“He’s not going to come,” I said, pushing the very thought away. In all the times I’d pictured this weekend, Mike had never, not once, been a part of it. If Mike showed up, there would be drama—and not fun, gossipy drama, like when we were all speculating that J.J.’s former girlfriend was secretly a Scientologist. It would wreck everything I’d imagined for this weekend, one perfect last Grant adventure with my siblings in our house—the ones who wanted to be there, that is. The ones who’d never once tried to break away from our family.
“I was just surprised by the plus-one,” Rodney said. “I guess Mike is dating someone at school.” Then he shuddered. “Unless Corrine is back in the picture?”
Corrine had been Mike’s high school girlfriend, and she’d been a nightmare. To say that none of us were fans would be an understatement.
“He’s not going to show up,” I said firmly. He may have told Linnie he was coming, but he’d told my dad he was coming home last Christmas, and that hadn’t happened, so it wasn’t like Mike’s word meant anything.
“Did you RSVP for a plus-one?” J.J. asked, waggling his eyebrows at me.
“Me?” I asked, startled. “Um, no. Who would I even—” As soon as I said it, Jesse flashed into my head. I was suddenly back with him in the rain, laughing with him as he carried me up to the guesthouse, his hands sliding up my waist. . . .
“Charlie?” I looked over to see everyone looking at me. “You were saying?” Linnie prompted.
“Right,” I said, clearing my throat. “Um, no. No date.”
“It might not be too late,” J.J. said as he scrolled through his phone.
Bill’s phone beeped with a text, and he looked down at it just as the front doorbell rang. “My uncle’s here,” he said. “And everything’s going to be okay. I promise.”
He smiled reassuringly. And then the alarm went off.
CHAPTER 4
Or, Can’t You Hear, Can’t You Hear the Thunder?
* * *
WILL BARNES, THE HEAD OF Where There’s A Will, seemed nice, very efficient, and looked nothing like what I’d been expecting a wedding planner to look like. He was tall and built more like a linebacker than Rodney’s brother, Ellis, who’d been an actual linebacker for the air force. But he’d come in with such an aura of confidence—like it wasn’t going to matter that Clementine had vanished the day before the wedding—that I could feel myself start to relax in his presence, and it looked like Linnie and Rodney were doing the same.
Feeling like things were in good hands, I’d used his arrival as an opportunity to take a shower, put in my contacts, and finally change out of my pajama-and-gnome ensemble. I’d put on jeans and, even though it wasn’t quite cold enough for it, the cashmere sweater I’d worn home that night from Jesse’s house. I shook it out and breathed it in, trying to see if I could still detect any of him—but since I’d brought it to imPRESSive Cleaners at least twice since then, it just smelled like dry-cleaning solution. I pulled it on anyway, twisted my wet hair into a knot, and left my room, heading back down the two flights of stairs.
The third floor, also known as the kids’ floor, was barely decorated—probably because nobody ever saw it except people who lived here. Our four bedrooms—J.J. and Danny had the biggest room and had always shared—branched off from a central landing, and for a while there, we’d all been involved in an indoor paintball game and had gotten very good at aiming from behind our cracked doors, sniper-style. You could still see the faint colored circles on the wall if you looked hard enough.
The second floor was at least a little more decorated—family pictures lining the walls and a decorative bench that inevitably became where bags and stuff got piled. The second floor was also four bedrooms that split off from a central landing—my parents’ master bedroom, my dad’s study, and the two guest rooms that we’d always called the Blue Room and the Ship Room. It seemed crazy, as I took the last flight of steps down to the front hall, that in only a few hours, all the rooms we had would be filled with wedding guests.
I was nearly to the front hall when I heard raised voices, and I stopped short. My parents had been fighting a lot earlier in the year—I’d walk into the kitchen and everything would go silent, like they were counting on the fact that I’d gone temporarily deaf before I’d opened the door. There was a crackling tension in the house, so that it felt like even the smallest exchanges, about what to get on our pizza, or who was supposed to buy the milk, had taken on a different significance. For a few months there, it was like I was trapped in a foreign film where everything was a metaphor. I hadn’t told my siblings, because there wasn’t really anything I could point to that was wrong. There was just the uneasy feeling that something wasn’t right, which was much harder, somehow, to prove.
But it all changed a few months ago, right around the time they’d told me they were selling the house. The whole vibe between my parents seemed better since then, which I took to mean they’d been fighting over what to do about the house—and once the matter was resolved, the fighting had stopped, and now arguments about pizza toppings were just about pepperoni versus sausage again. But I didn’t want it to be happening again—not during Linnie’s wedding weekend.
“Because you’re not the only one who lives on this street, Don!” I heard my dad snap, and, relieved, I took the rest of the stairs down to the front hall two at a time, now knowing exactly what I would see.
Sure enough, my dad was standing in the foyer across from Don Perkins, our two-doors-down neighbor. He was in his sixties and had lived on our street longer than we had. He was nosy, forever in our business, always calling or stopping by when he thought things were too loud. He was also in the Gardeners’ Association with my dad, and over the years, a rivalry had developed, Don always trying to outdo my father’s garden in the yearly competition. This rivalry was mostly one-sided, though, since he’d never once won and my dad had won three times, the last two years consecutively. This had only served to make him a worse neighbor, and his complaints increased with each one of my dad’s victories. Don had, of course, become a character in the strip—though the fictional Grants’ neighbor Ron was eventually revealed to have a soft side under his gruff exterior, which I really didn’t foresee happening with the real-life Don.
“Morning,” I said, widening my eyes at my dad as I came to stand next to him.
“Oh,” Don said, giving me a curt nod by way of a greeting. “You’re still here, are you?”
“Um,” I said, glancing at my father.
“Thought maybe you’d gotten them all off to college, now that you’re selling this place.”
“Charlie’s starting Stanwich in the fall,” my dad said, giving me a smile that didn’t quite meet his eyes.
“Why on earth would you go there?” Don asked, shaking his head. “Oh—were you not a very good student?”
“You know I teach there, right?” my dad asked, his voice frosty.
“My condolences.”
My dad’s face turned a very dark shade of red. “Listen here—”
“Like I said, Jeffrey,” Don said, talking over him, his very bushy eyebrows meeting in a frown, “I don’t want to be disturbed this weekend. There have already been all kinds of people coming and going, your alarm going off . . .”
“As I’m sure you remember, Donald, we sent out a letter to all the neighbors about this wedding months ago—letting you know it would be happening and asking for your patience and good neighborliness for just the one night.”
Don snorted as he looked through the open kitchen door, toward our backyard. My dad immediately took a step to block his sight line. He always suspected that Don’s coming over to complain about things were just excuses to see what my dad was doing with his garden and steal a win from him by spying.
“Well,” Don said with a huffy sigh, “it had better not get too loud tomorrow night. There are noise ordinances in this town, you know.”
“Yes,” my dad said, his tone getting calmer and more pleasant, always a bad sign. “Just like there are zoning laws that would have prevented you from building that gazebo. But some of us don’t feel the need to mention these things. Yet.”