What Happens to Goodbye(24)

She shrugged. “Experience. Dave’s house is not the place you want to ooking for a snack. Unless you’ve got a real yen for wheat germ and veggie jerky.”
“Veggie jerky?”
“Dried vegetables,” she explained.
I raised my eyebrows.
“Yep. It tastes just like it sounds.”
“Poor Dave,” I said.
“I think that’s why he likes working at Frazier Bakery so much,” she told me as a guy wearing headphones bumped me from the side. “The sugar and chemicals abound there, and he’s got a lifetime of making up to do.”
We were at my classroom now. Inside the open door, I could hear Se?or Mitchell greeting people in his cheerful immersion-or-else Spanish. “His parents seemed nice, actually. I was kind of surprised.”

“Surprised?” she said. “Why?”
“I don’t know.” I shifted my bag to my other shoulder. “You and Heather made them sound super-strict.”
“Oh, right,” she said, nodding. “Well, the truth is, Dave’s changed a lot since he transferred here. I think it’s a good thing, because he’s, like, a real person now. But it freaks his folks out. I think they liked it better when he was just like them, completely under their control.”
“Yeah. I get that.” I was thinking of my mother as I said this, the pleading, desperate tone of her final words before I’d hung up on her. Stop trying, I wanted to tell her, and make her understand. Stop forcing it and I just might come to you. I just might. “But you can’t help it if you change, I guess. It just happens.”
“Yeah, it does.” She smiled. “Hey, I’ll see you later, okay?”
I nodded, and she turned around, stuffing her hands in her jacket pockets and starting back down the hallway. I thought of her sitting on that bench a few days earlier, leaning forward to listen as Dave stood with his parents and the administrators. I couldn’t even imagine anymore what that would be like, to have so much—or anything at all—invested in a friendship. It was hard enough just taking care of myself.
The bell rang, and Se?or Mitchell turned, seeing me. “Hola, Mclean!” he said, beckoning me toward him, like we hadn’t just met, and only the day before. Odd how it was so easy for a stranger to assume such familiarity. Especially when those who were supposed to know you best often didn’t, not at all.
My phone, zipped away in my backpack, buzzed twice during Spanish. When I scrolled through the screen on my way to second period, I saw only one name, two times: HAMILTON, PETER. I stuffed it back in, deeper this time, picturing my mother watching the clock as she wondered how, exactly, I defined later. Minutes? Hours? Maybe she was calling to ask me. I wouldn’t be surprised.
I couldn’t believe she was bringing up the beach again. Ever since Peter had bought her that house for a wedding gift—because houses are standard gifts, right?—she’d been pushing me to come there for a visit. Before now, it was always too difficult, involving at least one flight and possibly two, far enough away from everything that I could argue my way out of any invitation. Now, though, not only was I only four hours from Colby, the town where the house was, but also right smack on the route that took them there. Lucky me.
I had nothing against the beach. In fact, there was a time when I loved it more than just about anything. Because my dad was always at the restaurant, real family vacations were a rarity: it was like disaster could sense every time he ventured outside of city limits, and struck accordingly. But my mom had grown up at the coast, in South Carolina, and she loved nothing more than to take off on impulse and just drive east until she saw the ocean. It didn’t matter if it was the hottest day in July or the dead of February. I’d come home from school, or wake up on a Saturday morning, and she’d have that look on her face.
“Road trip?” she’d ask, but she knew I wouldn’t say no. The car would already be packed with our pillows, a cooler, warm clothes in winter, beach chairs in summer. We never wanted to spend the money for the nice hotels, even off-season, which was how we’d found the Poseidon, a ramshackle, 1960s-era motel in North Reddemane, a tiny town just down from Colby. The pool was lined with cracks, the rooms smelled just enough like mildew to notice, and everything from the taped-up bell at the front desk to the bedspreads had seen a million visitors and much better days. But the views were incredible, the screen doors of each room opening pretty much right into the sand, and it was walking distance to the other two businesses in town, which happened to sell everything we needed. After we stayed there once, we never went anywhere else.
We spent our days either walking on the beach or sunbathing, with breaks for food at Shrimpboats, which, as the only restaurant in North Reddemane, served breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Beside Shrimpboats, there was Gert’s Surfshop, a clapboard shack and gas station that sold bait, cheap souvenirs, and basic groceries. My mom and I, however, were partial to the handmade rope bracelets, decorated with seashells and weird-shaped beads, with GS written in Sharpie marker on the backside. We had no idea who made them, only that they were always on display by the front register and we seemed to be the only ones who ever purchased them, something we did on every trip down. My mom called them Gerts, and there was a time when my wrist never sported fewer than two or three of them, in various stages of wear and tear.

This was my mother as I liked to remember her, hair in a sloppy ponytail, wearing cheap sunglasses and smelling of sunscreen and salt. She read terrible romance novels during the day (her guiltiest of pleasures), and at night, sat with me on the rickety chairs outside our room and pointed out constellations. We ate fried shrimp, watched bad TV, and took long walks, whether it was bitter cold or the perfect summer day. At the end of the weekend, we’d drive back as late as we could, arriving home to find the house pretty much just as we’d left it, my dad having been there only to sleep, shower, and grab a bite to eat now and then. I don’t remember him ever being with us at the Poseidon, and that was okay. It was our thing.