Never Have I Ever(68)

Mr. Lawrence B. Shipley

requests the pleasure of your presence

at the marriage of his daughter

Charlotte Marie Shipley . . .



I stopped there, unable to make sense of the time and date and address on the lines below.

My hands went icy, and my feet, and my face, as every bit of blood I had rushed to my center.

“Are you all right?” Davis asked, solicitous.

I shook my head, blinked. “I’m fine.”

“Goodness, you’re white as a ghost,” Char said, concerned, taking a step toward me.

Her voice was the only thing that could have pulled my gaze off her printed name; I turned to her. The whole room seemed to telescope, retracting, until her face was all I could see. It was surreal, like a live-action version of that celebrity baby-photo game in gossip magazines, where they show some round-faced, anonymous toddler who grew up to be famous. I wasn’t good at it, never guessing it was George Clooney or Julia Roberts until I flipped the page to look, but then it was always instantly so obvious.

Now that I knew, I could see Lolly Shipley. I could see her so, so clearly. The foyer faded, and I was standing by that smashed-in car, swaying on the dark road, hearing Tig Simms moan. These round eyes, still the same shade of blue, fringed with soft brown lashes, had looked right at me. This mouth, still a rosebud framed by full cheeks, this exact mouth had opened, had said, Amy? Paul is cry.

So many unconnected details I had culled about her life over the past few months shifted, clicked into focus. The little brother, who had grown up and joined the service and “fallen for a fr?ulein” while stationed in Germany, that was Paul. Baby Paul, who’d had colic, and who’d needed to be driven round and round the neighborhood by his exhausted mother in the wee hours of the morning. Char’s difficult father, who struggled with depression and imperfect sobriety, that was Mr. Shipley, the man I’d made a widower with a business and two little kids to manage alone. Her dead mother . . . oh, I knew who that was.

My vision swam, and I might have fallen if Davis hadn’t hooked an arm around me, “Hey, now! Amy! Are you okay?”

I shook my head, tried to laugh, though my hands clutched at his arm. “I probably shouldn’t have had that second G&T.”

“Let me get you home,” Davis said, and then, thank God, he got me out of there.

I barely remembered him dropping me off. I went straight to my bathroom, where I threw up Char’s chicken divan, her garlic green beans, and her strawberry shortcake until I was dead empty. Then I knelt on the cool tiles, gagging on my own bile. When my stomach finally stopped spasming, I crept to my bed, and for hours I lay awake, thinking I would quit my job, hurl my belongings pell-mell into my car, and flee back to California. It meant leaving Maddy and Davis—that thought hurt me like a knife drawn slow across my skin—but I had to give Florida back to Lolly Shipley. How could I do otherwise? I didn’t fall asleep until almost dawn.

I woke up late, still determined to start packing. While I stared blearily into my first untouched cup of coffee, the phone rang. I picked it up on autopilot, not thinking, without even glancing at the caller ID.

It was Charlotte, calling to check up on me.

“Are you okay? You got the wibbles last night, right at the end.”

I assured her I was fine, but she didn’t get off the phone. She was rosy with a natural-born hostess’s pleasure in last night’s success. I could hear her pouring her own coffee, then settling in for a dinner-party postmortem, asking if the chicken had been dry and what I thought of her flowers. I answered as best I could, horrified. I didn’t have the right to be taking calls from Lolly Shipley.

But as she went on, rehashing everything Davis had said to me, gauging his interest and mine, making teasing kissy noises, I realized I had even less right to refuse to take her calls.

I was already so connected to her life. I wondered what she would think when she called tomorrow and found that my phone was disconnected. Would it hurt her? The last thing I wanted was to hurt Lolly Shipley. I couldn’t simply disappear.

I needed to set it up, talk about a job offer, ease out of her life. This, I realized, meant time. Time with Maddy and Davis, time with her. I wanted it. I wanted every extra minute with a longing so fierce it shook me. It made me understand exactly how deep I had embedded here.

While all this was swirling in my head, Char turned serious. Just for a moment.

“Don’t take this wrong, okay? You’re barely twelve years older than me, and you’re super pretty, so really, really, do not take this wrong,” she said. “But Lisa Fenton, last night, she called you my mom-friend. Isn’t that funny?”

I knew the term because I taught so many kids and teenagers. In Maddy’s class the title had gone to a boy named Simon. He was the one who had to check everybody’s trim, who tried to track the whole group’s no-stop dive times, who kept saying at Summer Social, Y’all, don’t gulp those milk shakes, you’ll get brain freeze!

“I’m not insulted,” I said.

I wasn’t. I was overwhelmed. She was joking, but there had been vulnerability in her inflection when she’d asked if I thought it was funny. And this word: mom. Even tethered to a piece of teen slang, it was a weighted word when it came at me out of Lolly Shipley’s mouth.

She must have heard that I was choked up, because she turned serious.