The Summer of '98 Page 17

  “Because they weren’t the interests that they wanted me to have.”

  I shook my head. “No, dude. That’s not it. You put a barrier up because you assumed they wouldn’t care if it wasn’t about football or whatever else. But that’s not true. Come on, Dad is always telling people how smart you are. Mom misses being close to you. I can tell.”

  His jaw twitched as he stared at the tabletop.

  “I miss you too, man,” I said. He was restless and shifting but he didn’t tell me to piss off, so I took that as a positive sign. “We’re different. We’re really different but we don’t have to fight so much. It’s dumb. Just chill out and stop being so hostile all the time.”

  He looked up at me and frowned. “Stop being so self-righteous all the time.”

  “Maturity is self-righteous now, is it?”

  He rolled his eyes. “Get over yourself. If you want me to do better, you do better too. Stop treating me like I’m beneath you because I like to sleep around, and you don’t.”

  “That has literally nothing to do with anything. I don’t care who you sleep with. You act like a dipshit and make stupid comments all the time.”

  “I’m funny.”

  “I guess we’ll agree to disagree.”

  We glared at each other, chewing on our food, and then, slowly, our frowns turned into smiles and then laughter. It was a relief, that was for sure. The tension was lifted, and even though who we were as individuals would never change, this felt like a step forward. One thing that I internally swore to work on was not putting him down. If that was what he felt I was doing, I couldn’t tell him he was wrong. His feelings were valid, and I needed to remember that.

  When we got back to the room, Cass and Ellie were cross-legged on their own beds, facing each other. Their conversation stopped immediately, and the room fell into silence. The girls stared at us, and Cass wore a shit-eating grin.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” she said, and I looked at Ellie. Her gaze was moving over me while she chewed on the tip of her thumb. I was obviously missing something here and I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what it was.

  Noah closed the door behind him and walked past me with the bag of breakfast. He dropped it on the table and headed for the bathroom. “I’m showering. Breakfast is in the bag.”

  Cass watched him until he was gone and then she looked at me. “Where did you guys go?” I pointed at the food in explanation. “We thought you might have gone to dump Noah’s body somewhere.”

  I sat down beside Ellie and kissed her shoulder. She leaned into me, and Cass watched us with that same stupid look on her face. The three of us sat in silence and I dared her to make some comment that alluded to the fact that she and Ellie were obviously talking about our night. Girls did that. No big deal, but she couldn’t hide it for shit.

  “Good night last night?” she finally said. I knew it, she couldn’t help herself. Ellie stiffened beside me and I looked at her just in time to see the warning glare that she was aiming at Cass.

  “Good walk?” I retorted.

  “It was awesome,” she said, her tone heavily laced with sarcasm.

  “You could have taken a cab.”

  “You had the money.”

  “Oh,” I pretended to be surprised. “That’s right. My bad.”

  She ignored me and stood up, heading toward the breakfast that was getting cold. Ellie joined her after I suggested that she should eat because we’d be on the road soon. The mood was vastly improved by the time we were all in the car. It felt more positive than it had in a while and I was glad that Noah and I had had the chance to clear the air. Even though we’d gotten thrown out of the concert early, it was still the best night that I’d had in a long time.

  Ellie

  “How was the concert?” Eleanor asked at dinner that night. We were seated in the dining room, rather than the kitchen table. It was larger and more spacious, which accommodated Cass, who was there as well. She sat on the other side of the table beside Noah, who had been in a better mood than I’d seen him since I’d first arrived ten days ago.

  “It was good,” Leroy answered as he scooped a forkful of potato salad into his mouth. “Just a concert. The girls had the most fun, I think.”

  “The girls all swoon over Steven Tyler, don’t they?” Eleanor giggled like a schoolgirl as she sipped her wine. Jacob raised his brow but chuckled from his end of the table. To be honest, my love for Steven Tyler had nothing to do with his appearance and everything to do with his voice and music.

  “He’s not bad for an older dude,” Cass said.

  Eleanor stared at Cass, likely thinking about the fact that she was older than the ‘older dude.’ If she was offended, she didn’t say anything; instead, she fixed Leroy with a knowing smile. “So what were the sleeping arrangements like last night?”

  Cass and I shared an alarmed look.

  “Super comfortable,” Leroy said, not missing a beat. “How was your night?”

  “It was fine, thank you,” she seemed mildly amused at her son’s attempt to deflect the conversation. “I noticed that there was only one room on the receipt. I could have sworn you said that you were booking two.”

  “They had a two-beds-for-the-price-of-one deal,” Noah jumped in. “Sweet, right?”

  It was safe to say that Eleanor did not believe him.

  “Oh,” Leroy nodded, pointing his fork at his mom. “You meant arrangements as in where we slept. My bad. They only had one room left but luckily they had two queen beds. Noah and I shared, and it reminded me why I hated camping with him. He kicks like he’s having a fit.”

  Eleanor narrowed her eyes at him. “Really? You shared with Noah? And Cass and Ellie shared?”

  “Of course, Mom.”

  Then it was my turn to receive her interrogating stare. “Is that tr—”

  Her sentence was interrupted when Cass’s glass of juice was knocked over and OJ quickly spread toward the edge of the table. “My bad,” Cass flailed and tried to catch the liquid with her hands. Eleanor shot up out of her seat and ran to collect a towel while the four of us shared a collective sigh of relief.

  Jacob was oblivious. “This lamb is so tender.”

  Eleanor didn’t bring up the conversation again and I wasn’t sure if that was because she believed us or if she didn’t want to find out that we’d lied. Either way, it made me feel incredibly guilty.

  Leroy went to have a shower after dinner, Cass and Noah had gone for a walk to get snacks from the convenience store, and Jacob had gone to bed. It was just me in the living room, watching an episode of Full House while I waited for Leroy. That was until Eleanor came wandering in with her PJs on, her hair in rollers, and her makeup gone. She gave me a warm smile and sat down in her armchair.

  “Have you been sleeping well in that spare room?”

  I nodded. “The bed is comfortable. I really appreciate you letting me stay here for the rest of the summer.”

  “Not a problem at all, sweetheart. Our door is always open to friends of the boys.”

  She was such a kind woman. “Are you looking forward to going home, though? Missing Mom?”

  “Yeah,” I felt as if I was lying when I said that. I guess I did miss Momma, but it wasn’t a desperate sort of miss. I was quite content here. “I’m looking forward to getting started on my correspondence course too. I have so many plans for effective, affordable skincare.”

  She straightened up and rested her chin in her hand. “That’s nice, honey. It’s lovely how much more accepting society is of working women today, isn’t it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I was in college in the ’50s, and back then, the most common role that women had was a housewife. It was just . . . the way it was and women that were in the workforce were often secretaries. Or nurses. And I didn’t want that. I wanted to be
a news anchor more than anything. More than I wanted a husband. More than I wanted children. It was very hard for a long time. I was dismissed a lot, belittled in the workplace, told time and time again that I would never get to where I wanted to be. I knew that if I got married and had children, it would put me behind in my career. So, I didn’t until I’d achieved what I wanted to achieve.”

  “That’s really inspiring,” I said, in true awe of her determination.

  Her gaze was distant as she smiled. “Yes. That’s how I met Jacob, actually. I was running a segment on the first ever Superbowl in ’67 and I interviewed him. It was quite immediate to be truthful. We fell in love very fast and he had an enormous amount of respect for the fact that I didn’t want to begin a family until I was older. And I was thirty-two at that time.”

  “At least he supported that.”

  “Oh absolutely,” Eleanor nodded and yawned again. “I wouldn’t have married him if he hadn’t. Mind you, there have been times where I’ve wondered if perhaps I did myself a dis-service waiting so long to have children.”

  “How come?”

  “Well, I’m sixty-four and I’ve still got a child in high school. How old will I be when Leroy and Noah decide to have children? How long will I have with my grandchildren? Sometimes I wonder if I should have tried to balance motherhood and working earlier than I did.”

  There was nothing that I could say to that, so I kept quiet. As far as I was concerned, she was an inspiration. She’d worked hard to accomplish a goal that she had for herself in a time that made it very difficult for women to do so.

  “Not to mention the fact that I was always so much older than the other mothers. I think that it bothered the boys a little bit. Neither of them said so, but Noah was never that eager for me to do school drop-off or pick-up. Especially as he got older and started to notice that I looked more like his grandmother than his mother. I understood, though. It didn’t upset me. Jacob, though, he got away with it—no one bats an eye at older fathers.”

  We laughed at that. She wasn’t wrong but she seemed to take it in stride. The television hummed in the background, audience laughter and clapping crackling between us.

  “But,” she broke the quiet with a cheerful shrug. “It is what it is. I’ve had a wonderful career, a great marriage, and good kids. I can’t complain.”

  “There is that,” I said, and she smiled.

  “I’ll head off to bed. These pills are doing their job. See you in the morning, sweetheart.”

  “Goodnight.”

  A week later, on Wednesday, the night air was hot. Stars glittered in the black blanket of the sky above us. The sound of the Red Hot Chili Peppers was coming from the kitchen window where the radio sat on the windowsill. The soft glow of the pool lights was enchanting in a subtle but spectacular way, and my feet glided through the water as I sat on the edge of the swimming pool. We’d spent the last week in a comfortable pattern. We spent time with Cass and Noah. We went to football practice, the movies, parks, the arcade. It felt as though I had been here for months rather than weeks.

  Eleanor and Jacob had gone to bed, so it was a good night to be out in the yard with the music going, and we didn’t have to worry about how loud we spoke. Both of them were down for the count and Cass, Noah, Leroy, and I were in the fenced-in pool area. I adjusted the cup of my bikini and squealed when Leroy jumped in beside me.

  “Babe,” I laughed as he resurfaced and shook his sopping wet hair off, drenching me while I shielded myself.

  Noah stood at the deeper end of the pool and turned around, doing an impressive backflip off the edge. The water was a tepid temperature, which was nice because while the air was hot, it cooled down once we were wet. Cass lounged on a pool chair and gave Noah an encouraging thumbs-up once he appeared again.

  “Come in,” Leroy didn’t give me a chance to argue—he took my hand and pulled me down from the edge. I wrapped around him as we moved through the water. “I want to take you on a date, Els.”

  I clasped my hands behind his neck and wrapped my legs around his waist as he walked us around the pool. Noah was talking to Cass from the edge, but I was focused solely on the most handsome man that I had ever had the pleasure of knowing. “That’d be cute,” I agreed, eager to go on a proper grown-up date with him.

  “How about The Chateau?” He stared up at me through his thick lashes, the glow of the pool lights casting a luminous blue hue on his profile.

  “Is that the five-star spot that we passed leaving the movies the other night? The one that looks like one in which I couldn’t afford to use the toilet, let alone eat?”

  “We can go wherever you want, Els. But you deserve to be wined and dined—I would love to treat my girl.”

  “You treat me every single time you look at me like that.”

  “Like what?” he asked, beads of water gathering on the tips of his hair.

  “Like I’m the only girl in the world.”

  “You might as well be.”

  He kissed me and it was a testament to how much he meant what he said. As far as doting boyfriends went, I’d hit the jackpot. He always knew just what to say and there was never any room for doubt.

  The sound of hands whipping through the water and Cass’s piercing shrieks had both of us glance over at the other side of the pool, where Noah was showering his girlfriend with strong splashes. “Tell her to get in the pool!” Noah shouted, his hand smacking the surface of the water repeatedly.

  “I’m not swimming!” Cass replied and retreated farther away so that he couldn’t get her. Her curls had become flat from being wet and she used Noah’s towel to pat down her front. “I have my period and I hate tampons.”

  “Thanks for sharing,” Leroy sighed with a hint of amusement.

  Something occurred to me then, and I did some quick, probably inaccurate equations in my head. I’d never paid a lot of attention to my cycle. As far as I was concerned, my period came when it came and there was no use giving it a lot of attention. But I began to realize I couldn’t even remember when I’d last had it.

  “You okay?”

  I looked at Leroy and realized I had been zoned-out while I thought over the possibility that I could be pregnant. I smiled at him and nodded, not wanting to be dramatic, but the upturn in my stomach was making me nauseated. The mere possibility made me numb with fear.

  That night while I washed my face, I went through the motions with a barely-there complex. The reflection didn’t look like me—it was pale and twisted with dread. One little match was all it had taken to start a blaze of panicked thoughts, and now I couldn’t stop imagining what would happen if it were true. How would my life change? What would Leroy say? What would Momma say? The nausea stirred in my stomach, making me curl over and grip the basin. Momma would be furious; her anger would be unfathomable. I took a few deep breaths and tried to calm down, because if I didn’t, I was going to throw up and that was the last thing I needed. All of this worry was probably silly anyway. I’d watched the girls at home fret over late periods a dozen times and it was always just their imaginations running wild.

  I hoped that was the case here too.

  Ellie

  Thursday morning practice brought overcast weather for a change. It looked as though it might even rain. The football team and the cheerleaders seemed relieved that it was a bit cooler than usual, the clouds offering cover from the harsh summer sun. Cass sat beside me on the grass, no shades this morning, and chattered about celebrity news and gossip. I tried to ask questions and show interest. But I desperately wanted to shift the subject to me for a second.

  “Cass,” I cut her off and she paused, waiting for me to speak, “I’m late.”

  “For what?”

  “My period.”

  Her brows shot up as she leaned back and winced. At her expression, I began to panic even harder than I had been before. There was something
so daunting about having another person confirm how screwed I was through a single facial movement. After a mere few seconds her face smoothed over, and she lightly laughed.

  “You do realize that you’ve been here for just under three weeks,” she stated and spoke at a slow pace. “You can’t be pregnant that fast.”

  “And you do realize that we had sex the first night that we met, almost two months ago,” I replied in a tone that matched hers. She leaned back and pursed her lips as she contemplated the information.

  “Still,” she said. “It was one night. I doubt you’re knocked up. The odds are low.”

  “I don’t really want to talk about odds. I would rather just take a test and be sure so that I can stop stressing out about it.”

  “We could get a test from the pharmacy,” she said, “but don’t you want to talk to Leroy about this first?”

  Cass picked the grass in front of her, the ringlets on her head whipping around her face as she stared expectantly, waiting for a response that I wasn’t sure how to give. He would be the first person that I would want to consult and confide in when it came to something so serious. But the last thing I wanted to do was panic him for no good reason.

  I shook my head and gazed out at him, where he was giving orders to the team. “I’ll just do it and tell him afterwards.”

  “I dunno. That seems like a bad idea. He’d want to know,” Cass argued. I fixed her with a questioning glare.

  “Would you tell Noah if you weren’t one hundred percent sure what the result was?”

  She flinched. It was barely noticeable, but I knew that I had her. She sighed. “Nope. He’d be pissed if I’d gotten him worried for no reason.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Come on, then.” She stood up and stretched her arms above her head before she pulled me up as well. “Let’s go and do this test.”