Chapter 8

Sawyer

“How was the sleepover?” I ask the boys over my shoulder as we drive out to my favorite kid-friendly trail, the overlook from Mount Mocadney.

“Fun!” Jonah says.

I catch a glimpse of my son’s face in the rearview mirror. In place of his usual expression of pre-teenage boredom, he’s grinning. I can’t help smiling in response, although I know he can’t see me.

“What’d you guys do?”

“Played Battlefront. Played Jukem. Watched Cars 3. Had a pillow fight.”

“Ms. Dunning must have loved that.”

In the rearview mirror, the boys exchange quick, knowing glances.

“My mom was a little mad. But not really mad,” Madden informs me. “She laughed after.”

I try to picture what Elle must look like in a parental lather, but my imagination fails me. My brain serves up another image instead. The night I met her, the way she looked right after I kissed her. Her mouth was kiss-slick, her lips parted, her eyes hazy with desire.

Okay, then.

I wrench my mind back to the present. Pillow fight. “Nothing got broken, did it?”

“Nah,” Jonah says.

“So, Madden, your mom’s a writer?” I tell myself I’m just making conversation with Jonah’s new friend, that I’m not indulging my curiosity about the woman next door.

“Yup. She writes for magazines and stuff.”

“Pretty cool. She written any books?”

“Not yet, but she says she wants to someday.”

“Do you like to write?”

“Not really.” I glimpse the tail end of Madden’s shrug.

“So what do you and your mom do for fun?”

Madden appears to consider that at length. “We used to have more fun before my dad left,” he says.

Ouch. Of all people, I should have known better than to poke that wound. I’m sure similar words could have come out of Jonah’s mouth.

“I bet you still do fun stuff sometimes,” I prompt, trying to undo the damage I’ve done by opening this topic.

Madden thinks, then brightens. “We go to movies and play games. And Mom says we’re going to kayak this summer and hike and stuff. She says this summer will be funner than last summer because things were kind of messed up last summer. ’Cause you know my dad went to go be with Helen, who was his high school girlfriend, and it really, really, really hurt my mom’s feelings.”

I feel a sharp pinch of sympathy for Elle. It’s mingled with respect, too, because it sounds like she was pretty truthful with Madden, without flat-out making Trevor into the bad guy. That’s not so easy to do.

“My feelings were hurt, too,” Madden says, matter-of-factly.

“Yeah,” I say. “Really, really hurt feelings would definitely make sense in that situation. But I bet you and your mom take good care of each other.”

“We do!”

“And she seems like a pretty fun mom.”

I flash on another image of Elle, at odds with the earlier one: her wearing rubber-duck pajamas and a diarrhea-joke apron, her hair up in a messy bun, clutching a spatula. I have to fight back a smile.

“She is,” Madden says emphatically.

Shortly after that, the boys conk out in the backseat. They probably didn’t sleep much, what with video games, movies, board games, and pillow fights.

The car takes on that soothing feeling I used to love when Lucy and Jonah both fell asleep on a drive, and I realize, with a start, that this will be the first time Jonah and I have hiked Mount Mocadney without Lucy. Lucy and I used to do this hike all the time with Jonah when he was little, making a day of it and packing lunches, snacks, and water bottles.

I can’t believe it’s been two years since I’ve been up here. I guess I took a break from being fun after Lucy’s death, too.

When we used to do this trip as a family, Lucy and I fought, not angrily but in the way people do who love each other but are together all the time. I never understood why the whole trip had to be such a production, why she got so fussy about whether we were dressed right for the weather and had enough food to survive an apocalypse. If I suggested that it was more important to catch the best part of the day than to be equipped for disaster, she got mad at me for being so cavalier. But not really mad. Just, you know, pissy. The sandpapery rub of two people’s neuroses against each other.

I miss it. The day-to-day reality, even the fighting.

I wonder if Jonah will remember that we used to do this with his mom. I wonder if he’ll feel like it was more fun before.

I’m suddenly so glad I brought Madden along for distraction. It’ll be different-fun with him.

I find a parking space, despite all the people who’ve had the same idea we did. The boys wake as the car stops and bound out, going from fast asleep to wide awake so fast it makes me crave coffee. They skip toward the wooden stand that holds the area map and study it, but I can tell as I get close that they don’t really understand it. So I boost them up one at a time and let them get a closer look, show them the “You Are Here” sticker and where we’re headed. Then I point them at the trailhead and let them run.

They dash ahead of me on the trail, Jonah with his jet-black mop and Madden, who’s a dandelion, with fluffy butter-blond hair and skinny limbs. The fact that they’re moving so fast is great, because it means that I have to walk at a pretty good clip to keep up with them. But it also means that they’re lost in their own world, some mix of woods exploration and video game culture. I hurry after them, admiring the late spring woods, the ferns unfurling, the ground russet with needles. My mind drifts, from the sights around me to my plans for the house (first, get rid of the heinous carpet in the living room), and I let it wander wherever it wants to go.

Oddly enough, as I catch up to the boys near the overlook, I realize that I haven’t mostly been thinking about Lucy.

Which is weird, because I must have walked this trail twenty or more times with her, wearing the backpack she’d crammed with supplies. While we walked, we chatted. Sometimes it was good, her sharing a funny story or something about her shop, or me talking about a piece of furniture I was working on. Sometimes it was bad, the two of us spatting over whether we had enough money to fix a broken oven or who was going to call around to find out who could do the repairs.

Today, though, those memories aren’t the thoughts that mostly fill my head.

Instead, it’s the sight of Elle dressed as she was earlier today, in those ridiculous shorty pajamas and that awful apron, spatula in hand.

I chuckle, thinking of it.

But barely suppressed laughter wasn’t my only reaction.

Standing there on her front stoop, part of me wanted to complete my mission as soon as possible and escape to the safety of my house.

Another part of me wanted something else. The part of me that remembered.

How her hair felt like handfuls of silk.

How her nipples rose under my touch, hard and needy.

How soft the skin of her inner thighs felt, rich and delicate, begging to be licked.

I wanted it again.

I wanted to unfasten the messy bun and let all that blond goodness tumble down around her shoulders so I could run my fingers through it.

I wanted to untie her apron and let it drop to the floor, then brush her nipples to peaks through the thin cloth of her shorty pajamas, because I’d bet the farm she wasn’t wearing a bra.

I wanted to take my time running my hands—and my tongue—up the satin expanse of leg revealed beneath the shorty bottoms.

But it wasn’t the remembering or the physical craving that had me tied in knots.

No. It was how badly I’d wanted to knock on her door and tell her I’d changed my mind, that I’d happily accept her invitation to join her and the boys for pancakes.

How close I’d come to doing it.