How to Be a Grown-up Read Free

shyness. Then he wanted to know where I liked to have brunch. We walked through the park, and that night he cooked me dinner. He was just . . . there. Blake Turner, in my butterfly net, in my studio apartment—in me.

    “Well?” Val prompted him again as we stood on her dusty driveway under the blazing sun. “Did you get the Netflix thing?”
    He shook his head.
    “Oh, Blake,” I said, an ache rippling out from my breastbone, “I’m so sorry.”
    He picked up his phone from the passenger seat of the convertible. “My agent left the message while I was in the air. Fucking coward.” Blake had started swearing again, having decided that Wynn was ten and had heard it all by now and that Maya was still small enough not to be paying attention. I did not agree, but this didn’t feel like the moment to bring it up.
    “Oh, honey, you’ll get the next one,” Val said, her gaze already off him as she pointlessly started moving the luggage around the porch. “You want a frozen banana?”
    Ignoring her, he picked up his smile, got out of the car, threw his arm around Wynn’s neck, and pulled him to his side. “You guys have fun?”
    “We caught a frog,” Wynn said. “I looked it up. It’s a Northern Leopard.” They told him all about our short-lived adventures in amphibious pet ownership while Blake scooped up Maya and tickled her tummy with his nose, making her squeal.
    “Last bathroom visit, guys,” I announced. They ran into the house, and I expected Blake to take me in his arms and squeeze me as he always did after being away. But he just walked past me to open the trunk.
    Okay . . .
    “So, we’ll talk tonight?” I couldn’t help but seek confirmation.
    “Let’s just pack up.”
    I nodded, unsure what to do. Step back and let him realize this exercise defied the law of physics? Or try to manage it.
    “Wow, we sure have a lot of shit,” he said angrily as he struggled to close the trunk with half our luggage and Wynn’s bike still on the ground.
    “Well, we thought we’d have an SUV like we rented to drive up,” I said, stuffing what I could in all the floor spaces. Wynn and I would have to ride with our legs crisscrossed.
    “Yeah, it was all they had left.”
    “When you made the reservation?” I prompted him.
    “I forgot, okay. Look, some of this crap will just have to stay here until next time.”
    “No!” Maya burst into tears as she returned to find him unloading one of her Hello Kitty bags filled with stuffed animals. “Not my fwiends!”
    “Not that one, Blake. It’s okay, Maya, we won’t leave your friends.”
    He scowled and I reopened the trunk. “Let’s just go through everything and figure out what we can leave here.”
    “You’re leaving stuff here?” Val asked, coming outside again as if she’d been listening for her cue.
    “Yes, is that okay?” I asked, because her son had absented himself from the conversation as he always did when we needed anything of her. Even staying for two weeks to cover the gap between camp and school and not one, as would have been her first choice, had been completely negotiated between Val and myself.
    “Well.” She pursed her lips. “I’m having friends up to stay when the leaves change.”
    When Blake’s grandparents died, Val had come into a little money; she bought a farmhouse and moved up to Woodstock. Gone were her shoulder pads, her broker’s license, her struggles as a single mother. Instead she studied Reiki, wrote iffy poetry, and threw pots. Everything she’d wished she’d embraced as a teen in the sixties and a big f-you to what Scarsdale had raised her to want: the dentist she landed at Boston College, whom she dutifully supported through his DDS, until he left them for—wait for it—his big-breasted dental hygienist and screwed her out of alimony.
    Hence the wind chimes. The Don’t Frack with Me bumper stickers. And a deep unwillingness to do anything asked of her.
    “That’s not until late October, Val.