Chapter ONE
The e-mails always began the same way.
Hi Auden!!
It was the extra exclamation point that got me. My mother would call it extraneous, overblown, exuberant. To me, it was simply annoying, just like everything else about my stepmother, Heidi.
I hope you’re having a great last few weeks of classes. We are all good here! Just finishing things up before your sister-to-be arrives. She’s been kicking like crazy lately. It’s like she’s doing the karate moves in there! I’ve been busy minding the store (so to speak) and putting the final touches on the nursery. I’ve done it all in pink and brown; it’s gorgeous. I’ll attach a picture so you can see it.
Your dad is busy as always, working on his book. I figure I’ll see more of him burning the midnight oil when I’m up with the baby!
I really hope you’ll consider coming to visit us once you’re done with school. It would be so much fun, and make this summer that much more special for all of us. Just come anytime. We’d love to see you!
Love,
Heidi (and your dad, and the baby-to-be!)
Just reading these missives exhausted me. Partially it was the excited grammar – which was like someone yelling in your ear – but also just Heidi herself. She was just so… extraneous, overblown, exuberant. And annoying. All the things she’d been to me, and more, since she and my dad got involved, pregnant, and married in the last year.
My mother claimed not to be surprised. Ever since the divorce, she’d been predicting it would not be long before my dad, as she put it, ‘shacked up with some coed’. At twenty-six, Heidi was the same age my mother had been when she had my brother, Hollis, followed by me two years later, although they could not be more different. Where my mother was an academic scholar with a smart, sharp wit and a nationwide reputation as an expert on women’s roles in Renaissance literature, Heidi was… well, Heidi. The kind of woman whose strengths were her constant self-maintenance (pedicures, manicures, hair highlights), knowing everything you never wanted to about hemlines and shoes, and sending entirely too chatty e-mails to people who couldn’t care less.
Their courtship was quick, the implantation (as my mother christened it) happening within a couple of months. Just like that, my father went from what he’d been for years – husband of Dr. Victoria West and author of one well-received novel, now more known for his interdepartmental feuds than his long-in-progress follow-up – to a new husband and father-to-be. Add all this to his also-new position as head of the creative writing department at Weymar College, a small school in a beachfront town, and it was like my dad had a whole new life. And even though they were always inviting me to come, I wasn’t sure I wanted to find out if there was still a place for me in it.
Now, from the other room, I heard a sudden burst of laughter, followed by some clinking of glasses. My mother was hosting another of her graduate student get-togethers, which always began as formal dinners (‘Culture is so lacking in this culture!’ she said) before inevitably deteriorating into loud, drunken debates about literature and theory. I glanced at the clock – ten thirty – then eased my bedroom door open with my toe, glancing down the long hallway to the kitchen. Sure enough, I could see my mom sitting at the head of our big butcher-block kitchen table, a glass of red wine in one hand. Gathered around her, as usual, were a bunch of male graduate students, looking on adoringly as she went on about, from the little bit I could gather, Marlowe and the culture of women.
This was yet another of the many fascinating contradictions about my mom. She was an expert on women in literature but didn’t much like them in practice. Partly, it was because so many of them were jealous: of her intelligence (practically Mensa level), her scholarship (four books, countless articles, one endowed chair), or her looks (tall and curvy with very long jet-black hair she usually wore loose and wild, the only out-of-control thing about her). For these reasons, and others, female students seldom came to these gatherings, and if they did, they rarely returned.
‘Dr. West,’ one of the students – typically scruffy, in a cheap-looking blazer, shaggy hair, and hip-nerdy black eyeglasses – said now, ‘you should really consider developing that idea into an article. It’s fascinating.’
I watched my mother take a sip of her wine, pushing her hair back smoothly with one hand. ‘Oh, God no,’ she said, in her deep, raspy voice (she sounded like a smoker, although she’d never taken a drag in her life). ‘I barely even have time to write my book right now, and that, at least, I’m getting paid for. If you can call it payment.’
More complimentary laughter. My mother loved to complain about how little she got paid for her books – all academic, published by university presses – while what she termed ‘inane housewife stories’ pulled in big bucks. In my mother’s world, everyone would tote the collected works of Shakespeare to the beach, with maybe a couple of epic poems thrown in on the side.
‘Still,’ Nerdy Eyeglasses said, pushing on, ‘it’s a brilliant idea. I could, um, coauthor it with you, if you like.’
My mother lifted her head and her glass, narrowing her eyes at him as a silence fell. ‘Oh, my,’ she said, ‘how very sweet of you. But I don’t do coauthorship, for the same reason I don’t do office mates or relationships. I’m just too selfish.’
I could see Nerdy Eyeglasses gulp, even from my long vantage point, his face flushing as he reached for the wine bottle, trying to cover. Idiot, I thought, nudging the door back shut. As if it was that easy to align yourself with my mom, form some quick and tight bond that would last. I would know.
Ten minutes later, I was slipping out the side door, my shoes tucked under my arm, and getting into my car. I drove down the mostly empty streets, past quiet neighborhoods and dark storefronts, until the lights of Ray’s Diner appeared in the distance. Small, with entirely too much neon, and tables that were always a bit sticky, Ray’s was the only place in town open twenty-four hours, 365 days a year. Since I hadn’t been sleeping, I’d spent more nights than not in a booth there, reading or studying, tipping a buck every hour on whatever I ordered until the sun came up.
The insomnia started when my parents’ marriage began to fall apart three years earlier. I shouldn’t have been surprised: their union had been tumultuous for as long as I could remember, although they were usually arguing more about work than about each other.
They’d originally come to the U straight out of grad school, when my dad was offered an assistant professorship there. At the time, he’d just found a publisher for his first novel, The Narwhal Horn, while my mom was pregnant with my brother and trying to finish her dissertation. Fast-forward four years, to my birth, and my dad, riding a wave of critical and commercial success – NYT best-seller list, National Book Award nominee – was heading up the creative writing program, while my mom was, as she liked to put it, ‘lost in a sea of diapers and self-doubt’. When I entered kindergarten, though, my mom came back to academia with a vengeance, scoring a visiting lectureship and a publisher for her dissertation. Over time, she became one of the most popular professors in the department, was hired on for a full-time position, and banged out a second, then a third book, all while my father looked on. He claimed to be proud, always making jokes about her being his meal ticket, the breadwinner of the family. But then my mother got her endowed chair, which was very prestigious, and he got dropped from his publisher, which wasn’t, and things started to get ugly.
The fights always seemed to begin over dinner, with one of them making some small remark and the other taking offense. There would be a small dustup – sharp words, a banged pot lid – but then it would seem resolved… at least until about ten or eleven, when suddenly I’d hear them start in again about the same issue. After a while I figured out that this time lag occurred because they were waiting for me to fall asleep before really going at it. So I decided, one night, not to. I left my door open, my light on, took pointed, obvious trips to the bathroom, washing my hands as loudly as possible. And for a while, it worked. Until it didn’t, and the fights started up again. But by then my body was used to staying up way late, which meant I was now awake for every single word.
I knew a lot of people whose parents had split up, and everyone seemed to handle it differently: complete surprise, crushing disappointment, total relief. The common denominator, though, was always that there was a lot of discussion about these feelings, either with both parents, or one on one separately, or with a shrink in group or individual therapy. My family, of course, had to be the exception. I did get the sit-down-we-have-to-tell-you-something moment. The news was delivered by my mother, across the kitchen table as my dad leaned against a nearby counter, fiddling with his hands and looking tired. ‘Your father and I are separating,’ she informed me, with the same flat, businesslike tone I’d so often heard her use with students as she critiqued their work. ‘I’m sure you’ll agree this is the best thing for all of us.’
Hearing this, I wasn’t sure what I felt. Not relief, not crushing disappointment, and again, it wasn’t a surprise. What struck me, as we sat there, the three of us, in that room, was how little I felt. Small, like a child. Which was the weirdest thing. Like it took this huge moment for a sudden wave of childhood to wash over me, long overdue.
I’d been a child, of course. But by the time I came along, my brother – the most colicky of babies, a hyperactive toddler, a ‘spirited’ (read ‘impossible’) kid – had worn my parents out. He was still exhausting them, albeit from another continent, wandering around Europe and sending only the occasional e-mail detailing yet another epiphany concerning what he should do with his life, followed by a request for more money to put it into action. At least his being abroad made all this seem more nomadic and artistic: now my parents could tell their friends Hollis was hanging out at the Eiffel Tower smoking cigarettes, instead of at the Quik Zip. It just sounded better.
If Hollis was a big kid, I was the little adult, the child who, at three, would sit at the table during grown-up discussions about literature and color my coloring books, not making a peep. Who learned to entertain myself at a very early age, who was obsessive about school and grades from kindergarten, because academia was the one thing that always got my parents’ attention. ‘Oh, don’t worry,’ my mother would say, when one of their guests would slip with the F-word or something equally grown-up in front of me. ‘Auden’s very mature for her age.’ And I was, whether that age was two or four or seventeen. While Hollis required constant supervision, I was the one who got carted everywhere, constantly flowing in my mom’s or dad’s wake. They took me to the symphony, art shows, academic conferences, committee meetings, where I was expected to be seen and not heard. There was not a lot of time for playing or toys, although I never wanted for books, which were always in ample supply.
Because of this upbringing, I had kind of a hard time relating to other kids my age. I didn’t understand their craziness, their energy, the rambunctious way they tossed around couch cushions, say, or rode their bikes wildly around culs-de-sac. It did look sort of fun, but at the same time, it was so different from what I was used to that I couldn’t imagine how I would ever partake if given the chance. Which I wasn’t, as the cushion-tossers and wild bike riders didn’t usually attend the highly academic, grade-accelerated private schools my parents favored.
In the past four years, in fact, I’d switched schools three times. I’d lasted at Jackson High for only a couple of weeks before my mom, having spotted a misspelling and a grammatical error on my English syllabus, moved me to Perkins Day, a local private school. It was smaller and more academically rigorous, although not nearly as much as Kiffney-Brown, the charter school to which I transferred in junior year. Founded by several former local professors, it was elite – a hundred students, max – and emphasized very small classes and a strong connection to the local university, where you could take college-level courses for early credit. While I had a few friends at Kiffney-Brown, the ultracompetitive atmosphere, paired with so much of the curriculum being self-guided, made getting close to them somewhat difficult.
Not that I really cared. School was my solace, and studying let me escape, allowing me to live a thousand vicarious lives. The more my parents bemoaned Hollis’s lack of initiative and terrible grades, the harder I worked. And while they were proud of me, my accomplishments never seemed to get me what I really wanted. I was such a smart kid, I should have figured out that the only way to really get my parents’ attention was to disappoint them or fail. But by the time I finally realized that, succeeding was already a habit too ingrained to break.
My dad moved out at the beginning of my sophomore year, renting a furnished apartment right near campus in a complex mostly populated by students. I was supposed to spend every weekend there, but he was in such a funk – still struggling with his second book, his publication (or lack of it) called into question just as my mom’s was getting so much attention – that it wasn’t exactly enjoyable. Then again, my mom’s house wasn’t much better, as she was so busy celebrating her newfound single life and academic success that she had people over all the time, students coming and going, dinner parties every weekend. It seemed like there was no middle ground anywhere, except at Ray’s Diner.
I’d driven past it a million times but had never thought of stopping until one night when I was heading back to my mom’s around two A.M. My dad, like my mom, didn’t really keep close tabs on me. Because of my school schedule – one night class, flexible daytime seminar hours, and several independent studies – I came and went as I pleased, with little or no questioning, so neither of them really noticed that I wasn’t sleeping. That night, I glanced in at Ray’s, and something about it just struck me. It looked warm, safe almost, populated by people who at least I had one thing in common with. So I pulled in, went inside, and ordered a cup of coffee and some apple pie. I stayed until sunrise.
The nice thing about Ray’s was that even once I became a regular, I still got to be alone. Nobody was asking for more than I wanted to give, and all the interactions were short and sweet. If only all relationships could be so simple, with me always knowing my role exactly.
Back in the fall, one of the waitresses, a heavyset older woman whose name tag said JULIE, had peered down at the application I was working on as she refilled my coffee cup.
‘Defriese University,’ she read out loud. Then she looked at me. ‘Pretty good school.’
‘One of the best,’ I agreed.
‘Think you’ll get in?’
I nodded. ‘Yeah. I do.’
She smiled, like I was kind of cute, then patted my shoulder. ‘Ah, to be young and confident,’ she said, and then she was shuffling away.
I wanted to tell her that I wasn’t confident, I just worked really hard. But she had already moved on to the next booth, chatting up the guy sitting there, and I knew she didn’t really care anyway. There were worlds where all of this – grades, school, papers, class rank, early admission, weighted GPAs – mattered, and ones where they didn’t. I’d spent my entire life squarely in the former, and even at Ray’s, which was the latter, I still couldn’t shake it.
Being so driven, and attending such an unorthodox school, meant that I’d missed out on making all those senior moments that my old friends from Perkins Day had spent this whole last year talking about. The only thing I’d even considered was prom, and then only because my main competition for highest GPA, Jason Talbot, had asked me as a sort of peace offering. In the end, though, even that hadn’t happened, as he canceled last minute after getting invited to participate in some ecology conference. I told myself it didn’t matter, that it was the equivalent of those couch cushions and cul-de-sac bike rides all those years ago, frivolous and unnecessary. But I still kind of wondered, that night and so many others, what I was missing.
I’d be sitting at Ray’s, at two or three or four in the morning, and feel this weird twinge. When I looked up from my books to the people around me – truckers, people who’d come off the interstate for coffee to make another mile, the occasional crazy – I’d have that same feeling that I did the day my mother announced the separation. Like I didn’t belong there, and should have been at home, asleep in my bed, like everyone else I’d see at school in a few hours. But just as quickly, it would pass, everything settling back into place around me. And when Julie came back around with her coffeepot, I’d push my cup to the edge of the table, saying without words what we both knew well – that I’d be staying for a while.
My stepsister, Thisbe Caroline West, was born the day before my graduation, weighing in at six pounds, fifteen ounces. My father called the next morning, exhausted.
‘I’m so sorry, Auden,’ he said, ‘I hate to miss your speech.’
‘It’s all right,’ I told him as my mother came into the kitchen, in her robe, and headed for the coffeemaker. ‘How’s Heidi?’
‘Good,’ he replied. ‘Tired. It was a long haul, and she ended up having a caesarean, which she wasn’t so happy about. But I’m sure she’ll feel better after she gets some rest.’
‘Tell her I said congratulations,’ I told him.
‘I will. And you go out there and give ’em hell, kid.’ This was typical: for my dad, who was famously combative, anything relating to academia was a battle. ‘I’ll be thinking about you.’
I smiled, thanked him, then hung up the phone as my mother poured milk into her coffee. She stirred her cup, the spoon clanking softly, for a moment before saying, ‘Let me guess. He’s not coming.’
‘Heidi had the baby,’ I said. ‘They named her Thisbe.’
My mother snorted. ‘Oh, good Lord,’ she said. ‘All the names from Shakespeare to choose from, and your father picks that one? The poor girl. She’ll be having to explain herself her entire life.’
My mom didn’t really have room to talk, considering she’d let my dad name me and my brother: Detram Hollis was a professor my dad greatly admired, while W. H. Auden was his favorite poet. I’d spent some time as a kid wishing my name were Ashley or Katherine, if only because it would have made life simpler, but my mom liked to tell me that my name was actually a kind of litmus test. Auden wasn’t like Frost, she’d say, or Whitman. He was a bit more obscure, and if someone knew of him, then I could be at least somewhat sure they were worth my time and energy, capable of being my intellectual equal. I figured this might be even more true for Thisbe, but instead of saying so I just sat down with my speech notes, flipping through them again. After a moment, she pulled out a chair, joining me.
‘So Heidi survived the childbirth, I assume?’ she asked, taking a sip off her coffee.
‘She had to have a caesarean.’
‘She’s lucky,’ my mom said. ‘Hollis was eleven pounds, and the epidural didn’t take. He almost killed me.’
I flipped through another couple of cards, waiting for one of the stories that inevitably followed this one. There was how Hollis was a ravenous child, sucking my mother’s milk supply dry. The craziness that was his colic, how he had to be walked constantly and, even then, screamed for hours on end. Or there was the one about my dad, and how he…
‘I just hope she’s not expecting your father to be of much help,’ she said, reaching over for a couple of my cards and scanning them, her eyes narrowed. ‘I was lucky if he changed a diaper every once in a while. And forget about him getting up for night feedings. He claimed that he had sleep issues and had to get his nine hours in order to teach. Awfully convenient, that.’
She was still reading my cards as she said this, and I felt the familiar twinge I always experienced whenever anything I did was suddenly under her scrutiny. A moment later, though, she put them aside without comment.
‘Well,’ I said as she took another sip of coffee, ‘that was a long time ago. Maybe he’s changed.’
‘People don’t change. If anything, you get more set in your ways as you get older, not less.’ She shook her head. ‘I remember I used to sit in our bedroom, with Hollis screaming, and just wish that once the door would open, and your father would come in and say, “Here, give him to me. You go rest.” Eventually, it wasn’t even your dad I wanted, just anybody. Anybody at all.’
She was looking out the window as she said this, her fingers wrapped around her mug, which was not on the table or at her lips but instead hovering just between. I picked up my cards, carefully arranging them back in order. ‘I should go get ready,’ I said, pushing my chair back.
My mother didn’t move as I got up and walked behind her. It was like she was frozen, still back in that old bedroom, still waiting, at least until I got down the hallway. Then, suddenly, she spoke.
‘You should rethink that Faulkner quote,’ she said. ‘It’s too much for an opening. You’ll sound pretentious.’
I looked down at my top card, where the words ‘The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past’ were written in my neat block print. ‘Okay,’ I said. She was right, of course. She always was. ‘Thanks.’
I’d been so focused on my last year of high school and beginning college that I hadn’t really thought about the time in between. Suddenly, though, it was summer, and there was nothing to do but wait for my real life to begin again.
I spent a couple of weeks getting all the stuff I needed for Defriese, and tried to pick up a few shifts at my tutoring job at Huntsinger Test Prep, although it was pretty slow. I seemed to be the only one thinking about school, a fact made more obvious by the various invitations I received from my old friends at Perkins to dinners or trips to the lake. I wanted to see everyone, but whenever we did get together, I felt like the odd person out. I’d only been at Kiffney-Brown for two years, but it was so different, so entirely academic, that I found I couldn’t really relate to their talk about summer jobs and boyfriends. After a few awkward outings, I began to beg off, saying I was busy, and after a while, they got the message.
Home was kind of weird as well, as my mom had gotten some research grant and was working all the time, and when she wasn’t, her graduate assistants were always showing up for impromptu dinners and cocktail hours. When they got too noisy and the house too crowded, I’d head out to the front porch with a book and read until it was dark enough to go to Ray’s.
One night, I was deeply into a book about Buddhism when I saw a green Mercedes coming down our street. It slowed as it neared our mailbox, then slid to a stop by the curb. After a moment, a very pretty blonde girl wearing low-slung jeans, a red tank top, and wedge sandals got out, a package in one hand. She peered at the house, then down at the package, then back at the house again before starting up the driveway. She was almost to the front steps when she saw me.
‘Hi!’ she called out, entirely friendly, which was sort of alarming. I barely had time to respond before she was heading right to me, a big smile on her face. ‘You must be Auden.’
‘Yes,’ I said slowly.
‘I’m Tara!’ Clearly, this name was supposed to be familiar to me. When it became obvious it wasn’t, she added, ‘Hollis’s girlfriend?’
Oh, dear, I thought. Out loud I said, ‘Oh, right. Of course.’
‘It’s so nice to meet you!’ she said, moving closer and putting her arms around me. She smelled like gardenias and dryer sheets. ‘Hollis knew I’d be passing through on my way home, and he asked me to bring you this. Straight from Greece!’
She handed over the package, which was in a plain brown wrapper, my name and address written across the front in my brother’s slanted, sloppy hand. There was an awkward moment, during which I realized she was waiting for me to open the package, so I did. It was a small glass picture frame, dotted with colorful stones: along the bottom were etched the words THE BEST OF TIMES. Inside was a picture of Hollis standing in front of the Taj Mahal. He was smiling one of his lazy smiles, in cargo shorts and a T-shirt, a backpack over one shoulder.
‘It’s great, right?’ Tara said. ‘We got it at a flea market in Athens.’
Since I couldn’t say what I really felt, which was that you had to be a pretty serious narcissist to give a picture of yourself as a gift, I told her, ‘It’s beautiful.’
‘I knew you’d like it!’ She clapped her hands. ‘I told him, everyone needs picture frames. They make a memory even more special, you know?’
I looked down at the frame again, the pretty stones, my brother’s easy expression. THE BEST OF TIMES, indeed. ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Absolutely.’
Tara shot me another million-watt smile, then peered through the window behind me. ‘So is your mom around? I would love to meet her. Hollis adores her, talks about her all the time.’
‘It’s mutual,’ I said. She glanced at me, and I smiled. ‘She’s in the kitchen. Long black hair, in the green dress. You can’t miss her.’
‘Great!’ Too quick to prevent, she was hugging me again. ‘Thanks so much.’
I nodded. This confidence was a hallmark of all my brother’s girlfriends, at least while they still considered themselves as such. It was only later, when the e-mails and calls stopped, when he seemingly vanished off the face of the earth, that we saw the other side: the red eyes, the weepy messages on our answering machine, the occasional angry peel-out on the road outside our house. Tara didn’t seem like the angry drive-by type. But you never knew.
By eleven, my mother’s admirers were still hanging around, their voices loud as always. I sat in my room, idly checking my Ume.com page (no messages, not that I’d expected any) and e-mail (just one from my dad, asking how everything was going). I thought about calling one of my friends to see if anything was going on, but after remembering the awkwardness of my last few social outings, I sat down on my bed instead. Hollis’s picture frame was on the bedside table, and I picked it up, looking over the tacky blue stones. THE BEST OF TIMES. Something in these words, and his easy, smiling face, reminded me of the chatter of my old friends as they traded stories from the school year. Not about classes, or GPAs, but other stuff, things that were as foreign to me as the Taj Mahal itself, gossip and boys and getting your heart broken. They probably had a million pictures that belonged in this frame, but I didn’t have a single one.
I looked at my brother again, backpack over his shoulder. Travel certainly did provide some kind of opportunity, as well as a change of scenery. Maybe I couldn’t take off to Greece or India. But I could still go somewhere.
I went over to my laptop, opening my e-mail account, then scrolled down to my dad’s message. Without letting myself think too much, I typed a quick reply, as well as a question. Within a half hour, he had written me back.
Absolutely you should come! Stay as long as you like. We’d love the company!
And just like that, my summer changed.
The next morning, I packed my car with a small duffel bag of clothes, my laptop, and a big suitcase of books. Earlier in the summer, I’d found the syllabi to a couple of the courses I was taking at Defriese in the fall, and I’d hunted down a few of the texts at the U bookstore, figuring it couldn’t hurt to acquaint myself with the material. Not exactly how Hollis would pack, but it wasn’t like there’d be much else to do there anyway, other than go to the beach and hang out with Heidi, neither of which was very appealing.
I’d said good-bye to my mom the night before, figuring she’d be asleep when I left. But as I came into the kitchen, I found her clearing the table of a bevy of wineglasses and crumpled napkins, a tired look on her face.
‘Late night?’ I asked, although I knew from my own nocturnal habits that it had been. The last car had pulled out of the driveway around one thirty.
‘Not really,’ she said, running some water into the sink. She looked over her shoulder at my bags, piled by the garage door. ‘You’re getting an early start. Are you that eager to get away from me?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Just want to beat traffic.’
In truth, I hadn’t expected my mom to care whether I was around for the summer or not. And maybe she wouldn’t have, if I’d been going anywhere else. Factor my dad into the equation, though, and things changed. They always did.
‘I can only imagine what kind of situation you’re about to walk into,’ she said, smiling. ‘Your father with a newborn! At his age! It’s comic.’
‘I’ll let you know,’ I told her.
‘Oh, you must. I will require regular updates.’
I watched as she stuck her hands into the water, soaping up a glass. ‘So,’ I said, ‘what did you think of Hollis’s girlfriend?’
My mother sighed wearily. ‘What was she doing here, again?’
‘Hollis sent her back with a gift for me.’
‘Really,’ she said, depositing a couple of glasses into the dish rack. ‘What was it?’
‘A picture frame. From Greece. With a picture of Hollis in it.’
‘Ah.’ She turned off the water, using the back of her wrist to brush her hair from her face. ‘Did you tell her she should have kept it for herself, since it’s probably the only way she’ll ever see him again?’
Even though I’d had this exact same thought, after hearing my mom say it aloud I felt sorry for Tara, with her open, friendly face, the confident way she’d headed into the house, so secure in her standing as Hollis’s one and only. ‘You never know,’ I said. ‘Maybe Hollis has changed, and they’ll get engaged.’
My mom turned around and narrowed her eyes at me. ‘Now, Auden,’ she said. ‘What have I told you about people changing?’
‘That they don’t?’
‘Exactly.’
She directed her attention back to the sink, dunking a plate, and as she did I caught sight of the pair of black, hipnerdy eyeglasses sitting on the counter by the door. Suddenly, it all made sense: the voices I’d heard so late, her being up early, uncharacteristically eager to clean out everything from the night before. I considered picking the glasses up, making sure she saw me, just to make a point of my own. But instead, I ignored them as we said our goodbyes, her pulling me in for a tight hug – she always held you close, like she’d never let you go – before doing just that and sending me on my way.