in their bedrooms and ignore their mothers. But all you do is work.”
His phone blipped, and Cleo lost him to his texts for a moment. A grin spread across his face; then he typed something back quickly.
“Is that Esme?”
“Stop snooping!” Lucas yelped, his smile gone.
“Lucas, you’re sitting two feet away from me, typing with a ridiculous look on your face. That is not snooping; that’s observing. A mother is allowed to do that.”
“Fine.” He stood, walked to the bathroom, shut the door. Cleo heard the lock spin.
“We still have a lot to discuss,” she called after him.
He didn’t answer, of course, because he’d given her as much as he’d wanted to for the night, and then he was gone. He really was her son, she thought. And she didn’t know if this filled her heart or emptied it.
EIGHT
Cleo missed Monday in the office, and despite working for the entire six-hour plane ride home, she was now behind. Cleo McDougal did not like being behind, and anyone, from MaryAnne Newman to Arianna, her junior-most staffer, could have told you that. She was a scheduler, a go-getter, and never once in her history of schooling had she missed a deadline, not even that rocky fall of her senior year when she was still unpacking her boxes from her move into her grandmother’s and unpacking her grief from everything else.
She had just made it back to her desk after a committee vote—a bill on the childcare tax cut that she had cosponsored, which indeed made it out of committee, and now the real negotiating began: cajoling, bargaining, duping, and manipulating members of the other party to give her what she wanted in exchange for something they wanted—and had barely plopped into her desk chair when Gaby knocked. This was being gracious, because Gaby never knocked; she just announced herself.
“I just got off a very interesting Skype.”
“Uh-huh.” Cleo was rooting around in her bottom drawer for a protein bar. She found a box of Girl Scout cookies—Trefoils—and figured that would do. She’d bought a bunch from the custodian’s daughter last year. Franklin worked the evening shift, and since Cleo was always there late, they’d struck up a friendship. “Do Girl Scout cookies expire? Do we know?”
“Doubtful,” Gaby said. “That’s seriously your lunch?”
Cleo tore the box open and placed a cookie smack in the middle of her tongue as an answer. “Oh my God,” she managed. “Heaven.”
“You were definitely a Girl Scout, weren’t you?” Gaby reached for one, despite her admonishment.
“Brownie and Junior. My mom was our troop leader. I probably would have kept going until high school, but MaryAnne convinced me that we’d never get boyfriends if we did.” Cleo thought of the two of them, at Pagliacci’s, watching Oliver Patel and the other baseball players slide their trays down the line to the cashier and MaryAnne narrowing her eyes and saying, We can’t be Girl Scouts anymore, Clee. It’s over. Hot guys don’t feel up girls who are Girl Scouts.
“Was she right?” Gaby reached for another cookie, then reconsidered and placed it back in the plastic.
“Well, we quit. And I did end up dating Matty. Though he was not really the type of boy MaryAnne meant. I mean, you met him.”
“I didn’t.”
“Oh, right. I’m distracted. But she and I weren’t beating anyone off with a stick.” Cleo stacked two cookies on top of each other and bit down. “I did lead our troop every year in cookie sales, though. One year I had so many that we couldn’t use our dining room.”
“Of course you did.” Gaby laughed. “Let me guess, MaryAnne came in second.”
“Indeed.” Cleo laughed too, though she felt a bolt of sadness for her old ex-friend. Why had everything between them always had to be a competition? Regret.
In fact, Cleo had spent last night poring over her list of 233 regrets to assess if what had occurred to her in Seattle—more friendships, more appreciation for kindnesses, more room for art in any form—had made the list. They hadn’t, not really, other than the brief notation from five years back—I never learned to paint. Or sing. Or dance. Or anything. Maybe that could have been a nice thing. Nearly everything on there was a concrete wrong or a direct action that Cleo had taken: she was surprised to see MaryAnne internship essay buried in the first hundred—she could have sworn she never put pen to paper about MaryAnne. But then there were simpler items too: not taking a probiotic regularly, not ordering