Hello, Goodbye, and Everything in Between(60)

“Later,” he says, as if testing the word.

She nods. “Later.”

“Like a second prologue.”

“There’s no such thing,” she says, shaking her head, but this doesn’t seem to bother him. He only smiles.

“Who says?”

This time, when the door swings open behind them, they both know what it means. Clare’s stomach drops, and she can see a flicker of alarm in Aidan’s eyes.

“Sorry to interrupt,” her mom says from the doorway, her voice full of apology. “But it’s time to load the car.”

Even after they’ve stood up, the chairs continue to rock back and forth, and the rain continues to fall all around the porch, shimmering and insistent. Aidan manages a small smile just before they walk inside, but when Clare tries to match it, she can’t.

The time has come, and there’s no more outrunning it.

Inside, her dad is walking down the stairs with a cardboard box. But when he notices them, he sets it down, his eyes widening as he catches sight of Aidan’s face.

“You look worse than Clare,” he says, reaching out to shake his hand.

“I know,” her mom says, glancing worriedly at Aidan. “We have some frozen corn, if you want to grab a bag.”

“Corn?” her dad scoffs. “Come on. At least give the boy a steak or something. It’s clearly been a rough night.”

Clare’s mom rolls her eyes. “You’re welcome to whatever you’d like,” she says, patting Aidan on the shoulder as she moves around him to the stairs. “You know that.” Just before walking up, she turns around once more, and this time, her voice quivers a little bit. “You’re always welcome here.”

Right then, the thing that kills Clare the most is that her mom doesn’t even know yet. When she’d dashed inside before to tell them she was home, she couldn’t bear to let them know it was over. It would only make it more real.

Besides, she figures they have hours ahead of them for all that, hours when she’ll stare out the car window and tell them all the reasons why this makes sense, why it was the logical thing to do—ending things with Aidan—in the hope that if she just keeps explaining, it might keep her from crying.

Though, of course, it won’t.

But now she realizes that her mom doesn’t need to be told after all; she already seems to know. And Clare is grateful for that, because it means she won’t actually have to say the words later. Instead, she can curl up in the backseat and let her mom pass her juice boxes and let her dad find something upbeat on the radio as they drive through Illinois and then Indiana and then Ohio, and on and on to New Hampshire, putting the miles between her and Aidan one at a time, until the moment when his flight takes off, and the distance between them will all at once be too great to count.

For the next ten minutes, the four of them troop in and out of the house, Bingo at their heels, as they carry suitcases and shopping bags, cardboard boxes of various sizes, pillows and lamps and even a football.

“Since when do you play football?” Aidan asks when he sees Clare walking through the kitchen with it tucked under her arm. He whisks it away from her, then stands near the sink, flipping it over and over in his hands.

“I don’t know,” she says with a shrug. “I feel like it’s the kind of thing you do in college. You know, toss a football around on the quad. Or is that Hacky Sack?”

He throws the ball to her, a gentle toss that spirals over the kitchen table, but somehow she still manages to fumble it.

“There goes my college athletic career,” she says, bending to grab the ball. “But I’m still bringing it.”

“When I said you should try some new things,” Aidan says, “I wasn’t really talking about contact sports.”

“Yeah, well, you won’t be laughing when I come back a seasoned quarterback.”

“Now that I’d like to see,” he says as they walk outside together.

In the driveway, her dad is shutting the trunk of the car. He’s wearing a bright yellow slicker with the hood pulled up, and his glasses are speckled with rain.

“I think that’s pretty much everything,” he says. “Unless you want to take the kitchen sink, too.”

“Very funny,” Clare says, but already there’s a lump in her throat, because she would, if she could: She’d rip that stupid, leaky sink right out of the wall and take it with her. For a brief, surging, impossible moment, she wants it all: her dog and her bed and her parents and her boyfriend. Even now, with just minutes to go, she has no idea how she’s going to leave any of it behind.

Her mom steps outside with the end of Bingo’s leash in one hand and a plastic bag full of sandwiches in the other. She locks the door and then turns around, staring at the odd rain-soaked trio assembled in the driveway, all of them looking back at her with obvious reluctance.

“I guess we’re all set,” she says, glancing down at the dog. Bingo is holding his leash in his mouth and wagging his tail, completely oblivious to the fact that they’ll be dropping him off at the kennel on their way out of town. “This is it, huh?

Her dad nods a bit too enthusiastically. “The start of a big adventure.”

“We’ll just give you two a minute,” her mom says, then walks over to Aidan, standing on her tiptoes to give him a quick hug.