Page 65 of Given Our History

She nodded. “I’ll find you on Facebook.”

Both of us were probably just saying these things to sound polite; there was little chance of us running into each other, and I wasn’t even sure she knew my last name to look me up. I figured that was the last time I’d be seeing Mindy Schooner, and that was all the thought I gave the matter.

After dinner, we drove back to the house, where Teddy had parked his Datsun, but he wasn’t ready to leave. We sat out on the curb catching up, because the walls in the house were paper-thin and my parents were notorious eavesdroppers. As it was, my mom had already poked her head out the front door twice under the guise of telling us she’d put together a vegetable tray and then again to offer us a glass of wine to celebrate. Our street was a dark suburban one with long lawns and few cars, and I had stretched my bare feet out into the road and crossed my ankles, my arches sore from standing for commencement in heels. I lay back on the sidewalk and stared up at the night sky. The concrete was cool and rough against my exposed shoulders.

“You remember when they made us do that astronomy thing at camp?” I asked. “We filled in that whole sheet and Ms. Fischer still marked it as incomplete because—”

“—because we missed Neptune,” Teddy finished, folding an arm behind his head and lying down next to me. “Ms. Fischer. I wonder where she is these days.”

I turned my head to look at him, studying him in profile while he stared up at the stars. The shorter hair made him look older and flattered his bone structure, the hard corner where his jaw met his ear. But I missed the curls, and the desire to run my fingers through them. After allowing me a few seconds to ogle him in peace, he angled his head toward me, eyebrows raised in question.

“I don’t like your hair,” I said.

“Gee, thanks.”

“It doesn’t look bad, I just always like when it’s a little longer, when you get the curlicues right here—” With a finger, I traced behind his ear, trailing down to the nape of his neck.

It was an innocent, feather-light touch, but his eyes fluttered closed for a moment, until I withdrew my hand. “I’ve been thinking a lot, lately,” he said.

“When are you not?” I joked.

He breathed a soft laugh. “About us, I mean.”

I propped myself up on an elbow, somewhat uncomfortable on the unyielding concrete. The word us had my heart running a marathon. I didn’t know where he was going with this, but the possibility of him dredging all that up again sent me into a panic. I was leaving for Manchester in three months. “Us?”

“How little we’ve talked, these past few years,” he said. “I’ve missed talking to you. I miss you.”

“I’ve missed you, too,” I admitted, and he didn’t ask me for more than that.

CHAPTER25

PRESENT

Irving to Cambridge is nearly a four-hour drive, and worse on Thanksgiving. We agreed to carpool, which I thought very little of at the time, but now—crammed into my Volvo with the heater blasting and Reagan in the back seat, her usual road trip playlist cycling through The Lumineers and Vance Joy—it all feels very domestic. Were it anyone else, it would probably be too soon for all this, but it’s Teddy, so it’s almost too easy. Familiar.

As soon as Reagan moves past her determination to embarrass me by rattling off stories about how I was always hogging the computer to Skype with Teddy whenever she wanted to play Club Penguin, we settle into a comfortable rhythm, alternating between talking and listening to music. When we pass over Bay Bridge, Teddy sinks in his seat and mumbles, “God, I forgot how long this thing is.” I laugh and Reagan teases him. It’s almost too perfect: a clear, windswept November day, the blue expanse of Chesapeake Bay stretched out on either side of us.

When we pull into my parents’ driveway a little under an hour later, Teddy’s the first to get out, groaning and stretching his legs.

“There they are!” Mom calls from the porch. Her Farrah Fawcett hair is fluffed away from her face, the grays half-hidden with box dye, and she’s wearing a puffer vest and riding boots like she took a cue from an old Pinterest board. “How was traffic?”

I hold out a hand and tilt it back and forth, so-so, as Reagan bounds up the empty driveway and flings herself at our mother. The white work truck is gone, an oil stain the only evidence of its usual parking place. I remove my sunglasses and tuck them into the neck of my sweater as I draw near the porch. “Where’s Dad?” I ask.

“Sent him to the store,” she says, waving us inside. “Ran out of Old Bay.”

Teddy shoots me a quizzical look as we cross over the threshold, and I know exactly what it’s about, because what does Old Bay Seasoning have to do with Thanksgiving? But there’s little need to explain when we’re greeted by the salty tang of seafood on the air, a stainless steel vat bubbling on the stove. The Thanksgiving crab boil: a Fernsby family tradition. A long folding table is erected in the living room, surrounded by mismatched chairs and draped in a checkered tablecloth.

“So, Teddy, I’m curious,” Mom says, stirring the large pot with a wooden spoon. “Where have you been all these years?”

I sigh through my nose and toss a vexed look at her back, though she doesn’t notice. Wasting no time, apparently, but I should’ve known better than to think my mother would beat around the bush.

“Ah—” Teddy glances at me uncertainly, like he expects some guidance, but I have none to offer. He’s on his own, here. “Pittsburgh, mostly.”

“Mmm.” She doesn’t turn away from the stove, but I can tell, just from this small, noncommittal noise, that she’s not satisfied with his answer. He could give her a breakdown of every place he’d set foot in the past decade, down to the latitude and longitude, and it wouldn’t quite be the explanation she was looking for.

The front door creaks open, followed by the rustle of grocery bags. “I see a car out front,” Dad calls. He alternates between his boots clomping and the click of his cane as he crosses over to the kitchen, depositing the bags on the counter. He pulls me into one of his sideways hugs and plants a scratchy kiss on my temple. “Clare Bear,” he says. He leans over to plant a kiss on Mom’s cheek, and she practically glows. All those months of arguing, years of struggling to get by, they’re a distant memory.

Dad’s ironclad stare has shifted to my date. He thrusts out a calloused hand. “Teddy. It’s been a while.” He manages to make it sound like a warning, but Teddy takes it in stride.