaled loudly, shaking her head.

"—and I'm asking you for one week of your time to begin doing it." Caroline looked at me, then back at my mother. "That's all."