Along for the Ride (5 page)

      Chapter

      FOUR

‘For you.’

I looked down: sitting in front of me on a little yellow plate was a plump, perfect blueberry muffin. A pat of butter sat next to it, like an accessory.

‘Your dad said they were your favorite,’ Heidi said. ‘I got the berries this morning, from the farmers’ market, and made them fresh.’

While she was still clearly tired, now my stepmother looked a lot more like the Heidi I knew: her hair was pulled back neatly, and she had on jeans, a clean and matching shirt, and lip gloss. ‘You really didn’t have to do this,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ she replied. Her voice was flat, serious. ‘I did.’

It was two
P.M
., and I’d just come down from a good seven hours of sleep to find her in the kitchen, rinsing out a mixing bowl, the baby asleep in the crook of her other arm. I was headed straight for the coffeemaker and not up for conversation, but before I even knew what was happening she’d blindsided me with a hug and baked goods.

‘Because of you,’ she said now, sliding into a chair opposite me, shifting the baby slightly, ‘I got the first uninterrupted four hours of sleep since she was born. It was like a miracle.’

‘It really was not that big a deal,’ I told her, wishing she’d just leave it alone. All this fussing over a person, it just smacked of desperation to me.

‘I’m serious,’ she said, clearly not getting the hint. ‘You are officially my favorite person in the world right now.’

Great, I thought. Then I peeled back the muffin wrapper, taking a bite instead of responding. It was still warm, and delicious, and made me feel horribly ungrateful for everything I’d felt since laying eyes on her. ‘This is really good,’ I said.

‘I’m so glad!’ she said as the phone rang. ‘Like I said, it was the least I could do.’

I took another bite as she stood, shifting the baby to her other arm, then grabbed the receiver off the counter. ‘Hello? Oh, Maggie, good, I’ve been wondering if that shipment came in…Wait, are you okay?’ She narrowed her eyes. ‘You sound like you’ve been crying. Are you crying?’

Good Lord, I thought, picking up the newspaper and scanning the headlines. What was it about the women in this town? Was everyone emotional?

‘Okay,’ Heidi said slowly. ‘I just couldn’t help but notice… No, no, of course. What? Well, it should be in the office, right in that left-hand drawer. It’s not? Huh. Well, let me think…’ She looked around the room, then threw a hand over her mouth. Her voice rose as she said, ‘Oh, crap. It’s here, I see it over by the door. God, how did that happen? No, I’ll just bring it down right now. It’s not a problem, I’ll just pop Thisbe in her stroller…’

The person on the other line was saying something, the voice equally high and shrill. I took a gulp of my coffee, then another one, just as Thisbe began to chime in as well. I wondered if emotions were like menstrual cycles, if you got enough women together. Give it time, and everyone was crying.

‘Oh, dear,’ Heidi said, glancing at her watch. ‘Look, I’m going to have to feed her before we can go anywhere. Just tell the delivery guy… Is there enough cash in the drawer? Well, can you check?’ There was a pause, during which Thisbe went from sputtering to all-out crying. Heidi sighed. ‘All right. No, we’ll come right now. Just… hold tight. Okay. Bye.’

She hung up, then walked across the room to the bottom of the stairs, jiggling Thisbe slightly as she went. ‘Robert?’ she called up the stairs. ‘Honey?’

‘Yes?’ my dad replied a moment later, his voice muffled.

‘Do you think you can feed Thisbe for me? I have to run the checkbook down to the store.’

I heard footsteps overhead, then my dad’s voice, louder and clearer, saying, ‘Are you talking to me?’

Thisbe chose this moment to increase her volume: Heidi had to shout over her as she said, ‘I was just wondering if you could give Thisbe a bottle, I need to go down to the store because I left the checkbook here, and I thought they could cover this COD charge with cash but there isn’t enough…’

Too much information, I thought, sucking down the rest of my coffee. Why did she always have to make everything so complicated?

‘Honey, I’m not really at a good stopping point,’ my dad said. ‘Can it wait twenty minutes?’

Thisbe howled in response, pretty much answering this question. ‘Um,’ Heidi said, looking down at her, ‘I don’t know –’

‘Fine,’ my dad said, and instantly I recognized his tone, put upon and petulant.
Fine
, he’d said to my mom, you just support us with your job.
Fine
, I guess you do know more about what the publishing industry wants.
Fine
, I’ll just give up my writing altogether, it’s not like I was ever nominated for a National Book Award. ‘Just give me a minute, and I’ll –’

‘I’ll take it down there,’ I said, pushing my chair back. Heidi glanced over at me, surprised, but not nearly as much as I was myself. I thought I’d given up this kind of co-dependent behavior years ago. ‘I want to go up to the beach anyway.’

‘Are you sure?’ Heidi asked. ‘Because you were such a help last night, I don’t want to ask you to –’

‘She’s offering, Heidi,’ my dad said. I still couldn’t see him, only hear his voice, booming down from sights unseen, like God. ‘Don’t be a martyr.’

Which was good advice, I was thinking ten minutes later, as I walked down the boardwalk, the checkbook – and some muffins for the girls! – in hand. Twenty-four hours in Colby and already I didn’t recognize myself. My mother would be disgusted, I thought. I knew I was.

When I walked into Clementine’s, the first thing I saw was the dark-haired girl from the night before standing by the counter talking to a UPS guy. ‘The thing is,’ she was saying, ‘I know it’s stupid that I’m still crying over him. But we went out for, like, two years. It wasn’t just a fling. We were serious, as serious as things like that can be. So some days, like today… it’s just hard.’

The UPS man, who looked decidedly uncomfortable, brightened at the sight of me. ‘Looks like your checkbook’s here,’ he said.

‘Oh!’ She turned to face me, then blinked, confused. ‘Is Heidi… are you… ?’

‘Her stepdaughter,’ I explained.

‘Really? That’s great. Are you here to help with the baby?’

‘Not –’

‘I can’t wait to meet her,’ she said before I could finish. ‘And I love her name! It’s so unusual. Although I thought Heidi was naming her Isabel or Caroline? But maybe I was wrong…’

I handed over the checkbook, then the bag. When she glanced at it, quizzical, I added, ‘Muffins.’

‘Really?’ she said excitedly, opening the bag. ‘Oh, these smell delicious. Here, Ramon, you want one?’ She offered the bag to the UPS guy, who reached in and took one, then to me. I shook my head, and she helped herself. ‘Thanks so much. Here, I’ll just write the check quick and send it back with you, because I think Heidi needed it for some bill stuff, and I wouldn’t want you to have to make another trip. Although it is handy to have it here, but at the same time…’

I nodded – too much information, again – then walked over to a display of jeans, leaving her to chatter on. Behind the jeans, tucked away against a back wall, were some bathing suits on sale, so I started picking through them. I was checking out a red, boy-short bikini that wasn’t entirely hideous when I heard the front door chime.

‘I brought caffeine,’ a girl’s voice called out. ‘Double mocha, extra whip. Your favorite.’

‘And I,’ another chimed in, ‘have the very latest issue of
Hollyworld
. They just got dropped at the newsstand, like, ten minutes ago.’

‘You guys!’ Maggie squealed. I glanced over, but because of the rack of suits, my view was blocked: she was all I could see now, as Ramon had clearly left the building, lucky guy. ‘What’s the occasion?’

No one spoke for a moment, and I went back to my browsing. Then one of the girls said, ‘Well… the truth is, we have something we have to tell you.’

‘Tell me?’ Maggie said.

‘Yes,’ the other girl told her. There was a pause. Then, ‘Now, before we do, I want to stress that this is for your own good. Okay?’

‘Okay,’ Maggie said slowly. ‘But I don’t like the sound of –’

‘Jake hooked up with another girl last night,’ the first girl blurted out. ‘At the Tip.’

Oh, shit, I thought.

‘What?’ Maggie gasped.

‘Leah!’ one girl said. ‘Jesus. I thought we agreed we were going to break it to her gently.’

‘
You
wanted to break it to her gently,’ Leah replied. ‘I said we should just do it fast and all at once, like an eyebrow wax.’

‘Are you guys serious?’ Maggie’s voice was tight, high, and I shrank farther into the bathing suits, wondering if there was a back exit. ‘How do you know? Who was it? I mean, how…’

‘We were there,’ Leah said flatly. ‘We saw her show up and we saw them talking and then walk off to the dunes together.’

‘And you didn’t stop him?’ Maggie shrieked.

‘Hey,’ the other girl said. ‘Calm down, okay?’

‘Don’t tell me to calm down, okay, Esther? Who was she?’

Another silence. Stupid Heidi and her stupid checkbook, I thought, burying myself more deeply into the nearby one-pieces. ‘We don’t know,’ Leah said. ‘Some summer girl, a tourist.’

‘Well, what did she look like?’ Maggie demanded.

‘Does it really matter?’ Esther replied.

‘Of course it matters! It’s paramount.’

‘It is not,’ Leah said with a sigh, ‘paramount.’

‘Was she cuter than me?’ Maggie asked. ‘Taller? I bet she was a blonde. Was she a blonde?’

Silence. I peered out from behind the rack of suits, by this point not surprised at all to see the redhead and the girl in the pigtails from the bonfire. They exchanged a look before pigtails – Esther – said, ‘She had black hair and fair skin. Taller than you, but kind of bony.’

‘And her skin wasn’t that great,’ the redhead, who had to be Leah, added.

I felt myself flinch, hearing this. First, I was not bony. And okay, so I had a couple of zits, but they were temporary, not a condition. And anyway, who were they to say –

Suddenly, the bathing-suit rack before me parted right down the middle, like the Red Sea. And just like that, with a clattering of hangers, I found myself face to face with Maggie.

‘Did she,’ she said, narrowing her eyes at me, ‘look like this, maybe?’

‘Holy crap,’ Leah said. Beside her, Esther slapped a hand over her mouth.

‘I can’t
believe
this,’ Maggie said as I fought the urge to try to protect myself with a nearby bandeau. ‘Did you hook up with Jake last night?’

I swallowed, the sound seeming louder than a gunshot. ‘It wasn’t,’ I began, then realized my voice was wavering and stopped, taking a breath. ‘It was nothing.’

Maggie sucked in a breath, her cheeks hollowing. ‘Nothing,’ she repeated. Then she dropped her hands from the suits on the rack, letting them flop to her sides. ‘You hook up with the love of my
life
, the boy I wanted to
marry
–’

‘Oh, man,’ Leah said. ‘Here we go.’

‘And it’s
nothing
? Really?’

‘Maggie,’ Esther said, walking over, ‘come on. It’s not about her.’

‘Then what it is about, exactly?’

Esther sighed. ‘You knew this was going to happen sooner or later.’

‘No,’ Maggie protested. ‘I didn’t know that. I didn’t know that at all.’

‘Yes, you did.’ Esther put her hand on her shoulder, squeezing it. ‘Face it. If it wasn’t her, it just would have been some other girl.’

‘Some other stupid girl, ’ Leah added, picking up the magazine and flipping through it. Then, as an afterthought, she glanced at me and said, ‘No offense. He’s just an idiot.’

‘He is not,’ Maggie protested, tears filling her eyes.

‘Come on, Mag. You know he is.’ Esther glanced at me, then slid her hand down Maggie’s arm, wrapping a hand over hers. ‘And now, you can really start to get over him. If you think about it, this is probably the best thing that could have happened.’

‘That’s right,’ Leah agreed, flipping another page.

‘How do you figure?’ Maggie whimpered, but she allowed herself to be led back to the counter, numbly taking her mocha as Leah handed it off to her.

‘Because,’ Esther said gently, ‘you were still just hanging on, torturing yourself, thinking he was coming back. And now you have to let go. She kind of did you a favor, if you really think about it.’

Maggie looked back over at me, and I made myself stand up straighter. I couldn’t believe I’d actually been worried about her: she was tiny, pink as a powder puff. Thinking this, I emerged from behind the suits and started for the door.

‘Wait a second,’ she said.

I didn’t have to stop. I knew that. Still, I slowed my steps, turning back to her. But I didn’t say anything.

‘Do you,’ she began, then stopped and took a breath. ‘Do you really like him? Just tell me. I know it’s pathetic, but I need to know.’

I just looked at her for moment, feeling all those eyes on me. ‘He’s nothing to me,’ I said.

She kept her gaze on me a moment longer. Then she picked up the checkbook, walking over and holding it out to me. ‘Thanks,’ she said.