Saugatuck Summer (Saugatuck, #1)(48)
What Brendan and I had done was wrong, without a doubt. We both knew that, though I think maybe toward the end there he’d started to lose sight of why. But was all that shit I’d just listed a proportional consequence for it?
In the end, I kept quiet. It ate at me, but I supposed that’s what Robin had meant when he’d said not to confess just to make myself feel better. I decided to put off making the decision for the time being. I could always do it later, see if I could get some hint of how Brendan was going to handle things.
“Hey! Topher!” Mo snapped her fingers in front of my face. “You in there, girlfriend?”
“Yeah, sorry.” I shook myself. “Got distracted.”
“That’s okay. I was making sure you were coming to the fireworks with us on Thursday. We’re cooking out beforehand, and I’d like you to meet my mom. This may be your only chance this summer. She works a lot.”
Oh, f*ck.
“Um.” I took a sip of my cooling latte and choked, coughing. “Well. Uh, I should probably see what Robin and Geoff have planned.”
She set her cup down with a thump and pinned me with a hard stare. “Topher, what the f*ck is with you? We were supposed to spend as much of this summer together as we could when I wasn’t working, and now you’ve got new friends and you’re just off and away. I’m starting to feel a little dumped here.”
“No! No, it’s not like that. It’s just . . . I need to get a life, you know? I want to spend time with you, but it’s lame spending most of my summer—when I’m twenty-one, and pretty as f*ck, and in a freaking gay vacation town—rattling around that big old beach house while your dad works downstairs. You’ve got Mr. Big Rapids now, and that’s terrific. I’m glad. I don’t mind that a bit. I love you, Mo, but I need to have something that’s mine, too. New friends. New hobbies. I don’t know. Something.”
“Okay.” She dropped her gaze to the tabletop, sighing. “That makes sense, I suppose. Um, why don’t you invite them along, if they don’t have other plans? It would be cool to get to know them better. We can make extra food, and there’s plenty of room on the deck.”
That wasn’t optimal. Optimal would have been not having to meet Brendan’s wife at all. But if I had to do it, I supposed having some moral support there to keep me from acting crazy wasn’t a half-bad idea.
“Okay, let’s ask,” I said, nodding resolutely. “Why don’t you come down to the gallery with me right now, we’ll talk to Robin, see if he and Geoff and Ling already have plans. Oh shit. Oh. No. Wait. We’ll go to the studio. Talk to Geoff instead.”
Her eyebrows crept up. “‘Oh shit?’ Why is going to the gallery a bad thing?”
I threw my head back and cursed my life. “You remember that guy I had the one-off with back on my birthday? The one who took the pictures?”
Mo nodded. “Yeah, what about him?”
I cleared my throat nervously. “Well, it just so happens that Robin is selling the paintings Jace made using those pictures.”
For a best friend whom I loved dearly, Mo could be f*cking diabolical when she wanted to make me squirm, and the grin she flashed told me I was in trouble.
“This I have to see.”
“I’d really rather you didn’t. Please.”
“Oh no. You’re not getting out of this. Let’s go.”
As Mo grabbed my hand and jerked me to my feet and practically dashed through town toward the art gallery, I thought, for all that I still felt weird about them, those paintings at least provided me with a perfect distraction. Mo would think of nothing else for days.
Since the Fourth was on a Thursday, there would be a lot of tourist traffic from vacationers taking long weekends. Like most Saugatuck businesspeople, Robin and Geoff would have their shops open until midafternoon, after which they would close up and come out to the Gardners’ beach house for the cookout. I’d been hoping Robin would come up with some sort of brilliant idea to get me off the hook, but he just shrugged and said that if I had decided to hold off on telling Mo what had happened, the only thing I could do was try to behave as normally as possible. Mo already knew I didn’t have to work that day, so there was no avoiding the expectation to show up a little earlier and hang out with her mom. I delayed as long as I could by inviting Mo to hang with me down at the beach after my morning swim, but eventually there was nothing left to do except trudge up to the house.
I’m pretty sure condemned prisoners have mounted the steps to their gallows with more enthusiasm than I climbed that stairway up the dune.
Sad to say, it might have made me feel less guilty if I could have found something to dislike about Adele, but I couldn’t. She had that gentle sweetness you see a lot in people who work with children. Her hair was darker than Mo and Brendan’s, but it was easy to see where Mo had gotten her tall, broad-shouldered, thick-waisted figure. Like Mo, Adele carried it well and unself-consciously. She didn’t try to make herself smaller or more graceful. It elevated my opinion of Brendan that she wasn’t a perfect little Barbie-doll cheerleader type. He might be an insensitive, selfish jerk for trying to turn me into his kept boy, but he wasn’t so clueless that he couldn’t see the beauty in a woman a lot of guys would have overlooked, enough to have remained committed to her for twenty-five years.