The untrained eye might think this is a guest room. Or that, even if it was Audrey’s room at one time, it’s long since been emptied out and converted to the sparse little office with the fold-down Murphy bed that Hayden and I are standing before.
The untrained eye would be wrong.
This is exactly what Audrey’s room looked like even when we were in high school. A desk. A dresser. A filing cabinet. A bed that pushes up to the wall to make room for anything other than sitting on the bed.
Hayden catches me smiling. “What?”
“You just,” I begin, “don’t fit here.”
He frowns at this. “I grew up somewhere pretty rural, remember?”
“No, I mean, you literally don’t fit,” I explain. “You make this room seem comically small. Or, I don’t know, maybe it makes you look cartoonishly large.”
“Oh.” He cracks a faint smile too, looks up—not very far—to the ceiling, and then lets his gaze sweep around the room before settling on me again. In my chest, it feels like a latch clicking into place when our eyes meet.
“Are you used to having tiny guests?” he asks.
“This was Audrey’s room,” I explain. “She’s always been a minimalist.”
“What about you?” he asks.
“Oh, I’m across the hall,” I say. “Want to see?”
“Of course,” he says, following me over to it. It’s just as small, but nowhere near as sparse. I used to love it, but now it makes me feel vaguely panicky how full I packed the walls with photos, magazine clippings, notes my sister and I had written back and forth between classes, games of MASH we’d played on notebook paper, trying to predict our futures and pairing ourselves up with our crushes du jour.
Like Audrey’s bed, mine is covered in a quilt Mom made from repurposed fabric, but unlike the light, breezy colors Audrey had selected, mine is a disgusting blend of neons. “This poor quilt,” I say. “A victim of 2001 trends, like so many of us.”
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” he agrees.
“Oh, there’s a reason for that,” I say, walking over and pointing to one of the magazine pages pinned to the wall. An old Limited Too catalog, an advertisement for their room decor, wherein everything is sparkly, inflatable, or covered in highlighter-green and pink fur. “This is what I wanted.” I wave toward the quilt, devolving into laughter. “And this is my poor mother trying to humor me.”
“Looking at it is giving me a migraine,” he says, dead serious.
I chortle, flip the top back to expose the other side: a sensible light purple with tiny white flowers—Mom trying to ensure maximum usage, beyond the length of time it would take me to get sick of the other side.
“What’s this?” Hayden asks, picking up a leatherbound book that rests atop one of the stacks of books that line the top of my old bookshelf. On the front, embossed, is The Scotts: A History.
“A present from my sister, when we were in college,” I say, going to stand beside him as he flips it open. “It’s just this service that will bind a story for you. I had all of these old photographs and journal entries from when we were kids, so…”
He flips slowly through the first couple of pages, gets to an old shot I took of Audrey crouched atop the compost toilet—fully dressed, not using it—the day we helped Dad build it. She’s wearing his wide-brimmed hat and making a funny face.
“Wow,” he says. “An outhouse.”
“Oh, yes,” I say. “This is our family’s opus.”
“So I see,” he deadpans, turning the page. There I am, out of focus, because Audrey took this one (thus it’s one of the very few shots of me in the book), lying on my back in a garden bed, spread out like a starfish in denim overalls like the ones Mom was wearing earlier, a mini bouquet of purple and orange wildflowers tucked behind my ear. I look beatific, under the sun. I can feel the humidity of that day on my skin, smell the grass baking, and catch the subtle buzz of the bumblebees bobbing around.
Behind me, crouched in front of the garden bed with his back to us as he digs, Dad is visible, just his lower half. Seeing it jogs something loose: the sound of Cosmo Sinclair’s signature vibrato crackling out from the old boom box Dad used while he worked, that velvety smooth voice singing about a woman who moved around with the light of the sun inside her, making everything better, warmer, brighter.
“You look so happy,” Hayden says, snapping me back to the present.
“I was.” I pass the book to him. “I am.”
“Mind if I borrow this after dinner?” Hayden asks. Then, teasing: “Might like to do some light reading.”
“Oh, that’s not light,” I say as he sets the book on the shelf. “This is a dense, academic doorstop. You’re going to want to take notes, have little colorful paper tabs to mark the sections you want to come back to. Actually, now that I think of it, there should be some highlighters in Audrey’s de—”
He pulls me into a hug abruptly, like he couldn’t resist, his face nestling into my shoulder. My stomach swoops up into my throat, trilling like a hummingbird. I loop my arms around his neck and lean back to peek into his face when he lifts it. “Were you trying to shut me up again?”
“No,” he says, shaking his head once. No other explanation, and if there was one, I’m fairly confident he’d give it, which means that he just wanted to do that. Which thrills me, makes me feel weightless and jittery, like that first second of a roller-coaster drop.
I can’t remember the last time I had a crush like this, not one that merely aches, the way I’d felt about Theo the first few months, that painful yet addictive feeling of wanting something that is being very intentionally withheld from you.
This is the other kind. The dopamine hit of proof, evidence, facts that add up to the knowledge that maybe the person whose very presence excites you is also excited by your presence. That I think he likes me back feeling.
Still, I can’t resist the impulse to double-check: “You regret coming yet?”
I’m expecting something jokey or deadpan. Instead, he just says again, simply, “No.” I let my arms tighten. His hands move to loosely circle my wrists.
It’s strange, how being here has instantly changed the boundaries between us, made everything feel more relaxed. Not just natural but inevitable.
“How would you feel about a walk?” I ask.
“Good,” he says.
We drop our stuff and go outside into the fading light, meandering down the driveway. At the corner of the country road the house sits on, his hand finds mine. We lace our fingers together and keep walking, kicking up dust, churning up sweat.
From the outside, we probably look picturesque and peaceful. Inside, my heart feels like it’s riding along the top of a very active geyser.
That’s the first time it occurs to me: I’m falling in love with him.
Maybe it should scare me.
It doesn’t. I never want it to stop.
In the crowded little kitchen, Mom drops a bundle of still-dirt-smeared carrots on the counter for me to chop, then goes to fill a pot with water. While she pops it on the stove, I connect to Dad’s old Bluetooth speaker and start up a playlist. Cosmo Sinclair’s “Say You Will (Be Mine)” croons out between us.
In my peripheral, I catch her twitch in surprise.
It strikes me that Dad was the one to put on their cooking soundtrack, largely because Mom always enters a kind of cooking trance that renders conversation with her nearly impossible. For all I know, she’s been cooking in silence these last two years.
The thought makes me sad. Wordlessly, she fishes a canister of noodles from the pantry and shakes some into the boiling pot.
“How can I help?” Hayden’s voice rolls over me as he steps into the room, freshly showered and dressed in a worn Purdue sweatshirt and black sweats. He looks so clean and cozy that suddenly I want nothing more than to nestle up in him, the human equivalent of a comfy bed after a long day.
My face must betray this, because he’s looking at me like What am I missing?
“You can help Alice peel the carrots, if you want,” Mom says over her shoulder.
I hand him the peeler and grab a knife from the block before rinsing the carrots. He peels, and I cut them on the diagonal, tossing them in a bowl with some oil and salt before spreading them out on a pan to roast.
If he’s bothered by the lack of conversation, he doesn’t show it, which is good, because I learned to cook at my mother’s hip and thus never developed a talent for talking while working.
With the carrots roasting, I put Hayden on salad-prep duty, rinsing and chopping Mom’s freshly collected cucumbers, tomatoes, and onions, while I massage the kale with some oil and smoked salt. Mom makes her Alfredo sauce from scratch, and when the timer goes off, I pull the carrots out, stir them around the pan, drizzle them with some honey and spices, and pop them back in for a few more minutes.
I’m so immersed in the process that it takes me a while to realize Mom is humming along to the music, another one of Cosmo’s love songs on the playlist, “Peggy All the Time.”
My chest twinges at the sound. Dad used to sing this as Angie all the time.
When I close my eyes at night,
Every time I’m down and out,
If the sky is blue and bright,
I’ll tell you what I’m thinkin’ ’bout.
It’s Angie all the time.
Angie all over my mind.
Tears unexpectedly spring to my eyes. Not just for my mom, but for the woman Cosmo Sinclair wrote the ballad for.
For Margaret Ives, and the part of her story that broke an entire generation’s heart.
“Hey,” Hayden says, so quietly his voice is more of an impression than a sound, tucked beneath the music. “You okay?”
When I let myself dream,
Or it all comes crashing down,
If it all turns out all right,
And at every pretty little sound,
It’s Peggy, Peggy on my mind.
Peggy all the time.
“Onions,” I say, the first outright lie I’ve ever told him, and he knows it. I lift the cutting board and swipe his neatly sliced veggies into the salad bowl with the kale.
“Soup’s on, kids,” Mom calls from the stove. “Grab some forks and plates. It’s serve yourself around here, Hayden. Hope you don’t mind.”
“Not at all,” he says. “That’s perfect for me.”
His eyes connect with mine, and the moment of melancholy slips past, the kernel of something warm and giddy swelling in its place at the word perfect.
I’m not sure why. It’s not like he said I’m perfect. But all those little zaps of excitement must be melting my brain a little.
Hayden on my mind, I think.
Again, I wonder if the thought should terrify me. But there’s no room for terror. There’s just warm golden light, the smell of freshly cracked pepper and almond soap, the soft pop of a cork Mom’s pulling from a bottle of cabernet, and a pair of pale brown eyes set into a thoughtful expression I can’t believe I ever mistook for a glower.
Perfect for me.
“I’m serious!” Mom says. “I hated him.”
“You did not hate him,” I argue with her over my own laughter.
“I did!” she says, turning to Hayden, who’s fighting a smile. “I’m serious. First impressions are so meaningless. I hated him.” She throws her hands up, then grabs her glass and takes another swig.
“Just to be clear,” I tell Hayden, “I’ve heard this story ninety thousand times—”
She rolls her eyes. “You’re exaggerating, my girl.”
“—at ninety thousand different dinner tables,” I go on, “and she’s never once said she hated my father at first. She’s always said she barely noticed him.”
“That’s because I didn’t want to hurt his feelings,” she says. “Now he’s gone, and I can admit I was not impressed.”
“Mom!” I cry, laughing a little from the shock of it. She so rarely talks about him, let alone acknowledges the humongous hole in this world where he should be.
“I had bad taste, and I didn’t see what a gem he was,” she says. “I just thought he was so…” She scrunches up her face as she finishes. “Silly.”
I snort into my glass, narrowly avoiding inhaling wine straight into my lungs. “Okay, that tracks,” I admit. My dad could be silly. My mom, though she has her own sense of humor, is not.
“What did you think was silly about him?” Hayden asks.
She gives an exaggerated eye roll and pushes her empty plate back from the edge of the table. “God, what didn’t I think was silly? I mean, we were living in a farming commune. Most of us took ourselves very seriously, you know? Alan was ridiculous. He was always singing, for one thing, and he couldn’t carry a tune to save his life. Beyond that, he was terrible at remembering lyrics, so most of what he sang was nonsense anyway.”
“And what did he think about you?” Hayden asks, leaning in, engaged, naturally curious like any good interviewer should be.
I catch myself beaming, waiting for the familiar beats.
Her exuberance softens into a calm smile, her fingers resting at the base of her glass’s stem. “Oh, he says he did all of that singing and everything to try to get my attention,” she says. “But seeing as how he kept doing it until his dying day, I’m pretty confident all he really meant was, he thought I was pretty.”
Here is where Dad would chime in, and so I do. “Beautiful. Smart. Hardworking. With great taste in books.”
“He’d just graduated from journalism school,” she says, “and I was taking a year off after undergrad, trying to figure out what to do. He’d see me reading in our downtime, so that was how he first struck up a conversation with me. Honestly, I thought he was so silly, it hadn’t occurred to me how much we’d have in common.”
The corners of her mouth tighten, her smile tilting toward woeful, and she says something I haven’t heard before, something new to the story: “He had this joy in him, this softness, and it took me a long time to realize that didn’t make him dumb. In fact, he was a hell of a lot smarter than me.”
She’s never been touchy, and so I’ve never been particularly touchy with her, but in that moment, for some reason—maybe it’s the wine, or the music, or Hayden’s comforting stone-steady presence—I reach out and touch her forearm.
Her smile tenses up a little, unconvincing, and she pats the back of my hand before pulling away to stand. “Dessert?” she says, moving the conversation on, and my heart flags in my chest.
“Sounds great,” I say, but it comes out thin.
