Always Something There to Remind Me (25 page)

In fact, what better way to screw Nate than to screw Brendan? And anyone else who appealed to her from now on, if she wanted to. Maybe she’d seek out Scott Koogan, whom Nate had once been jealous of, warning her that he was “bad news.” She’d date everyone he’d been jealous of, why not? She’d already decided she would never fall in love again, so what did she need to hold out for?

A girl’s first mattered. Losing her virginity was significant. But the second? The third? As long as she was careful not to get a disease or get pregnant, the rest didn’t matter. They had no more significance than the second and third teams knocked out of the NFC East playoffs.

Her Super Bowl was already over.

She’d lost.

She leaned in to Brendan and put her mind elsewhere and pretended he was someone else, from the first kiss to his final release. She felt nothing but pretended to be as into it as he was.

It was a trick she would employ for a long time to come.

Chapter 16

Present

It’s been my experience that the best cure for anguish or emotional duress is housework.

Go ahead and make June Cleaver jokes about me. I’ll wait.

But that physical exertion, all of which makes a house a home, has always made me feel better about just about anything that was upsetting me.

Unless, of course, it made me confront memories that made me feel worse.

I spent the day after seeing Nate vigorously cleaning baseboards, organizing the pantry, digging stuff out of closets that had been there so long I didn’t even recognize it all, and so on. Not one thing was interesting, but I listened to NPR while I worked and lost myself in the tasks at hand.

It was better than thinking about what had happened.

Until late afternoon, when I came across an old box of letters and pictures in my closet. They were from high school, and I saw the gingham ribbon that I recognized as flagging the pile of letters Nate had sent to me from his grandfather’s summer place in Michigan.

Why is it that people always seem to find this stuff just when they’re thinking about it or, more to the point, trying
not
to think about it? That’s always the way it went in movies and books. It seemed like some big Foam Finger of Fate pointing something out, but I couldn’t buy that.

Fate had already given me the finger.

“Okay, I get it,” I said out loud. “He’s an issue for me. Jordan was right. Got it.”

“Are you on the phone?” Camilla asked behind me.

Startled, I dropped the box and turned. “Oh, my God, you scared me to death.”

She laughed. “Um, not as scary as your mom going crazy and talking to herself.”

“Believe me,” I said, reaching to pick up the various papers and pictures that were now strewn on the floor, “some things are better said only to myself, not to you.”

“What’s that?” she asked, honing in on the pile of letters. How was it that kids always seemed to know and go for the things you don’t want them to see?

I tried to shrug it off. “Just a bunch of old stuff.” I dropped the letters into the box.

“Lemme see.” She reached for a picture.

I moved it out of reach. “It’s nothing interesting.”

“You just pulled it away from me,” she pointed out. “It
must
be interesting.”

“No, seriously, Cam.” I put the last of the pictures in the box and put the lid back on. “It’s my high school stuff.
Really
dull.”

That ignited a fire I wasn’t expecting. “Oooh, I want to see it!” She grabbed the box.

At that point, I had two choices: I could either let her get bored with it by herself, or I could make it seem super interesting by taking it away from her. I’d been at this game long enough to know the better course of action.

“Suit yourself,” I said, sitting down in the closet. “You’ll be disappointed.”

Her slender hands pulled an envelope out of the bunch and pulled one of his letters out.

“
Hi Baby,
” she read, then raised a questioning brow to me before continuing. “
Today we went to the mainland to check for mail and supplies but the boat broke down. I had to improvise a fix on a hose with Band-Aids from the first-aid kit until we got to land. I was glad there was a letter from you waiting for me!
” She looked at me.

“Date smart boys,” I said, trying to sound light. “That’s the lesson there.”

She gave me a dubious look and continued reading. “
We’re in tents tonight because we’re starting fishing at three a.m. I know you will still be asleep but I’ll be thinking of you and hoping I’m in your dreams.
” She set the paper down and asked me, “Um, was this guy, like, totally in love with you or what?”

I hesitated for a moment, feeling disconcerted. How could I explain Nate to Cam? He wasn’t just another ex-boyfriend, yet how could I explain to her that he was anything but? I’d never had to before. I’d always skipped over Nate in the let’s-talk-about-your-ex-boyfriends game.

I laughed, but it sounded hollow to my own ears. I just had to keep this light. “Yes. He was totally in love with me. Who could blame him?”

“No, seriously, Mom, what’s the story about this guy?”

“He was my high school boyfriend,” I said, making a face like,
Everyone’s got one like this
. She would never know how much more Nate had meant and how completely blown apart that was now.

“Not everyone. Look at this stuff.” She read from another letter she’d pulled out. “
It’s three a.m. and I can’t sleep. I want you. Now. I love you more than anything, my baby. Forever.”
She looked back at me. “I mean, that’s not
Rick
.”

“No,” I agreed, a dull ache in the pit of my stomach. “It’s not Rick. It was just a little high school romance, that’s all. Don’t make this more than it was.” It was already more than it should be.

“Are you kidding?” She slipped the letter back into its envelope and picked another one at random. “Who
was
this guy?”

I winced inwardly.

“
I want you, I need you, I miss you, where are you?
” she read, then looked to me for the explanation that was still not forthcoming. “This is intense.”

I reached out and took the letter from her and put it back in the envelope. My hand shook slightly. I hoped she didn’t notice. “No, it’s not,” I said, putting the envelope back into the box. “It’s not that big a deal.”

“What was his name?”

No point in lying. She’d never hear it again. That chapter was now officially over. “Nate.”

“What did he look like?” she pushed. “Is there a picture in there? Is that a box full of him?”

Yes, it was. And over the past few years, I’d probably looked over the outside of the box a million times and just hadn’t given it much thought. Why did I have to find it and drop it in front of its greatest audience ever?

“It’s got a bunch of stuff in it,” I told her, keeping a firm hold on it. She didn’t need visual aids. “Mementos and letters and all the same kinds of things you save now, but no pictures. Nothing that interesting, truly. Do
you
have anything super significant in your closet?”

She raised her chin. “No, but only because I never had, like, a love of my life like that.”

If she was lucky, she never would. “Who says this is the love of my life?”

“
He
does.” She reached for the box and I held it out of reach. “He loved you, he wanted you, he needed you, he’d love you forever. Omigod, Mom, that’s, like, huge.”

“That’s, like, youth,” I corrected, standing up and putting the box back on the shelf. “And a few weeks spent apart. Find me a teenage guy who doesn’t suddenly turn his ordinary girlfriend into the girl of his dreams when he can’t see her for a few weeks and I’ll show you a unicorn.”

She looked disappointed. “But he sounded like he meant it!”

“That’s what I thought too, honey.” I felt sick. Somehow I’d gotten so tangled up in these memories that it hurt me too, to think he’d sounded like he meant it when he didn’t.

I’d sincerely believed it was forever, and I’d believed, even more than that, that Nate would be there forever.

What a mess this had all become.

The past, the present, and all the stuff that lay in between. “At the time. But we were just kids.” I looked at her with sincerity, since I believed what I was saying even though I thought Nate and I
had
shared something a lot more intense than the usual youthful relationship. “You don’t meet the love of your life when you’re a kid. You have to figure out a whole lot of things before you’re ready to say what you want.”

“So…” She looked at me tentatively. “Is Rick the love of your life, then?”

For the first time in years, I wished I could say yes to a question like that. I wished I felt like someone in the present, someone who was really
here
for me, was a great love of mine.

But I couldn’t.

“Rick is
great
,” I dodged. “Don’t you think?”

“The greatest! Obviously!” She narrowed her eyes with a disconcerting amount of perception. “But … do
you
think so?”

“Of course!” I did! I really did! So why did I feel the need to point out his added value? “And it’s a nice bonus that he has Amy, what with you two being so close.”

“
Totally
.” She looked at me intensely. “But I want to hear more about this Nate guy.”

“There’s really nothing else to say. It was a thousand years ago.” And yesterday.

“Didn’t your grandparents meet in elementary school?” Cam went on, raising an eyebrow.

It was true; we have a picture of my father’s parents in their second-grade classroom together. “Yes, but that was a small town in the thirties. Things changed a lot over the next fifty or sixty years.”

“But you never found anyone else.”

“Um, besides Rick, you mean?”

She was young and romantic and obviously wanted this to be earth-shattering. “You’ve never been in love like
that
”—she gestured toward the letters—“again.”

“Who says?” This was getting tricky. I was well aware that I was screwed up emotionally—I didn’t want to encourage her to be the same. “I’m just not in love with
him
anymore.”

She looked sad. “It’s just so romantic. And so sad now.”

“Yeah.” I nodded and put my arm around her, closing my eyes against the emotion for a moment. “It is. It was. But it wasn’t real.” Funny how it made me sad to say that. Not sad that it wasn’t real
now
but sad for the girl I’d been who was so completely sure she knew her heart and that Nate was the guy in it.

Boy had she been naïve.

“So if I fall in love with a guy, I can’t believe it’s real?” she asked, disappointed.

“If you wait and fall in love with a guy when you’re emotionally ready, it will be amazing.”

“Or it will be a complete failure and I’ll be forty-five and single, like Lois DeMatto’s mom, who shows up with a different ugly guy at every school event.”

“That’s not fair,” I said. “For one thing, there aren’t that many school events, and for another, you don’t know what she sees in them. Not everything is about appearance, remember.”

Cam gave a sarcastic shrug. “Maybe not, but isn’t
some
of it about looks?”

“Some. For a very short time. And even then, everyone’s different.” I looked at her, and saw the baby she’d been not so long ago. I saw all of the people she’d been so far; the pudgy infant, the three-year-old who loved wearing one black patent-leather shoe and one white one, always with her rose-patterned dress; the six-year-old I’d made into a Twister game box for the first-grade play; the ten-year-old who cried to me that she was taller than everyone in her class and was embarrassed and awkward; and now this fifteen-year-old who was starting to bloom into the woman she’d become but who was still so much a child that it made me want to cry.

Suddenly I was a crier.

If I could go back in time and slow myself down from the insane drive to grow up at that age, I would. I’m not sure why my mother didn’t. If I’d had a little more childhood, I believe I would have been a lot less wobbly in my adulthood. Particularly my young adulthood.

“I never want to be a desperate older woman, looking at creepy guys through new glasses and saying maybe they’re not so bad after all,” she said.

Wow. I didn’t either.

“Well, how about you wait and see what happens?” I suggested. “I promise you, you’re not going to lose anything by playing it cool with guys in high school.” The chorus of “Sunrise, Sunset” swelled in the back of my mind. I ruffled her hair. “You are a
prize
. You need to be won, not hand yourself over. Never forget that!”

“Jeez, Mom, it’s not like I’m going to
do it
with anyone right now!”

She might have been me, trying to sell my mother the same lie, even while I was Nate’s personal amusement park at night after she went to sleep.

Not that Camilla didn’t mean what she was saying now.

I would have said and meant the same thing at her age.

She just didn’t know how quickly her hormones were going to change her mind. Especially after a few well-placed strokes from a boy she thought she loved.

I sighed. “Trust me, honey,” I said, wishing she never had to learn anything the hard way. “If you want so much as a good kiss good night, he has to feel like he pursued you, not the other way around.”

Cam shrugged. “Is that how it was with that guy and you?” she gestured toward the box of Nate’s letters.

I nodded. The desperation to get away from this conversation was intense, but this was one of those defining moments in a mother-daughter relationship and I couldn’t let the ball drop just because I’d been stupid enough to sleep with the guy again without knowing all the facts. “At first. He did all the traditional boy stuff he was supposed to. He called me, he asked me to do things with him and his friends, kissed me good night, the whole nine yards.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Only at first?”

“Well, then we were going out, so we were equal. He didn’t always have to court me. We talked all the time, all night long, we saw each other every day before and after school, but we never really had the thing where the boy calls and asks the girl on a date. It was all just…” I shrugged. “Hanging out.”