She seems to finally accept that I’m not just going to turn around and run away. “Well, what can I get you? Hot chocolate? It’s just the instant kind with the mini marshmallows, but it’s good in a pinch …” She leads me through the hallway and into the kitchen, where I cough to cover a gasp.
Mason is sitting on the counter.
“Um, what?” I say, distracted. I haven’t seen him since Asha said we had a “special bond,” and now it’s all I can think about.
“Cocoa or Coke Zero?” Mrs. Leary asks again.
“Nothing, thanks. I can’t stay that long,” I say.
“Well, this should be interesting,” Mason says, while at the exact same time Mrs. Leary says something about a glass of water.
My mouth feels like sandpaper. “Sounds great. Thanks,” I manage to get out. As Mrs. Leary busies herself with the ice dispenser, I try to catch Mason’s eye, but he’s looking at her. I want to explain to him why I’m here, but of course I can’t say anything without it seeming completely insane to his mom. He finally looks up, and I smile as if to say,Just relax, I’ve got this.But do I?
Mrs. Leary puts the glass on the counter in front of me andstarts unloading the dishwasher. “So how are your parents?” she asks, filling her hands with butter knives and dropping them in a drawer.
“All good.”
“And your brother? Is he, what, in second grade now?”
“Third,” I say, like the sparkling conversationalist that I am.
“Christ, is she going to ask you how you’re enjoying your classes next? Why does she always talk about nothing?” Mason jumps down off the counter and paces behind me.
He’s right. Breaking through small talk feels as rude as smashing a full-length mirror at Mrs. Leary’s feet, but there’s no other way.
“Mrs. Leary—” I say finally.
“Cat,” she corrects me.
“Cat—” Just dive headlong. “I know I’ve never exactly been your favorite person, but—”
“Hattie, what a thing to say!” She closes a cabinet a little too hard and turns to me. “Why on earth would you say that?”
“Uh,” I start, finding it difficult to swallow.Because you do things like yell “What a thing to say!” at me?Nope. Can’t say that. “I don’t know. I just always got the feeling that maybe you didn’t like me very much.” I think about when my brother was little and one of us would try to be firm with him about bedtime, and he would cry in his adorable baby voice, “You spoke to me in a harsh tone!” That’s what Mrs. Leary has. Chronic harsh tone.
Mrs. Leary sighs heavily and rubs her eyelids just under her brows. “No, no, no. It’s not that I don’t like you.” She tossesher hands out helplessly and looks around, like the magic words to make me disappear might be written somewhere on the kitchen ceiling. “I may have felt, and this really wasn’t fair to you, but in any case I felt, a bit, that you might not have always been the best thing for Mason. In terms of his happiness.”
“Mom!” Mason says sharply.
I feel like someone stuck a vacuum tube down my throat and sucked all the air out of my lungs. “Why?”
Mason interrupts. “You know, I was trying to let you do you here, Murph, but I think this is maybe headed in the wrong direction. This isn’t good for either of you.” He’s buzzing around me now, trying to usher me back into the hall. But I’m rooted to the spot.
“Why?” I say again.
“There didn’t seem to be parity in your relationship. It wasn’t even,” she clarifies, as if I don’t what the wordparitymeans. “As his mother, I wanted him to be able to get out there, grow, maybe find a nice girlfriend, to have the full high school experience. And now—” She stops, choked on the obvious.
Before I know what I’m doing, I touch her arm. My mind is whirling with what she’s saying. She thought I was keeping him from getting a girlfriend? How exactly? But in the eye of that mental storm, I know she’s wrong about at least one thing.
“Cat, there’s nothing I can do to make any of that better now. But if you’re talking about our relationship, all I can tell you is that Mason was and is very important to me. I cared about him. A lot. More than a lot.”
She smiles then and nods. The air between us relaxes; the only one who still seems tense is Mason. Then Mrs. Leary seems to remember something. “Wait here,” she says, and disappears into the darkened hallway.
While she’s gone, I turn to Mason. “Parity?” I whisper.
He blushes—and now you’ve seen a ghost blush, Hattie, check that off your bucket list—but then just shrugs. “You know how moms are,” he says. “Always overthinking.”
Cat reappears, and in her hand is the unmistakable neon of a pile of Post-its. My sloth facts. “Are these yours? Lucia said she thought they might be.”
