Page 35 of Songs of Summer

“Well, are you guys staying in Matt’s room?” Dylan asked, adding with a giggle, “Do you still have those bunk beds?”

“I do,” he confessed.

“Are you top or bottom, Maggie?” Steve asked, in what was meant to be a joke, until Maggie turned him into the straight man.

“Depends on the night,” she countered, surprising herself with her somewhat risqué humor.

Renee silently mouthed “What the hell?” to her son before following Dylan and her wedding date to the guest house.

As soon as she was out of earshot, Maggie did more than mouth it.

“What the hell, Matt? I wanted to fly under the radar, remember?”

He nudged her arm. “Let’s go upstairs and discuss this in private.”

Back in the room, Matt closed the door behind them and quietly pleaded, “I’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking.”

“I think you were thinking—thinking about how you would feel like a dateless loser at the wedding now that Dylan has a plus-one!”

“I’m not that quick, Maggie.” His eyes widened, and a smile slid across his face. “But now that you mention it!”

Maggie grunted, clearly unamused. He took it down a notch and apologized again. “I’m seriously very sorry. I didn’t think it through.”

“I’ll say—you could have just stuck with her one-night stand assumption. You’re a grown man. What was she gonna do—punish you?”

“OK, but hear me out: by jumping into the girlfriend role, you could come to the wedding and all the festivities and see that Bea is much more than the loon you saw on the roof. The rehearsal dinner is at your grandfather’s house! You can really dip your toe in the familial water.”

“That’s not my toe, Matt, that’s like a deep dive—and you want me to lie to everyone? My birth mother? My grandfather?”

“I’ll be lying too. To my whole family and Dylan and the rest.”

“Well, that’s not on me.”

“That’s fair.”

He sat down on the chair and took a beat. “OK, I’m just going to tell the truth.”

“What truth?” Maggie asked with more than a note of panic in her voice. “You can’t tell themmytruth!”

He put his head in his hands, gathering his thoughts before giving it his best shot.

“I know Bea. She’s been looking for you for thirty years. In the end, she won’t care that we lied, she won’t care about anything other than having found you. This way, you can spend quality time around her if you want while deciding what to do, and you don’t have to stay in that gross hotel.”

“How do you know I’m staying in a gross hotel?”

“Are you?”

“Yes,” she conceded, before teasing him with: “Was this all part of an elaborate plan to get a date for your mother’s wedding? You can tell me. I know going to a wedding alone is torture.”

She smiled sweetly, clearly letting him off the hook.

“So, you’re in?” He smiled back.

“What choice do I have? I’m in.”

His smile grew.

“OK, we need to synchronize our stories—my mother is a lawyer. She will question the shit out of this.”

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