Save the Date(121)

SUNDAY




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CHAPTER 27


Or, About Last Night




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IT WAS VERY EARLY WHEN I crept downstairs into the kitchen, dog at my heels. It was barely light outside, but I’d been lying awake for the last hour, so finally I’d just given up and headed downstairs. I’d been sleeping in Linnie and Rodney’s room. When Danny and I arrived home, I headed to J.J.’s room just in time to see Jenny slipping inside and closing the door behind her. I wasn’t really mad at him about this—given the night we’d all had, if any one of us could have turned it around a little bit, that seemed good to me.

I’d thought about going back down and sleeping on the couch again, but somehow, the thought of sleeping in the room where, not very long ago, everything had fallen apart was more than I could handle at the moment. As I stood on the landing, I turned and saw Linnie and Rodney’s room, the door ajar, and realized that since they’d gone back to the Inn, there was a room free for the night. I’d just gotten settled in and turned out the light when the door had creaked open, and I looked over to see Waffles nudging it with his nose. I was about to motion him over, but he was already crossing the room and hopping up onto the foot of the bed, turning around twice, and then curling into a ball, all with an air of detachment, like he would have done this whether or not I happened to be sleeping there. When I’d woken up, though, I’d found he’d moved a lot closer to me during the night, his head resting in the crook of my leg.

I stepped into the darkened kitchen, yawning, and opened the door to let Waffles out, noticing how only after a day, we already had our routine.

“Hey there.”

I jumped, startled, and whirled around to see my mother sitting at the kitchen table, in her robe, a mug of coffee in front of her. “Jeez,” I said, putting a hand to my racing heart. “You scared me.”

“Sorry about that.” She nodded toward the coffeepot. “There’s coffee if you want it.”

Considering I’d gotten three hours of sleep, maximum, I nodded and took down one of the mugs that still remained in the cupboard. I turned it in my hands once. It was a red Stanwich College mug—my dad thought it was the one that he’d gotten thirty years ago, when he went to interview for his assistant professor position, but J.J. had actually broken that one a decade ago and replaced it, and none of us had told him. As this thought flashed through my head, the weight of everything that had happened the night before came crashing down on me again. What was going to happen to this mug when my parents moved into separate houses? What was going to happen to the story behind it?

Halfway through filling up my mug, the dog scratched once at the back door, and I let him in—it looked like his paws were, thankfully, staying clean—and headed to the fridge for milk. It was packed with leftovers from the caterers, plastic wrapped neatly and fit into our fridge almost mathematically, like catering Tetris. I had just finished adding the milk to my mug when my mother said, “I think we should talk.”

I looked over at her and realized for the first time that she probably wasn’t up before anyone else, just sitting and enjoying her coffee. She was lying in wait for whichever one of us woke up first. “Yeah,” I said, coming over to sit across from her. She just looked at me, and suddenly I wondered if she’d found out about the near arrest outside the governor’s house. “About last night?” I asked, then realized this could be referring to many things.

“About what happened in the family room,” she said. I nodded, but my relief only lasted for a moment as I remembered everything I’d said to her—I’d talked to my parents the way I never talked to them, and the memory of it was making my cheeks burn.

She didn’t seem mad, though—mostly, in the cool morning light, she just looked tired. I took a breath. “Sorry for yelling like that.”

“It’s okay,” she said, then took a long drink of her coffee. “I’m so sorry you had to find out that way. Your dad and I had a whole plan . . . how we were going to tell you kids.”

“The rest of us, you mean.”

My mom winced. “Right.” She looked at me for a long moment, then gave me a smile. “I’m not surprised, actually. That you took it the hardest. You, my youngest, have always hated change.”

“No, I haven’t,” I said automatically.

“It’s not a bad thing,” she said, taking another sip of coffee, and I took one of my own as the dog started sniffing around my feet, clearly looking for some crumbs that had gone unnoticed. “Remember when you could no longer fit into your kindergarten dress? And how you cried and cried when you couldn’t wear it anymore?”

I nodded, even though I was mostly remembering the stories I’d been told about it, the pictures I’d seen, and the way it had made its way into Cassie Grant’s biography—how I wanted to wear the same dress, blue with sailboats on the collar, to basically every day of kindergarten, and how my mother had secretly bought three and rotated them. “Maybe,” I finally allowed.

“You don’t like to see things end,” my mother said, looking at me with a sad smile. “But if you don’t . . .” She trailed off.

“What?” I asked, in a voice that came out cracked.