I press my eyes closed for a few seconds. But. Just. Round and round we go.
“—?Pete makes me happy,” she says. “Maybe you and Julian can work it out, talk it through. Please, baby. This is my chance. Will you just try? And then, before you know it, we’ll be off to New York for a nice break.”
A dull, familiar disappointment fills me up. Whenever I find myself in some awkward situation, I always, always hope. And she never, ever surprises me.
“I’m going out,” I say, moving away from her.
She perks up at that, taking my action as a sign of acceptance. “Good idea. Get some air. Just be back in time for dinner. We’re going to eat as a family; won’t that be great?”
I grab my messenger bag back from the barstool where Mom dropped it earlier and head for the door. With my hand on the doorknob, I turn back and meet my mother’s desperate gaze. I fight the urge to stay, to help her unpack, to make sure she eats that sandwich she’s making, to say, “Yeah, that’ll be swell.”
Instead, I leave without a word.
Chapter Four
I CALL LUCA AS SOON AS I’M OUTSIDE.
“Gray-Gray!” he shouts into the phone. I’m so wound up, I don’t even have the energy to give him crap about his ridiculous nickname for me. It’s a play on cray-cray that arose after my legendary leap from Colin McCormick’s second-story balcony and into the pool at his Memorial Day party last year. Luca thinks the name is freaking hilarious. He also thinks my jump was inspired by a multitude of lime-green Jell-O shots. It wasn’t. It was only fueled by one. I jumped because I goddamn wanted to. I had recently spent the better part of a Saturday on the phone with the electric company trying to figure out our bill—?and by figure out, I mean asking them how long they’d give us to scrounge up some more pennies before leaving us in the dark. I was so pissed off. For weeks. Colin’s party rolled around and I just wanted to feel like a damn teenager, stupid and carefree. So I jumped.
“Are you back?” Luca asks. “Tell me you’re back.”
“If you’d call it that.” I walk over to the garage and peer inside, searching to make sure my beach cruiser is still in one piece. It’s my only mode of transportation around the cape.
“What does that mean?”
“Typically, in order to come back you have to return home.” I wade through more boxes, shove aside golf clubs, and edge around a rusting lawn mower before pulling my bike from a corner by one handlebar.
“What the hell are you talking about?” He yells it, but only because he’s at LuMac’s, his family’s diner, and a blender starts whirring in the background.
“We moved.”
There’s a beat of quasi-silence. I can almost feel Luca wincing through the phone. I push on my bike’s dingy white tires, amazed Mom managed to keep them intact during the move.
“Are you serious?” Luca finally asks.
“Yes. To the lighthouse.”
“Okay, Virginia Woolf. Wait . . . Peter Lanier is the new lighthouse manager—?”
“Yeah, no shit.”
“So . . . you’re living with Jay?”
“Again, no shit.”
“Damn.”
“Do you have anything helpful to offer, or should I try to hit up my mother again for a little comfort?”
“I’ve got pizza fries.”
“That’ll do. But you know I can’t leave Mom here by herself for too long when she’s unpacking. She’ll probably start a fire trying to store pillows in the oven or something. Or she’ll channel-surf until she finds the most depressing UNICEF commercial in existence, and then she’ll really be useless.” I think about my neat little room and swallow a lump in my throat. Mom can be damn focused when she wants to be. Key word want.
“Gray, she’s a big girl. You’re allowed to do something for yourself.”
“I did. I went to Boston for two weeks and look what happened.”
He doesn’t say anything to that. In the background, I hear his mother, Emmy, calling out orders. “Blue Burger up for table ten!”
Luca clears his throat, then laughs a little. “If anything, she’d burn the place down with her hot glue gun. Remember that time she left it on in the bathroom of that crappy duplex you lived in a couple years ago?”
“And melted my toothbrush—?yeah, I remember.”
When things get heavy, Luca likes to whip out a story or two and hardy-har-har over it. From anyone else, I’d rip them a new one, but I know he only does it to keep me from using Mom’s legendary hot glue gun for much more sinister purposes. Either that, or he legit has no idea what to say to all this insanity, which is highly likely. Still, no matter how many times this happens, no matter how many times Luca smiles through it all, it’s still embarrassing as hell that this is my life.
“Hey, seriously,” he says. “Do you want me to talk to my mom? You could move in for a—?”
“No.”
“But—?”
“Luca. No.”
He sighs so loudly into the phone, it hurts my ears, and I know we’re both thinking the same thing. When we were thirteen, my mom disappeared for a few days. Luca came over and cooked up a pretty convincing lie to tell Emmy, said he was staying over because we were helping Maggie with some huge jewelry order. Emmy has an enormously sensitive bullshit detector. She showed up an hour later at our apartment, a casserole dish for dinner in hand. When we couldn’t produce Maggie, she hauled me home with her, despite my protests.
When Mom came home two days later, she went to Emmy’s looking for me. They had a huge blowout, Mom screaming at her that she had no right to take her kid, and Emmy calmly—?but with a firm fury to her tone that scared the shit out of me, to be honest—?explaining to her that I wasn’t old enough to be on my own for that long.
Mom went apoplectic. She grabbed my arm so hard, it bruised—?the only time she’s ever laid a less than gentle hand on me—?and took me home. She didn’t talk to Emmy for a year after that, and even though a sort of strained peace exists between them now, their interactions are still awkward as hell.
Luca tries to bring it up every now and then—?like now, when he knows I’m in a situation that’s less appealing to me than a Brazilian wax—?but I always shut him down. I can’t leave her. She’s my mom; I’m her kid. We belong together. I start to tell him this, to tell him about the New York audition trip and how she organized my lighthouse room and managed not to break anything, but even in my head, it sounds like an excuse.
“Okay, fine,” Luca says. “I’m training the new girl in an hour, but I’m done at six and then I’m coming over, no arguments.”
“You don’t have to do that—?wait. What? What new girl?”