How he’d tried so hard—holy shit, he had tried so fucking hard—and it hadn’t meant anything at all.
Colby watched the place where the deer had disappeared. Then he got back in his car and headed home.
Thirty-Two
Meg
When the party was finally over, she helped her dad and Lisa load presents into Lisa’s SUV, waving at the two of them as they pulled out of the parking lot and toward Lisa’s house in Penn Wynne. She thought for sure Emily had left, too, but as Meg headed for her Prius, she caught sight of her sitting on a bench by the back door of the restaurant, a bottle of prosecco she’d filched from somewhere clutched in one manicured hand.
“Hey,” Meg said—approaching carefully, no sudden movements. “You’re not going to drive home, are you?”
Emily shook her head. “Of course not,” she said, her eyes glittering in the dim light coming off the restaurant. “Mason didn’t drink anything. He’s getting the car now.” Then, lifting her chin like a challenge: “Did he leave?”
Meg swallowed hard, not bothering to ask who she was talking about. “Yeah,” she said. “He left.”
Emily nodded. “Is it true, what he said? Are you not going to come to Cornell with me?”
Meg sighed. “Em, can we just—”
“Yes or no, Meg?”
Meg took a deep breath, and then she just said it. “Probably not,” she admitted. “No.”
Emily seemed to absorb that for a moment, taking a swig from the bottle of prosecco before setting it down on the pavement. “Don’t text me, okay?” she said, getting unsteadily to her feet. Then almost to herself: “Yeah. Just, like . . . don’t.”
“Emily,” Meg said, “come on,” but Mason was already pulling up in the car by then, the slow crunch of tires on concrete. She could hear Bob Dylan playing on the stereo as Emily got clumsily inside.
“Tell your dad congratulations again,” Mason called, waving through the passenger-side window. Meg watched the taillights until they disappeared down the street.
The house was dark when she got home, just the sound of the cicadas through the window and the hum of the refrigerator clicking on and off. Meg was grateful for the quiet—she wanted to get into bed and sleep for a hundred years without trying to spin tonight into something that a) wasn’t a disaster and b) wouldn’t somehow hurt her mom’s feelings. She changed into leggings and a T-shirt and scrubbed her makeup off in the bathroom sink, pointedly avoiding looking at the guest room, but as she was creeping down the hallway, her mom’s door opened.
“Is that you?” she asked, blinking a little, swaying the same as Emily had back in the parking lot and curling her hand around the door frame for balance. Her blond hair was mussed and her face was creased from the pillow, but she was still wearing the clothes Meg and Colby had left her in that afternoon. She must have passed out, Meg realized dully, though not for long enough to sleep off whatever it was she’d drunk in the first place.
“It’s me,” Meg said, pasting what she hoped was an even expression on her face and heading down the hallway in her mom’s direction. “You okay?”
“I’m fine,” her mom said, turning and shuffling back into the bedroom. If it occurred to her to ask where Colby was, she didn’t let on. “How was your thing?”
Hearing her mom describe it that way made Meg want to cry more than anything else had all night, though she couldn’t have explained why in any articulate way. “It was nice,” she lied.
Her mom nodded, heading into the master bathroom and shutting the door behind her. Meg sat down on the edge of the rumpled bed. It smelled stale in here, though, so she got up again and opened the window above the hope chest that held her christening gown and baby pictures. She was doing the one near the TV when the bathroom door opened again. “Leave that,” her mom said, though instead of getting back into bed, she fished a pair of Birkenstocks out of the overflowing closet. “It’s too cold.”
Meg frowned. “What do you need your shoes for?” she asked. “Where are you going?”
Her mom didn’t look at her. “Errand to run.”
“What?” Meg shook her head, already knowing what it was in the pit of her stomach; the gas station at the end of the street sold cheap, syrupy-looking wine. “Now? It’s after eleven, Mom.”