After they hung up, Pete felt pleased by the way he had stood up to the big, fancy WASP-y lawyer. Mac relented and was going to accompany Pete to the examiner’s office. As Pete had known he would. No lawyer would want to lose a client like Pete. And Pete would nail the exam, just as he had every test he had ever taken. He was a member of Mensa; he doubted very much that Mac could say the same.
Closing his eyes, he ran through the last moments again:
Hugged, kissed, I love you, worried, you need to rest, Beth, keep your feet up, stay in bed ...
19
“Should we go school shopping?” Kate asked.
Sam lay on the sofa, texting. Morning light streamed through the loft’s tall windows, bouncing off the red brick wall, casting a blush on Sam’s face. She didn’t look up. “I need to get my phone fixed,” she said.
“That one seems to be working fine,” Kate said. “Considering you’re always on it.”
“I dropped it, and the screen cracked,” Sam said. She stopped, raised her thumb, and showed Kate the beads of blood.
“Why are you typing on broken glass?” Kate asked, nudging Sam’s legs over and sitting at the other end of the sofa.
“I don’t know,” Sam said.
“We’ll get you a new one,” Kate said.
Sam shook her head. “I just need a new screen. I’m keeping the phone. Mom gave it to me.”
It was a warm day, but Sam had wrapped a blanket around herself. Kate tucked it more tightly around her legs, not looking into her eyes. She understood. There was a plastic water bottle in the back of her car that Beth had left there one day in July. They had gone to the arboretum at Connecticut College, to walk through the trees and sit in the shade, and Beth had drunk from the bottle. Kate kept hearing it rattle around, hollow and dull, under the driver’s seat, but she wouldn’t throw it out.
“Let me see the screen,” Kate said. Sam handed her the phone. It had a rose-gold case. Beth had thought it pretty and that Sam would like it. She’d driven to the Apple Store at Providence Place and bought it the first day the new iPhone had come out. It had a good camera with telephoto enhancements, and Beth had hoped Sam would start taking pictures. She had never stopped encouraging Sam’s interest in art—any form would do, from photography to watercolors to the dry and more scholarly pursuit of studying other artists’ work.
“To answer your question,” Sam said, “I don’t need school things.”
“I thought all kids did.”
Sam shook her head again. “I don’t want anything new.”
“No?”
“I don’t want anything that Mom hasn’t seen. Hasn’t touched. If I got new shoes, she’d never know about them. Or a new jacket. She’d never be able to tell me she liked it, or didn’t like it, or button it up for me the first time I wore it. She still did that, you know. It was so funny; I’m old now, but when I got my winter coat last year, she did all the buttons for me before I walked out the door to get the bus.”
“You’re not old now. You’re just sixteen. You were always hers, and you still are. Her little one.”
“Yeah, I know.”
Kate’s chest tightened. She wanted to do and say the right thing. She had always been an on-the-sidelines aunt. She’d loved this girl from the minute she first met her as a tiny, red-faced infant in the hospital, the third to hold her after Beth and Pete. But Kate lived the life of a pilot, more at home in the sky than on earth. She had avoided relationships and commitment since she was sixteen. So how could she, right now, be everything Sam needed?
“What should we do today?” Kate asked. “Besides get your phone fixed?”
“I was thinking,” Sam said slowly, “that I should go home.”
That stopped Kate in her tracks. She pressed her lips together, gathering her thoughts. She wondered if Sam knew that Pete was basically living at Mathilda’s. Kate planned to kick him and Nicola out, but she’d been too absorbed in Sam and racking her brain to figure out where the funny little key she’d found in Beth’s drawer fit.
“I want you here,” Kate said. “Does it seem I don’t?”
“You’ve been great,” Sam said, giving her a crooked smile. “Even though I know you’d probably rather be flying places with Lulu, whatever.”
“There’s time for that, but right now I’m concentrating on you,” Kate said.
“You’re a lesbian like Mathilda was, right? In love with Lulu—it’s obvious. Why won’t you come out?”
“I’m not,” Kate said, not completely surprised by Sam’s assessment but knowing the truth would be too hard to explain.
