Save the Date(15)

“You didn’t come in from New York, did you?” Linnie asked.

He shook his head. “Hartfield-Putnam.” Hartfield-Putnam Airport was a tiny airport twenty minutes from us, but if J.J. hadn’t flown in there, he would have landed at one of the big New York airports, all an hour and change away, leading to a much more expensive taxi fare.

Linnie nodded, then immediately grabbed her right earlobe, and J.J. and Rodney followed suit—this was our not it gesture, one we’d all been doing so long I didn’t know the origin of it.

“Seriously?” I asked, sounding more annoyed than I really was. This was one of the thousands of tiny things that only happened when we were together, one of the things you didn’t know you’d miss until it was gone.

“Can’t be slow on the uptake,” J.J. said, taking another sip of my coffee, then making the same disgusted face and setting it aside.

I didn’t have any cash on me—in fairness, I was still in my pajamas—so I grabbed two twenties out of the mason jar that had always held the cash for things like pay the pizza guy and tip the delivery person and buy up all the Thin Mints. It had always sat on a teetering stack of cookbooks, but there were only two left there now. I spun the lid shut on the jar, then pushed my way out of the kitchen door. The sun was shining weakly, and it was a bit overcast. I crossed my fingers that everything would clear up by tomorrow as I hurried across the wooden deck that wrapped around the back of the house. Beyond the deck, the backyard was a huge expanse of green, almost a perfect rectangle that backed up into the woods bordering our house. My dad’s garden ringed the front and the sides of the yard, but there was a big, open empty space in the center that was free from plantings. It’s where the tent would be set up and where the wedding would take place tomorrow, the spot that we’d always campaigned for a pool to go, without any success. The closest we’d gotten was a trampoline that split the space between my dad’s greenhouse and my mom’s office.

I crossed the deck, went down the stone steps, past the side entrance to the garage, and out onto the driveway. Sure enough, there was a black Stanwich Taxi idling there.

The driver inside was staring down at his phone, so I knocked on the glass. He jumped, and looked over at me, then rolled down the passenger-side window. “Hey,” I said, leaning in slightly. “Sorry about that. I have your money.” I glanced at the meter and saw that it was thirty-five dollars, and handed him the twenties, hoping the change was somewhere in the realm of the right tip amount.

“Thanks,” he said, taking the money from me and hitting a button on his meter, then looking back at the house. “Have you guys called me before? I keep thinking I know this house from somewhere.”

I glanced at where he was looking. Our house was from the turn of the century and had started out as a Victorian, but over the course of years and owners, it had Frankensteined (Frankenstein’s monstered, Danny always corrected) with extra additions and wings, into something that no longer belonged to any one architectural style. But it was still striking—three stories, white with black trim and green shutters, a widow’s walk at the top of the house and a wide front porch that got festooned with pumpkins in autumn and twinkle lights from Thanksgiving until approximately Valentine’s Day.

It would have been familiar to the millions of readers of Grant Central Station, since the fictional Grants lived in an identical house, down to the color of the shutters. And I had a feeling this was why the taxi driver recognized it. “My mom draws a comic strip,” I said proudly. “Maybe that’s where you know it from?” The second after I’d asked this, I felt my smile falter as I realized I’d just used the present tense, and that it was no longer technically correct.

The guy’s face cleared, and he nodded. “I think so . . . the comic strip about the beagle, right? The one that’s always eating everything?”

I nodded. Waffles the beagle was unquestionably the breakout star of Grant Central Station. He’d been introduced when I was five, and for a while there, the Waffles merchandise was selling like hotcakes. He was the only character without a real-life counterpart. We’d never had a pet—Linnie was allergic to cats, and my mom always claimed that five kids was chaos enough without bringing a dog into the mix. “That’s the one.”

“Cool.” He nodded and backed out onto the road, the only car on our always-quiet cul-de-sac.

I was just starting to walk up to the house when a flash of something pink caught my eye, and I whipped back around to face the street. Sure enough, Sarah Stephens was riding her bike slowly up the road, zigzagging back and forth. She may have been a twelve-year-old seventh grader, but that didn’t mean she didn’t have the ability to inspire a slow-burning fury in me whenever I saw her.

For most of this past year, Sarah had just been our papergirl, and if I happened to be leaving the house early and she was delivering copies of the Stanwich Sentinel, I might wave at her as I passed, but that was basically the extent of our interactions. But in the last few months, something had changed. For whatever reason, she’d stopped delivering our paper altogether. We hadn’t gotten a paper since February. My dad kept calling to complain, but Sarah kept insisting that we were mistaken and that she was delivering it, that she hadn’t missed a day yet. This had led to a standoff, both of us insisting to the subscription office at the Sentinel that the other one was lying. My dad tried to cancel our subscription, only to be reminded that he’d prepaid for the entire year. So now, not only did we not get our local paper, but we also had fraught interactions with the middle schooler who lived down the street.