“I’ll tell them, but I don’t think it’ll make any difference. They clearly don’t intend to move.”
“This is crazy!”
“Riley?” Jacy stood just outside her cubicle. “May I speak with you?”
“I have to go, Brenda. Monday. I want my house Monday.”
Riley threw her phone onto her desk. “What is it now, Jacy?”
“We’ve had a little scheduling snafu. The dance instructor injured his foot last night, so your tango lesson with him is off, and we have a five-minute slot to fill, and we don’t have a backup guest. Instead, we thought we’d try something really radical. An on-air colon cleanse. Totes adorbs! Right?”
Riley held her breath until she thought she might black out. Then she exhaled deeply. “No. And by that, I mean hell, no.” She stood up, unzipped the purple dust ruffle dress, and let it fall to the floor. She was standing in the middle of the newsroom in her panties and bra, rediscovering the liberating sensation of knowing that once again her give-a-shit had got up and gone. She pulled a promotional WDHM T-shirt over her head and stepped into her own jeans.
Jacy gaped. “What are you doing?”
“I’m quitting. Right? Cleanse your own damn colon.”
* * *
The midmorning traffic on I-40 was light, and she made it to the Woodlawn School by eleven fifteen. She went directly to the Alexandra Winzeler Administration Building, filled out the necessary paperwork, secured a visitor’s pass, and walked to the Susan B. Foster Dining Pavilion where she found a sad little girl with a long braid and blue-gray eyes sitting at a lunch table by herself.
“Mama! What are you doing here?”
Riley grabbed Maggy’s backpack. “I’m busting you out of here, kid. Let’s go.”
61
Maggy peered out the car window. “Where are we going?”
Riley smiled. She felt amazingly lighthearted. “What do you say we go back to the hotel, get Banksy, pack up our stuff, and blow this pop stand?”
“Are we moving into the new house now?”
For a moment, Riley’s mood threatened to collapse. “It doesn’t look like our new house is going to be our new house after all. The owners decided they want to keep it. And since I no longer have a job, I couldn’t afford that house anyway.”
“Okay.”
“Okay? You’re not upset about not moving into the new house?”
Maggy turned and studied her mother’s face. “Are you?”
“I was, but now, I sort of don’t care. It’s, like, maybe it wasn’t supposed to happen.”
“Yeah.” Maggy nodded her head. “I think that, too. You know what I wish? I wish we could go backward. I wish we could move back into our old house, and I could go to my old school. And, you know. Everything.”
“You know that’s not really possible, Maggy. But I’ll tell you what, we could go to lunch and maybe ride past the old house and check it out.”
“Sweet! Can we go to Snoopy’s?”
Snoopy’s was an old-style hot dog stand near the St. Mary’s house. It had been Maggy’s favorite dining spot since toddler days.
“Why not? It’s lunchtime. You check your blood and take your shot, and I’ll swing past the hotel and get Banksy.”
* * *
Riley slowed the car as they passed the old house on St. Mary’s Street, and Maggy hung out the car window so she could get a look. “Look, Mr. Banks. There’s our house.” She held the puppy up to the window.
“They painted it.” Maggy sounded stunned.
Sure enough, the blue-green spruce color the house had been for the past decade during the Griggs’s ownership was now a bright goldenrod shade.
“Eeew. It looks like mustard,” Maggy said. “And look! They cut down my tree. And the swing is gone from the front porch. It looks terrible. Like it’s naked or something.”
“It’s their house now, sweetie,” Riley pointed out.
“Maybe I don’t want to move back there after all.”
* * *
Maggy ordered the Snoopy’s special—hot dog with chili, mustard, and onions, crinkle fries, and a Diet Coke. Riley had her usual, the chicken salad sandwich. They sat at one of the picnic tables and ate and burped, and Maggy snuck fries to Mr. Banks when she thought her mother wasn’t looking. The late summer sun beat down on their heads, but Riley didn’t care. She was savoring this illicit-feeling moment.
Maggy gave her mother a pleading look. “Do I have to go back to school now?”
“No. You’re not going back to Woodlawn School, and I’m not going back to WDHM.”
“You mean, like, ever?”
“That’s right.”
“Sweet!” Maggy’s face was wreathed in the kind of smile that had been missing from her repertoire for months. She tapped the puppy’s smushed nose. “High-five for no school, Banksy!”
“Hold on, missy. I didn’t say you weren’t going back to school at all. Just not that particular school.”
“Then, what are we going to do?”
“This is going to sound crazy, but I have absolutely no idea.”
“Where will we live? And where will I go to school? And you said you have to work, so where will you get a job?”
“The only thing I’m sure of is this: I’m done with television. The truth is, television has been done with me for a while, it just took me until this morning to figure that out.”
Maggy sucked loudly on her drink and waited.
One tiny idea had been floating around in Riley’s imagination all day. The seed had been planted the night before, when Maggy shared her fantasy about moving back to the island and being homeschooled on the beach. Or maybe the idea had been there all along. Maybe it had germinated when Nate Milas asked her if she’d ever considered working in the family business.
She’d told him that had never been an option for her. But maybe, now that she’d slammed the door on being Riley from Raleigh, a new window was opening in her life. All she had to do was find the courage to crawl through it.
* * *
It took longer than Riley anticipated to reinvent herself.
She’d shared her scheme with only one other person—Parrish—strictly out of necessity, since it involved moving into her guest room with a daughter and dog in tow, for the duration.
“It’s brilliant,” Parrish said, as they sat around in their pajamas in the den of her house in Country Club Estates.
It was, they agreed, just like old times living together at Chapel Hill. Except for a couple of fairly major exceptions.
“Except I don’t have to worry about walking in on you and your squeeze du jour,” Riley said.
“And I don’t have to get pissed about you borrowing my car, my clothes, or my Dooney and Bourke shoulder bag,” Parrish countered.
Riley had enlisted Parrish to expedite the refund of her down payment on the new house, plus an extra eight thousand she’d squeezed out of the sellers in return for Riley’s signature on a “hold harmless” document.
“Not that I don’t love having you and Maggy here,” Parrish said, late one night after a dinner of Red Dragon takeout, “but I still don’t understand why you can’t just go to Evelyn and tell her what you want to do.”