Roman Holiday: The Adventure Continues (17 page)

Not that she wanted to get up. She ought to. She should help Esther, but Stanley was already over there, making whatever Stanley’s version of a move was, and it was nice to let someone else be in charge for a while.

Plus, the number of men she’d slept with who were interested in sitting on green lawns
with an arm around her waist, letting her rest between their thighs, was very short.

It was a list of one, actually.

So she would take her romantic lawn-sitting, thank you, even in this less-cozy guise.

“How are you doing?” Roman asked.

She plucked at the sleeve of his black hoodie.
Is shit-blind with panic a thing?

“I’m nervous,” she said. “Because I’m dumb.”

How strange was it that Roman had on a black hoodie? He’d bought it at REI. It made him look like an ordinary person, except more beautiful, and seeing him zip it up this morning in the tent had shoved a shish-kebab skewer of affection right through her heart.

Which was also dumb.

“I don’t think it’s dumb to be nervous. You’re on a quest, remember? Quests are scary.”

The quest thing felt dumb, too, today. What was this, trial by picnic lunch? Afterward, they would explore the caves, which weren’t really caves so much as pits and hollows, moist crags and shelves of rock formed where Lake Michigan pounded into the limestone cliffs of the Door County peninsula.

It wasn’t as though any evil geniuses lurked about, waiting for a chance to push her off a cliff so she would split her head open on the rocks below.

No, all Ashley had to do to get through today’s trial was talk to Esther about Grandma. Ask the questions she’d carried here from Florida—
Why did she cut me off? Why did she keep secrets from me? Why didn’t she let me say goodbye?

It wasn’t the questions or even the answers that scared her now. It was knowing that after she heard them, she might not feel any different. It was understanding that no matter what Esther had to say, Ashley’s future was up to her.

“Remind me what the holy grail is on this quest of ours,” she said.

“I can’t say it.”

“How come?”

“It’s too corny.”

She elbowed him in the ribs. “Come on. You’re not going to say, like,
enlightenment
, are you?”

“No. Close, though.”

“Inner peace? Karmic balance?”

“Stop,” Roman said. “You’ll nauseate me, and I won’t be able to eat lunch.”

“Just tell me and I’ll stop,” she promised.

“I was going to say something like
self-awareness
.”

“You were not.”

“I was!”

“You really were?” She twisted around to look at his face. He was serious. “You think I’m on a quest for self-awareness. You actually think that.”

“Not if you’re going to make it sound that way.”

“I can’t help it. It’s like you’re telling me I’m going to reach Nirvana in an hour. Become a bodhisattva. I’m about to wet myself, and you think I’m becoming self-aware.”

“I’m just saying you seem like you’re … growing into yourself.”

Ashley turned back around and looked at the water, because otherwise she’d be glaring at Roman, or possibly kicking him in the shins.

Growing into herself.

She was a twenty-four-year-old woman who kept all her worst feelings trapped in a well with a lid on top of them. A woman who’d spent years giving people whatever version of herself they seemed to want—party-girl bartender, adorable tour guide, long-suffering girlfriend, incompetent nonprofit employee, rebellious daughter, world-traveling granddaughter.

It was only with Roman that she’d started to find the edges of herself, the boundaries of her own needs and desires. Arguing with him, talking to him, making love with him—he was the only person she’d ever met who didn’t seem to want her to be anything for him. The only person who wanted her to be whoever she was.

It felt so good to be with Roman.

But Ashley didn’t know what came next. How much further would she have to go to get to a place where she could live in this home she’d found with him? Was it even possible? It didn’t feel possible, and that scared her more than anything, because whatever her flaws, she’d always been someone who approached the future with optimism.

She ought to be able to imagine a way for them to be happy, but she couldn’t.

“I think you have the wrong idea about me,” she told him.

“Probably. I have a lot of wrong ideas.” He plucked a grass stem to twirl between his fingers. “Are you ready for this talk with Esther?”

“I guess so.”

Ashley had been thinking during this morning’s drive about what she wanted from Esther, and she’d realized it wasn’t really answers she was looking for. What she wanted was for Esther to tell her what Susan and Ashley had looked like to her.

Draw me a portrait
, she would say, because Esther was an artist, and she believed in the ability of portraits to reveal the essential nature of their subjects.
Tell me what we were
.

Because she’d thought she knew. A year ago, she could have drawn it herself.

She would have drawn her grandmother sitting on the floor beside Ashley’s bed in her gardener’s cottage bedroom. Grandma with a hot mug of peppermint tea in her hand, Ashley pouring out her complaints or confessing her fears.

She would put pencil to paper, paintbrush to canvas, and immortalize the moment when her grandma handed her the tea—cold, often, by then—and Ashley would drink it.

Or she would have drawn the first time Grandma took her to the beach to try to teach her to meditate. The morning when attempting to sit still with her feelings had made Ashley so angry that she’d thrown rocks and stranded seaweed and clumps of wet sand into the ocean, fistful after fistful, crying until she was exhausted and Susan put an arm around her skinny shoulders and said,
There, now, don’t you feel better?

A year ago, Ashley would have drawn a picture of the two of them at a campground together, bundled in blankets against the morning chill, eating pancakes at a picnic table and laughing about some shared nonsense from the day before.

Understanding, sympathy, companionship—surely that was love.

It was. She knew it was.

But her grandmother’s death and the events that had followed—the reading of the will, the loss of Sunnyvale—had shaken her up. Now when Ashley flipped through those memories, they were like pages in a sketchbook, or like those unopened boxes in the Airstream. They were fragments of the past, each with its own colors and feelings attached, each with some kind of
resonance
, but she didn’t know how to make them add up to anything.

She couldn’t tell her own story anymore. She needed Esther to tell it to her so she could hold Esther’s version up to the other versions she’d heard and listen for the parts that resonated because they were right, because they were true, because they were
her
.

What she hoped for was the truth—the grace—to be able to tell her own story in her own
words. Because if she could do that, she could move forward.

Forward was where she wanted to go.

“Do you know what you’re going to talk about?” he asked.

“I have some ideas.”

“You’ll do fine. You’re braver than I am.”

The sun went behind a cloud. Ashley shivered. “Stop saying stuff like that, or I’m going to punch you.”

“Bet you hit like a girl.”

Ashley turned around and socked him in the arm. Her fist bounced right off, but he hissed, rubbed his biceps, smiled.

He’d skipped shaving at the campground. His hair was quite obviously beginning to curl at his nape. She wanted to ruffle it with her fingers and kiss his cheek.

She also wanted to hit him again.

“Why are you so smug?” she asked. “It’s like you’ve completely forgotten I’m ruining your life.”

“I like this place. I like being with you. I keep getting texts from Carmen saying things like,
Where are you? Where are you
exactly?
What’s going on there? Where’s Ashley? What are we going to do?
And instead of making me freak out, they just make me think,
Shit, I
really
needed a vacation
.”

“You’re having too much sex,” Ashley said. “It’s turning your brain to mush.”

“Yeah, that’s probably it.” He moved her hair out of the way and pressed his nose into her skin. “Or maybe the real world just sucks.”

Ashley smiled and tried to focus on the trail of warm kisses he was planting along her neck. It helped distract her from the racing poison of her dread.

After a while, Roman lowered her hair back down. She sighed. “It’s terrible, though, if that’s what this quest is all about,” she said. “I mean, other people just buy self-help books, you know? Or talk to a therapist.”

Roman snorted. “You, sweetheart, are
not
other people.”

Ashley was still trying to figure out what to think about that when a car pulled up and parked in the spot next to the Escalade. Her equilibrium slipped away as she got a look at the driver.

Dark hair, dark suit … Not just a vaguely familiar face. Not a coincidence.

Fuck.

“Roman,” she said. “I think—”

But even as she spoke, the car’s doors opened as if synchronized, and a man and a woman stepped out.

“That’s Carmen,” Roman said.

Ashley barely heard him.

She was looking at her father.

Ashley got to her feet without any trouble. The lawn was uneven, the downhill slope steeper than she’d accounted for, but she only reeled on the inside.

Her father was here. Her
father
.

And Carmen. Who looked pretty much exactly as she had in Ashley’s imagination: like a Latina
Maxim
cover girl in a power suit and four-inch heels.

Roman had called this woman
Kitten
.

“Holy shit, and that’s the senator,” Roman said. “What’s he doing here?”

Roman’s hand found her elbow, as if he could steady her that way.
Ha
.

“Capturing me,” Ashley said. “He forgot to check his fence lines, and I got away.” She glanced behind her at Roman. “I’m a wayward calf,” she explained. “Not a person.”

“He can’t be that bad.”

He wasn’t—not by himself. Practically every Republican voter in Florida loved her father. He was their smiling Senator Bowman, so handsome, so sure of himself.

Ashley loved him, too, so long as they were separated by hundreds of miles.

“Just wait and see,” she replied. But then she made the mistake of imagining how it would go. How she would explain Roman to her dad. “Actually, on second thought, I would rather you two didn’t … Stay right here, okay?”

Before she could second-guess herself, Ashley took off across the lawn, meeting her father in the middle.

“Ashley.” His smile came a few beats too late to be genuine. Flashed in televised interviews and behind campaign-trail podiums, this particular smile of his made her think of hair oil and firm handshakes.

“Dad.”

His eyebrows were lifting, his attention focused over her shoulder. Ashley turned around to see Roman had come after her.

“Mr. Díaz.” Her father extended his hand. “I’m Bill Bowman. I believe we’ve met.”

Roman shook it. “Yes, sir.”

“The Miami Entrepreneurs dinner, wasn’t it? In the spring.”

“I’m surprised you remember.”

“I try not to forget the up-and-comers. Heberto told me you were going places in the Keys. It’s always a pleasure to meet one of our Florida businessmen.”

Roman’s return smile chilled Ashley’s blood. She’d forgotten that he could do that with his face.

He’d never told her he’d met her father.

“Thank you,” Roman said. “And I appreciate your work for us in Washington. The industry press has nothing but good things to report.”

“I’m glad to hear that. I’m a big believer in growth. We grow or we die, that’s an economic fact.”

“I hear you.”

“Guys?” Ashley cut in. “Maybe we could not do the bullshit?”

There was a moment’s awkward silence. Her father bounced once on the balls of his feet and cleared his throat. “Ashley,” he said. “I’d almost forgotten how … refreshingly honest you can be.”

“That’s one way to put it.”

“Right. Well. Can we talk?”

“Go ahead. I’m listening.”

“Privately,” her father said.

Ashley sighed. And then, internally, sighed at herself for sighing.
Don’t go down this old road with him
, she warned herself.
Don’t instigate, don’t react
. When she did that, she and her father created a feedback loop of rancor. He accused her; she antagonized him. “Fine. Let’s
walk.”

She started moving away. Roman caught her elbow. Leaning close, he spoke in her ear. “You sure, Ash?”

“He won’t leave until I talk to him,” she whispered.

“I could take care of this for you.”

She closed her eyes, because it was such a sweet idea, and so completely untrue.

“It’s okay,” she said. “I can handle him.”

She kissed Roman’s temple and walked away, crossing the lawn toward the corner of the parking lot. Her father followed.