Elizabeth
THE FABRIC OF FAMILY
I KNEW OLIVIA WAS GOING to be furious. Positively furious. I wanted to wait until the morning to tell her, but when she showed up at my door with a bottle of chardonnay in her hand and her best scheming look on her face, I knew I wasn’t going to be able to put it off. She was grinning from ear to ear. I was in trouble.
“He loves her,” she said, her voice gleeful.
I pulled her in the front door, putting my finger to my mouth.
“Harris,” I whispered, pointing upstairs.
Olivia rolled her eyes. Her cheeks were flushed. This is awful to say, but I loved her so much more at times like this, when she had about a half glass of wine in her. Not too much. But my best friend could be terribly serious, and she was so much more fun when she loosened up just a touch. But tonight, I knew I was going to take the fun down several (hundred) notches.
I almost broke down and cried right then and there. How many more times would my best friend walk through my door like this, like she had thousands of times since our childhood? Just before Amelia came back to town, Charles and I had had a very real conversation about our future, and, much to my surprise, I had finally acquiesced. No, we weren’t old yet, but we were getting too old to take care of such a large house. It didn’t make sense, financially or otherwise. Charles felt suffocated by the place that made me feel warm and protected. Robby and Trina weren’t interested in dedicating their lives to a house like Charles and I had. And I wasn’t sure how Amelia was even paying her rent right now.
Charles tried to console me by saying that we could live in the cabin behind Dogwood, that we would still be on our same land. Liv would still be right next door. Nothing would change.
But everything would change. The mere thought of leaving this beautiful home where I had carved my initials in the banister, where my great-grandmother had given birth to my grandmother upstairs, where my grandparents had hosted black-tie affairs and dinner parties that I had watched from the top of the staircase, where my children had taken their first steps, where my sister and I had pulled off the biggest secret of our lives… This wasn’t a house. It was the fabric of my family, woven thread by thread, memory by memory.
I couldn’t share any of that with Liv, I decided. Not yet. Not now. The sorrow was too big to digest. Pulling her into the kitchen and pointing to a stool at the island, I produced a wine opener from the drawer, got two glasses, poured, and handed her one. Then I sat down beside her, and we both swiveled so our knees were almost touching, the same way we had done since we were barely toddlers.
“How do you know he loves her?” I whispered.
Her eyes were glittering. “Did you see them dancing tonight? The whole town knows they’re in love now.”
“I don’t want to tell you this,” I said.
Her face darkened.
“But I think she loves Harris.”
Elizabeth made a skeptical sound and said, “Oh, please. They have nothing in common. It’ll never work.”
But I knew that they did have quite a lot in common. They both loved books and art and music. They both loved New York. She smiled a lot when Harris was around, and, well, that was good enough for me. Not that I was abandoning my dreams of my best friend and me being sort of related. I wasn’t. But I was willing to put my daughter’s happiness above that, I’m happy to report.
I shrugged, and Olivia crossed her arms. “Do you mean to tell me that we have done all of this—all of this—for nothing?”
Olivia is a dreamer, a talker. She will talk, talk, talk about something, and when it doesn’t magically materialize, she is flabbergasted because, even though she has done absolutely nothing to help the situation on its way, she feels like she has. I usually think it’s hilarious, but tonight it didn’t seem funny at all.
“I don’t know, Liv. I could be wrong. I have been wrong before. I think I’m just so happy to see her smile again.”
She took a fortifying sip of her wine. “I am, too. Obviously. But I want to see him happy, too, Liz. It has been years, and I’m just afraid that he’ll never find joy again. He lights up when Amelia is around.” She shrugged. “He always has.”
Now I was torn. I wanted Amelia to be happy. But what if she could be happy with Parker? We had thought she could be happy with Mason, but that was before, well, everything. And I felt grateful that she hadn’t gone down with his sinking ship. A lot of girls her age would have. And I was grateful that my friendship with Liv had recovered. A lesser friendship never would have survived.
“You know what, Liv? I think it’s time for you to tell him.”
She nodded stoically. “Are you sure?”
“She might settle down with this Harris. And I’m okay with that. But this also might be the last chance, if Parker really that way, for him to tell her.”
She took the last sip of her chardonnay and stood up. I stood, too, and tried to hand her the bottle back, but she waved it away.
“Nothing to do now but let the chips fall where they may,” Liv said. Usually, I had an idea of where I wanted the chips to fall, but, on this point, I was a little torn. I said a silent prayer for it all to work out. Whether she chose Harris or Parker—or simply lived out the rest of her life alone—all I wanted was for my daughter to be happy again.
Amelia
ASPARAGUS
I KNEW THE FISHING TOURNAMENT had gone even worse than I’d expected as soon as I saw all their faces. And that’s saying a lot because I expected it to go truly terribly. Maybe he had thrown up. Or maybe he had let a fish get away.
“Cool boyfriend you have there,” Mason said, under his breath, as he slid by me.
I glanced up at Parker, who rolled his eyes and shook his head, but then flashed me a tiny, secret smile that made my heart race—and my guilty conscience surge. Dad had gone straight upstairs, which was a good call because they all smelled horrific after a day of sun, wind, sweat, beer, and, yes, fish guts.
I took Harris’s arm and guided him protectively up the stairs. “What on earth?” I whispered.
“Well, for a second, I was the hero. I hooked a marlin, it trailed the boat for almost thirty minutes, and I did it. I reeled that sucker in. It was the biggest rush of my life. I had no idea what I was doing, but it was just instinct. My hunter-gatherer ancestors were taking over. I was in it. I was in control. It was man versus animal, and man would prevail. Everyone was yelling and high-fiving me. For, like, two hours, I was in.”
I wanted to say something, but I didn’t know what. I held my breath.
“And then,” he said, like it was a full sentence.
“And then what?” I asked, pulling him into my bedroom and closing the door behind him, motioning for him to sit down on the bed.
“Did you know that every person on a boat has to have a fishing license?”
I gasped and put my hand over my mouth. Oh my gosh. He didn’t have to say anything else. Every person on a boat had to have a fishing license. It didn’t matter if you were in the galley flipping pancakes when the fish came in. I was sure they got a ticket and had been disqualified from the tournament. All that beautiful prize money and all those bragging rights just gone, in an instant. I was so used to everyone I knew receiving a lifetime hunting and fishing license when they were born that it hadn’t even occurred to me. Shouldn’t Dad have thought of that? Or Parker? Had they set him up?