CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
I leave the Overlook just before two o’clock, feeling like my chest is being squeezed in a vice. It’s a terrible feeling, and one I haven’t had for a long time — one that I hate myself for feeling because it means I’ve allowed myself to care for Gavin way too much despite knowing better on every level. I didn’t even feel this squeezing sensation with Brian when we ended things. By the time I broke off our engagement, I hated Brian more than I liked him, let alone loved him. Even the first time I found proof he was cheating, I didn’t hurt like this. It’s sad to think about, but I suppose I always knew.
But this, now, is like something structural has been tugged out of me. Without realizing it — surely without meaning to — I must have built a home for Gavin inside my heart. I was a stupid little schoolgirl again, the way I was a stupid little school girl before Brian, kissing at an age where I had to worry about my braces locking with another’s. I’d made a fantasy despite knowing he was bad news, and that fantasy must have become part of what kept me going. In retrospect, it even seems obvious. I’ve been buoyant these past few weeks. I’ve been optimistic. I’ve written something substantive for the first time ever, and of course I’ve written it to Gavin’s music.
Sprinkled throughout me are these little pieces of him. Bits of reinforcement and glue that have worked to prop me up. I’ve thought about calling my parents. I’ve imagined standing up to Roxanne. I’ve felt a bit kinder, more generous. My future as a career waitress suddenly seems less black and white, all because he’s been remaking me from the inside out.
And now it’s gone.
The fantasy has collapsed. Finally, after that last confrontation, I know with all my head, heart, and body that we would never work. I feel so dumb for ever, apparently, being fooled into thinking we might. I’m just another fish on the line, naive enough to believe that I was the one the hungry fisherman would keep as a pet. But now that we’ve had it out and he’s remained … well, who he is and always was … I can no longer pretend. I get it. And now all that he’d been filling inside me has collapsed, leaving me weak.
I have to work tonight at the Overlook, and obviously Gavin will be performing. I don’t know how I’ll face him. Worse, I know I have to — eventually if not tonight. The possibilities of the unnamed collaboration between me, Freddy, and Gavin is one thing that my collapse has left undamaged. There was never any false hope there, but I almost wish there was because then I wouldn’t be facing a future of fighting with Gavin, warring with feelings like this.
But unfortunately, I do believe all I said today. Our musical venture, strictly as a creative business thing, is solid despite my private misgivings. With Freddy’s drive and the know-how and ethic I absorbed from my family, it’s hard to believe we won’t make it. Gavin has cred and fans both from his Firecracker days and the past three years as a popular soloist. I know how to parlay, and have hatched a plan. It’s what I’m best at. It’s what I would have earned from a stuffy Ivy League education if I’d never left home.
In my weakened state, everything is falling into doubt. Planning for the band makes me wonder if I should have turned down Princeton. I’m realizing truths about Mom’s psychology work that have me thinking that maybe she’s smarter than I allowed, seeing as I’m using it now to make myself feel better and explain what’s happened. What Gavin said about the way she characterized me in the book got me thinking too, and I pulled up a digital copy on my phone to check some stuff out. I’d have to read the entire book to be sure, but maybe it’s not as bad as I thought. Maybe she didn’t paint me as a black sheep. Maybe that’s my baggage, being the youngest kid, adopted, always welcomed but never quite feeling as much of a fit.
Maybe I’ve been wrong all along.
Maybe I haven’t done anything right. I sure didn’t exhibit the best judgment concerning Gavin, despite abundant evidence that I shouldn’t have allowed myself to get so close.
Maybe I should have gone to Princeton for the education that, here and now, might help me drive this band, once it gets its final member. Or maybe the truth is somewhere in between, seeing as I wouldn’t be anywhere near the music scene (unless you count classical) if I’d stayed.
I pull out my phone, sure I’ll call my mom. I want to hear her voice, telling me that everything will be fine. She’ll forgive me, and I’ll forgive her, just like that. Instead, I punch Maya’s number, and a half hour later she pulls into the Inside Scoop parking lot with Mackenzie. I’ve already had a cone because it felt necessary, but I don’t tell them that.
“Thanks for coming,” I say as they get out and walk toward me.
Maya looks confused. “Was this a request rather than an invitation?”
I look down at Mackenzie. She’s nine years old with big, bright eyes and strawberry-blonde hair that hasn’t yet found her mother’s bright red. She’s one of those kids who people say is “nine going on thirty,” probably because she had to grow up fast with a single mom, always working. All I know about Mackenzie’s father is that he left them. As much as I like Maya, I haven’t felt confident enough to ask more.
Mackenzie looks at you with an accountant’s serious, patient expression. Her eyes are so big and blue that she manages to look curious yet earnest, so the eyes-on stare never feels challenging or rude. You have to answer when she asks a question, as honestly as you possibly can. She’s one of those people who says everything even when she isn’t saying a thing, persuasive with a look.
With a final glance at Mackenzie, finding myself unable to lie too directly, I say, “It’s both.”
“Oh, Honey,” Maya says, reading all she needs to know from my body language. “What happened?”
I glance down at Mackenzie. Her big eyes are doing their work. She’s not gawking, but she’s definitely not vanishing into the background. She might be my favorite kid ever, with a precociousness and intuition far beyond her years. But I still don’t want to talk about my botched personal life in front of her.
“Mack,” Maya says, reaching into her purse and pulling out a twenty. “Get me a scoop of rocky road on a sugar cone, okay? And whatever you want, but one scoop is plenty. And for Abigail … ” Maya raises her eyebrows in my direction.
I’m fumbling in my wallet. My request; I pay for everyone. I was just slow on the draw.
“Put your money away, Ab,” she says.
“I want to pay.”
“And I want to be a princess. This is an emergency.”
I haven’t told her what’s bugging me, but she knows. That’s how Maya is. Out of everyone in my life, nobody knows the jilted story better.
“Seriously,” she says. Maya, as wonderful as she is, also has a serious don’t-screw-with-me demeanor. She tolerates Ed because he’s too pathetic to fight, but I fear for him if she ever decides to snap back.
I put my money away.
“Don’t think I won’t ask you to return the favor someday,” she says with a small, broad-lipped smile. “I like knowing you owe me.”
Mackenzie turns her gaze on me.
“Chocolate peanut butter,” I say.
“Two scoops,” her mother adds.
I open my mouth to protest, seeing as I already had one. But fuck it.
“Thanks, Mackenzie.”
“Of course, Abigail.”
Maya taught her daughter to address adults as equals, but I suspect Mackenzie would do it anyway. So it’s always nice to see her be a kid, as if she’s trying to remind you there’s still a child inside. I watch her skip toward Inside Scoop. She pauses short of the window to inspect a bug of some sort before Maya puts her hand on my shoulder.
“Tell me everything,” she says.
So I do. I’m embarrassed by most of it because the parts that matter involve me confessing to my own stupidity. Gavin holds little fault in the full version of the story — other than, of course, simply being Gavin. But Maya listens sans judgment, and I only pause when Mackenzie runs back three separate times with ice cream cones and change.
When she returns the final time with her own cone, Maya deftly deflects her to the nearby playground. Even this sliver of mother-daughter interaction fascinates me, seeing how different it is from any interaction with my own mom. Maya’s instruction to leave us alone is closer to a suggestion, but Mackenzie, even knowing she’s being sent away so the adults can talk, goes as if it was her idea then sits quietly on a frog-shaped rocker and resumes work on her cone, napkin dutifully at the ready.
When my story is done, Maya gives me a pressed-lip nod and wraps an arm around me, saying nothing.
“Tell me I’m an idiot,” I say.
“You’re an idiot. But hey, we’re all idiots.”
Mackenzie returns and asks if she can (please) have another cone. Knowing it’s a violation of both the mother-daughter permission structure and Maya’s edict about who’s supposed to be paying, I fish a five out of my pocket and hand it to her. She’s considerate, polite, and discreet. She let me get my poison out without interruption, and I figure I owe her.
Mackenzie returns, hands me my change, says thank you, then gives her cone a lick. The last was strawberry, and this one is chocolate. I applaud her selection. For me, it’s chocolate or nothing, and bonus points if peanut butter is also involved.
“That man over there is grumpy,” Mackenzie says matter-of-factly. Maya and I turn to see skinny, boyishly handsome Kevin Hughes, who might hate his job more than anyone in town, plopping another scoop into a waffle cone with a dumpy expression. We laugh as Mackenzie skips back to the frog rocker to finish her second course.
“You think you were bad?” Maya says. “I know I was certainly an idiot. But that little person over there?” She nods toward Mackenzie, a proud smile finding her lips. “That was the result of my stupidity.”
“I’m not pregnant,” I tell her. “We didn’t even make it that far. It’s not like there’s an upside to this for me.”
“Not yet, anyway,” Maya says.