I cover Jasmine’s ears. “A dead squirrel on her doorstep.”
Suze’s face goes pale. “Do you think he was the one who did it?”
“I don’t know. If it was, I would feel better because he’s clearly not part of an organized group like the LNB.”
“How could you possibly know?” Ben asks.
I raise my eyebrows. “He seems incompetent, more like the guy who yells at you for crossing his lawn than part of something so organized.”
Ben scowls. “Don’t underestimate people like him. There’s a lot of anger and frustration in the world.”
Suze is visibly shaking. “Let’s get you home and call the police,” I say.
She nods jerkily, and I feel a wild sense of the unfairness in the world and the weight of my own guilt. Suze has suffered plenty, mostly thanks to her father, but I’ve played a role, too. I have secrets I’ve kept too long.
Is it too late to put them right? I think of Blue River Electric. That might be a way to begin.
THEN
I THINK I LOVE YOU
Phoebe
The Saturday before Thanksgiving, I was up before the sun, and by the time my dad had his first cigarette and cup of coffee, my suitcase was in the car. “Anxious to get to Amma’s?” he asked with a wink.
“Yes. My friend Suze and I have a lot of plans.”
He stroked his thick mustache, eyeing me over the curling blue smoke of his L&M cigarette.
“You need to make friends here,” my mom said, bustling into the kitchen. She wore her silky robe, belted tight around her middle, and a pair of mules with feathers on the top. Her toenails and fingernails were red. She poured a cup of coffee. “What about the girls you had over to swim?”
I rolled my eyes to cover the intense embarrassment that still burned in me over that night. If she thought I was contemptuous, it was better than if she felt sorry for me. “Not everyone needs a million friends,” I said.
“Not a million,” my mother said in her direct way. “A couple would be fine.”
“Mom!”
“I’m saying that maybe if you reached out and tried to be friendlier, you’d have more friends, more of a social life.”
“Like you?” I shot back, because really all she did was work and have cocktails with her lawyer friends.
It was impossible to get her mad, though, and she raised an eyebrow. “I’m allowing the Thanksgiving week trip, but you are not going to spend the entire Christmas break in the back of beyond, hiding from your life.”
“Lilly,” my dad said mildly, lifting a hand. “Leave her alone.”
“Maybe Suze can come here,” I said.
“But—” My mother shook her head. “Phoebe, I hate to say it, but that girl is strange. All that hair, her weird clothes.”
“Oh, I’m sure! Don’t be so judgmental, Mom!” Heat pulsed in the hollow of my throat. “That’s not her, it’s her dad. He won’t let her cut her hair and makes her wear those clothes so that boys don’t look at her.”
“I’m sure it works,” my mother muttered.
I shoved my chair back with a loud scrape and said to my dad, “I’ll be in the car.”
With every mile between us and Portland, tension slid away from my neck and shoulders. It wasn’t just Suze. It was going toward my grandmother and the studio where we would spend our time painting, and the beach and tide pools and the taste of the air. My parents fought all the time lately, and not hearing their furious, low voices would be a relief all by itself.
Watching fog-draped pine trees swish by the car windows, I asked my dad, “Why did you leave Blue Cove? It’s so much better than Portland.”
He took a breath. “Well, kiddo, it doesn’t have a lot of opportunities for a guy like me. I was never going to be a fisherman or a hotel manager. I wanted to read books for a living.” He winked at me. “Now I do.”
“Couldn’t you have taught high school English?”
“I could have,” he said, “but to tell you the truth, I didn’t want to. From the first time I found out you could live at college as a professor, there wasn’t another damned thing I wanted.” He reached for my hand on the seat. “They call that a vocation. And knowing what you’re supposed to do for work is one of the best things that can happen to a person.”
It was the first time I’d ever heard this idea. “When did you figure it out?”
“Pretty much the day I walked onto the campus, freshman year.”