“Not the tent.” Rachel spoke in a whisper. “Seeing Annie Perley has dragged it all up. I couldn’t sleep last night. We should’ve told the truth. Like I wanted to.”
Lena crumpled the wrapper in her fist. A bitter taste rose in the back of her throat. “Nothing good would have happened.”
“What about what’s right?”
“Honey, Tim Meeker was a crappy father and a horrible husband,” Lena whispered. “In his final moments, your father helped us. That’s what’s right.”
Lena swallowed, hard, and stared out over the neighborhood. A jogger bobbed up the road, stopped at Lena’s driveway, put her hands on her knees.
“I’ll call you back,” Lena said, her voice dry. “Laurel’s here.”
Laurel hadn’t seen Lena’s wave. She reached into the pocket of her running tights and slipped out her phone.
“Laurel!” Lena shouted, and Laurel spun around quickly and dropped the phone on the road. She bent to pick it up.
“Is it broken?” Lena said.
“No.” Laurel held up the phone. “It’s all right.”
“Well.” Lena turned in a slow circle, arms extended. “What do you think? Do you want to come inside the tent to see? Oh dear.” Another wrapper lay on the ground by the gate. This was getting ridiculous. She was going to have to say something to Rudy.
She straightened up and turned all the way around again, but Laurel was gone, vanished so quickly it was like she’d never been there.
“That was odd,” Lena said aloud to the empty yard.
She’d check in with Annie after graduation. Lena considered herself an expert on dirty secrets, and Laurel Perley sure looked like a girl who was keeping one.
CHAPTER FIFTY
Jen watched Nan walk slowly down Main Street in a puffy black parka that emphasized the stoop of her shoulders.
Jen pushed her own shoulders down and back against the driver’s seat. She couldn’t stop trying to picture Nan at her age, Indian print top, long flowing hair, saying goodbye to her son, taking for granted that she would see him tomorrow.
Then that middle-of-the-night phone call, blowing up Nan’s whole life.
Jen was already tearing up. She should go inside, hands raised in surrender. Don’t worry, I completely understand. Not a good fit.
What if I start to cry during the meeting, she had asked Paul in a panicked phone call.
You won’t, he said, you’re a fighter.
There was a lot wrong with his statement, but she was too overwhelmed to pick it apart. Because she was not a fighter, or at least she did not want to be one anymore.
Nan walked gingerly up the steps to the coffee shop, hand gripped onto the railing. Jen waited until she was inside before stepping out of the car.
It was warm and steamy inside and she and Nan greeted each other pleasantly enough, ordered their coffee, and settled in the back corner, as far as possible from the people at the other two other tables: a couple in flamboyant biking jerseys, a woman breast-feeding a baby under one of those gauzy wraps and watching something on her phone.
Jen claimed the command seat facing the door. She pictured Paul nodding with approval.
Nan shrugged out of her coat. “Let’s get to it,” she said. “I don’t want to waste your time.” As Nan reached into her bag, Jen felt the conversation careen out of her control.
Across the room, the baby shifted underneath the wrap. The mom had dark circles under her eyes, clutched her coffee double-handed, like it was salvation.
Pal, Jen thought, you have no idea what’s ahead.
Nan pulled out her phone and slid it on the table. She didn’t have a passcode, Jen noted, and her fingers were shaky and too-deliberate. They hovered over the mail app and after some consideration tapped into the saved-emails folder.
“Ah, here it is,” Nan said.
The message was from Colin. Subject line: As discussed.
There were no contents, just an attached file that Nan frowned at over her glasses.
“I don’t believe you’ve seen this?” she said. She turned the phone so it was facing Jen, and she pressed play.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
All of the parents were grumbling about the eighth-grade graduation having been moved inside. They had all been robbed of that beautiful mountain backdrop, plus the auditorium had a musty smell and horrible acoustics.
But when the PA system crackled with the low resonance of the opening bars of Pomp and Circumstance, and Laurel and her classmates walked down the aisle in their Kelly-green robes, a satisfied hush settled over the room.