Page 2 of Finders Keepers

Quentin Bell.

Quentin Fucking Bell. (That isn’t his real middle name, obviously, but I think it fits better at the moment than Foster.)

Now he’s just here ? Back in Catoctin and “Nina”ing me as if the last seventeen years of silence between us never happened?

This development balloons the embarrassment and hurt that have already been taking up the majority of my emotional real estate lately.

But it also introduces a modicum of panic and something that feels almost reminiscent of joy.

It’s extremely tight quarters inside my frontal lobe.

Might explain the dull headache starting up between my eyes.

Well, that, the incessant crying, and the grass pollen drifting over from Mr. Farina’s yard.

“Nina, sweetheart?” My mother’s voice comes from the sidewalk.

Right. I’m still squatting behind my car like an action hero in the middle of a shoot-out. I surface slowly, hippo-esque, cringing at the audible pop my knee makes. “Hey, Mom. I’m here.”

“Oh, I thought I saw you pull up.” Have to admire the way she makes it sound like she just happened to catch a glimpse of the street at the exact moment I arrived and not that she’s been glued to the window for the last hour. “But then it was taking a while for you to come in…”

“Yeah, I, uh, dropped some trash,” I improvise. “It went under the car. Didn’t want to be a litterbug.” My hand dives into the pocket of my hoodie and pulls out the balled-up, damp Auntie Anne’s napkin that I fortunately happened to stash in there. “Anyway, hello.”

My mom practically bounces on the balls of her feet in excitement as I lean in for a hug. She squeezes me tightly for a solid thirty seconds, then takes me by the shoulders. “Oh, sweetie, I’m just so glad you’re here!”

“Thanks,” I say, probably a little too sarcastically. Would it kill her to sound a tiny bit less thrilled that I’ve seemingly dropped a marble into a sort of Rube Goldberg machine of misfortune, the end result being my arrival back in Maryland?

I guess the thought shows on my face, because her smile turns contrite as she says, “I do wish it were under better circumstances, but it’s good to have you home. It feels like years since I saw my baby.” She releases me and pinches my cheek.

I frown and tilt my head, attempting to escape her crab fingers. “It’s only been six months, Mom.”

“And look how much has happened in those six months,” she says.

She has a point. When I was here for a brief visit over winter break, everything was going so well.

My boyfriend, Cole, had accepted an assistant professorship at UMass Boston starting this fall, marking the end of three excruciating years of long distance.

We’d be getting an apartment together at the beginning of the summer.

And the chair of the history department at the small liberal arts college where I’d been teaching had promised me a multi-year lecturer position.

I remember telling my mother how much of a relief it was to know I’d no longer need to plan my life in nine-month contractual increments.

Fast-forward to the first week of June and now there’s no Cole, no shared apartment, and, it turns out, not only no multi-year lecturer position but no position of any kind for me at Malbyrne College anymore.

How much has happened in six months, indeed.

(Although all of that actually happened within the last three days, because I’m nothing if not an overachiever.)

“Thanks for letting me stay here,” I say. “I promise it won’t be for long. I’ve already started looking for a new—”

“Nonsense. This will always be your home too, Ninabean. You stay as long as you need.”

“Thanks,” I say, tears nearly spilling out again. Ugh. The only time I’ve ever cried this much as an adult was when I babysat a colleague’s kids and they made me watch every episode of Bluey . “I’ll grab my stuff.”

She flicks her hands dismissively. “Leave it. We’ll have your father come grab it all.

You know how he loves feeling useful.” I’m not sure this is actually true.

My father loves having a task . Any task.

Whether it’s a useful one or not doesn’t make much difference to him.

The way I am with long-term goals, he is with extremely short-term ones.

But I’m not going to complain about not having to haul everything inside on my own, in front of the neighborhood, in some sort of walk of shame designed specifically for adults upon whom life has recently shat.

Mom links her arm with mine as if we’re off to see the Wizard and says, “Now, let’s get you settled inside. I made banana bread this morning.”

I sniffle. “With cookie butter swirl?”

“Of course, with cookie butter swirl. What is this, amateur hour?”

I follow her up the walkway to the house where I grew up—the one that apparently once again shares a wall with Quentin Bell, the first boy to ever break my heart.

···

As soon as I enter my old bedroom after my mother has completed her maternal duty of stuffing me full of pot roast and baked goods while telling me all of the latest hot goss about locals I’ve either never met or don’t remember, I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror above the dresser opposite the door.

My splotchy, swollen face is framed by my high school friends’ senior pictures that I for some reason glitter glued to the wooden edges.

All of those seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds posed in fields, leaning on fences, or draped in velvet in a photography studio, holding roses or band instruments or footballs.

Those kids look ready to go out into the world, to reach their potential.

And then present-day me, there in the center like Alice from The Brady Bunch if she’d showed up for filming the show’s opening the morning after a bender.

Welp. I’m officially back at the starting line a decade and a half after the pistol sounded, looking as haggard and defeated on the outside as I feel on the inside.

It’s kind of hysterical. And not in a haha-this-is-so-funny way, but like a suffering-from-literal-hysteria way.

I don’t have time for a full emotional breakdown right now, though, because my father has caught up with me in the doorway.

Considering there was a substantial period of time when he couldn’t even walk, it’s always reassuring to see him up and about.

In fact, it seems he’s taken Mom’s request to unload my car as a personal challenge to do it in as few trips as possible.

He was able to grab most of it in one go; he’s got my weekender and duffle slung over one shoulder, a large tote and another duffle over the other, and my suitcase trailing behind.

All that’s left, I think, are a few boxes with my kitchen items and sentimental tchotchkes in the trunk.

The books I shipped should get here in however long media mail takes to arrive.

Everything else I already sold or donated over the last few months in preparation for my imminent move.

Cole and I were supposed to move into a gorgeous Somerville two-bedroom today.

I thought we were equally excited about it, but apparently he was just a little more hyped than I realized.

That’s the only reason I can fathom that explains why he decided to move in two weeks early by himself.

It had to have been that and not the reason he gave me: that he came up to Boston without telling me he was in town because he “wanted to enjoy the space a bit before he had to share it with someone.”

Because that’s totally fine and normal when it’d been four months since we’d last seen each other in person!

Not at all a problem that, when I was texting him how disappointed and upset I was about losing my job and that I wished he were around to comfort me, he responded with stuff like Me too, babe , when he was actually only two miles away, drinking with mutual friends at Backbar.

Nothing wrong with it at all, according to him.

In fact, when I told him that I couldn’t be in a relationship with someone I couldn’t count on or trust, his expression alternated between annoyed and confused for so long I thought I might have short-circuited him before it finally settled back into its usual flat dismissiveness.

I don’t understand what the problem is, Nina.

You weren’t expecting me until tomorrow anyway.

“Where’d’ya want me to put all this stuff, Ninabean?

” Dad’s gruff voice brings me out of my thoughts like someone turning down the knob on a stove, and I no longer feel on the verge of boiling over.

Instead, I’m back to the previous slow, steady simmer of ire and pain that seems like it might never fully evaporate.

“Over there on the floor is fine,” I say. “I’ll put it away later.”

He unloads everything at the foot of the twin bed, which still sports the bright orange and hot-pink floral comforter from JCPenney I begged my parents for when I was fourteen.

It’s bold, I’ll give it that. Staring at the garish, narrow bed reminds me how much I already miss my queen-size mattress—the one I sold for twenty-five dollars on Facebook Marketplace last night to avoid having to strap it to the roof of my car and haul it all the way to Maryland.

I have many fond memories of waking up in my small-but-sunny apartment in my soft cream linen sheets, burrowing farther beneath the soothingly neutral blush-brown duvet cover I paid too much for even on sale at CB2.

I stare at my suitcase, where my beloved bedding is currently compressed within an inch of its life inside a vacuum bag.

Symbols of a failed attempt at adulthood, packed away, while that orange-and-pink comforter waits for me, a print so loud it’s practically screaming.

And not even some fun, irreverent message, like Welcome back, bitch!

but a steady Ahhhhhhhhh! that buries itself deep into my brain.