Never Have I Ever(19)

I went back to the kitchen. I half wanted to hustle Oliver into his car seat and take off after them. It would be an overreaction, though, and it would embarrass Maddy nigh unto death.

I sat down and put breakfast into the baby as he banged around with his “helping” spoon, spattering us both with oatmeal and apples. His world was so small and so safe, but Maddy had ridden off into a much larger one, in a car, with a shady boy. And why would a kid who looked like Luca be offering our Mads a ride to school anyway?

Maddy was beautiful, to us. To most adults. But not the kind of beautiful that played in high school. She had her dad’s bold nose and a heavy brow line, and two weeks ago, in a fit of despair over the rash of pimples that kept appearing on her forehead, she’d grabbed the meat sheers and cut herself a thick wedge of unflattering bangs that poinked out in all directions. She was the kind of girl who would come into her own in college, when ideas about beauty widened to include girls with striking features and flashing dark eyes, and when the boys themselves got a dollop of emotional maturity.

Luca, meanwhile, was teenage-dream-style beautiful. Cheekbones for days and that sulky James Dean mouth set in skin so clear and flawless that he looked like he’d been carved. Add the hot car and he was cheerleader bait. I couldn’t see him fitting in with the spotty herd of magnificent weirdos in Maddy’s clique.

Unless he was gay? Please, God, let him be gay, because I doubted that Roux had taught her boy to be gentle with girl hearts. Last night she herself had come to book club with a battle strategy. And what kind of mother would put an adolescent male behind the wheel of a car like that? But of course I knew what kind. I had met her. A shit stirrer. With a great big spoon.

When Oliver finished eating, I called the school office to make sure Maddy hadn’t had bigger, badder plans to skip with Luca. She was on the attendance log for homeroom, so the stolen ride had been the end of it. Still, it was more drama linked directly to Angelica Roux, and on a morning when I was already full up with her.

I released Oliver into the babyproofed keeping room. There the TV and a pair of comfortable brown leather sofas shared the space with Davis’s armchair and a ton of built-in bookshelves. The lower shelves were full of soft, squeaky toys. I latched the baby gate to keep him from the kitchen while I was baking, watching him pull up on the low coffee table as I mixed ingredients, answering his babbles and blowing raspberries back.

Once the blondies were in, Oliver and I went upstairs to clean the bathroom, get the ruined sheets in the washer, and remake the bed. We’d just come back down so I could check on my baking when I heard my front door opening.

“Amy?” Char called from the foyer.

I checked the microwave clock. Nine-fifteen, damn it.

“I’m in the kitchen,” I called back.

I power-walked with Charlotte every weekday morning. The time had gotten away from me. My head was really not on right. Worse, caught up first in my own invented worries and then with Maddy’s deception, I hadn’t considered what I was going to do about Tate Bonasco and Charlotte’s husband. Now, that was a real problem, concrete and immediate, and it wasn’t like me not to put Char first. She’d been a priority ever since she’d poked her nose nervously into Divers Down almost seven years ago, right after I started working there, asking if we had adult swimming lessons.

I’d been sitting in the empty shop, thinking about all the ways I’d already given up my mission. I’d come to Florida after my thirty-fifth birthday. That was the year Boyce Skelton, a lawyer at the firm who managed my family’s money, called me to tell me the clause earmarking Nana’s trust for college had expired. The money, well over half a million dollars by then, was wholly mine, to do with as I pleased. As soon as he told me, I thought about Tig Simms. Even before I got off the phone, I was forming a half-assed, nebulous plan to give the money to Tig.

But first I’d had to find him, which meant coming back to Florida. He’d always been close with his ex-stepdad, Toby, the one who’d gotten Tig into Brighton in the first place. I’d gone by Vintage Wheels and asked about a fictitious classic-car-themed Christmas present for my equally fictitious husband. As Toby and I had chatted, I’d mentioned, offhand, that I used to know Tig. I’d made it sound like I knew him from Downtown, not school. Toby’d told me Tig was doing great, living an hour and change away in Mobile. He’d started his own business, another classic-car garage and parts yard. Restoration, it was called.

I got into my car and headed straight for Mobile, but I turned back before I even breached Pensacola city limits. I tried again the next day. And then again, days leaking into weeks, then months. I got the job at Divers Down to cover rent and food, driving toward Mobile a couple of times a week, inching a mile or two closer, then turning back. It was like a failed game of Mother May I?, though I knew damn well what my own mother would say.

That day I was sitting in the empty dive shop considering going back to my empty life in California. There at least I could blame my cowardice and inaction on the distance. But when I saw Charlotte’s face peeking in the door, young and round and earnest, cheeks pinked with the embarrassment of admitting her fear of the ocean, I’d thought, Here. Here is a small, good thing that I can do today.

I’d signed her up with no presentiment that my life was already shifting. In a few short months, Char would become my closest friend. I owed her so much, and not only because she was Char. She had led me to Maddy, who led to Davis, and now Oliver. She had gifted me with my whole sweet second life here.