of me wonders if it might be easier to never see him again. I can tell myself I made him up and the summer wasn’t real, and go back to Ohio and see Saz and my dad and all my friends, and then go off to college like nothing ever happened.
Except that he happened and we happened, and I just want one more day with him. An entire day, start to finish, with no This is the end but instead I’ll see you again someday.
But no, he’s not making it up, because now he is on the walkie-talkie, pacing off down the hall, speaking to some unseen person. I sit up, swing my feet onto the floor, and reach for my clothes.
* * *
—
We are going to meet after lunch and head to the beach. He drops me at the general store, where I buy a new notebook because mine is almost filled. This one is large and fat, with a green cover the color of spartina. I walk home in the sunlight.
Back at Addy’s, I find my mom in the kitchen, book in hand, drinking coffee. Her hair is piled up on her head in a messy bun, and she is wearing her BADASS AUTHOR shirt, the one I bought her last Christmas.
“I’m home.”
“You’re home.” She sets down the book. “Everything okay?”
“Yes.” I can feel the wall, and I don’t want there to be a wall. I hug her and she hugs me back like she can feel it too. Together we knock it down, and then we pull apart because this is the thing about hugs—they have to end sometime even when you don’t want them to. I pour juice into two glasses, grab two bowls from the cabinet, open the cereal boxes. She hands me a cup of coffee. Then she nods at the window seat and the package sitting there.
“Is that from him?”
“Yes.”
“I told him to stop sending me my things.”
“So don’t open it.” She smiles. “But if I know your dad, that’s an apology.”
I pick up our bowls and our glasses and our mugs—a balancing act—and take them to the table. I sit with my back to the window seat. My mom sits across from me.
We eat for a moment in silence and then I say, “What was he like when you met him?”
Her hand freezes in midair. She sets her mug down and stares up at the ceiling.
“Complicated. Funny. A little full of himself, but in an endearing way. He believed he could do anything. He wore black because he was going through an artist phase and he felt older than everyone else, and he was this musical genius. I was a little in awe of him.” She doesn’t ask why I want to know.
“After he graduated from Juilliard, why didn’t you stay in New York? Why didn’t he try to make it as a musician?”
“Your dad never felt at home there, at the school or in the city. Music has always just come to him, but I don’t think the structure of a program like that worked for him.”
“But he still could have done something with it.”
“It’s not easy to make a living as an artist.”
I say, “You do it.”
“And I feel extremely grateful and also a bit like, God, I hope they don’t find out what a fraud I am.”
“Do you think you’d still be together if he hadn’t given up music?”
“I don’t know. I want you to promise me something, though. That you will go out into the world and fulfill all your Claudeness.”
“I promise.”
We sit, picking up our cereal spoons at the exact same moment, picking up our coffee mugs at the exact same moment, perfectly synchronized.
“Stop it,” I say.
“You stop it.”
And now we’re laughing. And now we’re both making the winding-down noise, like a sigh, which gets us started again.
“Mom? I’m going to miss you.”
“I’m going to miss you. Something awful. But I’ll be coming to New York to see you. I may even bring Dandelion. And it’ll be Thanksgiving before you know it. In the meantime I’m going to be cheering you on as you go out and write your life, and I’ll be busy being so incredibly proud of who you are.”
“What are you going to do?”
“After I take you to New York and drop you at your residence hall and hug you goodbye? Probably eat a pound of Oreos and cry into Dandelion’s fur.”
“And what are you going to do after that?”
“I don’t