I'd Give Anything(77)

Avery told Cressida that her father had admitted to everything, even to the phone calls he made after it was all supposed to be over.

“I want you to know that my mom and I are going to do whatever we can to make sure people get the real story. We’ll spread new rumors, true ones this time,” said Avery.

She gave Cressida her father’s letter, which contained an apology that made up for in thoroughness what it lacked in heartfelt eloquence. Her father’s letter made his own wrongdoing plain; it left nothing ambiguous. At the end, he said he regretted any harm he had brought to Cressida and her family. After Cressida read it, she folded it back into its envelope and regarded Avery with astonishment.

“You asked him to write this?” she said.

“Yes. I wish he’d thought of it on his own, but at least he did it.”

“He admits everything,” she said, wonderingly. “Anyone who sees this will know that what happened wasn’t my fault.”

“That’s right,” said Avery.

Cressida looked down at the letter in her hands and then at Avery. “What should I do with it?”

“Whatever you want,” said Avery. “It’s yours.”



Gray appears and smiles down at Avery. He’s tan in his white shirt, and he holds two cupcakes, one in each hand, and Avery thinks, as she’s thought before, that it’s no wonder Zinny fell in love with him.

“It’s not really time for dessert,” he says, “but it made me feel like less of a thief if I also stole one for someone else, so chocolate or coconut?”

“Coconut, please,” she says. “Want to sit?”

They sit and eat and talk about the baby.

“The day my mom found out you were naming her Dahlia, we went to the garden store and bought some dahlia bulbs and planted them in our yard,” says Avery. “So now when they bloom, we’ll bring her some.”

“She’ll love that,” says Gray.

He squints, gazing down at the bright water.

“It’s a perfect day, isn’t it?” says Avery.

He hesitates before he says, “Yes.”

Gray starts to talk about CJ, how strange it is to be in this particular place without him. He says the two of them have hardly spoken to each other since the day CJ told him he was turning himself in to the police for setting the fire.

“Do you think he’ll go to prison?”

“I hope not,” says Gray. “Kirsten got her dad to hire a big deal defense attorney for him. And my family will ask for leniency. I can’t even imagine CJ in prison. I’d hate that. But you know what?”

“What?”

“I can’t be his friend right now or maybe ever again, and I feel so bad about that.”

Avery’s impulse is to jump in and tell him that he shouldn’t feel bad, but she knows exactly what he means. So she stays quiet, giving Gray time to say what he needs to say.

“All this time, everyone’s assumed that whoever set the fire did it out of anger or hatred. I know CJ did it out of friendship. He was trying to help me. And he was my best friend before it happened and for twenty years after it happened. But it was there, all the time: CJ set the fire that killed my dad. Only one of us knew it, but it was there. And I can’t figure out how to forgive him for either of those things: for setting the fire and for letting me go along being his friend without telling me.”

“Forgiveness is hard,” says Avery.

“I still miss him. I can’t believe he’s never met Dahlia. I picture him holding her, how completely awkward he’d be, and I miss him. You know what I mean? Do you miss your dad?”

Avery nods. “Even though I am so mad at him. Sometimes, I sit at my dining room table doing homework and just wait for him to walk in. He used to tell me ‘math is a bear.’ I miss that.”

“Lately, I’ve been thinking about it this way,” says Gray. “They love us. And they’ve done something bad that hurt us. You’d think those facts would cancel each other out, but the crazy thing is that they don’t.”

“You really think they don’t?” asks Avery.

“Not only that, but I’m beginning to believe that the bad might not take anything away from the love. I mean, it’s possible, isn’t it? They might care about us just exactly as much as we always thought.”

Gray and Avery sit side by side at the edge of the party on the edge of a cliff on what feels like the sunstruck edge of the world with the conundrum of love between them and the azure sky overhead and the shining water below.





Ginny


In the grass, in the lilac hour just before nightfall, we are dancing.

Kirsten with Gray. Trevor with Iris. Tex with Kirsten’s mother. Evan with Tex’s mother. Daniel’s daughter, Georgia, with Dobbsey and Walt. My nephews, Sam and Paxton, with the implacable Mose. Dahlia with my lovestruck Avery. Me with Daniel. All of Kirsten and Tex’s beloveds and their beloveds’ beloveds swaying and twirling. No one’s arms are empty.

Because Kirsten and Tex will honeymoon in Paris, the music is French, Edith Piaf singing “La Vie en Rose,” wistfulness and vibrato threading through the trees, winding upward, hovering over us like the first stars, the cradle of a quarter moon.

I press my cheek against Daniel’s.