Great Big Beautiful Life(67)

Mom flashes a naturally perfect, if slightly yellowed, smile across the top of the car. “Nice to meet you,” she says, then adds simply, “Angela.”

“Nice to meet you too.” Hayden hoists his duffel out of the back seat and comes around to shake her hand.

“Oh, we’re huggers,” she says, bypassing the hand and going straight for the kill, the same kind of firm grip and single hit between his shoulder blades, over before it even began.

“Thanks so much for having me,” he says as they separate.

“Oh, it’s nothing.” She flicks the glove in her hand. “I’m still not used to cooking for one, honestly, so this is better. Come on in, and Alice will get you settled while I clean myself up.”

“What are you working on?” I ask as we follow her to the front door.

“Well, mostly the strawberries and peaches, of course,” she says.

“What about the beans and peas?” I ask. “Are they ready yet?”

She nods. “Yep, and the cucumbers this year are incredible. I mean, you wouldn’t believe! Well, you will believe. Figured we’d have them in a salad tonight.”

She kicks open the squeaky screen door—the door behind it is never shut—and steps aside to let us pass.

Inside, Mom and I kick off our shoes, and Hayden follows our lead. Luckily, he’s not any more of a sandals person than he is a shorts person, so he’s wearing socks, which I didn’t think to warn him is a bit of a necessity in our house.

Even though we’re a no-shoes-inside family, when you spend as much time outside as Angela Scott, the dirt finds its way into the old floorboards. I watch him scan the entryway: the tidy rows of boots, clogs, and sandals coated in varying degrees of dried mud, the reusable grocery bags and totes dangling from the hooks drilled into the wall over them, the pencil marks where Dad documented Audrey’s and my growth spurts on the doorjamb on the left, which leads into a dining room that’s long been treated more as an extended pantry.

“You want to show Hayden to his room?” Mom asks me, draping her gloves across the mouth of a bucket sitting in the corner.

“Sure,” I say. “I’ll meet you in the kitchen after you shower?”

“Sounds like a plan.” She leans in and plants a firm kiss on my forehead. “Glad you’re here, kid,” she says.

“Me too,” I say. The truth, and not the truth.

Then she pats my shoulder and ambles down the hall toward her bedroom. When I face Hayden again, he’s leaning in to study the Polaroid pinned to the wall beside the front door. Mom and Dad, back in the seventies, standing in front of a newer and less rambling version of this house, their arms wrapped around each other, both proudly beaming, the day they moved in.

Hayden feels my eyes and looks over to me. “You lived here all your life.”

“I did, yeah,” I say.

“You must miss it,” he says.

“Sometimes,” I admit. “Come on, I’ll show you where you’re staying.”





21




The untrained eye might think this is a guest room. Or that, even if it was Audrey’s room at one time, it’s long since been emptied out and converted to the sparse little office with the fold-down Murphy bed that Hayden and I are standing before.

The untrained eye would be wrong.

This is exactly what Audrey’s room looked like even when we were in high school. A desk. A dresser. A filing cabinet. A bed that pushes up to the wall to make room for anything other than sitting on the bed.

Hayden catches me smiling. “What?”

“You just,” I begin, “don’t fit here.”

He frowns at this. “I grew up somewhere pretty rural, remember?”

“No, I mean, you literally don’t fit,” I explain. “You make this room seem comically small. Or, I don’t know, maybe it makes you look cartoonishly large.”

“Oh.” He cracks a faint smile too, looks up—not very far—to the ceiling, and then lets his gaze sweep around the room before settling on me again. In my chest, it feels like a latch clicking into place when our eyes meet.

“Are you used to having tiny guests?” he asks.

“This was Audrey’s room,” I explain. “She’s always been a minimalist.”

“What about you?” he asks.

“Oh, I’m across the hall,” I say. “Want to see?”

“Of course,” he says, following me over to it. It’s just as small, but nowhere near as sparse. I used to love it, but now it makes me feel vaguely panicky how full I packed the walls with photos, magazine clippings, notes my sister and I had written back and forth between classes, games of MASH we’d played on notebook paper, trying to predict our futures and pairing ourselves up with our crushes du jour.

Like Audrey’s bed, mine is covered in a quilt Mom made from repurposed fabric, but unlike the light, breezy colors Audrey had selected, mine is a disgusting blend of neons. “This poor quilt,” I say. “A victim of 2001 trends, like so many of us.”

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” he agrees.

“Oh, there’s a reason for that,” I say, walking over and pointing to one of the magazine pages pinned to the wall. An old Limited Too catalog, an advertisement for their room decor, wherein everything is sparkly, inflatable, or covered in highlighter-green and pink fur. “This is what I wanted.” I wave toward the quilt, devolving into laughter. “And this is my poor mother trying to humor me.”