99 Days(30)

Julia’s not convinced. “I am worked up about it,” she counters. I can picture her so clearly, her J.Crew clothes and her swan limbs, long and graceful. Julia’s a warrior, she always has been. I used to tell her that if I ever had to bury a body or wage a ground campaign in Tasmania, she was the one I would call. “I think it’s tacky. It’s tacky and gross of Gabe to bring her here to begin with, and it’s doubly gross of her to come when Patrick—”

“Patrick’s here with Tess,” Connie points out.

“Mom, that nice girl is a giant rebound, and everybody here knows it, so—”

“Can you give it a rest, Julia?” Connie sounds exasperated now, like there’s no way this is the first time they’re having this conversation—I remember, bizarrely, the summer we were eight and Julia decided she didn’t ever want to wear shoes, how adamant she was no matter how anybody argued with her. “Come on, we’re going to have cake. It’s your birthday, we’re all together, let’s not—”

“It’s not my birthday today,” Julia points out.

Connie sighs. “Liz, help me out with her, will you? Explain to her that Molly doesn’t matter?”

There’s a high, affable laugh—Elizabeth Reese, too, then, all three of them, shooting the breeze about me and my tacky, gross behavior—but all I can hear over and over are those last three words:

Molly doesn’t matter.

I can taste the metallic ticking of my heart at the back of my mouth. I know they’re not even wrong, that’s the worst part—it was absurd of me to come here, it was way out of line.

“Ugh, whatever, don’t bring Lizzie into it,” Julia’s saying now, disgust dripping from her voice like gasoline. “She isn’t worth it, blah blah, even if she is a filthy—”

“Are you guys serious right now?” an angry voice interrupts her—Gabe’s angry voice. I shrink farther back into the half darkness of the bathroom—heart pounding with even more force than it was a moment ago, if that’s possible, humiliated at the thought of him hearing what they said. “Sitting in here shit talking like a bunch of stray freaking cats?”

Julia snorts. “Like a bunch of wha—”

“I expect it from you, Jules, but, like—what the hell, Ma? Like, who even are you right now?”

There’s a beat before Connie answers, the silence hanging pregnant in the air. “Gabriel . . .”

“Molly was our family. Molly was here when Dad died. And I don’t—not to put too fine a point on it, but it takes two people to do what we did, okay? And Patrick’s my brother. I just, I’ve had it with this shit. I really have.”

“Easy, tiger,” Julia is saying, voice hard and brittle. Connie doesn’t say anything at all—or maybe she does and I just don’t hear it, how the back of my wrist is pressed hard to my mouth so I don’t sob outright and give myself away.

I slip out of the bathroom as I hear him stalking down the hallway, put a finger to my lips at the sight of his surprised, baffled face. I yank him around the corner into the kitchen, press him against the wall and plant a kiss against his startled mouth. “Thank you,” I keep it together enough to say.

Gabe just shakes his head and laces all ten of his fingers through mine, squeezes. “Come on,” he says, and nips at my bottom lip, friendly. “There’s a party outside, did you hear?”

*

Things start to wind down around midnight, citronella candles burning low and the after-dinner Stevie Wonder replaced with Ray LaMontagne crooning quietly about Hannah and Jolene. Tess waved good-bye a little while ago, her hair like a beacon in the blue-purple night. It’s chilly away from the fire pit, goose bumps rising on my arms and legs.

I find Gabe stretched out in a lawn chair, alone for maybe the first time all night, a mostly done bottle of Ommegang dangling from his fingers. I raise my eyebrows. The Donnellys were never strict, as parents go, and once Chuck died Connie basically gave up on discipline altogether—even if he’d lived, though, I think they still would have been do-it-in-the-house-if-you’re-going-to-do-it kind of parents. But as he sits up, I can tell Gabe’s drunker than is really toward at a family affair. “Hi,” I tell him, perching at the edge of the lawn chair, down by his tan ankles. “I should probably think about an alternate route home, huh?”

Gabe furrows his brow in mock consternation, then grins. “I . . . definitely shouldn’t drive, yeah,” he says cheerfully, reaching for my hand and tugging until I scoot closer on the chair, the heat of his body bleeding through his T-shirt and mine. “I’ll find somebody to take you, though.”

“I could take your car,” I suggest. “I could drive it back tomorrow before work, or—”

Gabe shakes his head. “I gotta open the shop tomorrow,” he tells me, then, like he’s just realizing: “Ugh, I gotta open the shop tomorrow, I’m stupid, I’m gonna hurt. Anyway. Let me see if—”

“I can take her.”

I startle, head whipping around in the darkness: There’s Patrick, hands in his pockets and the same hard, unfamiliar stare I’ve gotten used to lately, like we never slept side by side in the hayloft in summer or told each other our ugliest fears. He scratches at a mosquito bite on his elbow, idle.