and the movie she saw starring that boy from Rocketman. I buy an ice cream sandwich and say I need to call my friend.
I throw my bag down on the table, and before Terri can go back to her book, Saz answers the phone. “The hell?”
“Sorry. The store’s been closed since Wednesday and it’s literally the only place I can get service. Are you okay?” I unpeel the wrapper from the ice cream and take a bite, enjoying the cold as it moves down my throat.
“I need to tell you something.”
“You’re getting married.”
“It’s about your dad.”
“My dad?” My ice cream starts dripping onto the table. For some reason it takes me a second to realize she’s talking about my dad, as in my dad, Neil Henry. This is how little I’ve been thinking about him lately.
“My parents were out at the White Lion—you know, that bar over on the west side? I guess they saw him there with someone.”
It takes me a minute because I’m trying to imagine my dad at a bar. “Someone?”
“A woman. I don’t know who it was. She had brown hair. They didn’t recognize her.”
“What were they doing?”
“Just having a drink. My mom said when your dad saw them, he left, like, a minute later. The woman stayed, so maybe it was someone he was just talking to, someone he met while he was sitting there. I mean, right? That was probably it.”
“If that was it, why are you telling me?”
“Because in case there was more to it, I thought you should know. I’d want to know.”
“Would you?” My voice goes loud and sharp.
“Yes. And I’d want to hear it from you.”
I want to hang up on her. Actually, I want this conversation to never have happened because until this moment it’s been a good day, bright and warm but not too warm, and Addy’s coming and there’s the promise of seeing Miah later. But I don’t hang up on her because this is Saz and she’s my best friend and she means me no harm and she loves me more than Etsy and Jolly Ranchers and Byron, her favorite brother. So in this dry, small voice I thank her and tell her I have to go because Addy’s almost here and that I love her too. Not that I love her more than this and that and that, because my brain has gone blank and silent, but I love her just the same.
* * *
—
Addy arrives on the afternoon ferry. Mom and I meet her, and she hugs my mom first and then me and then my mom again. Addy Birch is trim and elegant, with gray hair shorter than mine and dancing blue eyes. From the second she steps off the ferry, dressed in white linen pants and a flowing kimono top, she looks like the Addy I’ve known since I was a little girl—timeless, ageless—and I get a lump in my throat. Home.
My mom has been close with Addy all her life. She was there for her when Danny drowned in the rip current. She was there for her after Addy divorced her husband, Ray. That was when Addy came here to this island house—the one she’d inherited from her mother—to catch her breath, as she called it. It was always Addy and Mom, Mom and Addy, just like Saz and me.
We go to dinner at the inn and no one mentions my dad. I take the image of him at a bar talking to a strange woman and shove it as far down inside me as I can. Way deep down where no one will see it, where you would need mining gear to find it.
Addy talks about the man she just started dating—an attorney from Columbus—and she talks about her work as a landscape architect, which takes her up and down the East Coast and sometimes to California.
Addy has never made me feel smaller than. I’ve always felt like she was my friend too. But as good as it is to see her, it also feels wrong. Like she shouldn’t be here. Like even though we’re staying in her house, living in her universe, she’s bringing the outside world into this one, where it doesn’t belong.
* * *
—
I am busy with Addy and my mom at the museum and he is busy clearing trails with the Outward Bounders. I sit on the floor, sorting through files, and think of him, replaying our adventures in my mind. I go