“Sorry,” I mumble.
He laughs. “Don’t be silly. I’m happy to be here. But the caffeine’s helping.”
“You don’t have to drive, you know,” I say. “We could take my car.”
“Nah,” he says. “This baby’s already gassed up and ready to go. I’ll drive.” He pauses and adds, “Unless you really want to. I just figure it’s easier this way. You can navigate.”
“If you’re sure you don’t mind,” I say.
We’re quiet for the first thirty minutes, except to make small talk about the route we’ll take down to New York, and the possibility we’ll hit traffic just outside Manhattan. Gavin yawns and turns the radio up when Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer” comes on.
“I love this song,” he says. He sings along with the chorus so enthusiastically that it makes me giggle.
“I didn’t even know you knew this song,” I say when it ends.
He shoots me a glance. “Who doesn’t know ‘Livin’ on a Prayer’？”
I feel myself turning red. “I just meant you seem young to know it.”
“I’m twenty-nine,” Gavin says. “Which means I was just as alive when you were when this song came out.”
“You were what, three?” I ask. I was almost eleven in 1986. Worlds away.
“I was four,” Gavin says. He shoots me a glance. “Why are you being weird?”
I look at my lap. “It’s just that you’re so young. A lot younger than thirty-six.”
He shrugs. “So?”
“So, don’t you think I’m kind of old?” I ask. I resist the urge to add for you.
“Yeah, you should be getting your AARP membership card in the mail any day now,” Gavin says. He seems to realize I’m not laughing. “Look, Hope, I know how old you are. What does it matter?”
“You don’t feel like we’re from two different worlds or something?”
He hesitates. “Hope, you can’t go through life living by all the rules and doing what people expect of you without thinking for yourself, you know? That’s how you wake up at the age of eighty or whatever and realize life has passed you by.”
I wonder whether this is how Mamie feels. Did she do the things she was expected to? Did she marry and become a mother only because that was the prescribed plan for women in those days? Had she regretted it?
“But how do you know?” I ask, trying to slow my racing heart. “I mean, how do you know which rules you’re supposed to live by and which you’re not?”
Gavin glances over at me. “I don’t think there are really supposed to be rules. I think you’re supposed to figure it out as you go, learn from experience, and try to correct your mistakes moving forward. Don’t you think?”
“I don’t know,” I say softly. Maybe he’s right. But if he is, that means I’ve been living my life incorrectly all these years. I’ve tried to do things by the book at every turn. I married Rob because I was pregnant with his baby. I moved home to the Cape because my mother needed me. I took over the bakery because it was our family business and I couldn’t let it die. I abandoned my own dreams of being an attorney because it no longer fit under the heading of what I was supposed to do.
Now I’m realizing that by always choosing the safe road, the one that was expected of me, I might have given up more than I ever understood. Had I left behind the person I was supposed to be too? Had I lost my real self somewhere along that road of doing everything right? I wonder whether there’s still time to figure things out and start playing by my own rules. Can I salvage the life I’m meant to have?
“Maybe it’s not too late,” I murmur aloud.
Gavin glances at me. “It’s never too late,” he says simply.
We’re silent as we drive across the arching Sagamore Bridge, which spans the Cape Cod Canal. Dawn is still a couple of hours away, and I feel like we’re all alone in the world as we cross to the mainland in the darkness. There’s not another car on the road. On the inky surface of the water beneath us, lights from the bridge and from the homes on either shore reflect back up toward the sky, pointing toward the stars. Mamie’s stars. I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to look at the night sky without thinking of my grandmother and all the evenings she has spent waiting for the stars to come out.
It’s not until we’re on I-195 heading toward Providence that Gavin speaks again.