Alexa’s mother rapped on her door at nine in the morning, which was about ninety minutes earlier than Alexa generally considered acceptable, and then opened the door without being invited to do so. Alexa, who had been sleeping deeply, raised her head and said, “What?”
“I’m sorry to wake you,” said her mother. “But I have to be gone for a lot of the day and Morgan will be at loose ends. Do you think you could keep an eye on her?”
Alexa had the day off from the Cottage. She flopped back on her pillow and pulled the comforter over her face. “Okay,” she said, her voice muffled by the comforter. “I can do that. But where are you going?”
“Oh, here and there,” said her mother. Alexa felt her mother pause in the doorway but she didn’t move her head from the comforter. “Alexa? Are you sure you’re okay? About Tyler and . . . Cam? Is there anything you want to talk about? Or maybe something not related to Tyler and Cam? Just . . . anything at all? You can talk to me about anything, you know.”
“Nope,” said Alexa. “I’m good.”
Since her trip to Cam’s lake house, Alexa and Cam were hanging out a lot. They did an old-person walking tour through Maudslay State Park, where the rangers told them all about the home that used to sit on the grounds. They kayaked down the Merrimack all the way to Amesbury and back. Seen through Cam’s eyes, even this tired town had begun to send out fresh green shoots of appeal or attraction. Her mother’s request to spend the day with Morgan failed to provoke the irritation it might have earlier in the summer. Was there a chance that spending time with Cam had made her nicer? Was niceness contagious?
Her mother was still standing there. “Maybe do something with Morgan, okay? Don’t just let her sit around on her phone.”
“Got it,” said Alexa. She peeked out from under the comforter. “No sitting around on her phone.” In fact she thought it might be fun to do something special with Morgan, which was not a thought she would have had in June. It was therefore confirmed. Niceness was contagious.
“I can leave you some money to go to lunch if you want. A burger and a shake at Lexie’s, maybe?”
“Not necessary,” mumbled Alexa. Her bank account was, to put it mildly, robust. Besides that, Lexie’s was great, but a burger and a shake seemed sort of ordinary. If she wanted to show Morgan a good time, she was going to take her someplace nicer. She was going to get her an experience, not just a burger.
Her mother was still standing there, as if she had something more to say.
“What?” said Alexa irritably.
“Nothing,” said her mother. She looked at Alexa for another long moment and then she departed, closing the door behind her.
Alexa decided on the Deck, because it was a beautiful day, and they could sit outside and look at the water. She let Morgan ride in the front seat of the Jeep, even though technically she was supposed to keep her in the back because she was still too small to withstand the crush of the airbags should they deploy. But they didn’t have to drive far, and they didn’t have to drive on the highway, so Alexa felt okay about it. “Don’t tell Mom,” she told Morgan.
“Of course not,” said Morgan, sounding like a little adult. She took a deep breath as she buckled the seat belt across her spindly chest and looked around like she was rounding the Cape of Good Hope for the first time.
They crossed Merrimac Street and Alexa immediately saw the line of cars stopped ahead of her. “Go figure,” she muttered. The drawbridge was on its way up, which meant they would sit here for at least five minutes, maybe ten. She could see the Deck from here; she could practically taste the street corn with cojita cheese. She tapped her fingers on the steering wheel, thrumming with impatience. If they’d left two minutes earlier or eleven minutes later, they could have avoided this.
But Morgan said, “Yess! I love it when the bridge goes up,” and her enthusiasm reminded Alexa of Cam, who in this situation would say something corny and soothing, like, That’s okay, we’ve got nowhere to be. Alexa had to admit, it was a fairly majestic sight, the view from this bridge, with the sun waltzing off the water. To their right, dozens and dozens of boats were docked in the slips at the harbor, with more out on moorings, and the river extended beyond the boats, all the way to the open ocean.
They watched as the mast of a grand sailboat cleared the bridge, and Morgan let out a cheer. The bridge eased down—it looked like it was exhaling—and the line of cars moved ahead.
A girl a year behind Alexa was at the hostess stand at the Deck, and two girls from her class were waiting tables. One of them came up to their table: a hard-core soccer and lacrosse player named Maya. Alexa gave her a hey.
“Let’s put our phones away,” Alexa said to Morgan. “Shall we?” Her mother would be proud of that. Alexa held out her hand and Morgan relinquished the phone—reluctantly, because she was playing some online game against one of her little friends. “Your generation is totally addicted,” said Alexa. “I worry about you guys.” She was kidding, but only a little bit.
Alexa ordered the fish tacos with the street corn. Morgan first claimed to want a grilled cheese from the kids’ menu but Alexa nixed that right away. They were in coastal Massachusetts! In summertime! Grilled cheese was not a native dish. Morgan sighed and ordered the fried fish plate. Better. The fish was cod, and local. Morgan requested no straws for either of them.
When Morgan lifted her arm to shield her face from the sun, Alexa could see that underneath her Ivivva tank top she was wearing a sports bra. A training bra, their mother called those, embarrassingly, and Alexa felt a surge of tenderness for her little sister, because she seemed to be training for a race for which she hadn’t yet registered. How long had it been since she and Morgan had done something alone together? Too long.
“Did you break up with Tyler?” Morgan asked. “Or did he break up with you?”
“Getting right to it, huh?” Alexa sipped her straw-less water.
“Well, did you?”
“Technically, yes,” said Alexa. Their food arrived, and for a few minutes they were busy and silent, eating. Alexa offered the street corn to Morgan, who shook her head violently.
“I don’t like Tyler that much,” said Morgan.
“No? Why not?”
Morgan dipped a fry into ketchup and considered this question. “I just don’t think he seems very nice all the time.”
Alexa was almost seven when Morgan was born. The year Morgan turned six and entered elementary school Alexa was already ensconced at the middle school, wearing a bra and getting noticed for her well-put-together outfits. That was the year the crop top came back, and Alexa got dress-coded more than once. She’d come home from school, tugging off the T-shirt they’d given her at the nurses’ office, and there Morgan would be, wearing her certified Disney Anna dress and wig and singing “Do You Want to Build a Snowman?” at the top of her phlegmatic lungs.
In one year Morgan will be the age Alexa was when she first had a boyfriend (an ill-fated romance, please don’t remind her); in two, the age when she sneak-watched Fifty Shades of Gray with Destiny. (Their mothers had dropped them at Cinemagic for what the mothers thought was the evening showing of the second SpongeBob movie: Sponge Out of Water.) She supposed she hadn’t given her little sister enough credit for maturing all of these years—for having her own, sometimes possibly anguished, interior life.
“No,” agreed Alexa. “He’s not very nice all the time.”
“Is that why you broke up with him?”
After Fifty Shades, emerging from the lobby into the parking lot, Alexa and Destiny were shell-shocked, unable to meet each other’s eyes. Neither would ever admit it, but both wished they had stuck with SpongeBob. Sometimes, after all, innocence was a blessing.
“Yes,” she said. “And you should do the same, if you ever have a girlfriend or a boyfriend or anyone in your life who doesn’t treat you well. Okay?”
“Okay,” said Morgan.
“I mean it for real, Morgs. Seriously. That’s really important, okay? You have to take care of yourself. Promise me.”
“I promise,” said Morgan.
Alexa had so many other things she wanted to say to Morgan: don’t grow up too fast, stay true to yourself, think for yourself and talk for yourself and don’t turn down dessert, and show your body if you want to but not if you don’t. “You know what I do if I find myself in a tricky situation?” she asked.
“What?” Morgan was all ears—well, and elbows and collarbone and ketchup-smeared face, but mostly ears.
“I ask myself what Peter would say to do. I find I really don’t go wrong if I do that.”
Morgan stared at the water for a moment, taking this in, and tears filled her eyes. One dropped onto the napkin in front of her, and then she nodded. “I like that,” she said. “I’m going to do that too.” After a beat she said, “You know who I do like?”
“Who?”
“That one who came to Canobie Lake with us. The one you were holding hands with on the street the other day.”
“Cam?”
“Yes. Cam.”
They ate and looked at the water. The sun shifted and Morgan started to squint.
“I like him too,” Alexa said at last.
“Maybe he should be your boyfriend.”
Morgan’s features had been changing steadily over the course of the summer and probably before that. There were new mature hollows in her cheekbones that offered a preview of what her face would look like when she was a teenager and then an adult. Her eyebrows, once they were professionally shaped, would be stunning (those came, frustratingly, from Peter; Alexa would have loved to have them too), and after Dr. Pavlo, the orthodontist who was responsible for Alexa’s smile, worked his magic on the space between her front teeth, Morgan’s smile too would be irresistible.
“Maybe. Or maybe nobody should.”
The rest of the meal they ate in companionable silence, and when Soccer Maya dropped the check, Alexa tipped extravagantly, just because she could.