What Happens to Goodbye(43)

Opal looked at her, then at my dad. “That would be great,” she said quickly. “We would love that.”
My dad, however, just grunted, then went downstairs without comment. A few moments later, we heard him start yelling again. But Councilwoman Baker, hardly bothered, was looking at the space where he’d been standing with an intrigued expression, like someone had told her a good riddle and she was enjoying figuring out the answer. Uh-oh.
“Look, Lindsay, I really appreciate you coming by,” Opal said to her. “If you want to just tell me a good time to get together, I’ll make sure we can—”

“Oh, dear, I’ve really got to run,” the councilwoman said, glancing at her watch. “But I’ll come back in a week or so. By then you’ll have more volunteers and a bit of progress, don’t you think?”
Opal swallowed again. “Um . . . of course. Yes.”
“The truth is, for now, this project has to stay here,” she continued, heels clacking. She was coming right toward me, and I felt this urge to jump out of the way, which was crazy. This woman was nothing to me. “It’s a good space and you did offer it, if I remember correctly. Maybe you can communicate that to Gus? I don’t think he realized it when he called me.”
The reporter let loose with a nervous cough while her photographer, for some reason, chose this moment to snap a shot of Opal. I pictured it in my mind, with the caption below: SCREWED.
“Oh, it’s going to really look like something when I come back, I just know it,” the councilwoman continued. Then she stopped, right in front of me, and stuck out her hand. “We haven’t met, I don’t think. I’m Lindsay Baker.”
To say I was surprised to be addressed was an understatement. It wasn’t just me either: behind her, Dave looked up, raising his eyebrows. “Mclean Sweet,” I said.
“Do me a favor.” Her hand, closed around mine, her grip strong, once I extended it. “Tell your dad I said it was really nice to meet him. Okay?”
I nodded, and she smiled. God, her teeth were bright. It was like she traveled with her own black light or something.
“Maureen? ” she said over her shoulder. The reporter jumped. “Walk with me. I want to give you some of my thoughts on that article. Bye, Opal! See you at spin class!” And then she was moving as if she knew even without turning around that the reporter would fall in behind her. Which she did, scurrying past me, the photogrpher loping in her wake.
We all watched them go, none of us saying anything until we heard the door at the bottom of the stairs swing shut. Then Opal exhaled, collapsing against a nearby table. “Oh my God,” she said. “Is it just me, or does anyone else feel like they just had a stroke?”
“She is kind of intense,” I agreed, walking over to the directions Jason had left behind and picking them up.
“Kind of intense? Did you even see that?” she demanded. “The way she comes in and rolls over everyone and everything ? God. It’s exactly the way she was in high school. And she’s so nice, at least to your face. All the better to hide her dark, evil soul.”
Dave looked up at her, eyes wide. “Wow.”
“I know!” Opal buried her head in her hands. “She makes me nuts. Plus, she’s, like, incredibly good at spinning. I don’t even know how I got into this! All I wanted was parking.”
We both just looked at her. Downstairs, my dad was yelling again.
“Well,” I said, after she’d been in this position, like an ostrich, for a good fifteen seconds, “parking is important.”
“It’s like, I know what I want to say to her,” Opal said, dropping her hand. “I plan to be professional and prepared. But when the actual moment comes . . . it’s not so simple. You know what I mean?”
Just then, the door banged open again downstairs. “Mclean?” my dad called up. “You needed to talk to me?”
Hearing this, I felt my own heart jump, remembering the real reason I was there. I looked at Opal, then answered both her question and my dad’s with the same answer. “Yeah,” I said. “I do.”
Ever since the divorce, and my ensuing epiphany that I did in fact have a choice and an opinion concerning it, I’d justified every bit of my anger toward my mom simply because of how she’d wrecked my dad. Cheating on a man with someone he greatly admired, in the public forum, and then leaving him for said person while his own life crumbles into pieces? Even now, just thinking about it never failed to get me mad all over again.
I couldn’t keep people from talking about my mom and Peter Hamilton on the street or at Mariposa, couldn’t go back in time and change what she’d done. But I could run interference with the morning paper, carefully taking out the sports section and chucking it into the recycling before he woke up in the morning. I could refuse to talk to my mom on the phone in his presence, and never put up any of the framed pictures of her and Peter and the twins she kept giving me for my room at home and then rooms, plural, everywhere since. I could talk about the past, our past, as little as possible, avoiding the entire subject of my first fifteen years in conversation whenever I could. He wasn’t looking back, so I did my best not to either.
But occasionally, this was not an option. Like, say, today, when in two hours I’d be sitting right behind the coach of the number-three-ranked college basketball team, on national TV. After two years of keeping everything possibly hurtful away from him, I was about to hand him a grenade. It was no wonder that as I walked over to meet him at a table by the window ten minutes later, I literally felt sick.