I hadn’t done any crime. I hadn’t done anything terrible, just stupid—but I couldn’t seem to speak at the moment to explain myself, so I only gave her the finger before I walked away. And I wasn’t going to cry about this again, at least not in front of people. I walked to my car and did it there.
No, the police hadn’t gotten involved in my public humiliation. But they hadn’t needed to broadcast it over their scanners for everyone to find out about it. We all had phones and it had been fun to repost the video of last Saturday night again and again. Super fun. Of course, I hadn’t enjoyed it, but it was the kind of thing that people would forget. I would need to ride this out until it died down. Eventually.
The dying thing hadn’t happened quite yet but at least it hadn’t seemed to spread much beyond the confines of our small, local college, which was lucky. If I moved away, no one in my new home would have heard about it—unless they looked up my name.
I calmed down, eventually, and went to the restaurant, as I always did. Today, my mom had somehow gotten my sister Morgan to join us, although she had gone into the office instead of doing anything helpful to set up for the lunch crowd. “At least she’s trying, Molly,” my mom told me when I glanced at the closed door. When she said my name, it sounded like a balloon letting out its air.
I tried too, really hard, and I managed not to do my age thirteen eye roll. At that time, I would have followed it with a “come on, Mom!” and capped things off by stomping away in my platformboots. Those had been really poor-quality and the black color had started to peel away before I’d even made it to age fourteen.
I started working on the crap that needed to get done and I got madder and madder as I did it. So she had finally shown up? Great, that was step one. Step two would have been to actually help out! “Morgan, that lazy little…” I muttered. I realized that I sounded like Dad, and that upset me even more.
I put down the napkin dispenser that I was refilling and stormed over to the office. “Hi,” she said as I yanked open the door.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
She glanced at her phone. “Nothing.”
“Why don’t you do something, then?” I suggested. “There’s always plenty to accomplish around here.”
“I know that, Molly. I’ve worked at Walter’s before.” She stood up and damned if she didn’t look kind of wobbly.
“Come and help me with the napkins,” I said over my shoulder as I stomped out.
I hadn’t seen her out of the half-light of her bedroom for a while now. We never ate together as a family because at most mealtimes, we were here at the restaurant. When we weren’t working, we always seemed to be too tired to get to our kitchen table as a group. But it wasn’t just time constraints, of course, because we actually didn’t like each other.
My schedule was pretty packed and if Morgan was getting up and moving around the house, I hadn’t seen her do it. But I was seeing her now and I was furious. She was obscenely pale,like one of those deep-sea, luminescent creatures, and she really was wobbling when she moved—was her muscle tone that bad? That was what happened when you didn’t get out of bed all day! You never saw the sun and your damn body atrophied! I shoved more napkins into a holder.
“What made you show up?” I demanded. “After all this time, why now?”
“I don’t know,” she said. She shrugged and pushed back her hair. Unlike mine, which was basically straight, Max’s and Morgan’s had the curl that had come from my dad’s side of the family and I’d always been jealous of it. Except right now, her curls were filthy. Her hair had divided itself into dark, greasy chunks that lay heavy on her head, lifeless and limp. She had a slight smell, too, not sweat but kind of musty. She smelled dirty.
“Did you want to shower, ever?” I suggested.
“Why are you being a bitch?”
I practically threw the napkins down and stomped into the kitchen, where my dad yelled at me for something that I didn’t even listen to, something that started with “Molly” and then had a lot of swear words. I had stopped paying attention to him years before, so I heard the sound of his anger now, but the actual message didn’t sink in.
Then my mom also said my name: “Molly!”
I turned and looked out the pass-through window. She was at the register, but she was looking back at me and smiling. Standing at the counter was Shane Bishop.
“Come up here,” she called, still happily grinning and now waving me forward.
I walked out from the kitchen. “Hi,” I said.
“Hi, Molly,” he answered.
Before my mom could suggest that I “take my break,” as if that was something real, I continued moving into the dining room. My sister had disappeared, probably into the office, but all the tables looked ready with ketchup, mustard, napkins, et cetera, so she had done something. Not enough, but it was something.
“Where are you sitting?” I asked.
“I’m not,” he answered. “I’m on my way over to Woodsmen Stadium and I thought you might want to go and see how it looks in the off-season.”
“Why would I want to do that?” I asked.
“Aren’t you a fan? When we went to the lighthouse, you spent most of the time talking about the team, when you weren’t telling me how many skeletons must be in these lakes.”
“I wasn’t talking about skeletons! It made sense to discuss shipwrecks that day.” A lot of historical information had come back to me and I’d had more to share than I’d expected. “I don’t remember talking about football at all.”
