Dolly All the Time(30)

I let out a breath. “Then we need this,” I say. I cannot imagine biking up to Eight Oaks or even driving my Jetta past the princess chapel and ringing the front doorbell. “Hello, I’m here to see my boyfriend, Stewart Whitfield. Please show me to the correct veranda.” I’m not ready, and he could clearly use a micro-break.

He’s quiet for a beat. I hear a chair scrape the floor, and he sounds like he’s walking around, maybe looking out the window for a change. “Okay,” he says.

“Okay?” I’m brushing a significant amount of recently removed digestive matter away from a clean heap of shrimp, but this time tomorrow I’m going to be on a Whitfield yacht. My dad has Rikki Clark scheduled, so I’m off. “Let’s do it. I’ll make sandwiches.”

“No. Gladys will want to do it, picnics are her favorite. But wouldn’t it be easier to meet here? We could have lunch by the pool if you’re so worried about vitamin D.”

“Nope. Sorry, Stewart. That’s not how negotiation works. You said okay. We have a deal.” I’m about to insist he leave his laptop behind when I get a text from Gus.

Gus: Biking home with a kid I met clamming, we might hang out for a bit

I stare at my phone. This sounds like a friend. A warm burst of something bright fills my chest.

“I’ve got to go, it’s Gus.” I start scraping the shrimp into the refrigerated drawer, only half of it deveined.

“What? Is he okay?” There’s alarm in his voice.

“Yes, sorry. He’s fine. It sounds like he made a friend. I need to get home and act cool.”

“I don’t think teenage boys care if their friends’ moms are cool,” he says.

“No. I know. It’s just.” I take a breath. “Gus has been having a hard time socially in Boston. His friends are into a bunch of stupid stuff, and he’s been hanging back alone.”

“Smart kid. I respect that,” he says.

“Right? Thank you. I mean, totally. But still, it’s awful to be alone and thirteen.”

“Yes,” he says.

“Okay I gotta go. Boat tomorrow. At boat o’clock. I’ll text you later.”

I hang up. I need to calm down. I need to saunter home, like this is nothing. Like this kid is one of a million friends he could be hanging out with.

I text Gus back: Cool

Ridiculous. That is not something I would ever text. He replies with a question mark.

I arrive at Goose Lane, and Christopher waves at me from the porch. “Dolly!”

“Hey, buddy,” I say, just as bike tires hit the gravel driveway. I turn to see them, and an indescribable well-being washes over me. My kid rolling in with a friend. I want to grab it with both hands, the half smile on his face and whatever he just said to make the other kid laugh. I want to put it in a jar and screw the top on tight so that I can get in bed for years and just stare at it.

They drop their bikes and make their way toward us. Gus’s recent buzzcut may have been a mistake but the Red Sox hat can fix anything.

“Oh hey,” I say, like I’m a middle-schooler and I don’t want him to know I like him.

“This is Clay,” Gus says.

“Hi, Clay,” I say. “I’m Dolly, Gus’s mom.” Obviously.

“Where have you guys been?” I ask. Open-ended, casual. If I’m cool, they’ll come back. One wrong move and they’ll start hanging out at Clay’s house. Clay has long blond hair, almost green from chlorine.

“I rode down to the salt pond to check out the clamming. Clay was there too.” Gus takes off his backpack, and I know before smelling it that it’s full of clams.

“Great,” I say. “Clay, are you here for the summer or do you live here all year?”

“All year,” he says. “Starting at North Street in the fall.” Ah, high school. They’re the same age. I start to say something about it being my alma matter, but it tastes corny as it’s about to come out of my mouth, so I zip it.

“We were going to drop our stuff here and head to the beach,” Gus tells me. I think this is the first time his plans have been a statement rather than a question, but I go with it.

“It’d be good to get in the water. Lifeguard camp starts Monday.”

“I’m doing that too,” says Clay, my son’s new friend, a thirteen-year-old answer to my prayers.





Chapter 12





That night Gus and I wash the dinner dishes, and we don’t talk about his new friend or lifeguarding camp. We tread in that uncharged space outside our own lives. I tell him about the caller who wanted my medical opinion on her bone density, and we make pretend calls back and forth using bananas for phones. For just a while it’s like when he was little and I could make him laugh by posing his Spider-Man action figure in the fridge like it was scaling a half gallon of milk. Sometimes before I went to bed, I’d leave his tiny Aquaman sitting outside his bedroom door, chin on fist, like he was bored waiting for him to wake up. It was nothing, but it was free and he’d smile and run into my arms every damn time.

“I signed the papers for the new roof today,” I tell him, drying the pasta pot. “Should get started in about a month.” The third contractor, Izzy, was the obvious choice. She gave a slightly better quote than the other two, and she’s backlogged with other projects so she can’t start until early August. This dovetails perfectly with my immediate need to tell the fire chief I have a plan while not having all the money to pay her until late August. I bought myself some time for free.