All Adults Here(62)
“It’ll pass,” Jeremy said. “That’s my one parenting truth that I can give you. Everything passes. The good stuff, the bad stuff, everything. Nothing lasts.” He shrugged.
Sidney was jumping up and down in the middle of the gazebo. “Dad!” she said. “Come onnn!”
“What are you doing, anyway?” Porter asked. She put her hand on his arm lightly, the way you might before you asked a stranger for directions. She and Jeremy had made their thing work for such a long time, and no one had gotten hurt. They’d made each other happy, and everyone wanted to see their parents happy. That’s what children of divorce always said—no matter how bad or ugly the actual divorce, it was better than living inside a sad marriage, or worse. Of course, Jeremy hadn’t gotten a divorce.
“She’s running for Junior Harvest Queen,” he said. “Weren’t you Harvest Queen once?” The vote seemed entirely due to her brothers’ popularity, but Porter had won, a prize that involved a short ride on a pickup truck filled with hay, and a sash, and a scepter made out of corn on the cob. She’d been sixteen, a junior in high school, and both her parents had been tearfully proud, as if she’d actually done something, which made her feel both dopily happy and totally furious. If she’d known that in three years, her father would be dead, she would have enjoyed it more. Porter’s biggest pet peeve was when people complained about having to do things with their families—Thanksgiving at their in-laws’, a birthday party, a formal baby shower for their mother’s friends. Did those people not understand that death was marching toward everyone, every single day? Porter thought about making a line of greeting cards that just said, “Surprise! You’re dying and so is everyone else! Get over yourself!” They’d be good for any occasion.
“I should go,” Jeremy said. “But it’s good to see you. Can I see you? Again?” He raised an eyebrow, as if such a cue were necessary.
“Always,” Porter said. “Call me. Or just come by, whatever.” She tried to be casual. “If you want.”
Jeremy winked and then jogged over to the gazebo, where Sidney was tapping her flip-flop on the wooden floor and staring into the small screen of her telephone. When her father approached with the camera, she widened her mouth into a plastic smile and flipped her hair over one shoulder. She was beautiful, after a fashion, like a catalog model, with all the parts in the right place but nothing extraordinary that would distract you from the shorts she was selling. Jeremy crouched down to take her photo, and Sidney changed positions every few seconds. The littlest Fogelman, a towheaded boy with earphones in and an iPhone, slouched against the opposite wall of the gazebo, his head nestled in a peony bush. Porter waved like a pageant queen, elbow to wrist.
Chapter 28
August Tells the Truth, Part Two
Painting a million three-inch-long pieces of wood white gave Cecelia a lot of time to think. Parade Crew turned out to be lots of tiny art projects put together, like preschool parallel play, where you were mostly doing your own thing but near other people, and Ms. Skolnick played good music, and it was fun. Cecelia’s hands had white flecks, her jeans had white flecks, her hair too. But she didn’t mind. She liked sitting in the drafty woodshop and making things.
“I think this is why adults are into coloring books,” August said. “I feel like my brain is in a jar on the table.”
“I know what you mean,” Cecelia said. And she did, sort of. But more than that, she understood that that’s how August felt. How she felt, with her busy hands and quiet mouth and all the extra oxygen that the Hudson Valley had to offer, was that her main problem was trying to be agreeable. A good girl, whatever the situation. Flexible with her parents, flexible with her friends. She didn’t ask questions if she thought the answers would lead to conversations she wasn’t ready to have. The goal of life, Cecelia thought, was to be conflict-free, to get along well with everyone. That was what her father spent years learning to do by meditating. Her mother couldn’t have cared less about getting along well with people, or about being agreeable, but Nicky was so agreeable that Juliette didn’t have to be. And since Cecelia knew she couldn’t change anyone else, she tried her best to be open to whatever someone else had in mind.
That was why, when Katherine first told Cecelia about the guy she’d been talking to online, Cecelia hadn’t said anything. Yes, the internet was full of dark, scary corners, but it was also full of kids just like her, and Cecelia chose to believe Katherine, or at least she chose to believe what Katherine had chosen to believe. The guy’s name was Jesse, @jdogg99 on Insta, and he only posted pictures of graffiti and sunsets and dogs. Cecelia pointed out that if Jesse was born in 1999, that made him eighteen years old, which wasn’t super gross, but still, not the best. An eighteen-year-old who wanted to talk to a girl going into the eighth grade was weird. Even the ninth graders she knew, like Katherine’s older brother, Lucas, and his friends, called them babies and wanted at least ten feet between them when they walked down the street together. But Katherine had insisted that Jesse was cool. And so Cecelia hadn’t said anything else.
It got to the point where Jesse and Katherine were texting all the time. She put him in her phone under the name Jessica, just in case her mom looked. Before school, after school, all night long. Cecelia got used to sitting across a tiny Starbucks table, just watching Katherine smile and chuckle, her fingers moving at the speed of light. Every now and then, Katherine would lower her phone to the table and say, you have to hear this, and would then read off a string of messages. She never actually took her hands off the device, though, as if by doing so, she might lose contact forever. Cecelia had known it wasn’t going to end well—she had seen it. He kept asking her how old she was and saying how she couldn’t tell anyone about them. Would an eighteen-year-old say that? Maybe. But deep down, Cecelia knew it was worse than that. But she didn’t want to upset Katherine. And so she just watched it all unfold, even though she could see it in slo-mo.