You Have a Match(60)

“We should get her to camp, have someone take a look at that,” says Pietra to Dale, as if I’m six and not sixteen. I square her up more easily, now that she’s not shouting her head off. She’s one of those mothering types, the kind who does it to everyone, not just her kid. “I’m sure I have some coconut oil in the car that we can put on it.”

She takes off, and Dale tilts his chin to indicate that I should follow. It seems that, much like Savvy, Pietra is a woman unused to hearing the word no.

I follow them in silence, hearing our feet squish in the mud in different rhythms. I’m supposed to think of something to say—Savvy would—but everything I think of is too blunt.

Instead, I am occupied by a much larger, weirder thought: if someone had like, shaken up the eggs or something—if I’d bullied my way down a fallopian tube first—I would have been born before Savvy and belonged to these people. And maybe I would have been the one with a closet full of pastel spandex and Instagrams full of comments with heart-eyes emojis and a head full of rules.

“So you’re into photography?” Dale asks.

He’s clearly the kind of person who fills silences. He reminds me of Finn. Someone who puts the grease on awkward moments, with a little forced cheer, and makes them go down a little easier.

“Um—just—mostly landscapes. Sometimes animals, like birds and deer and stuff.” I unconsciously touch the magpie charm on my lanyard, wrapped around my wrist.

“You sure your camera survived?”

“It’s definitely seen worse.” I turn Kitty back on to check, and sure enough she flickers back to life, her lens whirring into place. A few lives left to go, I guess.

“Is that—that’s from the hill up there?”

Dale is tall enough that I doubt anything gets past him, let alone the hot second the Puget Sound popped up on Kitty’s screen. I freeze, horrified for being so careless.

But this isn’t about me or my stupid photos. There’s way too much at stake for me to worry about Dale seeing one of them, even if my palms are sweating enough to create their own small pond.

“Nah, that’s, uh—from another spot,” I say, clearing my throat. “A trail on the other side of camp.”

Dale peers down at the screen with such sincere interest that I don’t even notice he’s reached out to take Kitty from me until she is in his grip. To my mortification, he starts to scroll, going through the different vantage points I took photos of the sunrise from yesterday morning.

“These are lovely.”

It feels weird to say thank you, like I’d be agreeing with him. And although my brain has abandoned me more than once in the last few days, it is not so far gone that I don’t remember that Savvy’s parents are Serious Art People. I can’t tell if he’s complimenting me because he means it, or because he feels like he has to, a charitable gesture toward a kid whose work doesn’t have any teeth.

“These three here,” he says, lowering the screen down to my eyeline. “You can blow them up, put them on canvas side by side. Where are you displaying your work?”

I laugh, but it comes out as a wheeze. “Uh, nowhere.”

“Not even Bean Well?”

It’s Pietra, surprising me and Dale both. She immediately turns back around, staring ahead at the trail, but not before I see a flicker of something she wants buried streak across her face.

I don’t want to say anything. I’ve lived sixteen years pointedly not saying anything in situations like this. But if I don’t, I’ll be kicking myself when I report back to Savvy and tell her I came up empty.

“You’ve been to Bean Well?”

Pietra takes on a breezy tone that even I, a person who has known her for less than a day, can hear right past. “That’s the name of it, right?”

“Pietra,” says Dale, chuckling, “you practically lived there.”

She turns to Dale sharply. “It was a long time ago.”

It takes me a moment to wrap my head around the idea. Savvy’s parents come from money. And while anyone was welcome at Bean Well, it was a far cry from Medina mansions and charity galas, which seem entirely more Pietra’s vibe.

Still, it’s more information than I had five seconds ago, and I can’t waste it. I channel my inner Savvy and ask, “Is that how you met my mom?”

Pietra winces, but softens when she looks over at me.

“It was a long time ago,” she repeats, in the gentle, firm way of someone closing a book they have no intention of reading ever again.

It’s a cheap shot, but it’s all I’ve got. “Well, it won’t be Bean Well for long. We’re selling it.”

“No. Why?”

I didn’t think ahead this far. They’re both watching me so intensely that it feels like I just lit a spotlight on something that I haven’t even figured out the shape of, a hole in me I’m still trying to figure out how to fill.

“Well…”

I don’t have to tell them, in the end.

“Oh. Abby, I’m…” Pietra has stopped walking, and so has Dale. I’m the one who stops a beat late, caught in the unexpected net of their grief. “I’m so sorry.”

Dale puts a hand on my shoulder. “Walt was a good man.”

My throat goes achy, my fingers clutching Kitty like a life preserver. I wish for Poppy’s camera instead. I wish for it even though that means it would be the one muddied up, and that Dale wouldn’t have seen my photos, and we would have finished the walk back without a word.