99 Days(8)

I laugh out loud—the first time all day, and the sound is sort of startling to me, unfamiliar. “First shift,” I tell her. “Well, sort of. I’m Molly, I’m Penn’s assistant.” I explain how I used to work here, that I moved away and I’m just back for the summer. I take a big, self-conscious bite of my donut when I’m through.

Tess nods. “That’s why I didn’t recognize you, then,” she says. “I’ve only lived here, like, a year. I came in as a senior.” She gestures at my donut. “Are there really more of those inside?”


“There are,” I promise, opening the flimsy screen door and following Tess back into the cool, dark lodge. “Bear claws, even.”

Tess snorts. “I’ve got that going for me, at least,” she says as we head through the old-fashioned dining room, hung with half a dozen dusty brass chandeliers. “I don’t know if I thought this was going to be glamorous or something, working at a hotel? My boyfriend’s gone for the summer, though, so I was basically like, ‘Give me all the hours you can, I’ll just work all the time and have no social life.’”

“That’s pretty much my plan, too,” I agree, glancing around for Julia’s coven of nasty friends and leaving out the part where the whole no social life thing isn’t exactly a choice. I like Tess already; the last thing I want to do is identify myself—or worse, have somebody else identify me—as her friendly neighborhood adulteress and family-ruiner. “Where’s your boyfriend?” I ask instead.

The lobby’s cleared out by the time we get back there; Tess picks a glazed chocolate donut out of the box and takes a bite. “He’s in Colorado,” she tells me with her mouth full, reaching for a napkin and swallowing. “Sorry, I’m rude. He’s doing some volunteer firefighter thing. I think he saw a Lifetime movie about smoke jumpers or something. I don’t even know.”

She’s joking, but I don’t laugh this time; my heart is somewhere in the general vicinity of the faded dining room carpet. Whatever’s replaced it is cold and slimy and wet inside my chest.

He didn’t see a Lifetime movie, I think dully. He’s wanted to fight fires since we were little kids.

“Is your boyfriend—” I start, then break off, unable to say it. She can’t—there’s no way. There’s no way. “I mean, what’s his—?”

Tess smiles at me, easy and careless. There’s a bit of donut glaze on her upper lip. “Patrick Donnelly?” she says, the affection palpable in her voice, the way you talk about your favorite song or movie or person. “Why, you know him?”

He was my best friend. He was my first love. I had sex with his big brother. I broke his f*cking heart.

“Yeah,” I say finally, reaching for another donut and forcing a weak, jellyfish smile of my own. “I do.”

There’s a moment of silence, Tess still smiling but her eyes gone cloudy and confused. Then I watch her figure it out. “Molly,” she says, like my name is the answer to a pie-piece question in a tied game of Trivial Pursuit, like she’d known it somewhere at the back of her head but hadn’t been able to come up with the word in time. Like she lost. “Wow, hi.”

“Hi,” I say, executing the world’s most awkward wave even though she’s standing a foot away from me. Jesus Christ, why do I insist on leaving my house? “I’m sorry; I wasn’t trying to be a weirdo. I didn’t realize—”

“Yeah, no, me neither.” Tess swallows the rest of her donut like a shot of Jameson, wrinkling her nose and setting the balled-up napkin down on an empty side table. For a second neither one of us talks. I imagine her calling Patrick in Colorado. I met your trashy ex-girlfriend this morning. I purposely don’t imagine what he’ll say in response.

“It was nice to meet you,” I tell Tess finally, wanting to get out of this lobby like I haven’t wanted anything since I got here. I wonder if she’s made friends with Julia. I wonder if she helped egg my house. It was stupid, to feel hopeful like that for a second. It was stupid of me to take this job at all. “I . . . guess I’ll see you around.”

“I guess so,” Tess says, nodding, raising one hand in an awkward wave of her own as I head toward the hallway that leads to the kitchen. I imagine I can feel her behind me the rest of the whole afternoon.

*

I’m sitting at the reservations desk in the lobby near the end of my shift, making a list of magazines and websites for us to advertise with, when the front door to the Lodge swings open and Imogen walks in. “Uh, hey!” she says when she spies me, clearly startled—she’s got that same look from the coffee shop the other morning, like I’ve surprised her and not in a good way. “Are you working here again?”

I nod, tucking my wavy hair behind my ears and trying for a smile. I hate how colossally awkward it feels between us, like puzzle pieces that got wet and warped and don’t fit correctly at all anymore. Imogen never treated me like a pariah before I left. “Grand opening in a couple weeks,” I try anyway. “Games and fireworks. You here to sign up for the three-legged race?”

Imogen shakes her head, smiling the kind of tolerant smile you’d use on a little kid who just asked if your refrigerator was running. “I’m actually supposed to pick up my friend Tess.” Her dress has buttons up the front and is printed with tiny leaves. “She works here, too. We were gonna get food and maybe drive over to Silverton and see a movie.”