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“Honey, it’s so good to hear from you,” she says. Her gray dreadlocks are pulled back in a bright silk scarf, and the familiar sight makes me almost tear up. I am, at my heart, entirely a mama’s girl.
My mom Kate’s face immediately fills the screen next to mama’s. “Angie! Sweetie. How was it in the wild and wooly outdoors?”
“Horrible,” I say, even though what I’m really thinking is that it was tranquil, beautiful, and relaxing. I don’t want to let on that being here with Carter isn’t as bad as I might have thought. “I didn’t get to shower for two days. And we had to survive off of microwave rice, protein bars, and whiskey.”
“You and Carter got drunk together?” My mama snorts, and shakes her head.
Too late I realize that I shouldn’t have mentioned the whiskey.
“Tell us everything.” This from my mom, who truly does live for drama.
“There isn’t much to tell,” I say. “We got drunk, we talked, we passed out early. Nothing happened.”
My moms are the only two people I have ever told about me and Carter hooking up. Living at home over the summer, it was tough to hide anything from them, and I didn’t want to. After he broke my heart, I let them spoon feed me ice cream and comfort me for a week.
“That’s good,” my mama says.
“Exactly. You don’t need him, sweetie,” my mom adds.
I know they’d actually be happy if Carter got me to forgive him and we started something up again. Because they know how I felt about him, and they want me to have what they have. But they’re still protective of me.
“I don’t. And I don’t even want him,” I say.Liarcrows my conscience.
“Where are you now? It doesn’t look like a cabin,” my mama asks.
I tell them all about Margery and Mitchell and the blueberry muffins. And then I give them a little tour of the place, leaving out the bathroom of course. They tell me about their plans for the week: hiking with another couple they’re friends with and attending a few events at Cat’s bookstore.
“I hope I’m home to join you,” I say, and explain to them that we’re still looking for transport off the island.
“We’ll look into some leads here for you,” my mom says. “It’s still cold, but someone must have their boat ready to go by now.”
I tell them I love them and that I’ll call them tomorrow and then we hang up.
My heart feels full. Though I’m not sure I feel any more prepared to deal with Carter. In truth, my moms’ marriage is part of the reason why I was so caught off guard by how Carter treated me all those years ago.
Their love story is one for the ages. Two weeks after my mom Kate found out she was pregnant with me (she had attended a party where, according to her, “Things got a little too bicurious” with one of her male friends), she met my mama. She was working at a coffee shop near my mama’s office in Manhattan, and they immediately hit it off. Two months later, my mom was moving into my mama’s luxury apartment and settling down. Six and a half months later, I was born. Almost eleven years after that, my mama got tired of working in finance and was ready to retire, so they moved to Harborview, the town we’d been spending summer vacations in for my whole life.
Their relationship isn’t perfect, because no one’s is, but their love story is. Simple. Easy. No second guessing, no ghosting. No wondering how the other felt. They fell in love and then they stayed in love, and they treated each other right the entire time.
Having parents with such a wonderful relationship did not prepare me for the shock of dating twenty-something straight men. When Carter broke my heart, a part of me genuinely couldn’t believe it. It wasn’t supposed to happen that way, especially not with someone I’d know for years, who I implicitly trusted to be good to me.
The many boys who broke my heart afterwards didn’t shock me quite as much, but they still confused me. Didn’t everyone who was trying to date want what my moms had? Wasn’t love their goal?
Nope. Sometimes their goal was a one-night-stand. Or two weeks of casual sex. Or, worse still, a few months of emotional support interspersed with blow jobs, which they reciprocated with half-hearted attempts at fingering me.
I shudder at the memories.
And then my heart does that funny thing in my chest that it always does when I think too hard about love. It aches.
It’s not that I don’t believe in love—how could I not after watching my moms together? After watching Cat and Jamie? It’s just that I don’t believe I’ll ever find it for myself.
But being around Carter makes me hungry for it. Ravenous, even.
I need to get back to Harborview. Now.
16
CARTER
