Wrong About the Guy(2)

He probably didn’t even understand my threat, which was fine, since I didn’t really mean it.

I carried him back to the house. He calmed down on the way, burrowing his head into my shoulder and cuddling close, and I couldn’t stay mad at him. It helped that he was so cute, with his big brown eyes, narrow chin, and wavy light brown hair.

My face was heart-shaped, too, and my eyes were also large and dark—we both looked a lot like Mom—but I had crazy curly dark hair, thanks to my biological father’s genes.

When Jacob was born, I wasn’t sure how I felt about sharing Mom with this little squishy stranger. There had already been a lot of adjusting in my life. She and I had been alone together for so many years, and then Luke came along and they were always going out without me. And then she had a baby, and I felt like here was someone needy and cute who was going to take even more of her time and attention away from me. But she kept urging me to hold him, and the more I did, the more I loved the way he smelled and his weight in my arms and the little noises he made, and finally one day I said to Mom, only half joking, “He can be mine, too, right?” and she said, “He already is.”





two


I was twelve years old and safely at home with my grandma the night Luke Weston met my mom in a Philadelphia alleyway. (It’s not as skanky as it sounds, I swear.) At that time, Luke was a singer/songwriter/guitar player who had so far scored only one moderate and esoteric hit, which played occasionally on a few alternate-rock stations and was loved by a very small handful of music geeks. That song had gotten him some early afternoon small-tent gigs at music festivals and the occasional booking as the opening act for better-known musicians.

That’s what he was doing in Philadelphia that summer—opening for a Portland band that had a lot more fans than he did. He had finished his set and was wandering out back into the alley to smoke a cigarette when he spotted a pretty, petite young woman with chin-length black-brown hair squinting down at her phone a few feet away. He assumed she was a fan, since she had chosen to duck out after he had left the stage, so he approached her with a cocky grin.

“Like the set?” he asked.

She stared at him blankly. “The set?” She was simply on a break from her job slicing onions and mushrooms at the hibachi restaurant next door.

A little sheepishly, Luke explained that he’d just been performing at the club, and she said, “Oh, I heard a little through the walls! That was you?” Later, when she told me the story, she admitted she hadn’t heard a thing, but she thought he was cute, so she figured it was worth pretending.

Luke found himself trying to prolong his conversation with the tiny, delicate woman with the surprisingly deep laugh and large, lively eyes. And I can’t imagine Mom wasn’t equally interested in spending the rest of her break with the thin, long-limbed, wavy-haired musician who had appeared out of nowhere. Still, they’d been flirting for only a few minutes when she spun her phone in her hand and casually mentioned that she had been in the middle of texting her twelve-year-old daughter. The defiant dare in her eyes and the lift to her chin both said, If you have a problem with that, don’t waste my time or yours.

He didn’t have a problem with it.

They talked until she had to go back inside, and by then they’d agreed to meet up after the restaurant closed.

He lingered in Philadelphia as long as he could, days after his gig had ended, meeting Mom for after-work dates and before-work lunches at our apartment, where he entertained us both with silly songs on his guitar. Eventually he had to return to LA, where he lived and performed semiregularly at a few small clubs, but he and Mom continued to talk and text and video-chat every day, and he flew her west a month or so later to come see him headline at his biggest venue so far, a club on the Sunset Strip.

That was the night that a hit-making music producer named Michael Marquand signed Luke to his label.

It was also the night Luke promised to quit smoking forever if Mom would agree to marry him. (Technically it was the next morning when he proposed, but they hadn’t gone to sleep, so it counted as that night.)

My grandmother and I flew to the West Coast in time to join Mom and Luke at a ridiculous little chapel tucked in between two huge casinos in downtown Las Vegas.

“Tell me I haven’t made a huge mistake,” my mother whispered to me as she pulled off the veil Luke had bought her in the gift shop and gulped at the air as if the veil had been made out of lead instead of lace.

“You definitely haven’t,” I said. Not that I was a reliable adviser: I was as caught up in the excitement of the sudden wedding as she was, and totally in love with the idea of having this handsome rocker with the mildly devilish smile for my dad.

Mom and I moved into Luke’s rental house in LA (small as it was, it was still twice as big as the studio apartment we’d been living in, and I had my own room, which was tiny and miraculous), and Grandma went back alone to Philadelphia, where she worked as a nurse. Her last words to Mom were, “He’s got to be better than that last one.”

She was referring to my father, a wildly romantic and brilliant older man who had said to the teenage Cassandra, “I love you madly and want to be with you forever.” His sincerity and enthusiasm rang true, and Mom had no training in identifying a manic episode. By the time he came crashing down, she was pregnant.

I was born shortly after he had gone missing, but Mom used his last name on my birth certificate, so I was named—and remained—Ellie Withers.