The Girl Who Chased the Moon: A Novel - By Sarah Addison Allen Page 0,15
Emily’s hair out of her eyes. Emily didn’t seem to notice, but when Julia looked across the table, Sawyer and Stella were staring at her like she’d just grown another head.
“Who is this with my mom?” Emily asked, pointing to an elegant dark-haired boy in a suit and bow tie. “He’s in a lot of pictures with her.”
“That’s Logan Coffey,” Julia said.
“That’s who he was talking about.” Emily sat back and smiled. “I met a boy named Win Coffey today. He mentioned that his uncle was Logan Coffey. He seemed surprised that I didn’t know who he was.”
Oh, hell, Julia thought. That can’t be good.
“Was Logan Coffey her boyfriend?” Emily asked.
“We all wondered. He and Dulcie denied it,” Julia said cautiously. “Basically, he was just a shy, mysterious boy your mother tried to coax out of his shell.”
“Does he still live here? Do you think I could talk to him about my mom?”
There was a conspicuous silence. No one wanted to tell her. Julia finally said, “Logan Coffey died a long time ago, sweetheart.”
“Oh.” As if sensing the change in atmosphere, Emily reluctantly closed the book. “I guess I should get back home. Thank you for letting me look through the yearbook.”
Stella waved her hand. “Take it with you. That was twenty pounds ago. I don’t need to be reminded.”
“Really? Thank you!” When Emily stood, so did Julia. Julia walked her to the door and said good night, watching until Emily evaporated into the darkness under the canopy of trees next door.
When Julia walked back in, Stella was standing there, her hands on her hips. “Okay, what’s going on?”
“What do you mean?”
“Why are you acting that way around her?”
“I’m not acting any way around her.” Julia frowned. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
“I’m just surprised, that’s all. I mean, come on. You’re the least maternal person on the planet.” Stella laughed, but stopped when she saw the look on Julia’s face. Julia had gotten used to people saying that to her, but it didn’t make it any easier to hear. It was the price you paid when you were thirty-six and had no apparent interest in sharing your life with anyone. “Oh, I didn’t mean it in a bad way.” And Julia knew Stella didn’t. Neither did Julia’s friends in Baltimore when they said, You love your independence too much. Or You couldn’t be a mom because you’d be cooler than your teenager. “Let’s go out on the back porch and have wine.”
“No, thanks.”
“Julia …”
“I know you have something sweet in here,” Sawyer called from the kitchen, followed by the banging of cabinet doors.
Stella rolled her eyes. “That man can find my stash of Hershey’s Miniatures no matter where I hide them.”
“Let him have them before he tries to raid my kitchen,” Julia said as she headed for the staircase. “I have work to do.”
EMILY SAT on her balcony when she got home, the yearbook on her lap. Earlier that day, she’d gone through the closet and all the drawers in her bedroom, in search of … something. Some clue to her mother’s time here. She’d begun to feel strangely suspicious, like there was something she needed to know that no one was telling her. But there was only her mother’s name on the dusty trunk at the foot of the bed to give any indication that Dulcie had ever even lived there. There was nothing personal. There were no photos, no old letters, not even a scarf or an earring left behind. That’s why Emily had gone over to Julia’s. She’d felt awkward about it at first, but now she was glad she’d done it. The yearbook was such a treasure, if a little confusing. One of the tenets of Roxley School for Girls was that there was no caste system, no superlatives, no elections. How could her mother have been prom queen?
Emily remembered her mother never let her go to the mall because of the open competition there to have something as good as or better than the next person. She always said that fashion should never be a factor in determining someone’s self-worth. So of course Roxley School had uniforms. Yet, here in the yearbook, her mother was in the trendiest clothes of the time, and she had mall hair.
Maybe she’d been embarrassed by who she’d been as a youth. Maybe she thought her grassroots reputation might have been hurt by her tiara-laden past.
Still, that seemed like such a peculiar reason never to come back.