Saugatuck Summer (Saugatuck, #1)(8)

I looked up as the troubled expression that had settled on Brendan’s face while I related being hauled away by the cops shift to gentle curiosity.

“The neighbors reported us, see? Because we were running around the neighborhood on a school day. My mom—who’s been an alcoholic my whole life—was too hungover to wake us up and get us ready for school in the morning, so we just stayed home, which got us reported for truancy.” I offered him a thin smile. “After that we lived with Grandma, and I spent my weekends and vacations with my mom.”

He blinked at that. Cue perfunctory apology in three . . . two . . .

“I’m sorry, Topher.” He slumped against the counter on the other side of the kitchen. “That must have been very difficult.”

Great. So now not only had I spewed words all over him, I’d made him uncomfortable. I hated this—hashing it over again—but there was no way around it. Not without rudely dismissing Brendan’s attempts to become better acquainted. But I had spent way too many of my teenage years brooding about it all, and now I just wanted to be over it and moving on.

“I think it would have been more difficult if we had lived with Mom,” I finally said, going for the perky I’m over it and can now look at it philosophically approach. “I have a rough relationship with my aunt and uncle, yeah, and let me tell you, my grandmother is so not the grandkid-spoiling, booty-knitting type. She’s a real ballbuster. But if I’d stayed in my mom’s custody, I probably would have wound up dropping out of some school whose diplomas weren’t worth the paper they were printed on anyway, and working for minimum wage the rest of my life. And that’s the best case scenario. But as it is, you know, I got to graduate from a top-notch school district and I’m enrolled in college, so really, I came out on top. In a lot of ways, I got lucky.”

And oh, had it taken a lot of hours of therapy and Alateen to get to the point where I could see it from that angle, even if sometimes I was just giving lip service to it.

“Your father wasn’t in the picture at all?”

“Nope. Never met the guy.”

His eyebrows lifted at that.

I shrugged again. “My mom’s first husband, the guy she married at seventeen while she was pregnant with my older sister, was in jail when I was conceived. She remarried a few years ago, but she’d been living with him for twenty years, and they were only married a few months before he died. I never lived with them, so I still think of him as my mom’s boyfriend, rather than my stepdad. But my biological dad? He was just some dude she hooked up with a few times after going out to the bar.”

Now Brendan was starting to look uncomfortable, as if he couldn’t fathom a family who was so lower class. White trash, as it were, my own genetics notwithstanding. Knowing that seemed to make him uncertain about how to deal with me, because I might as well be from a different planet. His parents had left him a beach house. His wife had gone to med school. He was a PhD. There was no way he was the first person on his family tree to be well-off.

Maybe he was starting to think I was too trashy to be hanging around his daughter. Shit, why had I blurted out my whole life story to him? I never knew when I was turning people off, and they were too polite to be obvious about how weirded out they were by me, but I knew they must be thinking it, which of course made me feel paranoid because I worried that they weren’t being honest with me, and that they really didn’t like me that much, and and and . . .

Yanking myself out of the sudden mental flail, I sprang up from my stool and practically scurried across the kitchen to load my plate and cup in the dishwasher, not daring to look at him.

“I’d better go do my swim. Thanks for the coffee,” I murmured, and beat a hasty retreat.

As I went down the driveway, I wondered when I was actually going to mean what I said about not caring what people thought of me.





When dreams are sent into a broken sky

They’ve got no chance to fly

And I’ve dreamed away my life

—Casey Stratton, “Broken Sky”

Oh gosh. The latest coffeehouse Mo and I tried had a piano. Apparently, they had live music on the weekends. I stared at it yearningly while we waited for our coffees. Yeah, I had my cheap keyboard, but a piano was so much better.

Mo nudged me. “Why don’t you go play?”

“What? No!” I cast a self-conscious look at the crowded tables. “You know I just play to mess around.” Mo gave me her patented not buying it look, which I deserved. I didn’t play to mess around. But I hadn’t had a lesson since the sixth grade, and I needed practice if I wanted to remember how to play. I needed to keep teaching myself. But my own family hadn’t appreciated hearing me, so I certainly wasn’t going to subject a coffeehouse full of customers to it. “Besides, I don’t have permission.”

“So ask for it.”

I shook my head and grabbed my mocha off the counter, heading for a table. Mo was always doing that—urging me to go after the things I coveted but didn’t think I could have. I was way too familiar with that road, though. That way lay rejection and denial and disappointment. It was best not to encourage her.



After coffee, we went out for a walk around downtown Saugatuck.

“Oh my God, look at that!” Mo stopped in front of the window of a body art studio. “Have you ever seen anything like that?”