Page 70 of Summer Romance

“She will be. It’s middle school girl stuff, and she needs me.”

“Oh. Wow, I really wanted to see you.”

“Me too. I’m sorry. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

He’s quiet for a while, and the din of the skate park pours through my car speakers. “I hope Greer’s okay,” he says.

42

“Goddamn it, Mom.” It feels good to say it. The words roll around against the white noise of the engine and the rumble of the tires against the road. I clutch the steering wheel and say it again: “Goddamn it.” If she hadn’t stepped in all the time, he would have had to lean in a little. Pete and I were never going to make it. We’d still be getting divorced, but maybe if Pete had been pitching in all along, he’d know how to be there for Greer now, and I would still be heading north.

Tears are running down my face. I have two hands on the steering wheel and I’m gripping it so hard that I could break it. I am sinking into a deep well of sadness and anger, and I don’t know who else to blame. “It was my life. Not yours. And I know you wanted me so much and that you loved me so much, but that didn’t mean my life belonged to you. It was for me to walk through, and for me to figure out.”

Darling.

“Don’t darling me! I mean this, Mom. You knew it was all wrong. You had to have known. You could have justtaken a step back and let me handle things. That marriage was going to end either way. I didn’t have to lose myself too.” Now I need to mop up my face because I’m having a hard time seeing the road.

I would have thrown my body onto a mountain of live grenades to protect you from pain.

All right, touché.

“This is really hard, Mom.”

“Have you beencrying?” Greer asks when she gets in the car.

There’s no denying it. I’ve been ugly crying and talking to my mom for three hours. We actually worked a lot of stuff out. Halfway back to Beechwood, I felt the last threads of anger toward her loosen and give way. She was my mother. Of course she wanted to step in.

“A little,” I say. “I was just thinking about Fancy and remembering what it was like to be in your exact same spot.”

“It sucks,” she says. What I wouldn’t give to see my mom’s wide smile on her face today.

“It does. Have you had dinner?” I grab her hand, and she lets me.

“No.”

“Let’s go to Rockport for an early dinner. We can sit right on the water and eat lobster rolls.” I know enough to know that she wouldn’t want to be caught dead eating with her mother in town today.

“Okay,” she says, and gives me half a smile.

“I’m going to need to get gas.”

I am tryingto be more even-keeled than my mom was in this situation. When this happened to me, we got through that first day, and then my mom immediately suggested I apply to private school. We didn’t have the money for private school, but she pretended we did; that’s how much she wanted to protect me from Jen Brizbane. I remember how scared it made me to see how upset she was, like she agreed this was the end of the world. As I sit across the table from Greer, who hasn’t touched her lobster roll, I can feel all of my mom’s feelings. I can feel the fury of a million mothers inside of me, and I want to roar my fiery mother breath on anyone who might steal a moment of my daughter’s happiness. I know I need to let her wade through this, but the truth is, if I could step in, I would. If I could snap my fingers and make those girls appear with balloons and apologies, I would. If I could prevent her from ever suffering another loss and growing from it, I might. And it’s in this moment that I understand my mother’s love for me. I can still feel the intensity of that love and the way she walked into my home, bright as the sun, and blinded me to all the shadows. How lucky I was to be loved like that.

In the end, I did not switch schools. In fact, the social tide shifted before any of the applications arrived in the mail. That’s the other part I need to remember—this will pass. My mother taught me how to create a cocoon for Greer, but inside of it I will allow her to feel how she feels.

“Put your phone away,” I say.

“What?” Greer looks at me like she’s never heard of such a thing.

“They’re not texting, right? Because they’re horrible seventh-grade girls. But this lobster is delicious and that seagull is eyeballing yours.”

She shoves her phone in her pocket and looks out at the water, like she just noticed where we are. “Can we move?” she asks.

“No.” I smile at her. My mom would have loved this idea.

“Rockport’s nice.”

“Middle school girls are awful in Rockport too,” I whisper. “It’s universal. It’s like anthropology or something; girls turning into women fight amongst their own to jockey for power. There’s actually a ton of learning that happens along the way.”

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