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He was going to warn me off bothering Dylan. He was so protective of her and knew how much she hated me right now. But I couldn’t bear it, the idea of her not being in my life anymore.
“Please don’t say anything,” I begged. “My night is hideous as it is.”
“It’s not about Dylan.” Of course, it wasn’t. It was about how awful I was. Sleeping with my best friend’s older brother. I was wrong about Row. He was going to hurt me after all.
“Row, please. There’s nothing to talk about. Trust me, I’m as horrified about you and me as you are. Probably more.”
He punched his steering wheel, muttering something under his breath. “Would you get out of your own fucking head for one second and listen?” he seethed.
“No thank you. My head is a terrible place. It’s exactly where I deserve to be right now.”
I wanted to apologize for the way I’d treated him. To try to beg him to reason with Dylan. But I also wanted to hold on to whatever little pride I had left in me.
We zipped past lush New England trees, English lampposts, and the local library, all cloaked by a bluish-orange dawn. The lighthouse gleamed behind a curtain of my unshed tears. With piercing pain, I realized that home wasn’t Staindrop, Maine. It was the Casablancas siblings. And I was forever banished.
“I really am sorry, you know,” I murmured when he stopped in front of my house, the engine still running. His stare was glued to the windshield, his jaw so tight it looked painful. “You guys are like my family. And I…I…” Like you so much. You are the two people I always felt truly myself with. But I didn’t have the guts to say these words. I swallowed. “And I hope everything works out for you.”
Row’s eyes, blank and hollow as a Greek statue’s, were still trained on the road ahead. “Good luck at Columbia.”
“Good luck in Paris.”
“Don’t need luck, got talent.”
He drove off without sparing me a glance. I stared at my clapboard stilt house, the color of strawberry ice cream, with the wraparound porch, pastel-potted plants, and knitted sweaters Mom wrapped the tree trunks in. Kooky, like its occupants. And I knew it would be a long time before I saw it again.
I never wanted to set foot back in Staindrop.
Not if my life depended on it.
CAL
“End of the Road”—Boyz II Men
Five Years Later
As it turned out, it was death that brought me back to Staindrop.
My father’s death to be exact.
“So, where did y’all bury Artem?” Melinda Fitch, our middle-aged neighbor, clutched her pearls in my parents’ living room, rearranging them across her heavy cleavage.
“Mom’s favorite vase.” I gestured in the direction of the mantel above our fireplace. The urn was a beautiful piece, a nineteenth century silver and enamel samovar my babushka had brought to the U.S. when the Soviet Union collapsed.
Melinda barked out a high-pitched laugh. When she realized I wasn’t joking, she paled, pressing her lipsticked mouth to her cup of tea. “Wait, he got cremated?” She whispered the last word, like it was a swear word.
“No, we just pushed him in there. It’s really not that difficult when you squeeze someone one limb at a time,” I deadpanned.
Verbal diarrhea—one.
My flimsy reputation—minus thirty.
Melinda looked ready to bolt through our wall like a cartoon character. Her eyes were the size of derby hats. Most people weren’t accustomed to my zero-filter train of thoughts. Over the years, my coworkers and peers had learned how to ignore my foot-in-mouth, nervous blabbering. Mostly, anyway.
Melinda brought another biscuit to her lips, nibbling on its edges demurely. “May I ask…um, why you chose cremation?”
“He was an atheist. He didn’t believe in God, religious rituals, or the afterlife.” A sharp stab of emptiness impaled my stomach when I spoke about him. “He told us cremation was less burdensome on the ecosystem.” I could tell my words flew right over Melinda’s hair-sprayed do. I had lost her at ecosystem. She probably thought it was our AC brand.
My dad had stood out in the quaint, small town of Staindrop, Maine, like a dildo in a church. He had taught physics at the local high school until the last month of his life and enjoyed chess, mental math, and volunteering twice a week at the local reservoir, collecting litter. He was ruthlessly pragmatic yet an oddly optimistic creature. His stage four cancer had bitten at his existence a chunk at a time but hadn’t stopped him from making every moment count.
