Fourth Comings_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [76]
“I don’t want to be,” I said. “But I am.”
And I suppose it’s that same desire to forgive and forget and let bygones be bygones and all that water under the bridge that compels me to keep my promise, to keep writing, even though I’m still angry at you, too.
forty-six
I made it to the Port Authority just in time to catch the New Jersey Transit #76 Shore Points Express bus to Pineville, which goes against the tide of commuters and is therefore mercifully unfull. The seat next to me was empty, so I could stretch out and think in as much peace as one can get as one bounces and bumps along the Garden State Parkway at a maximum speed of fifty-five miles an hour, though we usually go slower because of the inevitable traffic snarls stretching for miles before any one of the ubiquitous toll plazas.
As a lifelong resident of New Jersey, I have been brainwashed into believing two things about traveling by car: 1. Highways can’t exist without toll booths. 2. Pumping gas is best left to professionals. This is the type of harmless propaganda you grow up believing until you experience otherwise and feel like a fool for being duped for so long. Imagine my surprise when Hope informed me that there is not a single toll road in the entire state of Tennessee. This amazement was only outdone by the passenger-side shock of pulling up to a self-serve in Pennsylvania and watching Hope deftly maneuver the gas pump all by herself. I was too impressed to be embarrassed by my own cluelessness.
See? I am working very hard at forgiveness, even though the childish part of me is thinking, Why are you telling Marcus this? I’m sure he already knows about Hope’s way around a gas pump. He already knows everything about Hope that you don’t.
I’m trying here.
Despite the luxury of a few more inches in legroom, the bus still seems less dignified than the train. But no rails lead to our hometown, which implies that it’s a destination no one needs to get to with any sort of expediency, which is frustrating because I want to get there as quickly as possible.
I keep returning to a semi-disturbing conversation I had with my dad the last time I saw him. It was not this past Sunday but the one before.
forty-seven
I’d woken up that morning cursing that it was my week to cheer for him. It was already past nine A.M., and his race was fifty miles long—fifteen laps at roughly ten minutes per lap. I remember thinking that if I hauled my own ass, I could get there to see him finish.
Bethany and I had urged him to join the Jersey Shore Amateur Cycling Association when we got tired of hearing how lonely he was. Apparently, now that Darling’s Designs for Leaving is thriving, my mom is too busy getting paid to “analyze the selling aesthetics” of other people’s homes to spend any time in her own. And it doesn’t seem as if she’s going to be a more reliable presence in the household anytime soon. “When the market is down, my business is up!” she chimes. And up it is. My mom has quickly become one of the top home stagers on the Jersey Shore, and she doesn’t even have to advertise. Darling’s Designs for Leaving is referral-only, which gives her business a certain snobbish cachet that my mother totally gets off on.
But now that she’s out earning and my dad is retired at home, it’s made for a bizarre role reversal that he, for one, has not gotten used to. It’s more than a little disconcerting to see my parents going through an awkward phase, even as they approach their Social Security years. Shouldn’t they have figured it all out by now? Shouldn’t they be over all that stupid maladjusted shit? Isn’t that one of the glorious advantages of old age?
Hence our insistence that he join the cycling club. The team travels to races all over the tristate area, and my dad often participates in the Sunday-morning series at Prospect Park, in Brooklyn. It gives him something to do, and provides his daughters frequent opportunities to spend time with him on our own turf. Unfortunately, the Masters race starts at the unholy hour of 7:02 A.M. Bethany and I feel obligated