Page 62 of Play Nice

He reaches his hand out. I give him mine. He says, “I wanted the drink back, but okay.”

I pull my hand away.

“I was kidding. Give me your hand.”

“You lost hand-holding privileges.”

“You told me not to be cute. You said cute was a turn-off.”

“That was then,” I say, standing. “This is now.”

The two of us walk down the driveway, and by the time we get to the end, we’re holding hands.

It feels good to step into the cul-de-sac. To put the house behind me for a little while. Out of sight, out of mind.

“Molly Ericson lived in that house. Do you remember her at all?” he asks, pointing to a house on the left with a red door and blue shutters, a flagpole out front sans flag. “Braces. Glasses.”

“Nope,” I say.

“Not just me, then? You don’t remember anyone?”

“No one specifically. I…” I reach for my snake charm, slide it back and forth along the chain. “I don’t know. I don’t remember a lot from that time. Is that weird?”

“I guess it was—what?—eighteen years ago? Shit. And you weren’t here for that long.”

“No. No, not really,” I say, finishing the White Claw and tossing it into a neighbor’s recycling bin.

“It felt long, though. To me, at least. When you’re a kid, a week is forever,” he says, turning down a driveway. “This one.”

Austin lives in a generic Colonial. Brick up to the awning that covers the narrow concrete porch, yellow siding at the top. Wide windows with brown shutters.

He leads me in through the two-car garage, which is crowded with cobwebbed bicycles and cracked plastic snow sleds and deflated soccer balls and broken hockey sticks—like a sad museum of a happy childhood.

There’s a single stair up to the door, which he opens for me.

His house smells like cheap candles. It’s decorated like it’s the set of a family sitcom. There are pictures of him and his brothers everywhere. His brothers on their respective wedding days with their standard blond brides. Baker with two other kids that I assume are his siblings or cousins.

“Hey, Mom,” Austin calls out. “I’ve got Clio with me.”

I follow Austin through the living room to the kitchen, where his mom sits at the table with her laptop open in front of her. She closes it and looks up at us.

Her chestnut hair is cut into a bob. There are gray streaks in her bangs. She wears drugstore reading glasses, a black zip-up cardigan, and baggy light-wash faux denim pants. No jewelry apart from a pair of gold heart-shaped studs. There’s something so comforting about her appearance. I never had a mother who looked like a “mother.” Mom never wore an outfit without ample cleavage, and Amy still dresses like a Y2K teenager. But this woman in front of me is straight out of the catalog. Classic Mom.

“Hello,” she says. “I’d stand but…”

There’s a cane leaning against the table.

“That’s all right. I’ll join you,” I say, pulling out a chair and sitting to her left.

She takes off her glasses and sets them down. She studies me for a moment. “You’re stunning. You look so much like her. Alex.”

“Thank you,” I say, smiling.

“You want some water?” Austin asks. “Mom? Clio?”

“Some tea?” she says.

“Yes, please,” I say. “Tea.”