Page 50 of Total Dreamboat

Which does not change the fact that it pisses me off.

I shrug out from under them. “What’s going on?” I ask. “Why are you both here?”

They look at each other, having one of the silent conversations I grew up trying to parse.

“We wanted to tell you in person,” Mom says, taking my father’s hand. “We’re back together.”

I gape at them. “Since when?” I ask, feeling childishly outraged. “I thought you had a boyfriend. I thought his name was Harold.”

I admit I haven’t asked her a lot of questions about her new man over the past few months. The idea of her moving on from my dad made me a little uncomfortable, even if I was happy for her. And given how busy I’ve been, I haven’t been talking to either of my parents as much as usual.

But even so, this is a total blindside.

“We’ve been finding our way since the summer,” Dad says. “We didn’t want to tell you in case it didn’t work out.”

They both look genuinely apologetic. And how nice, that their love story has a happy ending after all. Maybe there’s hope for the rest of us who fall fast and hard.

My shock turns into elation.

“I’m so happy for you,” I say, wrapping my arms around them again. “This is amazing.”

They look relieved.

“We also have a surprise,” Mom says.

“You two being back together isn’t the surprise?” I ask.

She laughs. “There’s more. We’re going to drive out to the Kingdom tonight.”

Now I’m truly flummoxed. The Northeast Kingdom is where our family’s cottage is, on a few acres near Lake Willoughby.

As far as I know it’s sitting empty, waiting for some other family to buy it.

“Why would we go to the Kingdom?” I ask.

“To the cottage,” my mom says. “For Christmas.”

“I thought you were selling it.”

“That’s the surprise,” Dad says. “We decided to hang on to it until we knew what we were doing. We took it off the market. We’ve decided to move there full-time—together.”

“But what about your job?” I ask. My mom is retired, but my dad is still a middle school principal.

“I took early retirement,” he says. “Yesterday was my last day.”

“Holy shit,” I say.

“I know this is a lot to take in,” Mom says, biting her lip a bit guiltily.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” I say. I gesture at myself helplessly. “I’m about to fall over.”

“Let’s get your bags, kid,” Dad says. “We can talk it all out on the drive.”

The Kingdom is about two hours northeast of Burlington, so we stop for pizza on the way out of town.

Over dinner, they give me the CliffsNotes version of their reconciliation.

They spent time together at the cottage packing up their things while I was on the cruise.

I knew they had been there together. What I did not know is that they had both felt the reality of their separation emptying out that house.

They felt like they were ripping apart the life they’d built together, and it was devastating to see it packed away in boxes and sold.

First, they decided to go on some dates. Then they tried living together in my mom’s apartment, while still hanging on to my dad’s. And then they decided to burn their divorce papers in a ritual fire in the hearth of the cottage, let the leases on their apartments expire, and move there full-time.

That was last month.

They’ve already moved the furniture back in, so the house is mostly as I remember it, just with fewer knickknacks and forty-year-old copies of Reader’s Digest . I never minded the clutter, but now the space feels lighter.

My parents seem lighter too.

I go to sleep in my childhood bed and don’t wake up for nine hours. When I do, fresh snow has fallen. My parents are in the living room, reading books in front of the fire—a thick biography for him, a slim volume of poetry for her.

“Want some toast, honey?” Mom asks.

“Sure,” I say. “Thanks.”

While my mom putters in the kitchen I settle in my favorite armchair with my laptop.

“Not work, I hope?” Dad says. “You just got here.”

“No,” I say. “It’s my book.”

“I’m so glad you’re writing a novel,” he says. “I always hoped you would try again.”

“Thanks. Me too.”

“How’s it going?” he asks.

“I love working on it, and I have a lot of ideas,” I say. “But it’s hard to keep momentum up with my job. Pretty frustrating.”

“What’s frustrating?” my mother asks, coming in with a mug of tea and a plate of toast for me.

“Hope’s book.”

“Not the book itself,” I clarify. “Just finding the time to write it.”

“I’m sorry, sweetie,” Mom says. “I wish you didn’t have to work so hard.”

“It’s okay,” I say, because I don’t want to worry them. “I’ll figure it out. I didn’t mean to complain.”

They exchange one of their loaded glances.

“You aren’t complaining,” Dad says. “Maybe that’s the problem. If you let loose with complaints, what would you say?”

“I’m really okay.”

“I had a lot of complaints last year,” Mom says.

“I was tired of being bored after retiring. Puttering around Burlington, going home to a sad little apartment. So I said to myself, you know what, Martha? You don’t want this.

What do you actually want? And it was this place. It was the companionship of your dad.”

I’m shocked she’s confiding this so directly. My parents are usually more private about their personal business.

“She showed up here in the middle of the summer and told me she didn’t want to sell the house and wanted to try again,” Dad says. “Obviously it was a risk. But if she hadn’t… we wouldn’t be here right now.”

“I feel like you’re trying to impart a parental message,” I say.

“Indulge us,” Mom says. “Close your eyes. Think about it. What would you do if you could throw off your worries and responsibilities and do exactly what you wanted?”

It’s not something that requires much thought. “I’d quit my job, move to England, and finish my book.”

“England!” Mom exclaims.

“Yeah. You know I’ve always been obsessed with British novels. I have this vision of going to the countryside and writing.”

I hesitate to mention Felix, because it feels wrong to include something I probably can’t have, even in a dream life.

But if I were being honest, he’s part of it.

And I guess that’s the point of the exercise.

“There’s also a boy there,” I decide to admit.

“Oh?” Mom asks.

“That guy I met over the summer, on the cruise. I really liked him, and I asked him to maybe try to date long distance. But he turned me down. Said he didn’t think either of us was ready. But I can’t get him out of my head.”

“Are you still in touch with him?” Dad asks.

“No. But his sister reached out to me recently and said something that made me wonder if he still thinks about me too. There’s a part of me that would like to see him again. Just to test the waters. Maybe when I’ve finished the first draft of my book.”

“It sounds to me, Hope, like you know exactly what you want,” Mom says. “And like I said: that’s the battle.”

“It’s never easy to make changes,” Dad says. “But you’re at an age and stage of life where you do have choices. Don’t rule them out.”

I think about what my choices actually are. They mainly come down to time and money.

My interim role at work is coming to an end in January, and Stacy has told me I’m in the top three for the permanent position.

If I quit, I’d lose my benefits, my security, and my foothold in yet another industry.

But if I tutored full-time, as a freelancer, I could potentially make up most of my salary with fewer overall hours, since the pay is so much higher, as long as I lined up enough private students.

And since the sessions are all on Zoom anyway, I could do it remotely.

I could do a summer in England and write. Give my dream a real chance and see what happens.

I decide in that instant.

I will.