Fourth Comings_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [79]
There is a very good reason I never introduced my parents to this junior-year error in judgment: Kieran was an emo assclown.
“Then last Christmas, Marcus shows up on our doorstep and is back in your life again. Just like that.” He snapped his fingers. “And he had really cleaned himself up. Got his head on straight. Got himself into Princeton…” He trailed off.
“What?”
“It’s just unfortunate,” he said, forehead wrinkling, “that things are unsettled just as he was getting respectable.”
“That’s right, Dad, I broke up with him just to piss you off.”
“That’s not what I mean,” he said. “He really seemed like he was getting his act together. It says a lot about a man’s character to overcome substance abuse problems and the like. And it showed real initiative for him to apply to Princeton.”
(I’m not disagreeing with any of these points.)
“Unsettled,” my dad groused. “Does your mother know about any of this?”
“No, I haven’t talked to Mom lately….”
“So I found out before she did.”
“Yes.”
“Ha,” he said with no joy whatsoever.
forty-eight
My mom was fifteen minutes late in picking me up from the bus station. As I waited for her to show up, I watched a shimmering silver SUV pull into the parking lot. I mocked the anonymous driver of this immense and intimidating luxury export for being a status-obsessed, bigger-is-better, gas-guzzling idiot who was responsible for U.S. dependency on foreign oil from countries that harbor and abet terrorists…
Then the driver rolled down her tinted window and told me to get inside.
“Jessie!”
My mortifying ride had arrived.
“Sweet tank, Mom,” I said as I climbed up and into the passenger side. “I hear it gets three miles to the gallon. Where’s the ‘Support Our Troops’ magnet?”
But my mom didn’t hear me. She was finishing up a conversation on her hands-free headset.
“Remember, you have to speak the language of the interior,” she was saying. “Is it Rustic French? English Country? Tuscan Renaissance?”
I do not speak any of these languages.
“I’m dropping my daughter off at the hospital. Then I’ve got a three o’clock. Then I’ll swing by around four-thirty to approve the throws for the Thompson sale and…”
I still can’t get over how efficient and businesslike my mother sounds when she’s working.
“So your father will be in for another two hours or so.”
I was looking the dashboard, marveling at all the various controls.
“Jessie!”
“Oh! I didn’t realize you were talking to me,” I said.
“Of course I’m talking to you,” she said, though there was no change in tone or gesture that would indicate that her phone call had ended and our conversation had begun.
“I’m going to drop you off, leave for a couple hours, then come back and take you both home.”
“You’re not staying?”
“I have an appointment,” she said.
“With who?”
“The nursery,” my mom replied, “should have set aside the hardy mums for you to arrange on the front porch. Make sure you put them in the clay pots because the plastic planters are tacky and cheap.”
It took me a second to realize that she was back to addressing the headset. I turned my attention to semi-abandoned strip malls along the highway, suddenly remembering that the last time I rode along this highway was in January, in the Caddie with you. wasn’t supposed to be back in Pineville, on the road, in the Caddie with you. I was supposed to be in the rental car with Hope, headed for Happyland, Oklahoma.
“Why do developers keep building new strip malls for dry cleaners, banks, and bad Chinese restaurants when the old strip malls aren’t fully occupied by dry cleaners, banks, and bad Chinese restaurants?” I had asked you. “It’s depressing.”
forty-nine
I wasn’t supposed to be back in Pineville, on the road, in the Caddiewith you. I was supposed to be in the rental car with Hope, headed for Happyland, Oklahoma.
“Why do developers keep building new strip malls for dry cleaners, banks, and bad Chinese restaurants when the old strip malls aren’t fully occupied by dry cleaners,