All We Can Do Is Wait(28)

One day on the drive over, Jason had surprised her by asking, “So, are you, like, dating anyone?”

Alexa blushed. “Uh, no, why?”

“I dunno. You’re always so eager to go to work. I figured you were, like, hooking up with someone in the pantry or whatever.”

Alexa laughed. “Well, I’m not. I am definitely not.”

“Well, you should,” Jason said. There was an awkward pause. “I mean, you’re, y’know, cool, and pretty.”

Alexa laughed again. “Gee, thanks,” she said. “Thank you for validating my prettiness. That’s all I needed. Now I will go screw someone in the pantry.”

“I didn’t mean it like that.” He turned to her, looking serious. “I didn’t, honestly.”

“I know.”

They drove in silence for a moment, “Cake by the Ocean” blaring incongruously—or maybe perfectly aptly—on the stereo.

Alexa turned to her brother. “Are you screwing someone?”

“What, in the Grey’s pantry?” he said, eyes on the road. “No.”

“But you are screwing someone.”

“None of your business.”

“You asked me if I was!”

“Yeah, but I get to. I’m your protective older brother.”

“Oh, gross,” Alexa said, making a retching sound. “I think you are, though. Not at Grey’s, but somewhere. I think that’s why you brought it up. You want to tell me, don’t you?”

“I do not,” Jason said, the smallest of smiles creeping across his face.

Alexa let it drop, content that she and her brother were getting along, making jokes, dancing around details of their personal lives.

With her two kids coexisting in harmony, Linda seemed to calm down some. She drank less, for one. Sure, a cocktail with Theo before dinner, and some dry white wine during the meal, but nothing so excessive that she’d fall asleep on the sofa, like she did much of the time back in Boston, waking up the next morning testy and short with a hangover. There weren’t any blurry reveries into the past, no painful, forced conversations about girls from Linda’s college way back when. Theo seemed less distracted, less pinched about work. He and Linda both were back and forth from Boston, but far less than Alexa had expected them to be. They stayed for days at a time, falling into easy rhythms of morning and evening swims, tennis and lunch at the club in between. The trip was working.

And, of course, there was Kyle. Maybe he’d been the key to all of it. Kyle had warmed the house. Though staying with Laurie and her cousin held the promise of a fun night of getting drunk and listening to music too loud well into the night, Alexa suspected that Kyle liked staying at the Elsings’ best, maybe because it offered some sense of family and normalcy that he didn’t get at home. Kyle, of course, was seeing the magical Pollyanna version of Alexa’s family—he’d likely have been shocked by how estranged they all were in Boston. But on the Cape, wrapped in the spell of those perfect summer winds, they’d put on a good show, and Kyle enjoyed it.

He fit right in, engaging with Jason about bands and books—it turned out that Jason liked Chvrches and thought the movie version of The Perks of Being a Wallflower didn’t do justice to the book, who knew? Kyle made Linda laugh, a sound round like a bell, and she’d put her hand on his wrist and say, “Oh, you are funny. You really are funny,” as she wiped an eye. Theo was fascinated by Kyle’s scrappy, jerry-rigged existence, which Kyle was frank and forthcoming about. Alexa’s dad thought it was noble somehow. Kyle was “a real bootstrapper.”

Alexa didn’t feel like she was losing him to her family, though. She felt like she was sharing him. She and Kyle still had plenty of time when it was just the two of them, at work and in the evenings after—and on some days off, though they didn’t share many of those. Alone together, they could easily, pleasantly fall into long conversations about big things. Places to travel, lives they’d like to lead.

They played a game they called, simply, Five Houses, in which they had to name the five places in the world where they’d buy a house if money was no object.

“A flat in Paris,” Kyle said one night, he and Alexa curled up on the love seat on the Elsings’ porch.

“What about the town house in Notting Hill?” Alexa asked.

“Oh right. Um . . . can I do both?”

“You can do five houses anywhere you want. That’s the point. But remember, there is the Chunnel.”

“The Chunnel!” Kyle exclaimed. “How could I forget the fucking Chunnel. O.K. So forget London. I’m Brexiting or whatever. I can just take the train from Paris if I want to see something in the West End.”

“And to stay at my house in Oxford.”

“In Oxford, yes, of course.”

“A tree house in Bali, too,” Kyle murmured.

“That’s four. Tokyo, New York, Paris, Bali. Where else?”

Kyle thought for a while. He looked out toward the water. “Here.”

“Like, Wellfleet?” Alexa asked, a little surprised. She figured he’d want to get as far away from the Cape as possible.

“No, like, here. This house.”

“My parents’ house?”

Kyle turned toward her. She could only barely make him out in the dark, but he seemed to shrug a little. “Yeah. I’ll buy it from them.”