The Start of Me and You (8 page)

“Then maybe the guys at Carmel are salvageable,” Tessa said.

“Salvageable?” Kayleigh laughed. “Thanks a lot.”

“I haven’t met him yet!” Tessa said, grinning. “I don’t know if he’s acceptable.”

“Geez, Tessa,” Morgan said. “They’re guys, not troll people.”

“That,” Tessa said, pointing at her, “shows exactly how much you know about high school guys. Let me take you on a little trip down memory lane. To Shawn Puker.”

Shawn’s last name was not Puker. But, the year before, he took Tessa to a party and got so drunk that he puked. Tessa recounted the total horror—
My shoes, Morgan! It got on my shoes!
—and I propped my chin against my hand, sinking into their easy laughter. Whatever happened next with my parents, my friends and I would still be here trading stories and sips of our lattes. Together, we made four
walls, holding each other up even as the world around us shifted.

When I got home, I found my sister brushing her teeth in our adjoining bathroom. I hadn’t talked to her about our parents yet, but if I had been upset, I expected catatonic from Cameron. At thirteen, my sister was primarily into glittery nail polish and phone conversations where she essentially contributed: “Oh my God. Nuh-uh.”

She was bent over the bathroom sink, wrapped in a towel. Beyond her, the bathtub gurgled with nearly drained water, a sickening
glug-glug
that made me shudder. I hadn’t used our tub in a year. My sister’s girly bath products were lined up in a neat row by the edge of the tub, each chosen for its cute bottle and fruity smell.

“Hey,” I said, leaning against the door frame. She looked up, wiping some sort of green gel off her face. Her hair, the same soft brown as mine, was pulled back with a headband.

“I heard you flipped out at Mom.” She blotted her face with a towel. “What’s your problem?”

My jaw dropped, as if to speak, but no words came out. Cameron stared at me, waiting.

“What is
my
problem?” I asked. “My problem is that they’re going to wind up hurting each other all over again.”

She rolled her eyes at me. “You don’t know that.”

“Yeah, Cameron. I do.”

“Oh, c’mon,” she scoffed. “They’ve had some time apart, and they’re good now. You should be happy for them.”

I rubbed at my temples. “You don’t remember what it was like.”

“I remember,” she said, frowning. “I’m only three years younger than you.”

“Then you’d remember they were
so
unhappy together. When we were little, they hardly talked. They only fought.”

Her expression became a full-on scowl. “No, they didn’t.”

“Cameron, they did. They got divorced because they bring out the worst in each other.”

She glared, refusing to break eye contact for a few beats. “Well, I think you’re being super negative. It’ll be better this time.”

I glanced between our faces, reflected back at me in the bathroom mirror. We looked so alike, the same green eyes and pale skin dotted with freckles, only she was shorter and bonier like I had been at that age.

“Maybe,” I conceded, finally, but only because she looked like a little kid to me in that moment. A little kid whose security blanket I had tried to yank away. “Good night.”

Once inside my room, I opened my planner to my How to Begin Again list. I’d done it—gone to a party,
despite a massive curveball from my mom. I slashed a line through

1. Parties/social events.

I smiled down at the list, pride spreading through me like warmth. I’d already done one of the five things. It wasn’t even that hard. Enamored by my success, I made a quick edit to number three. Because it couldn’t be just any random guy. I needed to go out with someone who
got
me, someone I connected with. Someone who made my insides fluttery.

3. Date (RC)

Chapter Six

Three months after Aaron died, my grandmother moved into an assisted-living community—
not
a nursing home, as the brochure was careful to state. I could hardly bear to say good-bye to her house, on top of everything else I was trying to let go of. But after her Alzheimer’s diagnosis was official, she wanted an apartment here.

I found that her new place comforted me the way her old house did. The decor was mostly the same—vines of linen roses crawling up the drapes, herbs blooming in their windowsill pots, china figurines curtsying to each other inside a glass hutch. She still stocked ginger ale and my favorite snacks, and she still kept the TV on mute while we talked, always Nick at Nite.

It was my grandmother who taught me that TV shows start with writing. We were watching
I Love Lucy
when I was eleven, and I said, “Lucy is the funniest lady ever.”

“Lucille Ball was a magnificent talent,” she told me. “But, you know, she was said to be very serious in real life.”

“And she could just turn on the funny for TV?”

“Well,” my grandmother had said, “almost every episode was cowritten by the same person, who was very funny herself.”

“By Lucy, you mean?” I asked.

“No, by a woman named Madelyn Pugh. It was very unusual in the 1950s, to have a woman as a main writer for a show. I think she really understood Lucy.”

When I expressed how confused I was, she explained how TV shows are written in advance, by a room full of writers. At first, that new information took away some of the magic for me. But then we watched
30 Rock
, a show about writing for TV, and my grandmother gave me Madelyn Pugh’s memoir for Christmas the next year. She made me want to be a part of it all.

Now I roamed around the living room, waiting for my grandmother to “put on her face.” She did her full hair and makeup before entertaining company, even if it was only me. And it was often me, carrying plenty of emotional baggage to unpack on her floor.

The mantel showcased my school pictures, framed next
to Cameron’s. Nestled between them was the picture of my grandma twirling in front of the Eiffel Tower—her arms slightly out, skirt in a bell shape around her legs, face blurred from the spinning motion. I know now that she was fifty in the photo, but she looked so young and free.

I sat down at the kitchen table, picking through the ever-present dish of trail mix. I liked sweet and Cameron liked salty. Our grandmother mediated between us even with snacks.

“Hi, sweet girl,” she said, emerging from her bedroom. She bent to kiss my cheek, and the smell of powdery lavender enveloped me.

“Hi, Grammy,” I said.

“New haircut?” She squinted at me as she lowered herself into a chair.

I nodded. “Bangs.”

She gave a sagely nod. “I’ve always said bangs would look good on you, Katie.”

“Paige.” This only happened once in a while, my grandmother calling me by my mother’s name.

My grandma blinked a few times and then laughed, a bit embarrassed. “Silly me. Did I call you Katie? You just look so much like your mother did when she was a girl. Only now you have bangs.”

“Bangs that my mother
hates
,” I said. “Of course.”

“She said that?” Her frown deepened the delicate wrinkles by her mouth.

I sighed, remembering my mother’s terse tone in the car on the way here. “Well, she hates that I cut them without asking her.”

“Oh, she’ll get over it.”

Sometimes I couldn’t believe that it was my grandmother who raised my mom. I didn’t remember my grandfather, but I knew he was a marine. Maybe that’s where my mom got her strict rules and military-grade enforcement of a curfew. We were quiet for a few moments while I lost myself in thinking about my mom. And my dad. And my mom and dad.

“My goodness, dear.” My grandmother peered at me from across the kitchen table. “You look like you have something heavy on your mind. Is it the dream again?”

She meant the drowning nightmare, which only she and the therapist knew about. As far as I could tell, it was one of the last things my grandmother retained before her memory loss worsened.

“No. It’s not that. Did you know,” I began, trying to sound calm, “that my mom and dad. Are dating. Each other?”

She sucked in her breath. “I think I may have heard something about that. Are you sure?”

This was the Alzheimer’s at work. My mom had surely told her already, but that conversation would seem dreamlike, confusing for my grandmother to recollect.

“I’m positive.”

“Goodness me.”

“I … feel …” The words scattered in my mind, and I
held my hands up in bewildered surrender. My mouth was still halfway open, thoughts stillborn. But no matter how I searched, there was no candy coating on the truth of my feelings. “I feel like a horrible daughter.”

With my free hand, I began plucking more M&M’S out of the trail mix in front of me and lining them up beside the bowl. “I know I’m supposed to be happy.
All
divorce-casualty kids want their parents to get back together.”

Her lips curved into a sad smile. “You’re afraid to get your hopes up.”

“Yes.” I exhaled all the air from my lungs, forming a more dramatic sigh than I intended. “I am. Because I already know how this ends.”

She tightened her hand over mine. Her nonchalance alarmed me, given that this should feel like new information to her.

“Don’t you think it’s a mistake?” I asked. I needed to know what she remembered, now that her long-term memory was stronger than the final years of my parents’ marriage. “Like … they’re not compatible, no matter how much they want to be?”

“Oh, honey,” my grandmother said. “It’s more complicated than that. Your parents, they were so happy together those first few years.”

“They were?” I started arranging the blue M&M’S into a line.

My grandmother nodded.

I’d once found a photo of my parents on their wedding day, in the bottom of my mother’s jewelry drawer. I sneaked back in dozens of times over the years to study it. In the soft light of the photograph, they were exiting the church, beaming sideways at the camera. They looked at ease beside each other, young and golden. They weren’t the parents that I knew.

“Then what
happened
?” It’s a morbid curiosity, the search for relationship fissures—like searching for a cause of death. I knew it wouldn’t change anything, but I still had to know.

“Things change. There are so many outside forces coming at marriage; finances and jobs and houses and children. You can lose each other if you’re not careful. It doesn’t mean it was all a wash.”

I shook my head slowly, disbelieving. I scooped up the blue M&M’S and popped them into my mouth.

“Oh, my little girl,” she said, patting my hand. “Not everything ends so badly.”

I wanted to live in Lucy and Ricky’s world, where the blunders of life were righted in one neat half hour. They made it look easy.

“Come on now.” My grandmother’s eyes had the glimmer of intrigue. “There must be some nice boy who makes you want to change your tune.”

This got a smile out of me. “I guess, maybe.”

My grandmother smiled back, settling back into her chair. “Tell me everything.”

“Well, you know how you told me that dating kind of helped you, after Gramps?” Her eyebrows dropped, and I scolded myself for phrasing it as a question. She didn’t remember. “It was a while ago. Anyway, that’s my plan now. And there’s this guy, Ryan Chase, whom I’ve liked since forever, and he’s the perfect person to go out with.”

“Why him?” she asked, still smiling. “What makes this boy good enough for my girl?”

I’d told her before, of course, but I started at the beginning all over again—with the cereal aisle.

“It was such a hard time for his sister and their family,” I said. “But there he was, dancing anyway.”

“Ah,” she said. “Joy in the face of destruction. A very admirable quality.”

“I think so, too. He had a bad breakup this summer, but he’s still so confident and positive. I know that if we went out, everyone would see that we’re both doing really well.”

“So he’s the plan,” said my grandmother.

“He’s the plan,” I agreed. “Or at least part of it.”

I told her my other goals, inspired so much by her. “I don’t think I can actually swim—not any time soon. But I put it on the list for someday. And travel might be harder to plan, too, but I’ll figure it out. I’m not sure where yet. Why did you pick Paris?”

She smiled. “Why not Paris? My world had crumbled around me. Like your friend Mr. Chase, I found a place to dance.”