The phone woke us the next morning: Scott asking if we could take the kids; Annabelle didn’t feel well, and he had a gig at the lakefront. Sunlight pooled beneath the curtains, the glare too bright on our clock to read the numbers. Erik was lying on his back, one arm holding the phone, the other crossed over his eyes. I leaned up to pull the alarm from the night table and saw it was almost nine. Erik told Scott he’d be right over.
“Annabelle’s sick?” She’d seemed so happy last night.
“A migraine.” Erik sighed. “I was really looking forward to a day of nothing.”
“At least we got to sleep in a little.” I pushed myself up to a sitting position. My eyes burned with exhaustion. The sky had been turning light when I came to bed. Too exhausted for sleep, I lay awake, thinking, as I rarely did, about Rehoboth. The briny smell of the boardwalk; Nick surfing, the ocean fiery with sunrise; Kelly and me sitting in beach traffic after school, counting the out-of-state license plates. For the first time since I’d left, I wanted to go back. I’d been afraid of what being there would do to me, afraid of the memories, afraid of the terrible, terrible shame. But I’d had a life there for twenty-four years, a life I loved. I wanted to visit our old house a block from the ocean, and the bungalow on Fourth Street where I’d been Nick’s wife and Lucy’s mom. I wanted to sit in my dad’s restaurant, wanted to walk the boardwalk with my mom. More than anything, that’s what I pictured: the two of us walking and talking, holding our to-go coffees, the pink ball of sun popping over the horizon.
I’m ready to go home, I kept thinking, surprised I still thought of it this way. Home.
“I woke around two and you were nowhere to be found.” Erik glanced at me, squinting one-eyed against the light. “You were up all night, weren’t you?” He didn’t wait for an answer, just leaned forward, kissed the top of my head, and slid out of the sheets. “You stay put. I’ll bring you coffee.” He stopped in the doorway. “And then I’ll get the hellions while you grab another hour of sleep.”
By the time he returned, I was in the kitchen, already on my second cup. Spencer was flapping his arms and pacing in a loop—kitchen, dining room, living room—his body practically vibrating with anxiety over the schedule change. “Everyone get a cooking hat!” Erik ordered as he set the keys on the table, and the kids scampered to their rooms, cheering.
“Really?” I teased as he plunked a Brewers baseball cap over my eyes. “We couldn’t have a nice calm morning?”
“Good luck with that.” He pulled on a knit Packers beanie with green and yellow pom-poms just as Spencer appeared wearing his foam cheesehead. I couldn’t remember when Erik began this practice of everyone wearing a hat when we cooked together, but it was now tradition.
Erik started making pancakes for him and the girls—Phoebe had on her purple bike helmet, Hazel a tiara—while Spence and I made smoothies for the two of us. At one point, Erik and I glanced at each other across the room, shaking our heads at the chaos: Spencer’s shoes—he hated shoes—were kicked off, one under his stool, one by the counter; a baggie of plastic jewelry was on the table; the blender was whirring, pancake batter sizzling, and Hazel and Phoebe were arguing, first over whether a tiara was a hat, and then over whether the napkins should be folded in triangles or rectangles.
“Circles!” Erik cried. “I want circle napkins!” but Phoebe stomped off in tears, saying, “You always make fun of my desires!”
Erik looked at me wide-eyed. “Desires?” he mouthed.
Later, Erik took the girls shopping for school shoes, and Spencer and I went to the grocery store. He was still anxious, chewing on the collar of his T-shirt, but as we were pushing our cart across the lot, he reached for my hand. Never mind that he was thirteen now; never mind that he didn’t like to be touched. I inhaled a sharp breath and felt something fierce rise up in me. Maybe I didn’t deserve this life, but it had been given to me; it was mine.
At home the girls modeled their shoes—Hazel got tan bucks and Phoebe hiking boots. “Do those really count as school shoes?” I whispered to Erik as the girls pranced across the living room, pretending it was a runway.
Erik looked at me in defeat. “She’s Annabelle’s daughter. You try telling her no.”
Annabelle phoned before dinner to say she was feeling better. The girls begged her to come over and see their new shoes, so she promised she and Scott would bring frozen custard for dessert. We ended up having it on the back deck. Scott was sunburned from being outside all afternoon, and although Annabelle looked a little blurry, her face puffy, she’d put on tiny pearl earrings and lipstick.
We talked about the kids’ schedule for the week, how great the gala had been the night before, and how impossible it was that summer was almost over. Our season of perfect happiness. Color drained from the sky, and Erik flipped on the outside lights, the grass looking more indigo than green. Bugs flickered in the air.
“We should head out,” Scott said, just as we heard a shout from inside the house. Gabe and Eva were hurrying through our kitchen to the deck.
“I got the part!” Eva called before she was even outside.
“You’re playing Serena?” Annabelle cried. It had been Lynn Fontanne’s role in Quadrille. Annabelle jumped up to hug her and then we all did, and Eva was telling us about the afternoon. The fellows had congregated at the lake house where Kelly was staying; a guy from Texas was playing Axel, the role Alfred had played; Kelly had been great, exacting and funny and self-deprecating.
After everyone left, we got the kids in bed and finally collapsed into our own. Erik lifted his arm for me to snuggle against him. It was the first time we’d stopped moving all day. I could have fallen asleep right there, Erik’s chest rising and falling, his fingers trailing up and down my arm. Like drifting in a rowboat.
“So, tell me about your mom,” he said. “You were on the phone for a while last night.”
“My mom.” I lifted my head from his chest and sank back into my own pillows. “My mom made me sad, Erik. Really sad.”
“Let me guess. Because you and Kelly didn’t talk?” He laced his fingers through mine.
“Yeah, there was that. She’s so desperate for me to find out about Lucy, and of course I want that too, but…” I stopped. “That’s not what made me sad. It’s how lonely she is, Erik. She didn’t go to the restaurant last night so she wouldn’t miss my call. It kills me because I came this close”—I held up my thumb and index finger—“to putting off talking to her until this morning. And then I thought, God, there’s probably been a zillion times when I have put it off and I didn’t even realize—” I swallowed. “Her life stopped when I left, and I’m not sure I really knew that before.” I stared at our entwined hands. “This is going to sound crazy,” I said quietly, “but all day I’ve had this sense that my mom and I somehow traded places, and I got to go out and build this whole new life in part because she stayed there, frozen in time.”
Erik didn’t say anything. He just squeezed my fingers tighter, making a fist of our hands.
“You think I’m nuts, don’t you?”
“I think it’s a lot of guilt you’re carrying, but no, it’s not nuts at all. Because if your mom could have traded places with you in order to give you a new life, she would have.” He paused. “In a way, it’s what you did for Lucy.”
“I think I’m ready to go back,” I said. “Will you come with me?”
“Are you kidding? I would love to go to Rehoboth with you.”