Page 68 of All Your Life

“I got that from the horse part. I didn’t ride growing up, but I knew girls who did. Financially, it’s no joke.”

“Exactly. My mother is a good person, she’s not mean or anything, but maybe she puts too much emphasis on things that aren’t really important.”

“And Liam being the guy who mucks the stalls at the country club rather than, say, hitting the links, isn’t her top choice for you?”

“Bingo. And meanwhile, intellectually speaking, Liam is the smartest boy I’ve ever met. And he’s a better all-around person than my boyfriend was, that’s for sure.”

“You drove through the town where I worked. It’s basically at the bottom of the school district barrel.Somany of those kids were smart, with so much potential, but just lacked the advantages that you and I grew up with.”

“That’s not your hometown?”

“No. I went to live with my aunt after I graduated. My parents had both remarried, my brother was away at school. There was nothing for me at home.”

“Are you close to your family?”

“I am now. My mother and I have been repairing our relationship over the past two years. She wasn’t perfect, but in all fairness, I started pushing both of them away when I was young…like twelve or thirteen. They were very busy people, and if you weren’t as competitive as they were at the time, you felt like a person standing on a dock with a suitcase in your hand, watching as the boat pulled away.”

“So your mother had a career?”

“They’re both physicians, and so is my brother.”

I can feel my eyes go wide as I acknowledge this possible link. “I’m pre-med.”

“I was going to say something before when you mentioned majoring in biology, but I didn’t want to push the whole,See, wearerelatedthing.”

“That’s weird though, right?”

“Maybe, maybe not. I just know that it wasn’t in my blood. I tried, but I just always had my head in a book, and it wasn’tGray’s Anatomy. I’ve always wanted to teach.”

“What about Damien?”

“He was majoring in business at Fordham. I told you his father died when he was a freshman, and then the World Trade Center was attacked at the beginning of his sophomore year. He told me a lot of Fordham alumni died, also a few people his father had worked with, and he felt like he was just sitting in class doing nothing important. So he finished out the year and then enlisted.”

“Wow. Did his father work there?”

“Yes, before he died. He was a maintenance worker and a handyman on the side. His mother worked at Lincoln Center, which for me, as a fallen ballerina, was fascinating.”

I sense there’s a story there. “Fallen?”

She gets up from the couch, smiling. “We’ll save that one for another time. Let’s just say that I love to dance, not to be toldhowto dance.” Looking back to the table, she asks, “Could you eat something now? I’m hungry.”

“Yeah, I could eat.”

We spend the next five minutes working our way through a veggie wrap we share, but it’s not long before we’re lobbing questions back and forth at one another again.

She tells me about visiting her brother and his wife out in California, her friends in North Carolina, and her parents, all over the course of one summer, referring to it as thenational leg of my telling the truth tour. This makes me laugh, even though I know there was nothing laughable about that time in her life. But the relief and closure it gave her allowed her to move on with her life.Not to leave you behind, or Damien, but to live my life again. She doesn’t need to reassure me on this. I get it.

Then I tell her the basics around the Penny-Parker betrayal, and she’s respectful enough to listen without piling judgement on either one of them. “Would you hate me if I say that I feel bad for Penny? Maybe I shouldn’t but I do.”

“Believe me, I’ve tried so hard to hate her but I can’t. She was my best...No, she was myonlyfriend for years. The other two friends in my group are great, but we’re flighty friends. Does that make sense?”

She nods. “People you think will probably breeze in and out of your life?”

“Exactly. But Penny has been my steady since the fourth grade. I cannot wrap my head around it, why she’d do this to me.”

“And Parker?”

Without taking a nanosecond to censor myself, I wave the question, his name, and every last thing about him off into thin air. “I don’t give a shit about him.”

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