You get what you get. You do what you have to do. You stop crying. You stop sleeping. You turn yourself into someone to be reckoned with. You become a straight line, and then you become an arrow.
Tucked into the hotel duvet, Cleo logged on to Facebook on her phone. She clicked out of the app and then checked Lucas’s location. (Yes, she tracked his phone. Emily Godwin had suggested it, and it had never seemed smarter than now.) He was still at the coffee place. Surely it would close soon. Surely he couldn’t be falling in love with MaryAnne Newman’s daughter. Cleo tapped the Facebook app again. She didn’t want to tell Lucas whom he could and couldn’t fall in love with, but she might have to.
She scrolled through Matty’s page and his photos—he liked to fish in the summers in Idaho evidently and also had a dog whose breed was undeterminable. There was a recent picture with a woman, probably the twenty-seven-year-old, at a Coldplay concert, and all this just seemed so Matty. He was right, she thought; she was not the type of girl who went to Coldplay concerts and fished in Idaho, so maybe they never really would have worked. But maybe that kind of life would have been nice, even for a long weekend, even for an occasional long-distance romance. She knew that if she told Gaby about how he showed up and they had a few drinks and she rested her head on his shoulder, that she—Gaby of her firm no-kids policy and her likely no-marriage policy too—would squeal and think that maybe this was the start of something. You can be a staunch independent feminist and still love a Kate Hudson rom-com. But Cleo knew she would never be the heroine in a romantic comedy. She just wouldn’t. She’d made her peace with that years ago. When she left Northwestern on her own with a baby growing inside her.
She typed MaryAnne’s name into her search bar, clicked on her profile. She found herself inhaling deeply, as if she were about to get her flu shot or a gut punch or terrible polling numbers (which, incidentally, she never got—her home state loved her) and was steeling herself for it.
The lock on the hotel door beeped, then unlatched, and Cleo threw her phone to the foot of the bed.
“Hey,” Lucas said. “How was your night? Anything exciting happen?” He flopped belly-down on his own bed, then angled his face toward her.
“Very funny.”
Lucas propped himself up on his elbows. “What? Did something happen?”
Now it was Cleo’s rare chance to roll her eyes at him. “I know that you messaged Matty, OK? The jig is up.”
Lucas swung his feet out toward the floor and sat up. “Don’t be mad. I just . . . I don’t know, it’s kind of pathetic how you have no life.”
“This coming from a kid who is literally locked in his room when he’s not at school or soccer.”
“But I have a life, Mom. Also, that’s entirely age-appropriate—teenage boys are supposed to lock themselves in their bedrooms and ignore their mothers. But all you do is work.”
His phone blipped, and Cleo lost him to his texts for a moment. A grin spread across his face; then he typed something back quickly.
“Is that Esme?”
“Stop snooping!” Lucas yelped, his smile gone.
“Lucas, you’re sitting two feet away from me, typing with a ridiculous look on your face. That is not snooping; that’s observing. A mother is allowed to do that.”
“Fine.” He stood, walked to the bathroom, shut the door. Cleo heard the lock spin.
“We still have a lot to discuss,” she called after him.
He didn’t answer, of course, because he’d given her as much as he’d wanted to for the night, and then he was gone. He really was her son, she thought. And she didn’t know if this filled her heart or emptied it.
EIGHT
Cleo missed Monday in the office, and despite working for the entire six-hour plane ride home, she was now behind. Cleo McDougal did not like being behind, and anyone, from MaryAnne Newman to Arianna, her junior-most staffer, could have told you that. She was a scheduler, a go-getter, and never once in her history of schooling had she missed a deadline, not even that rocky fall of her senior year when she was still unpacking her boxes from her move into her grandmother’s and unpacking her grief from everything else.
She had just made it back to her desk after a committee vote—a bill on the childcare tax cut that she had cosponsored, which indeed made it out of committee, and now the real negotiating began: cajoling, bargaining, duping, and manipulating members of the other party to give her what she wanted in exchange for something they wanted—and had barely plopped into her desk chair when Gaby knocked. This was being gracious, because Gaby never knocked; she just announced herself.
“I just got off a very interesting Skype.”
“Uh-huh.” Cleo was rooting around in her bottom drawer for a protein bar. She found a box of Girl Scout cookies—Trefoils—and figured that would do. She’d bought a bunch from the custodian’s daughter last year. Franklin worked the evening shift, and since Cleo was always there late, they’d struck up a friendship. “Do Girl Scout cookies expire? Do we know?”
“Doubtful,” Gaby said. “That’s seriously your lunch?”
Cleo tore the box open and placed a cookie smack in the middle of her tongue as an answer. “Oh my God,” she managed. “Heaven.”
“You were definitely a Girl Scout, weren’t you?” Gaby reached for one, despite her admonishment.
“Brownie and Junior. My mom was our troop leader. I probably would have kept going until high school, but MaryAnne convinced me that we’d never get boyfriends if we did.” Cleo thought of the two of them, at Pagliacci’s, watching Oliver Patel and the other baseball players slide their trays down the line to the cashier and MaryAnne narrowing her eyes and saying, We can’t be Girl Scouts anymore, Clee. It’s over. Hot guys don’t feel up girls who are Girl Scouts.
“Was she right?” Gaby reached for another cookie, then reconsidered and placed it back in the plastic.
“Well, we quit. And I did end up dating Matty. Though he was not really the type of boy MaryAnne meant. I mean, you met him.”
“I didn’t.”
“Oh, right. I’m distracted. But she and I weren’t beating anyone off with a stick.” Cleo stacked two cookies on top of each other and bit down. “I did lead our troop every year in cookie sales, though. One year I had so many that we couldn’t use our dining room.”
“Of course you did.” Gaby laughed. “Let me guess, MaryAnne came in second.”
“Indeed.” Cleo laughed too, though she felt a bolt of sadness for her old ex-friend. Why had everything between them always had to be a competition? Regret.
In fact, Cleo had spent last night poring over her list of 233 regrets to assess if what had occurred to her in Seattle—more friendships, more appreciation for kindnesses, more room for art in any form—had made the list. They hadn’t, not really, other than the brief notation from five years back—I never learned to paint. Or sing. Or dance. Or anything. Maybe that could have been a nice thing. Nearly everything on there was a concrete wrong or a direct action that Cleo had taken: she was surprised to see MaryAnne internship essay buried in the first hundred—she could have sworn she never put pen to paper about MaryAnne. But then there were simpler items too: not taking a probiotic regularly, not ordering Lucas’s Christmas presents in the fall during Labor Day sales, the like. Yes, there was a shouldn’t have quit yoga, but that wasn’t really reflective, now was it? That was an action that she would like to undo. But did not. Had not. The yoga itself might lead to a more meditative, thoughtful state, but as it was on the list . . . not particularly insightful. Even, Cleo realized, her regret about her artistic pursuits. She could have tried something, done anything!, but she hadn’t. She’d been content to jot it down and carry on. She reread the list of 233 regrets and wondered why she hadn’t found them more propulsive, why they hadn’t sparked her to change, to make amends, and who she might be, how she might feel if she had.