I spend the entire walk up Marco’s gravelly road bombarding Mom with a rapid-fire round of are-we-fucked-or-are-we-fine? questions.
“Have you gotten any texts from Richard?” I ask.
“Nothing,” she says. “The prick —”
“Anything from Luke?”
“Luke? Why would he —”
“The cops?”
“No.” She laughs grimly. “Joey —”
“What about Nonna?”
“I thought you talked to her last night.”
“Yeah,” I say. “But she keeps calling me.”
“She’s called me a couple times, too.”
“And you’ve been ignoring her?”
“What’s with the third degree? Jesus.”
“I’m freaking out!” I finally admit as we approach the trail entrance — all giant trees and rocks and dirt. “Luke sent me some insane texts. He showed up at our apartment.”
“What? Why?”
“He says he just wants to talk,” I answer. “But I’m scared there’s more to it than that.”
“Don’t be crazy.” Mom marches ahead in her knockoff Lululemons. She sounds calmer than I’d expected her to, especially given the tone of her voice at the house a few minutes ago. Maybe I was just projecting when I thought she sounded frantic. “Did he say anything else?” she asks.
“Nothing important.” I take a giant step over a veiny cluster of roots in my path. “He said he’s sorry again.”
“See?” she says. “I told you he’d come crawling back.”
“Whatever.” I shake my head. I couldn’t care less about that right now. “You really think we’re safe out here? Off the grid?”
“Seems like it.” She pauses in thought for a moment. “But what the hell do I know?” Her calmness seems to crack a little bit, like one of these dead leaves out here on the ground. Didn’t take much. “In the long run… I have no idea what we’re gonna do.”
“Maybe the answer is that we just stay here,” I suggest. “Like forev — for a long time. At least long enough for the fire investigation to blow over.”
“I don’t know.” Mom sighs. “Being around Marco last night did make me feel better. He’s so safe, you know? I didn’t realize how much I missed that.” She pauses. “You missed him, too. I can tell.”
“Not really,” I lie. “But I mean. He is so much better than Richard.”
“Ha.” She clicks her tongue. “There were moments last night when I totally forgot who I am — the mess we’re in — but then it would all come rushing back to me. And I’d just think, God. I shouldn’t be here. I don’t deserve him. He doesn’t deserve this. He’s such a good guy —”
“Stop that! You’re being way too hard on yourself.”
“You do wish I stayed with him,” Mom says. “Don’t you?”
“I think you have me confused with Nonna,” I tell her. “You did what you had to do! At the time. You weren’t happy toward the end. I remember. You guys fought so much.”
She groans as we approach a steep incline. “I guess I still haven’t really forgiven myself. Even if he has.”
“Forgiven yourself for what? You just grew apart.” I wipe a bead of sweat off my eyebrow. “And now” — I grin — “you’re growing back together.”
She takes a breath like she’s about to say something, but swallows it back instead. “You still haven’t told me about the party. How’d that go? You must’ve stayed late. We didn’t even hear you come back in.”
“Oh, my God — the party.” A boulder of shame forms in my stomach as I sort through all my mental snapshots from last night. They’re fuzzy as hell, but I remember more than I probably should, given my level of intoxication. “It was all rich kids from the city. I mostly just talked to this one guy…” I give her a synopsis of my interactions with Will, and finish with a retelling of the hell I raised on my way out. “I feel so horrible. Like a total piece of human garbage.”
It’s true. I feel worse about this stupid wagon than I do about Luke’s car or even Richard’s house. Will seemed like a decent guy, you know?
“Holy shit,” Mom says breathlessly. “So that big-ass wagon is still just dangling there?”
“I don’t know!” I tell her. “It totally could’ve fallen by now.” The shame-boulder in my stomach presses into my rib cage. “Do you think they’ll tell Marco? Shayla said I’m gonna have to pay for it. How much do antique ceiling-hanging wagons even cost? This is such a nightmare.”
“Accidents happen,” she says — not necessarily calmly — more like she’s just given up on caring about things. Like we’re already in such deep shit with the car and the house, what’s a wagon on top of it all? “Don’t be so hard on yourself.”
“Thanks.” I give myself permission to take a breath. “Who even hangs a wagon from their ceiling in the first place?”
“Who knows with these rich bitches?” Mom says. “I used to be friends with this girl Brittany in high school. Her parents had a mansion in Montclair. All kinds of weird-ass family heirlooms.” She lets out a breathy chuckle. “No wagons, though.”
Huh. This is the first I’ve ever heard of a Brittany from high school.
“How’d you become friends with a rich girl from Montclair?” I ask.
“Cheerleading camp.”
“Come again.” My eyebrows float up in surprise. “How have you never told me you went to cheer camp?” I stifle a laugh at the thought of Mom in full Bring It On regalia. Something about the image doesn’t fit — maybe because cheerleaders aren’t typically known for drinking wine and saying the word fuck twenty times per sentence — I don’t know. “How has Nonna never told me about this?”
“It was just one summer, okay?” Mom clarifies. “And I don’t know, because it was obviously Nonna’s idea. She saved up for an entire year to afford it.”
“Of course she did.”
“Anyway,” Mom continues. “We only got along because her mom also forced her to go. But we stayed friends after the summer ended. I slept over her house some weekends — oh, my God, it was unbelievable. This house they lived in. Everything was so perfect and clean and comfortable. Her family would go out to eat at nice restaurants. They weren’t eating at Da Vinci’s Pizza only for special occasions, you know what I mean? They just had a totally different way of life — never had to worry. Sometimes when I slept with her in her queen-size bed, I would close my eyes and pretend it was my bed. Just for a second, before falling asleep.” She stops to lean against a tree. “Jesus. It’s hotter than a bitch out here.”
“So what happened?” I ask. “Did you have a falling-out or something?”
“To say the least,” Mom says. “Her parents, like, forbade her from being friends with me after I got knocked up. I think a pregnant sixteen-year-old from Bayonne was a little too much of a blemish on their perfect little existence.”
Though I’ve never heard this particular story before, I have heard versions of it about other people from her past. Pretty much everyone in Mom’s life flipped on her that year. She’s told me it felt similar to what happened to Monica in the nineties: a total public shaming. One in which the man took absolutely no responsibility for his (significant!) role in the whole thing.
“That’s really unfair.” I look down and see that my arms have a shattered-glass glow from the rays of sunshine sneaking through the thick ceiling of leaves above us. It’s kind of stunning. “I’m sorry.”
“Whatever, I was used to it. It’s not like they were the only ones.” She sighs. “I don’t recommend being a pregnant teenager. It’s the worst.”
“Yeah.”
We continue hiking in silence for a while. Partially because it really is hotter than a bitch out here and breathing is becoming a challenge, and partially because I’m not sure what to say after that last story. This is why we don’t usually talk about Mom’s high school years. It was such a dark time for her — and yet I’m the direct result of that darkness. So it always ends up making us feel shitty. Like, I know she loves me more than anything in the world. But also, what if I’m the worst thing that’s ever happened to her?
Finally we make it to the top, where the ground levels out. The fragmented rays of light on my arm disappear as we emerge from under the brush. Sunshine blankets us from every direction. You can see miles and miles of lake and mountain from up here. It’s the type of perfect scene that you can’t even bother taking a picture of, because you know your phone could never do it justice.
Mom and I sit down on opposite sides of a giant rock.
“So what about this Will guy from the party last night?” she asks. “You like him?”
“I don’t think so.” I flash back to the sloppy kiss I tried to give him. That was a mistake. The thought of someone like Will knowing what to do with someone like me is akin to the thought of a kindergarten teacher knowing how to operate a machine gun. “But even if I did, I’m sure he never wants to talk to me again.”
“You don’t know that!” Mom says. “They have enough money to fix their wagon. Life’s easy when you can afford it.”
“Even if he doesn’t hate me, it would never work. He’s a total Nice Guy.”
“And that’s a bad thing?” Mom asks and then throws her hands up, like, duh, why did I even ask? She shakes her head and laughs in what I’d estimate is a fifty-fifty combo of amusement and disappointment. “Jesus. We need therapy.”