by Justina Chen
“You like it?” Mom asked Reid.
“Love it!” he yelled, and held up a new set of MythBusters DVDs. “Thanks, Mom!”
“Did you find your moving-in gift, too?” Mom asked me.
I shook my head. “Just something from Jackson.”
“Oh.” Mom’s forehead furrowed as she lifted herself off the cold stone floor. “Then it’s probably in the closet. I’ll find it.”
As she did, Dad clapped Reid’s shoulder with one hand. “You can thank Giselle, too. She orchestrated all this.”
“Who’s Giselle?” Reid asked, reading the back of the DVD case.
“One of the women at the moving company.”
Mom halted at the stairs and turned around. Her eyes didn’t waver from Dad. “We should get her a little something for all her help. Do you think she’d want a scarf? Or chocolate?”
I had a sudden image of Giselle—tall, fine-boned, long hair. No, she wouldn’t be one to devour chocolate, to dare add a stray ounce on her body.
“Definitely not chocolate,” I said.
Mom frowned as she leaned against the stair rail. “Why?”
Like an energetic puppy caged overlong, Dad sprang to his feet and trotted to the front door, saying, “I’m sorry about this, but I got to run to work. Emergency.”
“But we just got here,” I said, even as Mom took a step toward him with a “Today, Thom? Really?”
“I can’t help it, but hey! I almost forgot.” He crouched down to his briefcase resting against the far wall in the foyer, and withdrew two flat parcels. “Something to welcome you to Manhattan.”
“That’s so nice,” Mom said, craning closer to watch Reid and me unwrap the presents: a membership to the Museum of Modern Art for me, and for Reid, a pass to the Museum of Natural History.
After breathing out a long “Wicked!” Reid demanded, “When can we go?”
“Maybe tomorrow. There’s so much to see in Manhattan.” Dad practically bounced on his toes. “You guys are going to love living at its back door! Just wait.”
I caught Mom gazing wistfully at the thick concrete door as it shut behind Dad. Before she noticed me, she locked the door with a sigh.
“Oh, Reb, you did find your present,” she said, smiling at the pendant I wore. “It looks great on you.”
I cupped the pendant. “I thought this was from Jackson.”
“No.” Her lips pursed briefly, a faint line. Then, a scant moment later, my move-in gift forgotten, Mom ordered us, “Go unpack.”
That evening Dad met us in the town square, where Mom, Reid, and I had been waiting for nearly two hours. All around us, happy, well-fed families were parked on their picnic blankets, content from their gourmet dinners. Reid had been getting progressively grumpier until Jackson reminded me by text of the emergency food Mom always carried. One of those just-in-case protein bars had saved Jackson on our Tuscany trip four months ago.
“Hey, there you are!” Dad said jovially, as if we were the ones holding him up.
He approached our fleece blanket that Mom had somehow thought to stuff into her luggage. By then it was almost eight, and Dad had been gone for five hours. I didn’t know why, but I watched him carefully when Mom asked him where he’d been and why he hadn’t answered her phone calls. Dad simply shrugged and said, “The emergency at work was gnarlier than I thought.”
I busied myself with making room for Dad on the blanket. Even then, I couldn’t help wondering: If he had driven all the way into the city, why didn’t we watch the fireworks and spend the night there, as Mom had suggested? As I had wanted?
“So, who’s ready for dinner?” Dad asked, hefting two plastic bags that strained from the weight of our meal.
Reid asked ravenously, “What did you get?”
Dad settled himself next to Reid, sitting on the grass rather than on the blanket with the rest of us. “The works for Fourth of July.”
No matter how much I tried to clamp down on the feeling that something was amiss, urgency needled me. For reasons I couldn’t explain, I wanted to knock the ribs, the baked beans, the corn bread off my plate. And Mom’s. This was the food of the fairies who tricked you into believing you were dining on chocolate, only to find yourself chewing a mouthful of dirt. There was no rational explanation for my panic, no logical reason for my complete loss of appetite. It was just there, as real as a frightened heartbeat.
Don’t eat, don’t eat, I wanted to warn Mom.
I needn’t have worried. Under my watchful gaze, Mom pushed the gooey ribs around on her plate for a few minutes before she abandoned them, uneaten, too.
“Too hot to eat?” Dad asked me.
“Yeah,” I said right as the first Roman candle burst in the sky, showering gold dust above us.
In the afterglow of a crimson starburst, I caught Dad shrugging as Mom waved off a piece of pie that he offered. He took a big bite, the juice from the apple pie dewing his chin. I couldn’t bear to watch him eat so greedily while I was sick to my stomach with foreboding. So I lowered myself onto my back and stared up at the night sky splintering with fireworks.
Chapter Six
Breakfast the next morning was a grim affair of leftovers, since the refrigerator was the Sahara desert of food, desolate in its emptiness. Back on Lewis Island, Mom had vigilantly stocked our fridge with produce from local farms, and gallons of milk so fresh you could hear cows moo with every poured cup.
“But I want cereal,” Reid said plaintively, his mouth curling in disgust at the cold rib glistening with coagulated fat on the paper towel that served as his plate.
With an elbow propped on the kitchen table, Mom leaned her head against her open palm, then methodically smoothed her hair off her forehead. Her eyes opened slowly and she said, “We’ll have Dad drive us to the grocery store as soon as he’s done with his shower.”
“I’m going to learn how to drive a stick,” Reid grumbled.
“Good idea,” Mom said. “I told your dad it would have made more sense for him to buy an automatic in the first place.”
By the time Dad appeared in the kitchen, hair damp, I had fashioned a spoon out of a binder clip for Reid. The rejiggered clip so appealed to Reid that he managed a few bites of the potato salad, enough to keep his low-blood-sugar grumpiness at bay. That won me such a heartfelt, relieved “Thanks, honey” from Mom, I felt exhausted but didn’t know why exactly. Maybe it had something to do with the restless night I had had, too uneasy to sleep for fear of what I’d dream. I chalked that up to never spending any real time in a house this large.
“Hey, Thom, your mother left a message on my phone. She wants you to call this morning,” Mom said as she set a paper towel in front of Dad.
With a sigh, Dad cast an exasperated scowl at the empty counter where our espresso machine should have resided. “God, I need coffee.”
“Sorry, no coffee,” said Mom, whipping around from the fridge with a flourish. “But… ta-da! Breakfast is served.”
Dad’s expression when Mom presented the ribs to him so mirrored Reid’s revulsion that she and I laughed, and I made a mental note to text this to Jackson. Dad shrugged self-consciously without taking a bite of what he had so eagerly devoured the night before.
“I’ll pick up some breakfast on the way to the airport,” he said.
“You’re leaving?” I asked. Dad’s announcement surprised Reid so much that he stopped spooning potato salad into his mouth.
“But it’s Sunday.” Mom leaned back against the counter as if she had been punched.
Dad held up his phone, but whether it was the culprit or the alibi, I couldn’t tell. “I told you about this last week.”
“I don’t think so,” Mom said flatly. “Rebecca needs a way to get to her interview tomorrow, and I need to go grocery shopping. I thought we agreed you were going to drive us.”
“God, Bits.” Dad shook his head and stared out the kitchen window like he wanted to escape. “You can just rent a car.”
The last time
I had felt tension this sharp-edged, I had been a half-drowned girl in my hospital bed. Even though I couldn’t understand what was so important that Dad had to leave us when we had just arrived, I assured him, “Dad, it’s no biggie. We’ll figure it out.”
“That’s my girl.” Dad shot me an approving smile before trotting jauntily out the door to our one car that only he could drive. He sped away.
The idea of not making the most of a spare moment was about as appealing to Mom as stepping on a slime-yellow banana slug with her bare foot. Sometime between Dad’s heading for the airport and her cleaning up after breakfast, Mom realized that she, Reid, and I could get acquainted with our neighborhood and go for a run at the same time.
“Why are we doing this, again?” Reid groused as he thrust his feet into his sneakers by the front door. I didn’t have an answer to that question, or any of the other mysteries that were my mother’s unfathomable decision-making.
“Speed Racer,” I muttered after Mom’s back as she ran well ahead of us. Wiping the sweat off my face, I wished I had swiped on another layer of deodorant.
Not a single other person was jogging in this sweltering humidity. A familiar rumble caught my attention. Jackson? I spun around, giddy even though I knew my guy was back at home. Instantly, I felt silly for grinning at a white-haired man in his air-conditioned Mustang, who cast me a look that was snagged between amused and bemused.
“Just look at that garden,” Mom called out, slowing to scrutinize the raised vegetable beds in a neighbor’s side yard. It didn’t require too much imagination to picture her transforming our lush, green front lawn into a self-sustaining, organic farm… and dividing our bounty between ourselves, our neighbors, and the local food bank.
“I hope you like digging,” I muttered to Reid.
My brother’s visualization powers must have been fine-tuned during our vision quest of a run, too, because he groaned, “Oh no.”
“Oh yes.”
“Okay, let’s head home!” Mom’s cheer wasn’t wind enough to blow Reid homeward. After one long block, he lagged so far behind us that I sighed like Mom, wishing again that Jackson were here in his Mustang to rescue us. But Mom had scanned the street, spotted a coffee shop at the corner, and asked, “Hey, kids, how about something cold to drink?”
We hadn’t even begun to nod eagerly before Mom shepherded us inside to the welcome blast of air-conditioning. As I started feeling woozy from the aftereffects of the heat, we stepped behind a stylish woman with glossy black bobbed hair. Her son looked to be the same age as Reid. Mom asked me, “Green tea frappe?” while withdrawing a dollar and pushing the bill toward the cash register a scant second before the woman ahead of us discovered she was short some change for her iced coffee.
“Are you sure?” the woman asked. Her cherry-red shoes made her look like a modern-day Dorothy, and when Mom handed her the calling card that Shana’s mother had designed as a bon voyage gift, I was positive the woman wished she could click her heels three times and be delivered far away from my mother.
“Just promise to call me,” Mom continued breezily. “We’re new in town. I need friends!”
Oh, geez, Mom wasn’t bribing a stranger to be her friend, was she? Mortified, I turned away, distancing myself from my mother. Before I knew it, she’d finagled the woman’s name—Angela—and arranged a playdate for Reid the next day, never mind that the boys didn’t even register each other’s presence. Never mind that Angela herself looked dazed, totally understandable since she had come for an iced beverage and left with an obligation.
Soon after we gulped down our drinks, Mom hustled us toward an ATM machine. Not one to let any teaching moment pass, Mom made Angela’s empty wallet today’s lesson. As she fed her bank card into the machine, Mom told us, “Never leave the house without your phone, key, and wallet. And always carry an emergency twenty dollars. Oh, and a tampon.”
“Mom!” Reid groaned. “Gross.”
“Well, of course, I didn’t mean—” Mom started to say when the ATM rejected her request for a hundred dollars. The three of us read the bank message in disbelief; how could we have exceeded our maximum withdrawal limit for the day?
“Dad must have taken out cash this morning for his trip,” I guessed as Mom tried—and failed—again.
“Hmmm.” Mom pulled out her cell phone and called Dad, but he didn’t answer. After she left him a hurried message, I expected her to transform seamlessly into our cruise director, herding us home to tackle five more things before the day was over. Instead, Mom stared distastefully at this crystal ball of an ATM machine that had spit out a prognostication about an unsavory future.
I couldn’t squelch the slow bubbling of unease. “Come on, Mom,” I said, and guided us home.
“Okay, can you say embarrassing?” Rather than dissect every last detail of the ATM Incident with Jackson, I focused on Mom’s bribery for friendship, recasting that into an amusing anecdote. “Just you wait. I’m going to be able to write the best self-help book one day thanks to Mom, since everyone’s mistakes are my lessons.”
But Jackson didn’t laugh the way I thought he would—not even a gratuitous chuckle. Instead, he asked, “Why would your dad need so much cash he’d max out the ATM?”
“I don’t even know if it was Dad. Maybe the bank made a mistake. Who cares?”
Jackson was silent.
“Oh, please. It’s not like he’s buying drugs or anything.”
“Hey, I didn’t mean that.” When I didn’t say another word, Jackson continued, “What can I do? Wire you some money?”
“No,” I said firmly, and winced. Even to myself, I sounded too emphatic. “Dad’ll be home soon. And besides, we’ve got a credit card. It’s no big deal.”
“Well, if you need anything…” Jackson’s voice trailed off, but he didn’t need to finish his thought. Even if I was annoyed at him, I knew he’d help me in whatever way he could. But the one whose reassurance I wanted was off the grid, not answering any of our calls.
Chapter Seven
Mom’s intentions were good—pushing what little cash she had left on me in the morning for a cab ride, despite my protests that I could take the bus and walk the three blocks to the architect’s office. “You can’t be flustered or sweaty for your interview,” she had declared. All my appreciation disappeared when she added, “You have your questions to ask Sam written down, don’t you? Like I told you to?” Of course, I hadn’t. I knew I’d remember them, but Mom had frowned when I said so.
Like all good intentions, whether delivered via cab or not, I ended up flustered and sweaty in my form of hell anyway: waiting in a sleek lobby populated with beautiful people in tailored clothes, while I felt like a country bumpkin. Where my khaki pants, short-sleeved black T-shirt, and black flats would have been perfectly acceptable—and possibly even chic—in Peter’s casual office in Seattle, here on the East Coast I might as well have been dressed for yard work.
The receptionist ignored me studiously, but twenty-five minutes after I was supposed to meet my potential boss, I approached her for the second time. She looked up at me from her awning of eyelashes, heavy with mascara—“Yes?”—as though I hadn’t been sitting six feet from her.
“I’ll try his admin again,” she finally acquiesced, and didn’t lower her voice when she actually got a real human on the line: “Mollie, Sam’s interview is here. Yes, interview. Well, I don’t know, but she says she has an appointment with him.”
That did not bode well. Embarrassed and feeling unwanted, I flushed.
Another ten minutes, and at last I was escorted inside the architectural firm. Mollie, Sam’s assistant, was a middle-aged woman with a mission-driven click to her step. Her heels might have been as sky-high as her boss’s signature buildings, but she didn’t so much as wobble as she led me down the long hall. The only sign of warmth in this building was Mollie’s big smile, which she shared generously, as though she could feel my anxiety.
“Have a seat,” Mollie said, g
esturing me inside Sam’s vast corner office. “A client meeting ran long, but Sam should be wrapping up soon.”
I perched awkwardly on the edge of the black leather chair in front of the glass-topped desk and shivered, not because of the air-conditioning but because the office’s aggressively modern lines made me feel insignificant and unwelcome. This was precisely how I had felt inside Synergy the one time Mom showed Reid and me where she used to work with the CEO. That corporate campus had been designed by Sam Stone, too. Strange thing was, if I told myself the truth, this remote distance was what I also felt inside our New Jersey house, built to be a statement, not an inner sanctum where you could safely retreat from the world.
A long twenty minutes later, Sam strode in, all efficient energy, barking a few instructions to his assistant. My stomach tensed. Finally, as Sam rounded his desk, he noticed me, and Mollie quickly introduced us: “Your interview candidate, Rebecca Muir.”
“Interview? Since when did I have an interview?”
“For a summer internship…” Mollie said when I remained silent.
How could I answer? I blushed, wanting to escape Sam’s intense, icicle-blue eyes that were sizing me up. His face was heavily wrinkled, though I doubted a single crease could be classified as a laugh line, since the corner of his mouth didn’t so much as lift a millimeter. Rather, he demanded, “How did you end up in my office?”
All semblance of a response ran out of my brain.
“Here? At Stone Architects?” he repeated, as though I were a dunce who had mistakenly crashed his advanced seminar for geniuses. He leaned against the edge of his desk, one hand on his thigh. “Well?”
“Well, I’m going to Columbia this fall.”
“Good, my alma mater. But who set up this interview for you?”
“Oh, my mom talked to my uncle, Adam Muir, and he—”