Page 36

THE HOUSE WAS dark when I came home. To resist going after Sasha, I’d made myself busy at the Revelry and helped Mitch close for the evening.

My parents left early, so I figured they’d be in bed by now.

Then I spied a lantern flickering in the garden out back.

I put my purse on the hook in the foyer, and slipped past the sleeping pit bulls on the couch, and out the back French doors to the garden.

The ocean roared in the distance, the moon reflecting off the white-capped waves that came rushing in at low tide.

My parents were on the swing, enjoying the evening as they rocked, back and forth, laughing about something that had happened tonight at the Rev.

A flicker of annoyance ran through me—it was like they didn’t even act like everything was changing.

Too fast, too soon, too terribly. Ever since I’d come home, I’d been bracing for some sort of conversation.

Some contingency plan. Something— anything —to acknowledge the timer we were on.

But instead they ignored it, like they always did. And I was understanding how less and less.

Dad saw me first and raised his lit pipe. “Daughter! I was wondering when you’d wander home!” he called, and motioned for me to come over and sit with them. Mom scooted one way, and he scooted the other, and they patted the cushion in the middle.

“I can’t fit there,” I said, thinking I should just go to bed. Closing the Rev hadn’t sweetened my mood at all.

“It’ll be a tight squeeze,” Mom said, “but your brother’s done it.”

“We got something we want to discuss,” Dad added.

A small tremor of hope raced through me.

I guessed I could stay for a minute. “Well, if Mitch can shimmy his hips between you two …” And I squeezed in between the two of them.

We were elbow to elbow. Which was incredibly uncomfortable.

I sat there for three swings, and then I pulled myself back out with, “I love you two, but I don’t love anyone this much. I’ll sit on the ground.”

Mom was appalled. “You’ll get dirty!”

Dad replied, “Wyn, that’s because there’s dirt on the ground.”

“Ha, Hank. Ha . So,” she added, taking a sip from her scotch glass, though now it was just Diet Coke, “I heard from a birdie you were in the private balcony tonight with a friend …”

I shifted awkwardly. “It’s not what you think.” And when my parents elbowed each other knowingly I added, “Okay, that’s enough.”

Dad put a hand over his heart. “My little girl, all grown up and taking strapping young men up into the make-out seats to, uh, make out. Wyn, don’t you remember when we used those seats? Worked wonders, lemme tell you. I got so lucky in those seats—”

“Please don’t,” I groaned.

“Where has the time gone?” Mom lamented. “It feels like just yesterday we were flexible enough to really appreciate the small space.”

Staying was a mistake. I massaged the bridge of my nose, taking a deep breath. “If this is the start of my origin story, I still don’t want to know.”

“Oh, no, you were at a festival. Mitch was in the balcony.”

“ Mom! ” I cried.

She laughed, almost spilling her drink. “Knowledge is power, heart!”

“And ten years in therapy,” Dad agreed. The wind began to pick up, and he put a hand on top of his hat to keep it from blowing away. “Did the weatherman confirm Darcy? You can smell it in the air.”

And you could. This earthy aroma that blew in from the ocean. “It smells heavy,” I commented. LA rain never smelled like this. It was always dry. Dusty.

“That’s the geosmin,” Dad informed, letting go of his hat once the wind calmed, and tapping the ash from his pipe.

“It’s a metabolic by-product of bacteria and algae that lives on the surface of water.

When hurricanes rotate, they churn the water, killing the algae on the water’s surface. That’s the smell.”

Mom kissed his cheek. “Look at you, putting your science degree to work.”

“Least I can do to spite my parents. God rest their souls,” he added, tipping his hat toward the sky.

Dad hadn’t wanted to take over the Revelry when he was younger.

He’d thought he’d go into marine conservation—when you grew up so close to ecological landmarks, it was kinda built into your bones—but then he met Mom and changed course.

They both had, come to think of it. The dreams they started with weren’t the dreams they left with.

I began to wonder if that was the destiny of all dreams.

Mine included.

Mom said, “We should probably get some—gosh, what are they called? The things you put dirt in?”

Dad guessed, “Sandbags?”

“Those! We should get those for the Revelry. Just in case.” Then she shook her head. “ Sandbags . I knew they were something.”

“Maybe we should do more memorization exercises tomorrow,” Dad said. “After the morning crossword?”

But Mom waved her hand. “It’s fine, Hank.”

I glanced at Dad, but he seemed to shrug it off.

It was easier for Dad, probably because he’d lived with it since the beginning—the words she forgot, the names she suddenly couldn’t remember after years of saying them, misplaced things like the coffee tin—but it was still hard for me.

I wondered if it’d get easier. I twisted my fingers anxiously.

“You wanted to talk about something with me?”

“Right! Right.” Dad took another puff from his pipe. It smelled strong. Not tobacco. “We’ve been thinking about when to close the Rev. We want it to be while you’re still here. It feels right.”

The hope that had timidly sparked in my stomach turned cold and hard. “Oh. That.”

My parents took my clipped words as being angry, not disappointed. “I know you don’t want to see it go,” Mom said, trying to soothe me, “but we would rather it go out with a bang than with a whimper, you know? Solidify some good memories.”

“Right.”

“But we can’t exactly remember when you said you’d be leaving,” Mom said, a bit tongue in cheek, making fun of herself.

“I haven’t decided yet,” I replied.

“Hmm. Maybe at the end of the month, then.”

That didn’t sound right, even to me. “But what about the shows? Aren’t we booked up past the summer? We can’t just close up and forget about them.”

Dad took another puff of his pipe. “We stopped booking starting mid-August. Told Mitch to keep the dates open.”

His words settled with a betraying realization. “So … you knew? For months ? And Mitch did, too?”

“Not officially. I think he probably guessed but we didn’t tell him,” Mom said.

My brother’s reaction to the venue closing—and Gigi’s, too, for that matter—started to make a lot more sense now. But then if they knew before our parents told us, why didn’t they tell me? Or why didn’t Mitch come up with some contingency plan to keep it going? To take on the venue?

Because he didn’t want to. He’d told me as much.

I was the only one who didn’t see it coming, and that was because I wasn’t even here.

Mom and Dad exchanged a worried look. “Heart,” she began earnestly, “we realize now that we probably didn’t break the news like we should have—”

I interrupted. “You didn’t even ask if we wanted it. If I wanted it. You just decided.”

“The Revelry is our responsibility. It was never yours or Mitchell’s,” Dad said, but Mom’s face had fallen into a pinched, thoughtful look. “We didn’t want to distract you.”

“ Distract me?”

“You have a lot going on in LA,” Dad said. “We thought we’d make it easy.”

“Well, you didn’t. Yeah, I have a lot going on in LA, but this is my home, too. You are my parents . I mean—for the last eight months, I’ve been worrying that I should be here.”

“No, heart, we don’t want you to give up—”

I held up my hands. “I know! I know. You just don’t ever talk about anything. Any of this. You don’t talk to me about the Rev, or home, or what’s going to happen. And I just feel like you aren’t taking any of it seriously.”

Dad sat up a little straighter. “Of course we’re taking it all seriously. That’s why we made this decision.”

“You have your life, heart,” Mom cut in. “You have your big, lovely life and it’s unfurling in front of you, and I want you to enjoy it.”

I wanted to tear my hair out. “Of course I have my life out there right now, because you won’t tell me about home! You put everything off, over and over again, you ignore the things that aren’t easy, and it just feels—really it does—like you ignore me, too.”

And maybe that was selfish to say, and maybe I was just being vengeful and bitter, and maybe the second I said those words I wanted to take them back because they weren’t true. Even though, sometimes, it felt like they were.

“I’m going to go stay at Gigi and Mitch’s for the night,” I said, over my parents’ immediate protests, shame eating at me. I shoved myself to my feet. “I love y’all.”

“But, heart …” Mom began, but Dad put his hand on her knee, and she caved. “We love you, too. More than anything.”

I never doubted that, even as I fled the garden.

I grabbed a night’s worth of clothes from my room, my charger, and my toothbrush, and then I was out the front door, past all the gnomes hiding in the bushes, heading down the sidewalk toward town.

The night was warm, and my brain was buzzing so loudly I couldn’t shut it off, even if I wanted to.

It was so loud that I almost didn’t hear Sasha at all.

“Breathe, bird,” he said.

I curled my hand tighter around my overnight bag. “I thought you wanted some distance.”

“We both know that’s impossible.” He didn’t sound upset, at least. Just a little resigned.

“I … was probably really loud in your head, wasn’t I?” I muttered, feeling awkward.

“A little. I didn’t want to ignore it,” he replied. Not that he couldn’t but that he didn’t want to. That simple change was a comfort, even if he didn’t know it.

Gigi and Mitch’s apartment building was on the next block. It was three streets over from the Rev, an older complex with popcorn ceilings and AC in the windows, but you couldn’t beat the five-minute walk to the beach. I lingered out front for a while, breathing in the warm summer night.

Can I ask you a personal question? I asked.

“Sure, bird.”

How did you get over it? Missing your mom?

He thought for a moment. “You don’t. At least, I didn’t.

I still miss her every day. But some days I miss her more than others.

Some days I’d give up everything just for one of her hugs.

And then I have to remind myself that she’s gone, but bits of her stay.

The parts that made me, the parts that raised me, the parts she left behind.

They all stay, bird. The things that matter always do. ”

Tears burned at the edges of my eyes. I wiped them away quickly. “Thank you for being honest.”

“I can’t be anything else with you,” he replied earnestly. Probably because we were in each other’s heads. I wondered if his answer would have been any different if we weren’t.