I pulled the car around and made sure to signal, then pause, when I reached the main street—I was all too aware that there was a police officer who could, presumably, see everything I was doing, and one who was probably a little annoyed with all of us at the moment. When I was sure I’d paused long enough, I pulled out onto the empty road and headed toward home.
“So, let’s not mention that to Mom and Dad,” Danny said, sprawling out in the passenger seat, turning to lean against the door so he could face me.
“If we told Mom, she’d probably just be mad she could no longer use it for the strip.”
Danny let out a short laugh. “Well, that’s certainly true.”
“Was it—” I started, then hesitated. Asking Danny why he’d done something foolish and ill conceived was something I had very little practice in; I was much more used to it with J.J. “Was it just because of what’s happening with Mom and Dad?”
Danny let out a breath and gave me a half shrug. “Mostly,” he said after a moment. “It’s also . . .” He hesitated, and I glanced over at him. “Brooke and I broke up.”
“Oh,” I said, blinking at him for a moment but then turning back to the road, trying to get my head around this. It had seemed like something had been going on with Brooke and Danny all weekend—but I hadn’t realized they’d gotten to that level. Only yesterday, I would have been secretly thrilled about this, but that was yesterday. “I’m sorry.”
He shrugged again. “It’s for the best. She’s a great girl, but I just don’t think we were really in the same place.”
“When did this happen?” I suddenly remembered Brooke leaning over me, concentrating hard as she applied mascara to my lashes, talking about how coming here, with Danny, hadn’t been what she’d expected.
“Middle of the reception,” Danny said, with a grimace. “Obviously not when I would have chosen . . . but I don’t think Linnie noticed, did she? You didn’t, right?”
“No,” I said, glancing over at him, but then back at the road. “I mean, I saw Brooke leave, but I think there were enough people around that it wasn’t obvious.”
“Good.”
“Did you guys have a fight?”
“No,” he said automatically. “Well . . . kind of. She didn’t like the toast I gave.” He shook his head.
I remembered Danny’s toast with sudden clarity—when he’d said he hoped someday to find something like what Linnie and Rodney had. What must it have been like for Brooke to sit there and listen to that, knowing it wasn’t about her?
“Anyway,” Danny said with a yawn, “I guess that started the conversation, but it wasn’t like it was a total surprise—things hadn’t been working with us for a while, actually.”
“But . . .” I shook my head, trying to understand this. “If things weren’t working out, why did you bring her to Linnie’s wedding?”
“Because she wanted to go,” Danny said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. “She was always bringing up how she wanted to meet everyone, see the house where we grew up. . . . She started talking about it all the time, and I didn’t want her to be disappointed. So I told her she could come, and she practically freaked out, she was so happy.”
I gripped the steering wheel. I was used to being on Danny’s side whenever he talked about his breakups, when he sketched them out in the most general of terms. And I never had any trouble believing that the fault lay with the other people, all of these girlfriends of Danny’s who came and went. But now . . . I couldn’t stop myself from feeling that it was Danny who was utterly in the wrong here. That if you ask someone to come home with you, to a family wedding, it means something.
“But ultimately, it’s for the best,” Danny said around a yawn as he looked out the window. “I think we’ll be able to stay friends, which is good.”
I nodded, fighting not to let what I was feeling show on my face. Because this was Danny. But right now, he kind of sounded like an asshole.
“Anyway,” Danny said after another huge yawn, “I think we got lucky back there. Good thing the governor showed up when he did.”
“I bet that’s the first time you’ve ever said that sentence.” It felt like a relief, to go back to talking about something else—something that would let me stop thinking about this other version of my favorite brother, the one I didn’t like very much.
Danny laughed. “You’re right about that.”
I took a breath to say something—what, I wasn’t sure—and looked over at my brother to see that he’d closed his eyes and was resting his head against the window. I glanced over at him for just a moment longer, then looked back at the road.
Even though almost no time had passed—it had been ten minutes, maximum, that we’d been in the car—my brother looked different to me now. It was like some of the glow that had always surrounded him had dimmed, like his gloss had rubbed off. He had always been my big brother, who knew everything and could do anything. He was the one who found fortunes under soda bottle caps, the one who had all the answers, the one who wasn’t afraid of anything.
But now, in this moment, he no longer seemed perfect, the one who knew everything, the one who was always right. Because he wasn’t. He was in the wrong with Brooke—and what’s more, I could see it and he couldn’t. It was the latest revelation in a night that had been chock-full of them. But it felt like it had tilted the world on its axis a little. Because who was Danny if he wasn’t my big brother, the one who could fix anything and do everything? Who was I if I wasn’t looking to him for answers?
As I drove in silence, my headlights cutting through the darkness, I realized that maybe it meant we could be closer to equals. Maybe I could actually find out who he was, now that I wasn’t blinded by the vision of him that I had been holding on to, the one left over from when I was six and he was the best person in the world.
I pulled into the driveway, and Danny stirred. “We here?” he asked, yawning again, covering his mouth with his hand.
“Yeah,” I said, shifting the car into park and glancing over at him, feeling in that moment just how tired I was. “We’re home.”
SUNDAY
* * *
CHAPTER 27
Or, About Last Night
* * *
IT WAS VERY EARLY WHEN I crept downstairs into the kitchen, dog at my heels. It was barely light outside, but I’d been lying awake for the last hour, so finally I’d just given up and headed downstairs. I’d been sleeping in Linnie and Rodney’s room. When Danny and I arrived home, I headed to J.J.’s room just in time to see Jenny slipping inside and closing the door behind her. I wasn’t really mad at him about this—given the night we’d all had, if any one of us could have turned it around a little bit, that seemed good to me.
I’d thought about going back down and sleeping on the couch again, but somehow, the thought of sleeping in the room where, not very long ago, everything had fallen apart was more than I could handle at the moment. As I stood on the landing, I turned and saw Linnie and Rodney’s room, the door ajar, and realized that since they’d gone back to the Inn, there was a room free for the night. I’d just gotten settled in and turned out the light when the door had creaked open, and I looked over to see Waffles nudging it with his nose. I was about to motion him over, but he was already crossing the room and hopping up onto the foot of the bed, turning around twice, and then curling into a ball, all with an air of detachment, like he would have done this whether or not I happened to be sleeping there. When I’d woken up, though, I’d found he’d moved a lot closer to me during the night, his head resting in the crook of my leg.
I stepped into the darkened kitchen, yawning, and opened the door to let Waffles out, noticing how only after a day, we already had our routine.
“Hey there.”
I jumped, startled, and whirled around to see my mother sitting at the kitchen table, in her robe, a mug of coffee in front of her. “Jeez,” I said, putting a hand to my racing heart. “You scared me.”
“Sorry about that.”
She nodded toward the coffeepot. “There’s coffee if you want it.”
Considering I’d gotten three hours of sleep, maximum, I nodded and took down one of the mugs that still remained in the cupboard. I turned it in my hands once. It was a red Stanwich College mug—my dad thought it was the one that he’d gotten thirty years ago, when he went to interview for his assistant professor position, but J.J. had actually broken that one a decade ago and replaced it, and none of us had told him. As this thought flashed through my head, the weight of everything that had happened the night before came crashing down on me again. What was going to happen to this mug when my parents moved into separate houses? What was going to happen to the story behind it?
Halfway through filling up my mug, the dog scratched once at the back door, and I let him in—it looked like his paws were, thankfully, staying clean—and headed to the fridge for milk. It was packed with leftovers from the caterers, plastic wrapped neatly and fit into our fridge almost mathematically, like catering Tetris. I had just finished adding the milk to my mug when my mother said, “I think we should talk.”
I looked over at her and realized for the first time that she probably wasn’t up before anyone else, just sitting and enjoying her coffee. She was lying in wait for whichever one of us woke up first. “Yeah,” I said, coming over to sit across from her. She just looked at me, and suddenly I wondered if she’d found out about the near arrest outside the governor’s house. “About last night?” I asked, then realized this could be referring to many things.
“About what happened in the family room,” she said. I nodded, but my relief only lasted for a moment as I remembered everything I’d said to her—I’d talked to my parents the way I never talked to them, and the memory of it was making my cheeks burn.
She didn’t seem mad, though—mostly, in the cool morning light, she just looked tired. I took a breath. “Sorry for yelling like that.”
“It’s okay,” she said, then took a long drink of her coffee. “I’m so sorry you had to find out that way. Your dad and I had a whole plan . . . how we were going to tell you kids.”
“The rest of us, you mean.”
My mom winced. “Right.” She looked at me for a long moment, then gave me a smile. “I’m not surprised, actually. That you took it the hardest. You, my youngest, have always hated change.”
“No, I haven’t,” I said automatically.
“It’s not a bad thing,” she said, taking another sip of coffee, and I took one of my own as the dog started sniffing around my feet, clearly looking for some crumbs that had gone unnoticed. “Remember when you could no longer fit into your kindergarten dress? And how you cried and cried when you couldn’t wear it anymore?”
I nodded, even though I was mostly remembering the stories I’d been told about it, the pictures I’d seen, and the way it had made its way into Cassie Grant’s biography—how I wanted to wear the same dress, blue with sailboats on the collar, to basically every day of kindergarten, and how my mother had secretly bought three and rotated them. “Maybe,” I finally allowed.
“You don’t like to see things end,” my mother said, looking at me with a sad smile. “But if you don’t . . .” She trailed off.
“What?” I asked, in a voice that came out cracked.
“You miss so much,” she said simply. “And sometimes the harder you try to hang on to something, the less you can see that.” She tilted her head slightly to the side. “Did I ever tell you I almost kept the strip frozen in time?”
“What?” I just stared at her. I had thought I had known everything about Grant Central Station—but I’d never heard this before, not in a single interview or note in one of her collections.
She nodded. “It’s what my syndicate wanted me to do. They didn’t like the idea of everyone aging, kids eventually moving out of the house, going to college, Waffles dying. . . .” The real Waffles looked up at her when she said this, then plopped down at my feet, resting his head against my arch. It seemed like he was actually learning his name.
“So why didn’t you?” I couldn’t even get my head around the idea that we wouldn’t have grown up in the strip, parallel to life.
“Because,” she said, setting down her mug and looking at me, “it would have been cheating, in a way. You don’t get to freeze the picture when you want it. It would have been living in the past, and eventually, you just start doing the same jokes over and over again.”
I nodded slowly, clearing my throat around the lump that had suddenly formed in it. “So, what are you saying?”
“I’m saying,” she said, giving me a smile, “that you may not believe me—or like me—very much right now. But that eventually it is all going to be okay.” She reached into her pocket and slid two twenties across to me. “And that you should go pick up some donuts.”
* * *
Even though I’d drunk most of my coffee before changing into clothes I borrowed from Linnie’s side of the closet, I was still not feeling totally awake yet—which was maybe the reason that as I pulled out of the cul-de-sac and onto the main road, it took me a little longer than it should have to recognize the figure who was standing on the side of the road, shivering next to a suitcase and a leather duffel. It was Brooke. I unrolled the passenger-side window and leaned across the car’s console to talk to her.
“Hey,” I called. She looked up from her phone and blinked at me.
“Charlie? What are you doing out so early?”
“Breakfast run,” I said. “Um—what’s going on?” I asked, when she just glanced down at her phone again, apparently not in a hurry to explain what she was doing standing in the road with monogrammed luggage.
“I booked an early flight back to California,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest. “And I called a car, but apparently the driver’s lost. He’s about half an hour late at this point. I was just about to cancel it and see if I can get another. I have a flight to catch.”
“Are you going out of JFK?” I asked, thinking I could get her the number for the airport shuttle everyone in Stanwich used.
Brooke shook her head, folding her arms. “That little airport had the soonest flight,” she said, looking down at her phone again. “But at this point, I’m getting close to missing it.”
I hesitated for just a second longer before I leaned over and pushed the passenger-side door open. “I can give you a ride,” I said. “Hop in.”
Brooke just looked at me for a moment, like she was trying to decide if she should. Then she looked down at her phone, and maybe it was the time—or the utter lostness of her driver—that decided her. But either way, she nodded, and I shifted my car into park, and she loaded her bags into the back.
We drove in silence, and it was like I could feel it like a physical presence between us—the reason she was riding next to me in my car, the reason she’d been on the street with her luggage at all. I wasn’t sure if I should ask—pretend not to know—or if I should wait for her to tell me, but the longer we went without speaking, it was like the elephant in the car with us just seemed to get bigger.
Brooke seemed as put together as ever, in dark jeans and a blue and white striped top, her hair hanging sleek and straight. But underneath all that, I could see how tired she looked, how her face looked drawn in the early-morning light. I had just taken a breath when Brooke, still looking out the window, and not at me, finally spoke.
“Danny and I broke up.”
I glanced over at her, then back at the road, deciding that this early, with my coffee not fully kicking in, I didn’t have it in me to act surprised. “He told me.”
Brooke let out a short laugh and looked out the window. “I guess I should have figured.”
“I’m really sorry.”
“Are you?” she asked, giving me a direct, questioning look that felt like it was going right through me.
“Yeah, I am.”
Brooke nodded as she looked out the window, at the scenery flying past. It was early enough that there weren
’t many people on the street—just the occasional dog walker or stroller-pushing parent. “I think,” she finally said, like she was choosing her words carefully, “I knew it wasn’t working out. But when he invited me to come this weekend, not only to meet his family, but to his sister’s wedding . . . I thought it meant more than it did. Like we were finally going to take the next steps. And I just wanted everything to be perfect. . . .”
I nodded, feeling like I understood this all too well. “Right,” I said softly.
“I hope it didn’t ruin Linnie’s wedding weekend.”
“Of course not.” The anger toward Danny I’d first felt last night reared up again. “And he shouldn’t have done it. He shouldn’t have asked you here if he really didn’t mean it. It’s just not fair to you and he shouldn’t . . .” I stopped and took a shaky breath.
“But it was probably easier,” Brooke said quietly, and I glanced over at her as I slowed for a yellow. “It was easier just to ask me than to have the hard conversation.”
“Still,” I said, shaking my head, feeling this new, unfamiliar anger toward my brother filling my chest. “He shouldn’t have—”
“He’s not a bad person,” Brooke interrupted, surprising me. “He’s not. He’s just a guy,” she said with a sad smile. “He’s just . . . human.”
I nodded, since this was the same revelation I’d come to last night—the one that really shouldn’t have been a revelation at all. But in the cold light of the morning, it was becoming clear to me just how wrong I’d been about so much. Danny, Jesse, my parents’ marriage, all of these were more complicated than I had believed—or wanted—them to be. Danny was his own, flawed person, as much as I might have wanted to keep him in one box and keep everything simple and neat. He was just more complicated than that. Life was more complicated than that.
“You know, when Danny told me that he was one of the Grants from the comic strip, I couldn’t believe it.”
“But—” I slowed for a stop sign, then sped up again. “I didn’t think you read it.” Brooke hadn’t said anything about the strip the whole weekend, not even when we were at the exhibit at the Pearce.
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