moments ago has disappeared. He sounds confident again, in command. The perfect boy to be a star quarterback. He sounds the way he did when we first met. The way he always does at school when he is hiding who he really is, and I know that this will be the way he will speak to me from now on. If he ever speaks to me again.
On the highway ahead, a giant red arrow above a sign that reads SINGLES $19.95. DOUBLES $21.95, points to a few cabins tucked back into the woods. I turn off into the parking lot, pull up to the office, switch off the engine. Before I get out, I tell Tyler, “I never wanted a golden-boy, football-hero boyfriend. I wanted you. Just you.”
SATURDAY, AUGUST 14, 2010
Who was that?” Martin asks the instant I hang up without having said a word.
“Tyler.” The one-sided conversation was over so fast, I’m not certain it really happened. “He was whispering. He told me not to worry and that he’s going to get Aubrey to call as soon as he can. Probably be a couple of hours at the earliest, though.”
Martin lifts his eyebrows, stands, asks, “Shaved ice or cupcake? We’ve obviously got time for dessert now.”
I put my order in for a cupcake, watch him lope away, and do not let myself remember other times at this park.
“Hey, Danielle!” A mother yelling to her friend as she enters the park catches my attention. She is carrying an infant hidden in a padded sling. A long-legged child of about four dressed in a POTTY LIKE A ROCK STAR T-shirt and tiny black skinny jeans is hiked up on her hip. Another mom and her daughter, also around four, wave to the newcomers from the swings.
The mother lugging two children lumbers toward her friend and I recall reading about how much advocates of attachment parenting hate strollers. The latest thinking in that group is that the good mother would not think of exiling her child to such a conveyance.
The women release the older children and they streak off to the swings while their moms settle in on a bench, talking like words are oxygen and they are drowning. The mother with the sling shifts the infant hidden within its padded folds, opens her blouse, and lets the baby nurse. This scene would be impossible to imagine in Parkhaven, where, if a mother does dare to breast-feed in public, there are dirty looks, followed by letters to the editor about public indecency, and then an effort to get a law passed to ban such “displays.”
“You really love it here, don’t you?” Martin places a sinful mound of a cupcake on the table in front of me. Dark chocolate. My favorite. He tips his head to the side to catch a sunset-colored drop melting off the side of his cone of shaved ice, asks, “Did you ever think of moving back?”
I study his face to see if he is being willfully obtuse. “Oh, no, never. It was so much more fun being a single mother in a place where that guaranteed social pariah–hood.”
“I knew that. Stupid question. Sorry.”
“And that helps me how, your apology?”
He stops slurping on the fluffed ice and stares at me, his lips tinted orange. “It doesn’t. I just wanted you to know that I am sorry.”
Then he goes directly back to slurping slurps of such blithe obliviousness that I demand, “What? You think you apologize and sixteen years disappear? Martin, you’re not some televangelist who blubbers on TV and tells everyone how sorry he is for sleeping with whores and Boy Scouts and Shetland ponies and all is forgiven.”
“I didn’t ever think I was. And I didn’t realize you knew about the ponies.”
Without a word, Martin hands me the shaved ice and I slide the cupcake toward him. We always did this, shared bites. You get one, I’ll get the other, and we’ll split.
He holds the cupcake up, asking if I want the rest. I shake my head, he finishes it, and says, “Move back to Sycamore Heights.”
“Right.” The shaved ice is cold and sweet.
“No, seriously.”
I gasp at the condescension of his ridiculous oversimplification; he is as bad as Dori.
“Why not? No doubt you’re underwater in Parkhaven. You either take some lowball offer on the house or just mail the keys back to the bank. Jingle mail. Happens all the time now. Then move. There’s enough from the car sale—”
“Car theft. Yeah, that’s a great idea. Next traces that