The Last House Guest(11)
It was the same look he’d given me the first time he saw me. I’d been sitting in Sadie’s room, cross-legged on her ivory bedspread, while she painted our nails a shimmering purple, the vial balanced precariously on her knee between us, nothing but sea and sky behind her through the glass doors of her balcony, blue on blue to the curve of the horizon.
Her hand had hovered in midair at the sound of footsteps coming down the hall, and she’d looked up just as Parker walked by. He was nineteen then, one year older than we were, just finished with his first year of college. But something had stopped him midstride. He’d looked at me, then back at Sadie, and the corner of her mouth had twitched.
“Dad’s looking for you,” he’d said.
“He’s not looking very hard, then.” She’d gone back to painting her nails, but he hadn’t left the doorway. His eyes flicked to me again, then away, like he didn’t want to get caught staring.
Sadie had audibly sighed. “This is Avery. Avery, my brother, Parker.”
He was barefoot, in worn jeans, a free advertisement T-shirt. So different than he looked in the carefully staged portrait downstairs. A faint scar bisected the edge of his left eyebrow. I’d waved my hand, and he did the same. Then he took a step back into the hall and continued on.
I’d been looking at the empty hallway when her voice cut through the silence. “Don’t,” she’d said.
“What?”
She shook her head. “Just don’t.”
“I won’t.”
She’d capped the bottle, blowing lightly on her nails. “Seriously. It won’t end well.”
As if everything that promised to follow would be contingent on this. Her attention, her friendship, this world.
“I said I wouldn’t.” I was not accustomed to being bossed around, to taking orders. It had been just me and my grandmother since I was fourteen, and she’d been dead six months by then.
Sadie had blinked slowly. “They all say that.”
* * *
PARKER LOMAN HAD GROWN broader in the years since then, more put together, self-assured. He would not falter in the hallway. But I raised my hand, just like I did back then, and he did the same. “Hi. I tried texting you first.”
He nodded, continued on down the steps. “Changed my number. Here.” He held out his hand for my phone and updated his contact info. I wondered if he’d changed his number because of Luce. Or Sadie. If people called him, friends with condolences, journalists looking for a story, old acquaintances coming out of the woodwork in a tragedy. Whether he needed to cull his list, his world shrinking back to the core and rebuilding—like I had once done.
“What time is the lunch?” I asked.
“It’s scheduled for one-thirty. I already added you to the reservation. Want to drive over together?”
I was taken aback, not only that he remembered but that he was following through. “I’ve got a few errands to run after, better drive myself.”
“All right, see you then.” He walked backward a few steps in the direction of the garage. “Off to pick up some groceries. There’s nothing in the house. I mean, other than the whiskey.” He smirked. “Should I get anything else?”
I’d forgotten how charming he could be, how disarming. “No,” I said. “We’re good.”
“Well,” he called, still smiling, “guess I’ll let you get to that early appointment.”
* * *
I KEPT TO A familiar path. Taking the incline down Landing Lane, stretching my legs in the process. Reaching the edge of downtown before looping back and ending at Breaker Beach.
August used to be my favorite time of year in Littleport, from both sides of the divide. There was something in the air, a thrumming, the town in perpetual motion. This place was named for the Little family, but everyone here—residents and visitors alike—had adopted the moniker like a mission. Everything must remain minuscule in the town center. Small wooden signs with hand-painted letters, low awnings, narrowed planks. The visitors during the summer sat at small bistro tables with ocean views, and they drank from small flute glasses, speaking in small voices. There were little lights strung from rafters, as if we were all saying to one another: It’s always a holiday here.
It was an act, and we were all playing.
Step outside the town center, and the act was gone. The summer homes towered two, three stories above the perfectly landscaped yards, perched even higher on cliffsides. Long stone-lined drives, sprawling wraparound porches, portrait-style windows reflecting the sky and the sea. Beautiful, magnificent monstrosities.
I’d grown up closer to the inland edge of town, in a three-bedroom ranch with one room converted to my mother’s studio. She’d ripped out the carpeting and pulled off the closet doors, lining the shelves with row after row of paints and dyes. Every room had been painted a bright color except that one, as if she needed a blank and neutral palette just to imagine something more.
Our only view then was of the trees and, beyond that, the boat in the Harlows’ driveway. Connor and I used to race the trail behind our homes, startling the hikers as we wove around them, slowing down for nothing.
My grandmother’s bungalow, where I’d spent my teenage years, was in an older waterfront community. The scent of turpentine and paint I’d grown accustomed to had been replaced with the sweet sea roses that lined the perimeter of her backyard, mixed with the salt air. Families had lived in the Stone Hollow neighborhood generations gone back, staking their claim before the rising prices and holding it.