“Ridiculous,” she said. “For me, it’s pretty much: cool car, big shoulders, facility with reference materials. But not in that order.”
“So, what are you going to tell this lady if you find her?”
“If she really did talk to her grandfather about somebody who really was Dot, I want to know what he said, I guess. Because even though Matt is a rotten potato of a person, he might have had this right. He found Rosalie, she made the connection when he showed her a picture of Dot that he probably stole, and the duck originally went from Kittery to Dot as a gift. That seems plausible to me. I also want to tell her what happened, I guess, because I feel like she has a right to know. If she was trying to help and he was lying to her, well…I’d want to know, if it was me.”
“And then what? Do you think you’ll sell it?”
She smiled. “That’s a whole other thing. If my mom and her sister and their cousins want to sell it, then we’ll sell it, obviously, and it won’t be up to me. But if they ask me what I think, I think that regardless of the kind of relationship it was, she wouldn’t have tucked it away like she did if it didn’t matter to her. I don’t know, I can’t think about it yet.”
“What would you rather think about?”
She smiled at him sideways. “I was thinking about June’s wedding. How I saw you at the reception for a minute and then not for another eight years.”
“You took off like a rocket,” he said. “I kept looking for you, but every time I spotted you, you’d be someplace else by the time I got there. It was like trying to grab a drink with Carmen Sandiego.”
She laughed. “Well, I wasn’t super excited about meeting Becca. It was an emotional day, just helping Junie and everything, and I didn’t have a date. I think I felt like if I met her and I didn’t like her, or if I really liked her, it would throw me for a bit of a loop.”
“You definitely would have liked her,” he said. “And she would have liked you. But I understand. Even though I knew you would be there, actually seeing you wasn’t as uncomplicated as I’d like to say it was.”
“Were you mad at me?” she said. “About how it ended? Were you still mad when we were thirty-two?”
“Not mad,” he said. “After all, you turned out to be right—I live here and you don’t. But I never thought about breaking up with you until the minute you broke up with me. My parents got together when they were in college, and I always really envied the fact that they connected so early.”
“Can I ask you something else?”
“Sure.”
“Tell me about Becca.”
He started peeling the label on his bottle of beer. “We met senior year. She was interested in botany.”
“Oh, a plant person,” Laurie said. “My mortal enemy. All the best people are animal people.”
He laughed. “Sure. But, you know, I overlooked it. We started dating, we were very happy. We both went to grad school in New York, and then we came back here, got married, because I was going to work for my mom and dad. But I think she thought it was temporary, you know? I think she thought we’d be here, and then we’d go somewhere else after a few years. And that felt okay to me, too, in theory. But then my folks were retiring, the branch closing came up, the job started to get harder, and at that exact moment, she got this amazing opportunity to go a very long way away. And I said, ‘I can’t leave right now,’ and she said, ‘Well, when can you leave?,’ and I said, ‘I don’t honestly know,’ and she said, ‘Well, in that case, I will be packing my stuff.’？”
“Do you ever wish you’d gone?”
“To Michigan? Not really. We almost got back together like a year after we separated. I was truly miserable and I asked if we could get together, and she was very kind about it. But when I got out there to visit, it was like the window had closed, right? She had new friends, new stuff, new things that she wanted to do. It wasn’t like anybody was mad anymore by then, it was more like…putting on an album you haven’t listened to for a long time and realizing it’s not your taste anymore. You have that well, I guess this isn’t mine anymore feeling even though you used to want to play it every single day.”
“Is it terrible if I say I feel that way about being in Calcasset sometimes?”
He shook his head. “It’s not terrible if that’s how it is.”