“All right. So I guess I’ll spend the day resting.”
“I can’t believe you’re doing this to me. I hope you feel better tomorrow.”
I sighed. “I’ll make it up to you tomorrow. You can stay home and I’ll take him wherever he wants.”
“No,” Vallery said. “Tomorrow I’ll have him convinced he wants to see Mickey.”
After Vallery and Collin left, I walked to the pay phone outside the motel and dialed Aunt Liz’s phone number.
“Hey, Aunt Liz. It’s Lainey.”
“Lainey! How are you, sweetheart?”
“I’m fine. Guess what?”
“What?”
“I’m in Orlando.”
“Oh, how nice! What are you doing in town?”
There was no way I was telling her the truth. Then she’d want to see Vallery and Collin. I wasn’t sure why that was such a bad thing, but it was.
“I’m here with a few girls looking at colleges. They’re, uh, off doing some stuff today, so I was wondering if maybe I could stop by.”
“Oh, of course! I’m glad you caught me on my day off. Where are you staying, honey? I’ll come get you.”
I told Aunt Liz where I was staying and then waited outside the lobby. While I waited, I imagined what it would be like to drive away with Aunt Liz and never come back. To start over in Florida with nothing but five outfits. Never arguing with Vallery again. Never fighting with Collin to get him to go to sleep at night. Not having to decide how I really felt about Riley or Eric. No more dealing with Old Crew nonsense.
When Aunt Liz pulled up to the curb, I caught my reflection in her passenger window. I was smiling.
“Oh my,” she said as I climbed into the car. She moved her purse off the seat. “Look at you! You’re all grown up.”
We hugged awkwardly with the center console between us. I tried to remember the last time I’d seen Aunt Liz. Probably when I was ten.
“Don’t tell me I look just like my mother,” I warned her.
She laughed. “Well, I never thought you did to begin with. I always thought you favored our side of the family. How’s your dad doing?”
I shrugged. “He’s fine.”
“Well, that’s good to hear. I’m glad he has you up there with him, at least. He was really broken up when he called to tell us about your poor mother. I mean, it was so tragic.”
As we drove out of the tourist zone, the motels and gift shops and miniature golf courses gave way to dentists’ offices and supermarkets. We turned down a residential street, and Aunt Liz parked in front of a beige rancher. All the houses on the street looked just like hers. I knew that Grandma Elaine had lived two doors down, but I didn’t know which direction. The house on the left had boarded-up windows. The house on the right had a playpen in the front yard full of broken-down cardboard boxes.
“Which house was Grandma Elaine’s?” I asked as we sat in the car.
She pointed in the direction of the house with the playpen. “That one right there. We sold it to a nice young couple after your grandma died, and they lived in it for about a month and then rented it out to some of their redneck relatives. We’re not happy about that at all, let me tell you. Should’ve just rented it out ourselves and handpicked our neighbors, you know?”
I nodded.
“Of course, it didn’t look anything like that when your grandma lived there. She had such lovely flowers. The rednecks let them all die. And the grass, too. They can’t even keep the grass alive.”
“I wish I could have seen it,” I said.
“I’ve got pictures. Plenty of pictures. We’ll look at them, all right?”
“Okay,” I said.
We sat in the car and stared at Grandma Elaine’s old house. “Do you have any pictures of her headstone?” I asked. “I never got to see what it looked like.”
“Oh, honey,” Aunt Liz said. “We don’t need pictures. We’ll go visit.”
She started the car back up and backed out of the driveway. “How are you and your brother holding up?” Aunt Liz asked.
“Fine,” I said.
“And your sister, too—how’s she doing? Your dad said she moved back to Maryland to look after your brother. I bet that’s a big help to you.”
“Yeah. She’s actually Collin’s guardian; I just help her out.”
“You kids,” Aunt Liz said, shaking her head. “You all turned out so well. It’s just terrible about Lisa. I wish she could be here to see how responsible you are and how well you’re all doing.”
“She could have been here if she wanted to,” I said. “She killed herself.”
Aunt Liz looked ahead and drove. “She had a lot of problems that caused her to do that. I’m sure she would have much rather stayed with you kids.”
I shrugged and looked out the window. “Everyone makes excuses for her.”
We turned into a cemetery. “You know, your grandmother drank a bit in her day,” Aunt Liz said.
“I know.”
“She smoked for forty-five years.”
“That long?”
Aunt Liz nodded. “She let her cholesterol get too high, plus she had the diabetes. She wasn’t one for exercise. She never even would have gone in for her checkups if I hadn’t made her.”
I turned to Aunt Liz and gave her a look as if to say, What’s your point?
“I’m just saying if she’d taken better care of herself, we could have had another ten or fifteen good years with her. She could have gone to your wedding and held her great-grandbabies. But she made her choices, just like your mom did, and we have to live with them.”
I shook my head. “I don’t know how you can even compare them.”
“Some people slowly kill themselves, Lainey. They don’t all do it with a bullet or a noose or some pills, but they sure enough do it.”
“Grandma Elaine was sick. How could you even say something like that?”
Aunt Liz touched my arm. “I’m not trying to upset you, honey. I’m just trying to get you to look at it from a different point of view. Maybe you shouldn’t judge your mother so harshly. I’m just saying maybe she was sick too. In a different way.”
“Let’s not talk about my mother. Okay?”
Aunt Liz looked at me closely. “You’re really angry, huh?”
I laughed. “Of course I’m angry.”
“Is it doing you any good?”
I didn’t answer her, because I thought that was a stupid question. I knew it wasn’t doing me any good. But how was I supposed to stop? What else was I supposed to be?
“I know she put you in this awful situation, but you can’t change it, and she’s not coming back. You need to just hold on to your happy memories, don’t think about the bad stuff.”
“It’s not that easy.”
“Have you tried?”
Aunt Liz parked and got out of the car. I got out and followed her to Grandma Elaine’s grave.
I’d never understood the appeal of visiting cemeteries, but I thought I would feel something, some kind of connection, when I stood there where Grandma Elaine was buried. At one time it had been so important for me to go there and see it for myself, but now I didn’t feel much of anything. I didn’t feel closer to my grandmother. She was dead, in the ground, and I was probably getting sunburned.
It should have been Riley standing there beside me with his arm around me, instead of Aunt Liz standing behind me with her arms crossed. That had been our plan, after she’d died. We couldn’t make it for the funeral, but he’d promised he’d get me there eventually. Except I’d screwed that all up. Riley wouldn’t take me anywhere ever again. Now Christine hated me too, and eventually Kara would decide it was easier to stop being friends with me, and then Eric would move to Pennsylvania and I’d have no one, nothing. Not even a job.
I didn’t like being here with Aunt Liz standing behind me. It didn’t matter if what she said was true. I didn’t want to hear it.
I looked at Grandma Elaine’s headstone and realized
there was nothing for me in Orlando either. It had been fun to daydream about, but I wouldn’t start over in Florida. What would be the point of that? Nothing would be better here than it was at home.
There was nowhere to go but back, whether I liked it or not.
When I got back to the motel, Vallery and Collin were already there. Collin lay on one bed with a huge Band-Aid on his chin, watching TV, and Vallery lay on the other bed, reading a Disney brochure.
“Good news and bad news,” Vallery announced.
“What happened to his chin?” I asked. I bent down and looked at Collin’s face. He turned his head away from me.
“That’s the bad news, but it’s not all that bad. He fell and busted his chin open on our way into the Holy Land. No stitches, but it was pretty bloody.”
She’d been alone with him for not even an hour before he hurt himself. Nice.
“Are you okay?” I asked Collin. He nodded and waved me away. I was blocking the television.
“So,” I said to Vallery. “Good news?”
“We’re going to Disney tomorrow. If you’re feeling better.”
“I am.”
“Good.”
I took Another Day off the nightstand and went out to the balcony.
Vallery came out a minute later and sat down in the chair beside me. “Where’d you go today?”
“I rested and then took a walk.”
“Long walk, huh?”
I shrugged.
“We’ve been back for hours, so I know you’ve been gone all day. Do you have a guy in Orlando or something?”
I glared at her and then looked back down at my book.
“What? You have two in Baltimore. I thought you might have a few spread out across the country. Or maybe a traveling salesman or something.”
“Shut up, Vallery.”
“Then what were you doing today?”
“It’s none of your business.”
“By acting evasive, you’re only increasing my interest.”
I sighed. “Fine. I saw my aunt.”
“That’s the big secret? That’s seriously what you did?”
“Yeah. We went to the cemetery and I saw my grandmother’s grave; then we went to the mall and had lunch, and then I hung out at her house for a few hours with her and my uncle and my cousin.”
“Why couldn’t you just tell me that?”
“I just did.”
“But you acted like you didn’t want me to know. Like you don’t want me to have anything to do with your other family.”
“It’s not that I don’t want you to have anything to do with them. You can’t make a generalization like that based on one incident.”
“You wouldn’t let me talk to your dad, either.”
“Whatever, Vallery.”
“Okay, listen. I’m not sure why you’re in a pissy mood, but I want you to know that we missed you today. If you’d been there, Collin wouldn’t have fallen. I wasn’t holding his hand like I should have. You always remember to hold his hand.”
“So you only missed me because you can’t keep the kid from falling down?”
Vallery sighed. “You know, it’s getting really hard to have a fun family vacation with you around.”
I took my book and went down to the pool. Vallery didn’t try to stop me.
Vallery and Collin both had big smiles the next morning as we sat in the lobby and ate our complimentary breakfast.
Vallery poked my arm and grinned.
I glared at her. “Why are you so happy?” I asked.
“Because we’re in Orlando on our fun family vacation.”
“Okay.”
“Look, you’re going to have a good time whether you like it or not. I’ve decided that you will.”
That seemed to be the new theme for my life: doing things whether I liked them or not.
“I’m doing this for all of us, you know,” Vallery said. “And it’s upsetting me that you’re trying to ruin it.”
“I’m sorry. I’m not trying to ruin anything.”
“So what’s your problem? Do you miss your boyfriends?”
Boyfriends. I probably should have called Eric by now. I didn’t even know his number by heart. I had it programmed into my cell phone with the dead battery.
“No.”
“Then what?”
I shrugged and spun my empty juice glass around on the table. Everything sucked. How many reasons did she want?
“Can you try?” she asked.
“Try what?”
“To be happy. At least while we’re in Disney World. The happiest place on Earth.”
“How do you try to be happy?”
“Like this,” Vallery said. “Like what I’m doing.”
I looked at her. She smiled.
“Just smile?” I asked. “You want me to fake it?”
“Well, you’ll only have to fake it at first. Smiling releases endorphins that make you happy. It’s a scientific fact.”
“All right,” I said. I flashed Vallery a fake smile.
“Not bad,” she said. “Keep working on it.”
As we entered Disney’s Magic Kingdom, Collin stopped walking and stared straight ahead at Cinderella’s Castle. Vallery whipped out the disposable camera and took his picture.
“We have to keep walking,” I whispered to Collin as the people behind us glared, then shoved around us. So much for being the happiest place on Earth.
“Let’s look at the map,” Vallery said. She pushed through the crowd and led us over to a bench.
I unfolded the park map and spread it across Collin’s lap. Vallery pulled a pen out of her purse and handed it to him. “Here. Circle what you want to do.”
I sat beside him and helped him read the descriptions. And then I heard Vallery say, “Smile!”
I looked up and saw her aiming the disposable camera at us. I put my arm around Collin.
“Look happy,” I said to him.
“I am happy,” he said. And we both smiled for Vallery.
We stayed until the park closed, but we’d made it through only half the things Collin wanted to do. “We’ll come back tomorrow,” Vallery promised. Collin fell asleep in the car on the way back to the motel. I carried him inside and then sat on the bed beside him and opened Another Day.
“I think you had fun today,” Vallery said. She squeezed onto the bed beside me even though there wasn’t all that much room for her.
I nodded. “I did.”
“Good. You know, I’d been planning this. I mean, not this, not a spur-of-the-moment trip. But ever since Collin’s awful birthday party, I’ve been trying to put away money so we could go on vacation. But then there were just too many bills, and I had to start using my savings to make sure stuff got paid on time. Then last week just sucked, and I figured we all needed to get away.”
“How are we paying for this?”
Vallery shrugged. “Credit cards. I’ll sort it out when we get back.” She looked down at Collin. “Didn’t you desperately want to go to Disney World when you were his age?”
“Sure,” I said. “Every kid does.”
“And you knew Mom was never going to take you,” Vallery said. “Just like I knew my dad was never going to take me. So I thought it would be nice to do this for Collin, and for us.”
“Mom would have taken him,” I said. “Eventually.”
“You’re probably right. She really changed, didn’t she?”
I thought about Mom, how she’d always been there for Collin, how she’d been around for me sometimes, how she’d hardly been there for Vallery at all. It seemed like she got better with each kid. Until she decided to leave all of us.
“She was always changing,” I said.
“You know, if things hadn’t happened like they happened, we wouldn’t be here.”
“No kidding,” I said.
“I mean, we never would have known each other. You would have just been the bratty little sister I was jealous of, and I would have been the
drunk older sister you only knew for one summer. Neither of us would have spent this much time with Collin. I probably never would have met him at all. I’m not saying it’s a good thing that she did what she did, I’m just saying…”
“No, I get it. Mom would have said that things always work out for the best in the end.”
“So this is the best?” Vallery asked. “This is the best thing that could have happened?”
I thought about it. The three of us together, in a motel room in Florida, going further into debt to spend a few days faking happy at the happiest place on Earth.
I shrugged. “If it hasn’t worked out, then it’s not the end.”
Back at the motel after our second day at the Magic Kingdom, Vallery explained to Collin that we had to go back to Baltimore soon so he could start first grade. Really, her credit cards were almost maxed out.
“No!” Collin screamed.
“Yes,” Vallery said patiently. We sat on the balcony and let him cry it out for a while, and then I went back inside the room.
“If you stop crying, we have a special treat for you tomorrow.”
“What?” he asked. He narrowed his eyes at me like he didn’t really believe me, and then he wiped some snot off his lip.
We’d anticipated a tantrum, so we had a plan. “There’s a store here in Florida that sells nothing but LEGOs,” I said.
“LEGOs?” he asked.
I nodded. “And if you’re good, we’ll go there tomorrow and let you pick out one thing that you want. All right?”
Collin nodded. “All right.”
After Collin fell asleep, we sat on the balcony and read. Vallery had taken an old newspaper from the lobby. I finished Another Day. It wasn’t my kind of novel, but I could see why Mom had liked it. Michaela Davis was married to a cop but had fallen in love with some kind of mobster. I’d thought maybe the book would help me with the Riley-Eric dilemma, but I couldn’t figure out which of them was the cop and which was the mobster. At first I thought Riley would be the cop since he’d been my boyfriend and Eric had been the other man. But the cop’s personality was more like Eric’s and the mobster was more like Riley. And then I remembered it didn’t matter anyway, because Riley had moved on. And Eric was probably going to be mad at me, too. We didn’t have a daily-phone-call kind of relationship, but I hadn’t talked to him at all since we’d left for Florida, and I figured that probably wasn’t a good thing.
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