“See you tomorrow, Molly.”
“Yeah. See ya.”
And you know what?
I can’t wait.
CHAPTER 27 Seth
I wake up blessedly late, a little bleary from a night of Prohibition cocktails, and give thanks that my nephews are already in the pool with their parents, leaving the house relatively quiet.
I throw on clothes and go to the kitchen, where my parents are drinking coffee and reading the newspaper on their iPads.
“Good morning, honey,” my mom says. “Want some breakfast?”
“No, I’m okay.”
“Are you sure? We have bagels and lox and I can make eggs. Or grits? Or I have—”
“Don’t worry about me. I’m actually going out. Dad, do you mind if I use your car for a few hours?”
“But Seth!” my mother cries. “Why go out when we have so much food here?”
I knew it was a mistake not to rent my own car. But my parents always protest that I don’t need one, that I can always take one of theirs. “Why spend the money?” my mother beseeches.
They then proceed to monitor my comings and goings and insist on accompanying me on every five-minute journey to the grocery store.
Normally I find their clinginess endearing; in my family, hovering is a love language. But today I have sixteen-year-old jitters and don’t want to be observed or explain myself.
“I’m meeting a friend,” I say.
“Oh, who?” my mom asks.
I really, really don’t want to tell her.
Obviously she can instantly sense this, and is on me like a bloodhound.
“Is it someone we know?”
“Yep. Molly Marks,” I say as nonchalantly as possible.
My mom glances at my father, whose eyes are carefully trained on his newspaper. I can feel the excitement building in her as she says, with conspicuous calm, “Oh, that’s nice. I thought I saw you go outside with her last night.”
I cough. I hadn’t realized we’d been spotted. I’m shocked my mother has kept it in this long. And I hope and pray she didn’t see all the sexually charged embraces.
“We didn’t get much time to catch up, since I was squiring a certain mother around the dance floor all night,” I say. “We decided to grab brunch for old time’s sake.”
There’s no reason why a grown man can’t consume room-temperature eggs with an ex for perfectly friendly and casual reasons. But my cheeks are red.
I know that she knows.
“Ah. Why don’t you take my car?” she says. “It’s comfier than Daddy’s.”
Her sudden lack of interest in my plans doesn’t fool me. She always pretends to be bored when she thinks she’s got something good. I know exactly what’s going to happen. She’ll play it cool, and then scream-whisper to my dad that I’m going on a date as soon as she thinks I’m out of earshot.
I like this dynamic exactly as much now as I did when I was sixteen.
“Thanks,” I say pleasantly. “When do you need it back?”
She gives me a beneficent pat on the hand. “We’ll use Daddy’s if we need to leave. Take as long as you like.”
“Thanks.”
I grab her key off the hook, gather some supplies from the garage, and leave as fast as I can.
My parents live on a golf course on the inland side of town, and Molly’s mom is out on one of the islands, so it takes me thirty-five minutes to get to her behemoth waterfront house. (I will not call it a McMansion, because no McDonald’s franchise would ever spend so much money on fake-Spanish turrets.)
I stop and press the call button at the gated driveway.
“Hello?” a woman’s voice says. It has to be Molly’s mom. “Is that Seth?”
“Yep, hi there.”
“Come in.”
She doesn’t sound enthusiastic.
The gates open and I drive past an ornamental gatehouse to the main residence, which is perched on a massive lawn verdant enough to rival the golf course in my parents’ development.
