“Be safe out there,” the gas station man said as he adjusted his thick-rimmed glasses. “You know how slippery those roads can get.”
When Anthony stepped outside, he took a long sip of the hot, black coffee and tried hard to recall some memory of where she might have gone or who she could possibly be with. He wished he could speak to her through his mind somehow. When she’d been really young, he always felt he understood her emotions, as though he could read them across her face. Back then, it had been a bit simpler. Hungry. Thirsty. Tired. Frightened. At sixteen, it was a bit different, especially now that he’d been away.
There was an overlook in Providence, the Overlook at Meehan. Anthony realized he was near to the spot where he and Melanie had gone frequently years before and eaten donuts from the nearby bakery. He guided his truck closer and closer as his heart thudded in his chest. There was a possibility that wherever he’d gone that night, Melanie had been only a few cars ahead, a mile or two — always pushing ahead of him, never allowing him to catch her.
But there was also a possibility that she’d gotten tired.
Just before the Overlook, Anthony’s headlights caught the back of a license plate. A car had lurched to the side of the road, crooked and pointed out toward the trees. In an instant, he knew. The car was Melanie’s.
The following few minutes were unlike any other minutes in Anthony’s life — save for, maybe, when Melanie herself had come into the world, the tiniest little red-faced baby, a complete miracle.
Anthony forgot to turn off the engine as he burst from the door and hustled toward the driver’s side of the little car in front of him. The front window was covered with snowflakes, which he immediately brushed off with his bare hand. He wasn’t even aware of how cold it was. On the other side of the glass, a teenage girl was all curled up, wrapped in a thick coat, with a big winter hat yanked over her head. Her hands curled over her face, and her knees were tucked up against her so that she was in a tight little ball. Anthony couldn’t tell if she was sleeping or crying.
But there was one thing for sure. It was Melanie. It was his beautiful, intelligent, frustrated daughter.
Anthony tapped on the glass tentatively. He didn’t want to frighten her, but he, himself, was terrified. Melanie jumped up; her hands were drawn away from her face. She looked at him as though he was a ghost, someone she didn’t recognize right away, but then her face changed to one of surprise and excitement and then complete and total, unadulterated love. She burst open the door and leaped against him so that her arms wrapped around his waist as she nuzzled her head in his chest. She shook as Anthony enveloped her with his arms.
“Dad. Dad, what are you doing here? Dad, oh, Dad!” Her voice was only a whisper, one of sadness.
When their hug broke, Anthony stepped back. Tenderly, he touched her hat. Her blue eyes reflected sadness, anger and sorrow. She’d lost some of the childish chunkiness of her cheeks and now looked more like a woman than she had the year before. Anthony’s heart felt squeezed with heartache. He’d already missed so much of her life.
“I ran out of gas,” she said finally. She pointed to the meter. “And I didn’t know what to do. I thought I might be out here all night.”
Anthony figured this wasn’t a good time for a lecture. Heck, he hadn’t been around when she’d gotten her license in the first place. Maybe then, he could have filled her with all his worries — like, always fill up your tank, and always check the tire pressure, and on, and on, and on. All the things his father had told him. All the things Melanie needed to know so she could fend for herself.
A few minutes later, Anthony and Melanie sat in the front of his truck. Anthony turned up the heat as high as it would go, and Melanie rubbed her palms in front of the hot air. They would head back to the gas station, fill up a little portable tank, and then fill her car back up. They had a plan, but they were in no rush. Neither of their phones had any charge, so there was no way to call Matilda with the news. Secretly, this pleased Anthony. He was allowed this time alone with Melanie.
Back at the gas station, he uncorked the gas can and told Melanie she could wait in the truck if she wanted. But she just shook her head. She stood out there in the frigid, late-night cold, with her hands deep in her coat pockets, and looked at him with those big, beautiful eyes. After a long moment of silence, she finally spoke.
“Dad, I am so sorry,” she breathed.
Anthony wasn’t sure what to say or what the apology was even for.
“It all happened so fast,” Melanie started to explain. “Mom said all these things about you. You know how she can be rash and dramatic. I don’t know. I was about to turn sixteen, and I was all wrapped up in my own drama. And then, you were gone, and Mom said you weren’t coming back and not to contact you. She even bought me a new phone and conveniently lost all the numbers in my old one. At school, I tried to look you up on the internet, but surprise, surprise, you don’t have any type of social media or anything.”
Anthony chuckled sadly. “No. I don’t.” How he wished he’d had one all this time. Maybe he could have kept in contact.
“Tonight with Mom, I really lost it on her,” Melanie grumbled. “I blamed her for everything, for cheating on you with Jim and for kicking you out of our lives. I knew I had to get out of there. I obviously didn’t get very far, though.”
Anthony pleaded with himself to stay strong and not crack right there in the presence of his daughter. Given space and time alone, maybe he would break down. Maybe he would sob for hours at the uselessness of it all, and at the year he’d lost with her.
“Melanie, unfortunately, I was forced to leave. I’ve never stopped loving you and I never wanted to be away from you, not for a second. You’re my daughter and I’ve missed you so damn much. If you’re willing to move past all this and have me in your life again, then I’m willing to do that, too,” he said softly. “We’ll have to deal with your mom, but I have a hunch that after tonight, everything will be different, especially now that you’ll be home safe.”
Melanie looked at Anthony with tears in her eyes before leaning her head on his shoulder. “I’d really like that, Dad. I’ve missed you too.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Matilda leaped from the porch and wrapped Melanie in the kind of hug only an overly worried and terribly sad mother could muster. Anthony stood beside them and peered at the open front door. He expected Jim to make an appearance, but moments passed, and only the three of them remained. The three of them— the original Paulsons. He wondered if his wife still used his last name since they hadn’t bothered yet with any kind of divorce. Mrs. Paulson. Matilda Paulson. She’d been that for years.
When the mother-daughter hug broke, Matilda all-but leaped around and wrapped her arms around Anthony. They’d hardly touched in the months before he’d left for the Vineyard, and it wasn’t like Anthony had done much in the way of hugging since then. The contact was both stressful and beautiful. Slowly, he tapped her shoulder. Maybe, the nightmare was over.
“Come inside,” Matilda said as she sniffled. “I’ll make hot chocolate. And Anthony, I guess you’ll probably want a beer?”
“Anything sounds great,” Anthony affirmed. He wanted to add; I’ve been out here driving all night. But he didn’t want to make Melanie feel any more guilt than she already did. “Let’s just get inside and warm up.”
Once on the couch, Matilda made heavy eye contact with him as she passed him a Bud Light. He cracked it open, reminded of a million other times she’d handed him a beer like this. Of course, back then, it had been Coors. Jim was a Bud Light guy. He knew that.
Melanie went to her bedroom to change into pajamas, which left Matilda, sipping her hot chocolate, and Anthony sipping his beer. Her voice soft, Matilda whispered, “Where the heck was she?”
Anthony shrugged. “Pretty far out. I think she wanted to keep going.”
Matilda’s eyes grew shadowed. “I can’t believe you found her.”
“Neither can I rea
lly.” Anthony took another long sip. His thoughts felt sluggish; he hadn’t eaten much of a lunch so that he could be hungry for dinner with Olivia. He took another sip as his stomach grumbled.
“I should feed you guys, huh?” Matilda said suddenly.
“You don’t have to do that.”
“No. I will.” Matilda gave a sly smile. “It’s not like I don’t have practice.”
How strange. Within the half-hour, Anthony, Matilda, and Melanie sat at the dining room table. They dove into whatever Matilda had had in the fridge and freezer, including frozen pizza, fish sticks, a huge bowl of potato salad, fruits, carrot sticks, hummus, bean dip, and tortilla chips. It was a weird-looking feast, but everyone was grateful for it. Over the table, Anthony’s eyes found Matilda’s, which were rimmed red from crying.
“Thank you for this,” he said. “Really.”
Matilda reached over and gripped Melanie’s hand. “Thank you for bringing my baby girl back home. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to thank you enough.”
Silence fell between them all. Slowly, Melanie unraveled her hand from her mother’s. She turned to look at her mother and said, “I need to have Dad in my life, Mom. This has gone on for too long.”
Matilda bit down on her lower lip. Guilt etched itself across her forehead and through her eyes. “I know that, Melanie. I do. It’s why I called him tonight.”
“Just because you didn’t want him in your life doesn’t mean you needed to lie to me the way you did,” Melanie continued.
Matilda’s eyes filled with tears. She flung her hands over them and scrunched her shoulders down. “I know. I don’t know what came over me, Melanie.” She sighed deeply. Anthony prayed she wouldn’t start to weep at the table. He couldn’t take it. Every emotion felt as sharp as a pin.
Finally, Anthony spoke. “We weren’t happy, Melanie. Me and your mother. We hadn’t been happy for a long time.”
Melanie’s eyes turned toward the frozen pizza, which had begun to cool rapidly on its metal slab. “I know that,” she answered.
Anthony supposed it was true that kids always knew way more than you thought they did.
“But it doesn’t mean I should have done what I did,” Matilda added softly. Her hands remained over her eyes, as though she couldn’t fully face her admittance. “I stepped outside of our marriage, and then, I made sure you couldn’t come back. I wanted to kick you out of my life because I was ashamed. And Anthony, Melanie, I know that I’ve done way more damage than I could possibly ever make up for. I am so sorry. I am so, so sorry.”
Somehow, Anthony made it through that dinner. Each of them spoke to one another as though they were injured animals. They spoke with tenderness and love. It would be a long time before they rebuilt anything and Anthony knew, somewhere in his heart, he would never find a way to fully forgive Matilda for everything she had done. But she had brought him back into Melanie’s life and he was grateful for it.
Melanie went to bed after dinner. She looked drained and exhausted, and her eyelids performed a little dance over her eyes, the way they’d done when she’d been a little girl. Anthony began to clean up the table, like the old days, but Matilda swatted him away.
“I’ll do that tomorrow,” she said. “Come on. Sit with me.”
Anthony did. He sat across from her in the living room and drank another beer while he and his wife discussed going through the legal process of divorce. As they spoke, he realized he had wanted this day to happen for a long, long time. They would help each other put the final nails in the coffin of whatever love they’d once had. And finally, he would be able to move on.
Sometime after one-thirty in the morning, Anthony asked if he could borrow a phone charger. Matilda leafed through a bucket of wires and passed one over that suited his phone. In fact, it was probably the very charger the phone had come with when he’d gotten it three years before. He pushed the charger into the bottom of the phone and waited as it came to life again.
With it, several messages popped up from Olivia.
OLIVIA: No problem. Why don’t we have dinner tomorrow? I told you — I’m pretty killer at risotto.
About two hours later, she’d texted again.
OLIVIA: I’m a bit worried about you. Is everything okay?
OLIVIA: Just FYI, me and the girls are at the mansion. I don’t want to scare you if you come back.
Then, a final text...
OLIVIA: Oh, my gosh. I have something to show you and you’re not going to believe it!
At this, a smile snaked across his face. Matilda caught it.
“What are you grinning about?” she asked. Her voice was heavy with drowsiness.
“Just a friend,” he replied.
Matilda chuckled softly. “I hope she’s a pretty friend.”
Anthony gave Matilda a crooked smile. “Goodnight, Matilda.”
“She must be pretty, then. Really pretty.”
“Sleep well, Matilda.”
When Matilda disappeared into the bedroom, Anthony scribed a text to Olivia.
ANTHONY: I am so sorry about tonight. I got held up in Providence.
ANTHONY: Actually, I have about four million things to tell you. I would love to call you right now, but I imagine you’re asleep.
ANTHONY: I hope you’ll forgive me. And I hope that risotto is still on-offer. It’s one of my favorite foods in the world.
And for a moment, Anthony’s fingers began to type: And you’re one of my favorite people in the world, too. But hurriedly, he deleted it. It was too far. And it was also really possible that she was really mad that he’d missed their “date,” or whatever it was supposed to be. Anthony hoped she wasn’t, though. He had a pretty valid excuse. But there was no way to know what would happen next. He would just have to wait and see.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Sunlight flickered through the thick drapes that hung around the glowing windows of Anthony’s bedroom. Olivia’s eyes opened slowly, like a flower unfurling, and she stared toward that light, without a single understanding of where she was or how she’d gotten there. Her head pounded, and her vision was blurred, and something off to her right stirred and then moaned softly. It only took a split-second to realize that she’d actually shared the bed with two of her best friends. Jennifer had placed herself in the middle, while Camilla had taken the left side.
If she remembered correctly, in the fog of their nightly chaos, Amelia and Mila had opted for the couches downstairs.
“Oh, my gosh,” Jennifer moaned into her pillow. “I feel like I went to a frat party or something.”
“You never went to a frat party,” Olivia replied. She grinned toward the ceiling. “We were always just here.”
“Yeah. Well. Don’t remind me. Maybe I should have gone to a frat party or two,” Jennifer said. She turned onto her back and rubbed her eyes, then lifted her fists to see the black makeup, oozed all over them. “Jeesh. I didn’t even wash my face before going to bed. Mila is going to kill me.”
“I’m going to what?” Mila appeared in the doorway, with Amelia right behind her. Both of them wore large t-shirts, which they had apparently taken from Anthony’s wardrobe, and neither of them had taken off their makeup, either.
“Mila! Am I going to age ten years in three days for not washing my face last night?” Jennifer asked playfully, in a dramatic fashion.
Mila leaped onto the bed and made it shake beneath them. Camilla groaned awake and turned to face them. She furrowed her brow and said, “I don’t know about aging ten years. Right now, I feel like we were at one of our high school sleepovers when we used to just sleep in a big pile on the floor.”
“How did we do that, anyway?” Amelia said with a hearty laugh. “Why didn’t our backs break?”
“We are strong women,” Olivia announced with a smirk. “That’s the only reason I can think of.”
Camilla brought herself up on the back pillow and turned her head so that the sunlight glowed beautifully across her blond hair. She was the
only blond of the group, and sometimes, Olivia made the mistake of thinking that she was overly innocent because of it, like a porcelain doll and not like the nurse who saved lives on a daily basis.
“Things got a little out of hand,” Jennifer said as she lifted herself up as well. “I guess we knew better than to open that fourth bottle of wine.”
“Fourth? I thought we did five,” Amelia corrected. She placed herself at the edge of the bed and then sneezed into her hand. “Phew. I’m allergic to some kind of dust around here. I haven’t been able to stop sneezing since I got up.”
“It’s true. We woke up at dawn because of it,” Mila complained.
“Damn allergies,” Amelia said as she rubbed her nose.
“What time is it, anyway?” Olivia asked. She reached toward Anthony’s side-table to grab her phone, which she had conveniently plugged into an outlet at some point in the night when she’d been dizzy with wine and deep in conversation.
And almost as soon as she’d lifted her phone, she dropped it. It landed with a thud on the floor as she swung her hand over her mouth and blinked out at her friends. Nobody spoke for a moment until again, Amelia sneezed.
“Bless you!” the girls said simultaneously.
“Oh, never mind me,” Amelia said. “What happened, Liv? You look like you saw a ghost.”
“In this place, I’m sure she did,” Jennifer said.
“Anthony texted me. Seven times!” Olivia said. She reached down and grabbed her phone, grateful she’d gone for the screen protection, and sifted through the messages. “They’re late, though. After one in the morning.”
“Wow. Does he say where he ran off to?” Mila asked.
Olivia’s mouth went dry as she scanned.
“You’re killing us, Liv,” Camilla said. “Seriously.”
“I — I think he’s coming back this weekend. He’s been in Providence, Rhode Island? He’s barely mentioned Providence,” Olivia said. “There are some texts from last night and some from this morning. And holy cow, it’s past eight!”
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