The Rest of the Story(55)

“If this was a real dance—” April said.

“It’s not,” Bailey told her from the couch, which she’d only left long enough for the guys to move it outside to the front porch. The house was tiny, though, and the door open, so she might as well have been inside.

“—then we wouldn’t be putting on our own corsages,” April finished. “The boys would do it for us.”

We all looked out at the deck, where Jack, Vincent, and Roo were still all gathered around the cooler. “I am not,” Bailey said, “going to let my brother pin a corsage on me for this fake dance. It would be even more humiliating than anything else that’s happened so far. Which is really saying something.”

“Jack’s with me, remember?” Taylor told her. “So you don’t have to worry about that.”

“Great.” Bailey took a gulp of her beer. “Now I don’t even have a fake date to the fake dance.”

April raised an eyebrow. “Slow down with those beers over there. The night is young.”

“This night sucks,” Bailey replied.

Taylor, piercing a stem with a pin, sighed. “Fine. Be that way.”

I actually felt kind of bad for her. “I’ll take one,” I said. “If that’s okay.”

She looked up at me. “Sure! Whichever you want, although the smaller ones are holding together better.”

I went over to the table, where she had laid out three little bundles of gardenias and stems so far, each pierced with a pin. The tiny kitchen smelled of nothing but their scent. I picked one from the middle, holding it up to the strap of my dress.

“Too small,” Taylor said, handing me a larger one. “Try this.”

“I wish I’d known I was going to a formal tonight,” April said. “I would have worn something else.”

“You could run home and change,” Taylor suggested, bent over the flowers again.

“No, I like the DIY aspect of this. Making do with what we have.” April, her hands on her hips, surveyed the room. “Okay, so we have the lights up—”

“It looks like Christmas,” Bailey, continuing her role as the dark shadow of the evening, observed. “Which is also depressing.”

“Bailey. Enough with the gloom and doom, okay?” April said.

“Yeah, listen to your party planner. They’ll be great once we turn them on,” Taylor said. Bailey, unconvinced, looked out at the water again. “Wasn’t Roo supposed to be finding a power strip?”

“He was,” April replied. She walked over to the open door. “Roo!”

Outside, he turned his head. “Yeah?”

“Power strip?”

“Oh. Right.” He put down his beer on the bench. “Coming.”

As he jogged up the dock, then came in the back door, brushing his feet on a mat, I took another look around me. Where Mimi’s house was big, airy, and full of windows, the place where Roo lived with his mom was small and cozy. The tiny kitchen, with its metal countertops and collection of sea glass lining the windowsill, opened into a bigger space, which held the couch (now outside) and a worn leather recliner, both facing a small TV. The table where Taylor sat, plain wood with four chairs, made up the only dining area somewhere in the middle.

Normally, small spaces made me anxious. But I felt different here. I had since the moment I’d stepped inside, following April with Bailey dragging along, complaining, behind me. There was just a comfort to it, even before I saw the fridge.

It wasn’t the appliance itself, which was white with a few rust spots. What drew me were the pictures that were scattered among the receipts and lists also adhered to the surface. Unlike the counter in the Calvander’s office, there were only a handful here, which made each of them seem that much more important.

The first I saw was a school picture of Roo, from what looked to be maybe second grade. Smaller and skinnier, he was still unmistakable, with that same white-blond hair, cut short and sticking up in the back. The grin on his face showed he was missing a top tooth, a gap in its place.

A little over from that one was a shot of who I assumed were his parents. Chris Price, shirtless and with the same blond hair and squinty smile, was sitting on a bench on the dock, a pretty girl with short red hair in cutoffs and a bathing suit top on his lap. He was looking right at the camera, while she had her head thrown back, caught in the middle of what looked like a big belly laugh.

Picture three, a little lower down, was of Roo and his mom, and more recent. Dressed in a gray EAST U sweatshirt, he was taller than her. She had on a black dress, her hair shorter now, one hand resting on his chest as she smiled proudly.

The last one was the oldest of the group, stuck high in one corner of the fridge door with thick brown tape. There are those pictures that are clearly posed, where the subjects were told to stop what they were doing and gather together. Then there were the ones when the photographer just aimed and shot. This had to be why Roo’s dad, in shorts and a baggy T-shirt, was slightly blurred: he’d been in the process of moving. The girl in the picture, though, was still facing him, and in profile, one hand held up as if making a point. She had blond hair spilling down her back and blue eyes with long lashes. My mom.

I leaned in closer, startled and not sure why. She was everywhere at the lake so far, so why not here as well? Maybe because you never think, leaning into a snapshot in a stranger’s kitchen, that you’ll see the person who probably knew you better than anyone. Like she’d been waiting there for me all this time, and now here I was.