Rebecca found Alexa in the kitchen, where she was buttering a piece of toast. Bernice was lying directly in front of the sink, as was her wont, so each time Alexa needed to use the sink she had to stand a Bernice-width away and stretch over her. Bernice was a Bernese mountain dog. Peter had named her—he’d been delighted with the play on words.
“Can you follow me to the service station on Bridge Road?” Rebecca asked.
The buttering grew more vigorous and Alexa said, “Now?” Bernice shifted her big fluffy body in the wrong direction, closer to the center of the kitchen.
“Sometime this morning. I’ve got to get that dent repaired—it’s already been over a week.” Rebecca felt suddenly nervous, as though she were asking her daughter out on a date. Alexa sighed prettily and glanced at her phone. “Unless you’re working,” said Rebecca, hurriedly, apologetically. (Why was she apologizing? She paid the car insurance on Alexa’s Jeep.) “I could always ask a friend.” (Could she?)
“No, I’m off today. I have plans later. But, sure, I can drive you.”
“Plans with your friends?” Rebecca couldn’t keep the inquisitiveness out of her voice. “With Caitlin and Destiny?”
“Mom,” said Alexa. She stared at the toast. “Stop. Why all the questions?”
“It’s not all the questions. I’m just—well, something made me realize how long it’s been since you hung out with Caitlin and Destiny.” It’s really too bad, what happened with Alexa and her friends, Esther had said, as if she knew something Rebecca didn’t. “And I want to make sure everything’s okay.” If she’d been more on the ball, if she hadn’t been wrapped up in Daniel and worried about Morgan, she would have picked up on this a long time ago. It vexed her that it had taken Esther’s pressing to force her to bring up the topic.
“Everything’s fine. Everything’s better than fine. People change in the course of high school. Isn’t that what you’re always telling me? That it’s okay to grow and change? Evolve. We’re just not as close anymore.”
Rebecca did say that it was okay for people to evolve, and she believed it. But she remembered Esther’s face at Plum Island Grille, her smug, knowing smile, and she kept on. “But the three of you used to be so sweet together. You were like Betsy, Tacy, and Tib!”
“Like who?” Alexa was taking very tiny bites of her toast (did she have an eating disorder? Rebecca wondered) and rubbing her earlobe with her other hand (or a touch of OCD?).
“Betsy, Tacy, and Tib. The books? About the three little girls?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Did I never read those to you?”
“No.”
“Are you sure? That’s a travesty. Practically a crime.”
“If you did, I don’t remember.” Bernice heaved herself to her feet (paws) and moved to another part of the kitchen, as though this discussion of desiccated friendship was irritating her. Alexa took a bigger bite of her toast and said, “Anyway, I have other friends. I’ve got plenty going on. So don’t worry. I’m not pathetic and alone.”
“I’m not worried,” said Rebecca. She was worried, of course—she was always worried about something. (What did Alexa have going on?)
“Do you mind if we go right now?” asked Alexa. “I have some things I need to do later.”
At the service station, after she’d arranged with the owner to call her when the work on the Acura was complete, Rebecca saw the young man who was pumping gas looking sidelong at Alexa from under the brim of his hat. Alexa, a foot on the dash, scrolling through Instagram, noticed him while pretending not to notice. Stop looking at her! Rebecca wanted to cry. That is my little girl, and you have no right.
It had been a long time since Rebecca had sat in the passenger seat with her eldest child. Since Alexa had procured a driver’s license and the Jeep she’d become so independent that at times she seemed more lodger than daughter. But here she was, her face washed clean of makeup, her hair in a messy bun, wearing pajama shorts that were for some reason designed to look like men’s boxer shorts, driving her mother home, with no shoes on, which Rebecca thought was probably illegal.
How strange it was: you raised these people from their most miniature, floppiest, most dependent suckling form, and then when they were scarcely grown you helped them get a laminated piece of paper and you sent them off in these hulking, crushable monsters of steel and rubber, and you hoped for the best. (Was Alexa hugging the right side of the road a little more than she should?)
They were crossing the bridge now, back into Newburyport, and Rebecca looked at all of the boats in the harbors on both sides of the river, the sun glancing off the water. It was one of prettiest sights in the world to Rebecca, the view from this bridge in the summer, and she’d put it up against the sun setting over the Blue Ridge Mountains or the fjords of Norway, although she hadn’t actually seen either of those places in person.
“It just goes so fast,” said Rebecca. The car sailed over the last piece of the bridge and stopped behind a line of cars waiting to turn toward town. “Do you feel like it’s going really fast? Life?”
Alexa made a face and said, “Absolutely not. I feel like every day lasts about a week and a half.”
“One day,” said Rebecca, “you will be being driven around by your own children, and you will see what I mean. I, at that point, will be toothless and infirm somewhere.”
The Jeep idled. “Don’t be dramatic,” said Alexa. “You’ll probably have teeth.” She flicked her tongue out, lizard quick, as she waited for the last two cars in front of her to disperse, and that made Rebecca think that she could still see her in there somewhere: the girl who used to stick out her tongue in the very same way when she was tying her sneakers at age seven. Further back in time, the girl who, when Rebecca packed her up in the middle of the night to move her out of a situation that was no longer safe, didn’t ask, Where are we going? but instead asked, When will we get there?—a question that showed such a survivor’s determination and such faith in her tattered, shattered mother that Rebecca set her shoulders back and understood at once that she had to make herself worthy of that little girl’s trust.
“We need to start shopping for your dorm room soon, don’t we?”
“Not soon. It’s only June.”
“Still, it’d be good to get a jump on it. I haven’t seen a list yet. Did they send a list? Of what you need?”
Alexa didn’t know; Alexa didn’t seem to care that much. Rebecca supposed the list, like everything else these days, could be found online.
“What about a dorm assignment? Did we get that yet?” Rebecca couldn’t wait to drop Alexa off at Colby and watch her get ready to experience everything she herself had experienced. “I wonder if you’ll be put in Hillside,” she mused. “Remember, from the tour?”
Alexa didn’t answer.
Rebecca’s phone, which was in her lap, buzzed. A text from Gina. Sry we missed u at the beach yesterday! U should have told us where u were going.
Rebecca could feel the passive aggressiveness seeping through the screen. “Oh, please,” she said.
“Drama?” asked Alexa. She found a spot in the traffic flow and shot across Merrimac Street; they were almost home. “Mom Squad drama?”
“Of a sort.”
Alexa’s expression simultaneously said, You are old, so your drama cannot possibly be as interesting as my drama and, Despite myself, I’m sort of curious. After a moment the curiosity must have won out because Alexa asked, “What’s going on?”
“Nothing,” said Rebecca. The phone buzzed again. This time the text was from Monica. Thought we’d see you at barre yesterday. “I mean, it should be nothing. Morgan and I went to the beach with Sherri and Katie and you’d think I gave the nuclear code to North Korea.”
“Who are Sherri and Katie?”
“New people. From Ohio. Jeez, try to make a new friend and it feels like high school all over again. Do you know what I mean?”
“Uh, yeah,” said Alexa. “I definitely know what you mean. Remember that time someone called you at one in the morning to find out why her daughter hadn’t been invited to a sleepover with Morgan and four other girls?”
“Tammy,” said Rebecca. “I remember. I told Morgan she could only have five that time. I can’t always host a dozen!”
“Remember when World War Three broke out over a barbecue that someone wanted to have on the same weekend as Brooke’s end-of-summer party?”
Rebecca remembered that too. “Gina,” she said. “Not even the same day. Just the same weekend. That was a kerfuffle. To put it mildly.”
“So who would be what, then?” asked Alexa. “If you were all in high school?”
Rebecca thought about it. “Esther would probably be homecoming queen,” she said. “And, let’s see, Gina would definitely be student body president, and Melanie would be the pretty girl who wanted the lead in all the plays but thought she was too cool to hang out with the theater kids. A theater kid in sheep’s clothing, I guess.”
Alexa smiled indulgently. “Homecoming queen isn’t really a thing anymore, Mom. That’s like super old-fashioned.”
“Well. Still. You know what I mean.” Alexa granted this statement a slightly condescending nod. “In a way,” Rebecca continued, “in a way it never ends. We’re in high school for the rest of our lives, like it or not.”
“Please, no,” said Alexa. “I just got out of high school. Whatever else you do, please don’t tell me that I’m stuck there for the rest of my life.” She turned into the driveway and parked neatly, pulling up on the emergency brake just the way Peter had taught her. Rebecca had left the whole of Alexa’s driving education to Peter and the professionals at Hoffman Driving School. She didn’t have the stomach for it herself. As a result, Alexa could parallel park like nobody’s business, and she could drive through rush-hour traffic on Storrow Drive without breaking a sweat.
“Peter would be proud of you,” Rebecca said now.
“For what? My parking? It’s just a driveway, Mom. Morgan could park here.”
“Well, your parking, to start with. But a lot of other things besides.”
Alexa winced. There was a moment where Rebecca thought Alexa might hug her, or that she might even cry. But: “Thanks,” she said softly, not meeting Rebecca’s eyes, hopping out of the Jeep, landing softly on her illegal bare feet.