The Truth About Forever(16)

"Macy," she'd say whenever she called and found me home on a Friday night, "what are you doing? Why aren't you out?" When I'd tell her I was studying, or doing some work for school, she'd exhale so loudly I'd have to hold the phone away from my ear. "You're young! Go out and live, for God sakes! There's time for all that later!"

My sister, unlike most of her new friends in the garden club and Junior League, did not gloss over her wild past, maintaining instead that it had been crucial to her development as a person. In her view, my own development in this area was entirely too slow-going, if not completely arrested.

"I'm fine," I'd tell her, like I always did.

"I know you are, that's the problem. You're a teenager, Macy," she'd say, as if I weren't aware of this or something. "You're supposed to be hormonal and crazy and emotional and wild. This is the best time of your life! You should be living it!"

So I'd swear that I was going out the next night, and she'd tell me she loved me, and then I'd hang up and go back to my SAT book, or my ironing, or the paper that wasn't due for another two weeks. Or sometimes I'd crawl out onto the roof and remember her wild days and wonder if I really was missing something. Probably not.

But the roof was still a nice sitting spot, at any rate. Even if my adventures in the outside world, my God-knows-what, started and ended there.

Work, despite my mother's assurances, did not improve. In fact, I'd come to realize that the cold treatment I'd received initially was actually Bethany and Amanda being nice. Now they hardly spoke to me at all, while keeping me as idle as possible.

By Friday, I'd had enough silence to last a lifetime. Which was too bad for me, because my mother was down at the coast for a weekend developer meet-and-greet conference. I had the entire house, every silent inch of it, to myself for two full days.

She'd invited me to come along, offering the opportunity to lie on the beach or by the pool, all that fun summer beach stuff. But we both knew I'd say no, and I did. It was just one more thing that reminded me of my dad.

We had a house at the beach, in a little town called Colby that was just over the bridge. It was a true summer house, with shutters that creaked when the wind blew hard, and a front porch that was always covered in the thinnest layer of sand. While we all went down for the big summer weekends, it was mostly my dad's place. He'd bought it before he met my mom, and all the bachelor touches pretty much remained. There was a dartboard on the pantry door, a moose head over the fireplace, and the utensil drawer held everything my dad considered crucial to get by: a beer opener, a spatula, and a sharp fillet knife. Half the time the stove was on the fritz, not that my dad even noticed unless my mom was there. As long as the grill was gassed up and working, he was happy.

It was his fishing shack, the place he took his buddies to catch red drum in October, mahimahi in April, bluefin tuna in December. My dad always came home with a hangover, a cool-erful of fish already cleaned, and a sunburn despite the SPF 45 my mom always packed for him. He loved every minute of it.

I wasn't allowed on these trips—they were, traditionally, estrogen-free—but he often took me down on other weekends, when he needed to work on the house or just felt like getting away. We'd cast off from the beach or take out his boat, play checkers by the fire, and go to this hole-in-the-wall place called the Last Chance, where the waitresses knew him by name and the hamburgers were the best I'd ever tasted. More than our old house, or our Wildflower Ridge place, the beach shack was my dad. I knew if he was haunting any place, it would be there, and for that reason I'd stayed away.

None of us had been down, in fact, since he died. His old Chevy truck was still there, locked in the garage, and the spare key it was always my job to fish out from the conch shell under the back porch had probably not been touched either. I knew my mom would probably sell the house and the truck eventually, but she hadn't yet.

So on Friday afternoon, I came home to find the house completely and totally quiet. This would be good, I told myself. I had a lot of stuff I wanted to get done over the weekend: emails to send out, research on colleges to do, and my closet had gotten really cluttered. Maybe this would be the perfect time to organize my winter sweaters and get some stuff to the thrift shop. Still, the silence was a bit much, so I walked over and turned on the TV, then went upstairs to my room to the radio, flipping past the music channels until I landed on a station where someone was blathering on about science innovations in our century. Even with all those voices going, though, I was acutely aware that I was alone.

Luckily, I got proof otherwise when I checked my email and there was one from Jason. By the second line, though, I knew a bad week had just gotten much, much worse.



Macy,

I've taken some time before writing back, because I wanted to be clear and sure of what I was going to say. It's been a concern of mine for awhile that we've been getting too serious, and since I've been gone I've been thinking hard about our respective needs and whether our relationship is capable of filling them. I care about you, but your increasing dependency on me?made evident from the closing of your last email—has forced me to really think about what level of commitment I can make to our relationship. I care about you very much, but this upcoming senior year is crucial in terms of my ideological and academic goals, and I cannot take on a more serious commitment. I will have to be very focused, as I'm sure you will be, as well. In view of all these things, I think it's best for us to take a break from our relationship, and each other, until I return at the end of the summer. It will give us both time to think, so that in August we'll know better whether we want the same things, or if it's best to sever our ties and make this separation permanent.