The Drifter(83)

Convinced the others were hiding in their cars, sizing her up through deeply tinted windows, Betsy was feeling self-conscious, which always led to second thoughts about her outfit. She wore a cotton summer dress in a too-cheery plaid and simple leather sandals that later, when her feet were swollen from standing for hours in the heat, she’d regret. Her hair, which had a memory for the humidity and sprang into odd angles when it topped 80 percent, was smoothed back into a stubby ponytail, wrested into order for the moment. Her hair wasn’t the only thing that had its recall triggered by the familiar surroundings. She suddenly realized that she might be the only person she’d see that day who didn’t have writing on her clothing. Her dress and shoes bore no swoosh or logo, and neither item was made of fiber that employed the word “micro” to describe it. She missed Gavin.

“Gooooo Gators,” he said, answering after the first ring.

“Yeah right, go Gators,” she said. “I’m standing in some sad parking lot waiting to be ripped limb from limb.”

“Hold on,” he said. “Hey, Rem, no climbing in the fountain.”

“You’re off to an early start,” she said, wondering where all of this parental energy was coming from.

“Up and at ’em,” he said, with a kind of forced brightness. “We had pancakes. We hopped the bus to Central Park. It’s not even ten and I’ve accomplished more today than I did in all of 1994.”

That was sixteen years ago, Betsy thought. I was an adult sixteen years ago.

“I’m starting to regret this,” she said, as her Ray-Bans slowly fogged.

“Which part? There are so many things we could regret, you’ll have to be more specific,” he said. Betsy paused. She was determined not to let anyone see her cry that day. She didn’t have an answer.

“Can you at least remember to laugh?” he said. “If not with them, then at them? It’s just a tailgate party at a football game. It’s just one day.”

She could call a taxi. She could tell the driver to take her to the airport and she could go home, or rent a car and drive to the beach in Venice or Sarasota to spend the day on the long, sandy, empty expanse of shoreline where she’d wasted countless hours in high school, drifting silently in bathtub-warm water, plotting her escape.

“Holy shit, if it isn’t Betsy Young,” boomed a voice from behind her, causing her to jump and splash the first of many lukewarm beverages on her feet that day. She turned to see a familiar face, at once harder (around the cheekbones) and softer (around the eyes) than it had been twenty years ago.

“Jen?” She remembered there were four Jens, a handful of Stacys, three Kims, and a couple of Hollys. She’d flipped through old party pics like flash cards the night before she left to see how many names she could recall. But standing before her, plain as day, was Jen Haws, with Molly and Brooke and one of the Kims, exiting a Mercedes wagon with the blackest tinted windows she had ever seen.

“Gav, I . . . they’re here,” she said, trying not to sound so ominous. “I’ll call you later?”

“I’ll look for you and the face painters on ESPN,” he said.

“I love you,” she said.

“I know.”

“Look what the flippin’ cat dragged in,” barked Jen. Despite the hour, and the informality of the event, lip gloss had been distributed generously among the pack before her, a sort of suburban, mannered version of Real Housewives with Bible study and Reef flip-flops. The hair was straight and excessively tasteful now. Their breasts still perfect after childbirth, their limbs Pilates-toned. Betsy imagined them all in a line at their respective private school drop-offs in a parade of luxury SUVs, hopping out to shuttle their small, bobbed, doppelg?ngers into fifth grade. They were the Lycra pants moms, bearing more discreet swooshes on non-game days. Betsy knew that she had been one of the last of her classmates to get pregnant and expected to be presented with photos of sons and daughters before the high school homecoming dance. She’d seen their offspring on Facebook and realized, not without feeling the looming inevitability of her own mortality, that she was not much older than those kids when she first met their mothers.

A tour bus the length of a city block with an entire swirling, purple galaxy airbrushed on its side panels came wheezing into the parking lot. Then, a woman in knee-length shorts and a blaze orange T-shirt, holding an Ann Taylor Loft shopping bag full of metallic Mardi Gras beads and blue plastic Solo cups appeared from around the corner.

“Oh my God, this thing is hideous,” she said, peering into the tinted glass door of the bus after it whined to a halt in front of her.

“Excuse me, sir?” She tapped on the glass with her index finger. “Can you open this thing up so we can load the coolers?”

A cardboard box full of toxic energy drinks and liter jugs of vodka, plus three bags of rapidly melting ice, were unloaded from the back of a Ford Expedition onto the gravelly asphalt by a man who, if she squinted, looked like Phil Portner, a guy she had made out with once after a day spent floating down the Ichetucknee River in an inner tube with a bunch of drunk frat boys. She had erased him, and his awkward groping in her dorm room, from her memory until that moment.

“Betsy, Jesus, it’s been a while,” he said, slapping her on the shoulder, never removing the sunglasses that were secured across the back of his neck by a neoprene strap.