“Well,” he said, looking down at his lap, “I guess I was hoping you’d be happy for me?”
I could feel the amazement written all over my face. “Okay. Yeah. Sure. I’m happy for you.” I paused. “No. I tell you what: I am happy for the kid, because every child deserves a great home, and you will be a fantastic father. But I am not quite happy for you. Not yet.”
I got up and walked out, feeling only a tiny bit hazy, with Thad calling behind me. I wasn’t sure exactly what I was going to do, but Harris’s car was already waiting for me on the curb. As I slid into the back seat and said, “Hi, Tom. Thanks for getting me,” I could feel tears sliding down my cheeks. I wasn’t so much sad as I was furious. I felt betrayed, like he’d known I had this one huge insecurity—that I couldn’t have children, which I had proven quite handily this year. And now he was rubbing it in my face. I tried to make small talk with Tom and seem normal, but it was pretty impossible to seem normal in front of Harris when I arrived with my tearstained face and shaking voice.
And as he pulled me into him, making me feel so safe and secure and happy, I couldn’t help but fall apart. Maybe I hadn’t done that enough over these past months. But, boy, did I ever do it then. I fell apart about my marriage and my family’s disappointment and not having Parker’s babies and breaking his heart all over again and breaking my own and knowing that, as much as I tried to push it away, I felt something for him that he could never feel for me. (I didn’t say that to Harris, obviously.) And I hated myself the entire time because this was what I had been trying to avoid. I liked Harris. He was handsome and laid-back, and, when we were together, I was the cool girl who didn’t have to talk about the future or “what we were.” Now I was ruining that with all these emotions.
Despite my better judgment, I allowed a rich, expensive cabernet to soothe my hurt feelings when Harris handed it to me. And when “Moon River” came on and I said I loved that song, I let Harris fold me into his arms and lead me around his kitchen-turned-dance floor, feeling so in sync with him that when he changed the foot he was leading with I didn’t even step on his toes. And I ate a delicious, thick steak, which made me feel full and warm and soothed inside. Sitting on Harris’s plush couch with a bottled water, the roaring fire feeling warm and good even though it was hot outside, I caught myself off guard saying, “I just want to stay right here forever.”
He shocked me by saying, “I wish you would.”
I looked at him wide-eyed, my buzz wearing off. I didn’t want to make too big a thing of it, so I laughed casually.
And he said, “No, really. I’ve been thinking about it. I know it’s early, but I want you to move in. Here.”
The vulnerable part of me wanted to eagerly take the bait that had been offered. But something was holding me back.
“After my giant scene, you still want me to move in with you?”
He laughed. “If that was your idea of a major scene, then yes, I want you to move in with me even more.”
“I don’t know what to say,” I said.
“Don’t say anything,” he said, waving it away. “This has been a big night for you. I know a lot is happening. Just think about it.” He paused. “I think we want the same things,” he said. “I don’t want to be married or have children. You don’t want those things, either. We have a great time together. We get each other. This feels like the real thing to me, Amelia.”
“It feels like the real thing to me, too,” I said.
It startled me to realize that, just a few months ago, all those things he had just said had been the God’s honest gospel truth. But then I imagined Parker beside me in that doctor’s office, holding my hand, how devastated he seemed as he’d walked out of my apartment just a few days earlier. How I had held myself back from telling him the way I felt when he was around, how everything had seemed right when we were together. In just a few weeks, everything I wanted had completely changed. But I couldn’t admit that yet. Not even to myself.
Parker
A REAL CATCH
WHY IN THE HELL DID Amelia have to bring this Harris guy here? I bet he got seasick. I bet he’d never fished a proper tournament in his life. I bet Harris knew not the first thing about the Cape Carolina Summer Splash & Fish, and yet here he was.
Now he’d be fishing with me and my dad and Amelia’s dad, and they’d get to be all chummy. Don’t get me wrong. I liked the guy. But I couldn’t get Amelia to fall in love with me if her rich, handsome boyfriend was around. This nonsense had me off my game, which is the only reason I could figure my mother tricked me into stringing lights in the town square.
“If you can, lift that strand just a little higher, Parker, darlin’,” Mrs. Stack said, breaking me out of my thoughts. All I could think about was that, when we were in middle school, we called her Mrs. Stacked. She’d been the subject of every Mrs. Robinson fantasy in Cape Carolina. Now the memory makes me cringe.
But lucky for her, we all started volunteering for the Summer Splash around the age of twelve, and, looking around and seeing that Watson, Spence, and even useless-ass Mason (who hadn’t been out of bed this early since last year’s Summer Splash) were here helping, it seemed like, no matter the original reason why, the action stuck.
I gave Mason credit: he was a bigger man than I was. Watson, Spence, and I were the reason the 2000 number one draft pick was living at home with his parents. I was still pissed at him for what he said about Greer last time I was home, but I was trying to let it go.
“Mace!” I shouted to my brother, who was on another ladder about twenty feet away from me. “Catch!” I threw him a strand that I had secured in my tree branch and he secured it to his, then threw it to Spence, and so on and so forth. After twenty years, we pretty much had this whole situation down.
I couldn’t see my mom or Mrs. Saxton or Trina. But I could hear them. Mom and Mrs. Saxton were continuing in the legacy of their mothers, the charter members of the Cape Carolina Garden Club, and Trina was the next generation to carry the torch. After four years, they’d finally gotten the town’s approval and raised the money to install a gazebo by the pond, and they were making sure that the flowers around it looked perfect. Or, well, actually, Robby was. Poor guy. He’d drawn the short straw. We’d all been there, though. Because the Cape Carolina Garden Club didn’t plant or prune; they pointed. Today, they were pointing at Robby.
By tomorrow, the entire square would be transformed with lights and flowers, food and wine, and, in the middle of it all, a dance floor with a band where the whole town gathered. Grandchildren danced with grandparents and neighbors with neighbors, couples and singles. Everyone had fun. I never got nervous about dancing because I’d been doing it my whole life with my mom and my grandmother, Amelia’s aunt Tilley, the girl with the pigtails in my third-grade class, and, yes, even Mrs. Stacked. Stack. Force of habit.
But the first time I brought Greer here, I danced only with her. I could see only Greer, in her long yellow dress, a flower in her hair. The night she died, I closed my eyes and thought about her under the twinkle lights that I had hung on the dance floor at the Summer Splash. That’s how I wanted to remember her: free and alive.