Well, there were probably better ways to go about that than dating my ex-boyfriend, Meg thought, unable to stop herself. Still, she pushed the thought aside and set her sundae down on the step beside her, knowing in her gut that this was the moment to talk to Emily about next year. “Em,” she started.
“Yeah?”
Meg hesitated, the words heavy as pennies at the back of her mouth: I don’t want to go to Cornell in September. I don’t know if I want to go to college at all. I have a phone interview with the Annie Hernandez campaign on Tuesday. I’ve been lying to you for a really long time.
“Nothing,” she said finally—hating herself a little, wishing this were half as easy as delivering a passionate endorsement of the electoral process or telling some stranger that his joke made him sound like an ass. Meg knew politics weren’t 100 percent straightforward—she wasn’t that naïve, no matter what Colby might think—but they were easier to talk about than a lot of other things in her life, that was for sure. “I’m glad we’re friends again, that’s all.”
“Of course we’re friends, dummy,” Emily promised. “We’ll always be friends.”
Twenty-Six
Colby
The following week, Colby dug the one suit he owned out of the back of the closet, tried it on over his T-shirt, then stood in front of the mirror on the back of his closet door, staring at himself in consternation. The sleeves were too short. The pants showed his pale, hairy ankles. And every time he breathed, it felt like the seam on the back of the jacket was straining, like he was going to Hulk out of the whole thing altogether if he made one false move.
He guessed he shouldn’t have been surprised: he hadn’t even taken it out of the closet since Brooklyn Greer’s sweet sixteen, which had been a ridiculously fancy affair at a banquet hall involving a chocolate fountain and a mashed potato bar. He’d worn jeans and a hoodie to his dad’s funeral, because he’d been in the mood to be an asshole, and nobody had dared to give him a hard time either way. His mom had wanted him to try it on before graduation, only then Jordan and Micah had thought it would be hilarious if they all went naked under their graduation robes. And you know what? It had been hilarious. Jordan and Micah had been correct.
None of which changed the fact that there was no way he could wear this fucking getup to Meg’s dad’s wedding.
He was sitting on the side of his bed trying to figure out how much a new one would cost when his mom knocked on his bedroom door, easing it open before waiting for Colby to tell her to come in—one of his least favorite habits of hers, and another reason he wanted to move out as quickly as humanly possible. “I’m headed out,” she announced, then looked at him with great alarm. “Colby,” she said, like she was possibly concerned he hadn’t noticed, “that suit does not fit you.”
Colby flopped backward onto the mattress. “I know that,” he said to the ceiling. “Thanks.” Still, when he sat up again, something about the way she was gazing at him had him confessing: “I’m invited to a wedding.”
He watched half a dozen questions flicker across her lined, serious face—where? Who with? Do you have a girlfriend I don’t know about?—and if she’d asked any of them he probably would have shut down entirely, but in the end all she said was “Follow me.”
Colby got up and trailed her down the narrow hallway into the room she’d shared with his dad, his bare feet sinking into the carpet. He didn’t come in here a lot lately, but mostly it looked the same as it always had: the pink flowered wallpaper border along the ceiling, the heavy oak furniture they’d inherited from Grandma Moran. Photos of him and his brother as babies sat in silver frames on top of doilies on the dresser, along with a picture of his parents smushing cake into each other’s faces at their own wedding. Colby glanced away from that one, jamming his hands into his pockets.
Glanced back.
His mom dropped her purse on the neatly made bed, then opened the closet that had been his dad’s. “There’s a couple of them in here,” she explained, rummaging through the hangers. “They probably aren’t hip or anything, but they should get the job done.”
Colby nodded wordlessly. With the closet door open, the whole room smelled like his dad all of a sudden: bar soap and orange Tic Tacs and overstock cologne from Odd Lot, so strong that Colby felt a lump form immediately in his throat. In the year since his dad had died, the rest of the house had shifted to accommodate his absence, his slippers disappearing from the mudroom and his favorite mug migrating to the back of the cupboard and their subscription to Newsweek lapsing, like scar tissue thickening over an open wound. In here, though, it was like he was still alive. Just for a second, Colby would have sworn he was going to walk in any minute to change his clothes after work, to put on his Indians hoodie and get himself a Coors Light from the fridge. Colby didn’t know what had happened to that Indians hoodie, actually; suddenly, he was seized with a physical urge to rip through every drawer in the house until he found it.
“Here,” his mom said, the sound of her voice startling in the quiet room. When Colby turned to look at her, she was holding out a sober-looking gray suit. “Try this one.”
“Um.” Colby cleared his throat, blinked twice. “Sure.”
His mom turned her back to give him privacy while he changed into it, then turned around and looked at him skeptically. “I’d need to hem the pants,” she decided, reaching out to pluck at the waistband. “Maybe take it in a little, too, but that’s not hard. When do you need it?”
“This weekend,” he admitted with a grimace. “Saturday night.”
His mom nodded, those same unasked questions written all over her face. “You look like him, you know that?”
That surprised him; people always said that Matt looked like their father, but never Colby. “I do?”
“You do,” she said, sitting down on the edge of the bed and pulling her purse into her lap like a cat she was thinking of petting. “You remind me of him, too. Not in a sad way; I don’t want you to think that. But sometimes when you’re fixing something around the house or I see you out in the yard with Tris in the morning. The way you hold your fork. I don’t know.” She shrugged. “I’m being maudlin.”
I miss him, Colby wanted to tell her. “It’s okay,” he said instead. Then, before he even registered thinking it: “Can I ask you something kind of important?”
His mom’s pale eyes widened. “Of course, Colby,” she said, in this sort of overly confident voice like he should know he could—like they had the kind of relationship where they talked about personal or important things all the time, which they definitely didn’t. It would have made him laugh on a different day. “Anything.”
“When Matt and I got in that fight, he said . . .” He broke off then, losing his nerve, reminding himself once and for all that there was no point in actually knowing. Still, though: “Dad hadn’t tried it before, had he? Like, before he actually did it?”
For a long time, Colby’s mom didn’t say anything, wrapping the strap of her purse around her fingers until the rough skin of her knuckles turned bone white, then unwinding it and repeating the process. “Matt said that?” she asked quietly.
“Uh, yeah,” Colby said, his voice cracking a little bit like he was going through puberty all over again. “I told him he didn’t know what he was talking about, but . . .” He cleared his throat. “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about, right?”
Another pause, even longer this time. Finally, she set the purse back down on the bed. “Colby,” she said.
Colby sat down on the edge of the mattress, all the air going out of him at once. “Oh.”
“I didn’t want you to find out,” she said, shrugging almost girlishly. “I wanted to protect you—gosh, your dad wanted to protect you. But now that you know, I don’t want you to think that if somehow . . .” She shook her head. “There was no saving him, Colby.”
“How can you say that?” Colby demanded, standing up so fast he almost tripped on the too-long hem of his dead dad’s suit pa
nts. “You have no idea. I could have talked to him. I could have—”
“Colby . . .” His mom reached out like she was planning on touching him, then thought better of it. Both of them stared silently at the carpet for a moment before she spoke again. “He was the best man I ever knew, your father. But somewhere in there, when I wasn’t paying attention, he stopped being able to see the possibilities in life. Do you know what I mean? He couldn’t see anything but what was in front of his face at that particular moment. And then at the very end, he couldn’t even see that.”
Colby thought he knew what Meg would say right now, about depression being a medical illness the same as diabetes or cancer. But he also thought he understood the point his mom was trying to make. There was a part of him that wanted to keep talking, to tell her about the nightmares—to tell her about Meg, maybe—but in the end he shrugged off the suit coat and draped it carefully over the footboard of the bed. “Thank you for doing this,” he said. “I mean, thank you for doing everything, but—yeah. Thank you for doing this.”
His mom lifted her head and looked at him then, smiling a little. “My pleasure, honey. Leave it on the bed here, and I’ll do the sewing when I’m home on Thursday.” She stood up, slinging her purse over her shoulder. “I’m happy for you.”
“Thanks,” he repeated, reaching out and brushing her arm with the tips of his fingers. “I’m kind of happy for me, too.”
The week passed, the air getting warmer; sweat soaked through his T-shirt twenty minutes into his shifts at work. He took Tris to get her heartworm test. He mowed the backyard for his mom. Friday morning, he hung his freshly hemmed suit on the hook in the back of the car and threw his duffel bag on the floor beside it, then climbed into the driver’s seat and dialed Doug’s number.
It rang three times before it went to voice mail. Colby took a deep breath before he spoke. “Hey, Doug,” he said. “It’s Colby Moran. I just wanted to follow up with you on that job offer. I’m out of town this weekend”—he liked how that sounded: out of town, like he was an actual adult—“but I’ll be back on Sunday, and I’m available to start any time next week. Just let me know. Thanks. Uh. Take care.”
He hit the button to end the call, feeling his shoulders drop and his chest fill up with something like anticipation. He rolled down his windows and headed for Meg.
When he pulled up eight hours later, she was sitting on the steps in front of her house, dressed in denim shorts and sunglasses and a pair of hippie sandals. She launched herself up off the brick and booked it across the grass, dark hair streaming behind her like a flag. “Hi,” she said when she reached him, her voice breathless. She flung her arms tightly around his neck.
“Oof,” Colby said, his own hands hovering awkwardly in midair for a minute before they got the message to hug her back. Nobody had ever greeted him that way in his entire life, and it was kind of overwhelming for a second—the smell of her neck, the softness of her body underneath her T-shirt. He really did not want to be popping a boner in the middle of her front yard first thing. “Uh,” he said, his head clanging a little as he set her down. “Hi.”
“Hi,” Meg said again, pushing her sunglasses up into her hair, her cheeks going a little bit pink. He’d embarrassed her, he could tell, but he didn’t know how to explain that it wasn’t that he didn’t want her to touch him. That actually he wanted her to touch him all the time.
She tucked her hands into the back pockets of her shorts, tilting her head toward the front door. “Come on in.”
Colby slung his duffel over his shoulder and followed her up the mossy front walk. The house was big, which he’d expected; an old brick colonial situation with a red door and shutters decorated with cutouts in the shape of old-fashioned candles. Inside, a grand staircase filled the front hallway, antique Persian rugs on the floors and a baby grand piano visible through a set of French doors that led to a formal living room. It looked like a set for a movie about rich, neurotic liberal people.
It was also—there was no other way to put this—a fucking pigsty. The whole place smelled like it needed an airing. Every flat surface was covered with a layer of dust. The giant dining room table was heaped with what looked like a year’s worth of junk mail, and the plaster on the ceiling was flaking in pieces the size of Colby’s fist, speckling the fancy rugs like so much snow. He thought, randomly, of the conversation they’d had back in Alma about abandoned places, then told himself to stop being so dramatic: obviously Meg didn’t live in a deserted amusement park or a decommissioned mental hospital. Still, something about this house kind of gave Colby the same vibe—of something that used to be, maybe, but wasn’t anymore.
He glanced around half-furtively, clearing his throat. His mom wouldn’t have been able to keep herself from immediately asking where the nearest mop was, from wiping the grimy windows and hauling out the trash. The whole tableau left Colby off center and a little bit ashamed, like he was seeing something he shouldn’t, but Meg seemed totally oblivious to the mess—or, if she wasn’t, she was doing a bang-up job of pretending it wasn’t there. “Mom!” she called. Then, more quietly, “I told her you were a friend of a friend of Emily’s and we met at a party over spring break.”
Colby raised his eyebrows. “Seriously?”
“What?” She frowned.
“I mean, nothing. I’m just saying, for a person who gave me such a hard time about whether my mom knew you were coming or not—”
“My mom knows you’re here, obviously,” Meg interrupted. “I just wasn’t about to start a fight with her over the details.”
“It would cause a fight if she knew you met me through your job?”
“It would cause a fight if she knew I drove eight hours to go visit you without telling her.”
Colby considered that for a moment. “Fair enough.”
“Thank you,” Meg said primly, and Colby nodded. Still, he couldn’t get over the sense that sometimes she required more from him than she was willing to give herself.
He followed her into the kitchen, which he knew his dad would have loved—original oak cabinets and wide-plank wooden floors, a pair of six-paned windows over the sink looking out onto an overgrown backyard. Sitting at the table peering at her phone was a woman with aggressively highlighted blond hair; she had that slightly stringy look that middle-aged ladies got when they drank more than they ate, but her blue eyes were sharp and canny. “This is my mom,” Meg announced. “Mom, this is my boyfriend, Colby.”
Colby blinked. It was strange to hear himself introduced that way; he had to admit he’d thought there was a chance she’d try to fudge it, which made him feel kind of like a turd. “Nice to meet you,” he managed to say.
“Nice to meet you, Colby.” Meg’s mom offered a manicured hand for him to shake. She didn’t look like an unpredictable alcoholic, with her can of Caffeine-Free Diet Coke and an off-white short-sleeved sweater he thought was probably made of something expensive. Then again, he guessed his dad hadn’t looked like . . . someone who would do what he did, and everyone knew how that had turned out.
They made small talk for a while, about his drive and the summer weather and the fact that she’d once dated a guy who’d gone to law school at Ohio State. “Where are you headed in the fall, Colby?” she asked.
Meg winced. “Mom,” she said, before he could answer, “Colby works, remember?”
“Oh,” her mom said vaguely, “that’s right.” She hesitated, a pause that lasted a second too long. “What time is your father’s thing?” she asked, glancing at the clock above the window—which, Colby couldn’t help notice, didn’t actually seem to be running. “Can’t be late for a rehearsal dinner.”
“It’s soon,” Meg said, ignoring her mom’s acrid tone. “We should go get ready.”
Colby smiled politely and held a hand up before following Meg back the way they’d come and up the creaking stairs to the second floor. “Sorry,” she muttered as they rounded the corner. “I told her you weren’t in school, but I gue
ss she was a little bit more in the bag than I thought.”
“It’s cool,” Colby said, though in truth he was already dreading having that identical exchange with her dad, and her friends, and probably her freaking mailman. This is Colby! He hauls appliances off trucks for a living but still manages to bathe himself and use tools, like a gorilla who knows sign language! “No worries.”
Meg nodded. “Watch the runner,” she said absently, pointing to the place at the top of the stairs where the fraying carpet was peeling up. “I don’t want you to break your neck if you get up to pee in the night.”
She brought him into a guest room at the end of the long hallway, which held a double bed and an antique dresser along with about a million unopened boxes from Amazon and an expensive-looking exercise bike with dry-cleaning bags draped over the handlebars. “Sorry there’s so much crap in here,” Meg said as Colby looked around for a clear surface to set his bag on; finding none, he dropped it at the foot of the bed with a quiet thump.
“Don’t worry about it,” Colby said, wanting to reassure her and not sure exactly how to do it. “I’m getting the full experience, that’s all.”
“That . . . does not sound great,” Meg said with a grimace. For a moment, she looked like she was going to add something else, then decided against it. “Okay.” She tucked her hands back into her pockets. “Um, I’ll let you get settled, I guess.”
“Okay.” Colby nodded, watching as she turned to leave. “Meg,” he blurted, grabbing her wrist and tugging her hand out of her pocket, pulling her back and pressing his mouth against hers. It wasn’t particularly artful, which didn’t keep all the blood in Colby’s body from immediately rushing straight to his dick. “There,” he said finally, pulling back and gazing at her, her eyes gone a full shade darker than he thought of them as being. “Now I’m settled.”
Meg laughed, loud and ringing. “Welcome to Philly,” she said, and kissed him again.
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