Ava says, “Should we go to the hospital?”
Scott says, “I’ll go and make sure she gets admitted. You don’t have to come.”
“I feel responsible,” Ava says. “This was my party. If I hadn’t organized it, Roxanne wouldn’t have broken her ankle.”
“I feel responsible,” Scott says. “I’m the one who invited her. And I was going to offer to help her cross the street, but I thought you’d get angry.”
“So that makes it doubly my fault,” Ava says.
“It was Roxanne’s fault for wearing those silly heels,” Scott says. “She couldn’t walk in them sober, never mind with a glass of wine and a shot of Jameson in her.”
“Shot of Jameson?” Ava says.
“Kevin offered her the flask,” Scott says. “While you were in the bathroom.”
While Ava was in the bathroom.
“I’ll come with you to the hospital,” Ava says.
“You don’t have to,” Scott says. “Really. You have a big weekend and your mom is coming tonight. You should go home. I’ll text you and let you know what the doctors say.”
“But—”
“Ava,” he says. He holds her chin in that way he has, and he kisses her. “I’ll text you.” He swats her butt before he starts walking down the street toward his car. Ava realizes then that he doesn’t want her to come, not even to keep him company. He wants to be the hero for Roxanne alone. Or, possibly, because he’s an administrator and Roxanne is a teacher he feels he must go and serve as a lieutenant to one of his troops. Or, he is really, truly thinking of Ava. Does she want to spend the next three hours sitting in the emergency room? No.
However, Scott has left her without a ride home. Has he even considered this? True, Winter Street is only at the top of Main, but it’s pretty cold out for that kind of walk. Ava will have to get a ride from Shelby and Zack, but when she looks around, they’re gone.
Ava pops back into the Boarding House to see if they’ve gone inside to warm up but Ava doesn’t see them. Shelby gets tired easily, and she’s not drinking; Ava bets they’ve headed home.
Ava’s eyes dart to the corner of the bar. Nathaniel’s seat is empty.
He left.
Ava’s heart drops an inch. It might have been nice to have talked with him without Scott right there. She could have told him what little she knows about Bart.
Ava considers having a drink by herself, a hot toddy, something to combat the frigidness of her impending walk home, but she’s the elementary school music teacher and thus has a certain image to uphold, plus she doesn’t want to grow reflective about Nathaniel, or maudlin about Bart.
She bundles up and heads back outside. She makes it as far as the corner of India and Main Street when a truck pulls up alongside of her.
Nathaniel’s truck. The passenger window goes down and Nathaniel says, “Need a ride?”
Actually,” Ava says, “I do.” And without giving it another thought, she hops in.
KELLEY
He knows Jennifer has been having a hard time with Barrett, the oldest of the Quinn grandchildren, who is the spitting image of Patrick and in many ways, the spitting image of Kelley himself. Part of what Jennifer is dealing with is regular eleven-year-old-boy sullenness, but on top of that, the kid’s father is in jail. Barrett is angry, he’s embarrassed, humiliated, ashamed, and he wants to know why he has to follow the rules if his father didn’t.
Once Jennifer leaves for the caroling party, Kelley decides to have a man-to-man chat with Barrett, and Pierce could probably stand a little grandfather lecture as well.
Kelley has to be quick with the remote—which he is—and firm. TV off.
“Grandpa!” Pierce says.
“I need to talk to you and you,” he says, pointing to the two elders.
“What about me?” Jaime says.
Jaime is seven which is a little young for the things Kelley wants to say. “You should go down to the kitchen and ask Isabelle if there are cookies.”
“Okay,” Jaime says.
“Bring me some,” Pierce says.
“Can’t this wait?” Barrett asks Kelley.
“It cannot,” Kelley says.
The boys reluctantly drop their controllers and sink back into the sofa. If Kelley had been thinking, he would have brought up a bribe—root beer floats, or Starbursts. Or are Barrett and Pierce too old to be placated with sweets? Kelley’s own grandfather had a farm with horses and a pond stocked with trout. Pops was a top-notch grandfather; Kelley can only hope to measure up.
“You two have to take it easy on your mother,” Kelley says.
“I do take it easy on her,” Pierce says.
Barrett is quiet.
“She’s under a lot of stress,” Kelley says.
“She picks wallpaper, and upholstery fabric,” Barrett says. “You can’t tell me that’s stressful?”
“She’s running a business,” Kelley says.
“She yells at us to get our homework done, but she doesn’t help us with it anymore. She makes us unload the dishwasher and take out the trash but half the time she forgets to give us our allowance. She tells us to pick up the slack, but what she doesn’t seem to get is that we lost our father.”
Kelley tents his fingers the way he remembers his own grandfather doing; it feels like a gesture of wisdom. “Your father made a mistake. It’s unfortunate, but you have to remember that he isn’t gone forever. He’ll be back this summer, and you want him to be proud of how you acted in his absence.”
“Why should we care if he’s proud of us?” Barrett says. “We aren’t proud of him. He’s supposed to lead by example.”
“What you’ll find in life,” Kelley says, “is that everyone is fallible. Everyone makes mistakes. Everyone messes up. Even dads.”
“I have a D in Spanish,” Pierce says. He hangs his dark head. Barrett and Jaime are as redheaded and freckled as leprechauns, but Pierce has inherited his mother’s black Irish beauty. “My teacher speaks only in Spanish and I can’t understand her, and then I get in trouble for not following instructions.”
“Idiot,” Barrett says.
“Barrett,” Kelley says, “I want you to stop with the name-calling and with the ill will toward your parents. They’re human beings.”
“They used to be cool,” Barrett says. “Everything was fine. Then Dad messed up and Mom… honestly, she makes everything worse.”
“She dropped a pot of spaghetti on the floor,” Pierce says. “Then she tried to clean it up with the vacuum cleaner, then the vacuum exploded and she cried.”
“Really?” Kelley says. He has a hard time picturing Jennifer in that particular scenario. Mitzi, yes; Jennifer, no.
“She’s turned into a complete psycho,” Barrett says.
“Barrett,” Kelley says. “Enough.”
Kelley tries to remember if Patrick and Kevin were ever this disrespectful. They must have been! When they were younger, and Kelley and Margaret and the kids all lived in the brownstone on East Eighty-eighth Street, there was a lot of squabbling, but Kelley let Margaret deal with the discipline while he spent fourteen-hour days worrying about the overseas markets. Once Kelley left Wall Street behind and moved to Nantucket to run the inn, he used to wake Patrick and Kevin up at the crack of dawn to do DIY projects, and then, as a reward, he would take them to the Brotherhood of Thieves for burgers. They watched college basketball together, and they had a dirty joke contest running for a while. Kelley had never crossed the line of being friends with his sons, but they had had good moments.
“Seriously, Grandpa, there’s something else going on with Mom,” Barrett says. “She’s either all wound up, or else she’s so mellow, it’s like she’s sleepwalking.”
Is she drinking too much? Kelley wonders. And if so, can he blame her? Is she smoking dope? The mere thought of straitlaced Jennifer smoking a joint makes Kelley smile.
“Just remember, your mom is suffering, too. She misses your dad.”
“Do you miss our dad?” Pierce asks.