“I’m sorry for my part in it,” Leland whispered.
Fray shook his head. “I blamed you initially because you were the easy target. My first love, the one I couldn’t get out of my system.”
“When I landed here this afternoon, I was thinking about our first date in the hot tub.”
Fray was so hard he had to adjust himself, subtly—the last thing he wanted was for Leland to move her hand. “You’d probably be uncomfortable to know how many times I’ve played back that scene in my head when I’m alone.”
“Fray! Seriously?” Leland Gladstone the feminist might have been offended to know that she was the subject of his sexual fantasies, but Leland Gladstone the woman lying next to him sounded…flattered.
“It was a horny teenager’s wet dream,” Fray said. “Coming back out to the hot tub to find you topless?”
Leland propped herself on her elbow and gazed down at him. He could see that she was older—there were lines at her eyes and around her mouth—but she was still the same smart, sassy, complicated person he fell in love with another lifetime ago.
Fray’s upbringing, seen through the lens of 2023, might be described as compromised, meager, possibly even traumatic. His mother, Sloane, was wild and rebellious. She got pregnant with Fray when she was twenty-one and couldn’t identify the father; there had simply been too many men, many of them sailors in port in Baltimore for a few days before shipping out. Fray’s grandparents, Walt and Ida, took on the job of raising Fray. They were kind, but their household was abstemious. Walt and Ida didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, didn’t swear. They didn’t allow Fray to eat potato chips or Cap’n Crunch, or drink Coke or chew bubble gum. His bedtime was nine o’clock sharp; he had never once been allowed to stay up to watch Taxi, Barney Miller, or Magnum P.I. If Ida could hear his music playing through his bedroom door, it was too loud. Sloane would live with them periodically when she was between boyfriends and had nowhere else to go, and she acted more like an older sister than a mom. It was Sloane who had offered Fray his first cigarette at fourteen, his first drink at fifteen, his first toke of marijuana at sixteen. She did these things only when Walt and Ida were away or out of the house. “Your grandparents,” Sloane would say—she always referred to Walt and Ida as “your grandparents,” as though they were of no relation to her—”think I’m a bad influence on you.”
She was, of course. His own mother was a bad influence.
In the face of that, Leland’s love had been a life raft. As soon as Fray and Leland started dating, Fray stopped spending so much time at the Blessing house. Senior and Kitty had always been welcoming and inclusive, though Fray suspected they pitied him. He’d once overheard Kitty refer to Sloane as a “perennial party girl,” a term he knew was unflattering but also not the worst thing she could have said. Fray found he felt more comfortable across the street with the Gladstones. Steve Gladstone took Fray under his wing, often taking Fray along on errands to the hardware or auto parts store, saying he was grateful to have “another man around.” Steve and Geri came to every single one of Fray’s lacrosse games junior and senior year, cheering for him as loudly as real parents might have.
When Fray left for college in Burlington, he and Leland broke up for the first time. She was still only a junior in high school and they both agreed the mature decision was to split up and see what happened. What happened was that they spent a small fortune on long-distance calls, and there were plenty of conversations that ended with one or the other of them slamming down the phone. But every time Fray returned to Baltimore, his first stop would be the Gladstones, even before his own house.
Frazier Dooley had loved Leland Gladstone. She was a key part of his personal history. Last night on the beach there had been nothing to stop them from making out on the blanket like the crazy kids they once were before standing up and going back inside to lock themselves in Mallory’s bedroom.
Fray’s phone rings again when he’s underneath the covers gently nibbling on Leland’s hipbone, a sex move he feels he invented because Leland says, “God, nobody has done that to me in decades. Please don’t stop.” He hears the vibrating of his phone on the nightstand and when Leland says, “Who’s ‘Dead to Me’？” Fray tells her to ignore it.
After making love, they decide to go out for breakfast. Leland scurries into the bathroom to freshen up and Fray checks his phone. Anna didn’t leave a message. It’s nine thirty in the morning on Nantucket, six thirty in Seattle. He clicks on her texts, in case there’s an emergency with Cassie, their ten-year-old daughter.