This Is What Happy Looks Like

by Jennifer E. Smith

  “Only if you bring yours too,” Ellie said, and Quinn’s smile broadened.

  They swept the rest of the taffy into the cardboard box, then pushed back their chairs and walked out to the front of the store together. The sky was turning gold at the edges, the waning light glinting off the band’s instruments. Ellie could see Meg from the deli making snow cones just beside it, and farther down, Joe from the Lobster Pot was standing beside an oversize grill, a spatula in one hand and a chef’s hat perched at an angle on his head.

  The whole town seemed to be out tonight, and the invisible boundaries of a dance floor had been loosely arranged, the first few brave couples out for a spin. Behind it all, the ocean was dark and glittery, and Ellie thought of the Go Fish, still docked in the town of Hamilton, and of those few quiet moments at the bow with Graham by her side before everything had gone wrong.

  When she shifted her gaze back to the party, she saw her mom weaving past a line of children at the ice cream station. Ellie felt a hitch in her chest at the sight of her, and she turned to Quinn, who had fallen uncharacteristically silent.

  “I should go talk to her,” Ellie said. “But we’ll meet up later.”

  Quinn nodded. “We always do.”

  Outside, Ellie hurried across the street before she had a chance to lose her nerve. Even as she walked, she found she was bracing herself against the stares that were sure to come her way. She’d seen how far and wide the story about Graham and the photographer had traveled in such a short time, and if her name was now out there too—not to mention the name of her father—then there was no reason not to think everyone in town already knew.

  And it was clear that they did, their eyes tracking her progress across the lawn. But there was also something odd about the way they surveyed her as she walked past; it was like they weren’t looking at her so much as around her, their gazes skirting the edges of her, hopeful and searching. They were looking for someone else, she realized. They were looking for Graham.

  Ellie felt like laughing. Quinn was right. Nobody cared about who her father was or why they’d come to this town in the first place. All they cared about was that the movie star in their midst had chosen one of them. And now they wanted to see for themselves.

  Mom was standing at one of the tables, her back to Ellie as she refilled her glass of lemonade. When she turned around, the hand holding the pitcher trembled a bit, and though Ellie had expected her to be angry—and rightfully so—all she saw was the relief that was scrawled so plainly across her face.

  “Where have you been?” she asked, setting down the pitcher. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere.” Her eyes seemed to hold another question, but she didn’t ask it. Instead, she turned and peeled a star-spangled paper plate from the pile on the table. “Grab some food,” she said, handing it to Ellie. “We’ve got some catching up to do.”

  Ellie’s stomach grumbled as she filled her plate with huge spoonfuls of potato salad and macaroni, topping it off with a hot dog and a cupcake, and then she balanced a glass of lemonade in the crook of her arm and followed her mother across the green to where she’d laid out the same plaid blanket they used every year.

  “Where’s Bagel?” Ellie asked, sitting cross-legged, the food spread out in front of her.

  “I took him home after he stole his second hamburger.”

  Ellie laughed, picking up her cupcake, which had a tiny flag drawn on top of the white frosting. “Have you been here all day?”

  Mom didn’t answer. She settled down across from Ellie, holding her blue cup of lemonade with two hands. “Have you checked your phone at all?” she asked, her expression serious.

  Ellie shook her head. “I lost it.” She knew what was coming next, and she knew what she should say, but somehow I’m sorry didn’t seem like nearly enough. She’d given away the secret that had run like a thread throughout their lives. And now the whole thing had unraveled in exactly the way that Mom had said it would, and there was nothing that Ellie could do to change it. Maybe it would help that the focus seemed to be on Graham, and maybe it wouldn’t. But she knew that wasn’t the point, and she swallowed hard as she waited for Mom to continue, still holding the cupcake in midair.

  “What happened last night,” she began, choosing her words carefully, “with Graham and the photographer. You know that’s been in the news, right?”

  Ellie couldn’t look at her, but she nodded, her eyes on the cupcake, the smudged corner of the little frosted flag. She didn’t know exactly how to answer, but a flood of words had welled up inside of her anyway, and she felt exhausted by the effort of holding them back.

  “I’m sorry, Mom,” she whispered, and then a lump rose in her throat, and the rest of it came out thick and choked. “It’s my fault. You told me this would happen, but I just couldn’t—I couldn’t help it. It’s not like I was seeing him this whole time. I stopped. But it was awful, not seeing him. I was completely miserable. And then it just happened again. But the thing with the photographer wasn’t really his fault. He was trying to keep them away from me, and they were horrible. Just like you said they’d be.”

  She was half crying now, fueled as much by exhaustion as emotion. Mom was sitting across from her, watching the words tumble out with a strained expression, and Ellie couldn’t tell if it was anger or worry or something else entirely. She sucked in a breath of air before continuing. “It was awful,” she told her. “He had no choice. And this morning, they still hadn’t figured out that it was me who was with him, and I thought it would be okay, but now it’s obviously not, and I’m sorry. I know this is a huge mess, and I’ve probably ruined everything, but I didn’t mean to, and I’m just so, so sorry.”

  For a moment, there was no reaction at all. Mom simply sat there, staring at Ellie, the untouched plates of food on the blanket between them. Then she leaned forward. “You haven’t ruined anything,” she said quietly, and Ellie opened her mouth to protest, but Mom shook her head. “Would I rather this hadn’t gotten out? Of course. It’s a chapter of my life that I’m not particularly proud of, and when I left D.C.—when I left your father—I felt like I was running away, which is never a good thing.”

  She paused, looking thoughtful. The sky had darkened several shades, and the orange streetlamps that lined the edges of the green winked on behind her.

  “But look what happened,” she said, sweeping an arm out. “We landed here. And much more important, I got you out of the deal. How could I ever regret that?”

  Ellie bit her lip. She’d spent the day in search of her father, like Ahab going after the whale. But she realized now that she’d been on the wrong quest all along. In the end, she was much more like Dorothy. In the end, what she’d been searching for was simply this: home.

  She lowered her eyes, wondering whether she should admit where she’d been today; it would be so easy to pretend it had never happened, to block out the memory of her father entirely. It was painful to think about even now, and talking about it—being forced to examine it and analyze it and argue about it—was the last thing she wanted.

  But there’d been so many lies already—about Graham and about Harvard and about the boat—and this one was far too big to hide, far too important to keep quiet. She ducked her head, examining the forgotten plate of food.

  “I saw him today,” she said quietly. She was about to continue, to say who she meant by him, but it was clear by the look on Mom’s face that this wasn’t necessary. She was sitting cross-legged across from Ellie, a paper plate with a cob of corn on her lap, and it rolled onto the blanket as she straightened, her whole body going tense. When she made no move to pick it up, Ellie reached out and did it herself, brushing off the fuzz from the blanket and then putting it back onto Mom’s plate with an apologetic shrug.

  “You saw him?” she repeated, her eyes glassy.

  “That’s where I was today.”

  “In Kennebunkport?”

  Ellie sat back, stunned. She hadn’t ever considered the fact that Mom mi
ght keep tabs on him too, follow his progress the same way Ellie always had. She’d always assumed they never spoke of him because Mom didn’t want to talk about it. But now, for the first time, she realized she might have been wrong. Maybe it was because she did want to talk about him; maybe all the silence was just a way to stanch the flow of memories like a bandage.

  Maybe she left him all those years ago not because she hated him, but because she loved him.

  After a moment, Ellie nodded. “Graham went up there with me,” she said, leaving out the part about the boat for now. “I don’t know what I was thinking. I just wanted to see him.”

  Mom’s face was still oddly blank. “And you did?”

  Ellie nodded again. “He was in town, meeting people for the campaign,” she said, and then, to her surprise, her voice broke. “He didn’t know it was me. He didn’t recognize me.”

  “Oh, El,” Mom said, scooting closer, so that they were side by side. “I didn’t know. I had no idea you wanted to meet him.”

  “I didn’t either,” Ellie said, feeling suddenly miserable. “Not really. I guess it was stupid to think he might know who I was.”

  Across the lawn, the band finished their song with a trilling crescendo and then fell silent. There was an air of anticipation as people found their blankets. Pretty much everyone here had been coming to the festival for enough years to know that when the sky turned a soft denim blue, and the band finished their last number, and the clapping petered out in the warm evening air, the fireworks would soon begin.

  “Do you know how I first started talking to him all those years ago?” Mom asked, and Ellie nodded.

  “You were his waitress.”

  “Right, and I always just took his order, and that was it,” she said. “But there was this one week when it rained every single day. He’d come in each morning with his coat dripping and his hair soaking wet, and slide into that booth that never seemed like it was big enough to fit those long legs of his. And then one morning, it just stopped.”

  “The rain?”

  She nodded. “As I was taking his order, I looked out the window and said something about how it was a miracle. And you know what he said?”

  Ellie shook her head.

  “He said, ‘There will be no miracles here.’ I remember we both looked around the table, and I was thinking he was right. I mean, it was a diner, and kind of a crummy one at that. We were surrounded by overcooked eggs and water stains and torn plastic seats and pies that had been sitting out for way too long. But when I asked what he meant, he told me a story about this town in France in the seventeenth century that was supposedly the site of all these miracles. When too many people started flocking there, all of them filled with hope, the authorities posted a sign: THERE WILL BE NO MIRACLES HERE.”

  Overhead, the first firework went whistling past the roof of the hotel and into the night sky, a tiny bead of light; as it sailed higher, it grew quieter, and Ellie lost sight of it entirely. But a moment later it exploded into the air with a fizzle, its spidery golden legs arcing down toward the ground again.

  “But that’s the thing,” Mom said, her voice soft amid the noise. “There was a miracle. We just didn’t know it yet.” She smiled. “The miracle was you.”

  “Mom—” Ellie said, but she was cut off.

  “He might not have recognized you today,” she said, shaking her head. “But he loves you. I saw the way he looked at you when you were little. He always wanted a daughter.” She reached out and gave Ellie’s hand a squeeze. “And staying out of our lives? That wasn’t easy for him either. You have to know that. It was my decision—I was the one who cut it off. He was ready to go public about you, even though it might have ruined his career. But I wouldn’t let him do it.”

  “Why not?”

  “That wasn’t what I wanted for us,” she said. “Him with his wife and kids in Delaware, sending us checks while we were stuck in D.C. with all the press. I wanted you to have a real life. This kind of life.” She swept an arm around at their friends and neighbors, all of them cheering, and Ellie felt her chest swell at the sight of this town that she loved, and that she’d never trade for anything, especially life as a senator’s daughter.

  All this time, she’d wondered if things would have been better if she were part of his family, but she understood now that it was the other way around. She wasn’t the one who’d missed out. Maybe she hadn’t grown up with money for summer camp or trips to Europe or a new car every year. But he’d never watched the sunset from the cove near their house. He’d never spent a winter’s morning at Happy Thoughts, warming his socks by the radiator. He’d never eaten at the Lobster Pot or tried the orange sherbet at Sprinkles. He’d never seen her win a soccer game or a spelling bee, and he’d never met Bagel. He’d never had dinner at Chez O’Neill.

  “He didn’t abandon us,” Mom said. “He gave us a gift.”

  “He let us go,” Ellie said quietly.

  Mom nodded. “And we’ve been fine,” she said. “But believe me: he still loves you. I don’t have to be in touch with him to know something like that.”

  It was getting harder to see, and the people still looking for places to sit were silhouetted against the streetlamps. A few kids with glow necklaces ran past, laughing, and Ellie squinted to make out the solitary form settling onto the grass not far from their own blanket. Her heart gave a little thump as she recognized him.

  It was Graham.

  He sat down alone on the grass, folding his legs beneath him and tipping his head back to look up at the sky, and she realized he had a phone pressed to his ear. She hoped he wasn’t talking to his manager or his lawyer or his publicist. Something about his posture, the relaxed expression on his face, made it seem like maybe he wasn’t. He was alone, as usual; he had a way of being in a crowd of people and still somehow apart from them, and tonight was no different.

  As each firework exploded and then disappeared, she closed her eyes, preserving the memory in glowing lines on the backs of her eyelids, thinking about the day behind her, the memory of her dad’s hand in hers, the comfort of her mother’s presence, and mostly—mostly—the boy sitting not ten feet away, watching the very same sky.

  She thought of the words her father had spoken all those years ago: There will be no miracles here.

  He was wrong, she was thinking, the words arriving with a fierceness that surprised her. Even in that diner, there must have been a sense of possibility. You just had to know where to look. Even a dirty window or stale apple pie could be a kind of miracle.

  “So what happens now?” Ellie asked. “If it’s all over the news, he has to know we’re here. Do you think he’ll try to find us?”

  “Do you want him to?”

  “I don’t know,” she said honestly. “Maybe someday. Or maybe not. I don’t know.”

  “That’s okay,” Mom said. “We’ve got time to figure it out.”

  “I’m really sorry,” Ellie said again. This time, she wasn’t exactly sure what she was apologizing for; there were so many things to choose from.

  “Hey,” Mom said, reaching over to cup her chin. “It’ll be fine.”

  “How?” Ellie asked, her voice very small.

  “We’re lucky,” she said. “It seems like everyone’s more interested in the other part of the story. Apparently Graham Larkin’s a lot more fascinating than Paul Whitman.” She shook her head with a smile. “I definitely didn’t see that coming.”

  Ellie’s eyes trailed over to Graham’s back again. He’d hung up the phone and his face was now angled toward the sky.

  “It’s a good thing,” she said. “It takes away the focus.”

  “Not while he’s in town, it doesn’t,” Mom said, leaning back. “But he’ll be gone in a couple of days, and then that will be that.”

  Another firework exploded overhead, this one a ring of green and purple, but Ellie didn’t see it. She was too busy watching Graham, and when he turned around, his eyes caught hers immediately. They stayed
there like that for a long moment while the sparks rained down overhead. Another explosion colored the night sky, and Ellie felt this one down to her toes, the heat and flame of it, like a candle, like a fever, like a burn.

  That will be that, she was thinking, but she didn’t stop looking at Graham.

  “Hi,” he mouthed from across the lawn.

  “Hi,” she said right back.

  By morning, it was as if none of it had happened: the band and the fireworks, the food and the games. As Graham walked to the set beneath an orange sky, the village green looked as it always did, a thumbprint of grass in the center of town, empty and quiet and covered in dew. There were no paper cups left to be batted around by the wind, no singed firecrackers or sparklers strewn on the sidewalks, not even squares of flattened grass where the blankets had been spread out like an enormous patchwork quilt.

  Graham took a sip of the coffee he’d gotten in the hotel lobby, careful not to spill it as the sidewalk began to slope down toward the water. Up ahead, he saw Mick crossing the street, looking tired and unshaven and holding a cup of coffee at least twice the size of Graham’s.

  “Well, if it isn’t our very own prizefighter,” he said, stopping to wait for Graham, who braced himself for what was to come. But to his surprise, Mick didn’t seem angry. Instead, he was trying not to laugh. “It’s always the quiet ones,” he said, shaking his head. “But from what I’ve read, you got the bad guy and the girl in one punch, huh?”

  “I’m really sorry, Mick,” Graham said. “I didn’t mean to screw things up for—”

  Mick waved him away as they walked down the hill. “It’s fine,” he said. “I talked to Harry already this morning. The guy’s a magician. He’s made it all disappear.”

  Graham stared at him. “How?”

  “Like I said,” Mick told him with a shrug, “magic. He turned the whole thing on its head. I guess he didn’t even need the lawyers.”