I’m about to turn around and get out of here—it’s spooky, how abandoned this place seems—when a little boy in light-up sneakers darts through the lobby like something out of The freaking Shining, bouncing off one of the brocade sofas before careening away down the hallway that leads to the dining room. I gasp out loud.
“Fabian! Fabian, what did I just say to you about running in here?” A tall, thirtyish woman in skinny jeans and an NYPD T-shirt strides into the lobby, stopping short when she finds me hovering in the doorway like a lurking freak. “Oh. Are you the new assistant?” she asks me, glancing over her shoulder toward the hallway Fabian ran down. She sounds irritated. A riot of tight, springy curls surrounds her face. “You’re late.”
“Oh, no.” I shake my head, embarrassed. It was weird of me to come in here. I don’t know what I keep doing since I got back, showing up one place after another where I’m not wanted. It’s like my new hobby. “I’m sorry; I used to work here. I didn’t realize you were closed.”
“Reopening this summer,” the woman tells me. “Under new management. We were supposed to open Memorial Day, but that was a fantasy if ever I’ve had one.” I watch her take in my sweaty clothes and sneakers, my damp ponytail, my blotchy red face. “What did you do?”
For one insane second, I think she’s talking about Gabe and Patrick—that’s how knee-jerk the guilt is, like even this total stranger can smell it on me—but then I realize she means when I worked here, and I explain.
“Really,” she says, looking interested. “Well, we’re hiring. Personal assistant to the new owner. Actually, we hired one, but she’s late, and here you are. I’m gonna take that as a sign. That’s a thing I do now, I take signs. It makes my kids really nervous.”
I smile, I can’t help it. I definitely wasn’t looking for a job—especially not one where it’s entirely possible I’ll run into a whole glut of people who hate me—but there’s something about this lady that’s winning, that kindles the same lick of anticipation I felt when I ran into Gabe at the gas station the other day. “Who’s the new owner?” I ask.
The woman grins back, bright and wry like she’s got a secret and really likes to share it, and she’s glad that I’m here so she can. “Me.” She sticks one smooth brown hand out and shakes mine, confident. “Pennsylvania Jones. Call me Penn. Can you start tomorrow?”
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day 8
My first shift as Penn’s assistant consists mostly of locating and compiling the fourteen hundred to-do lists she’s made and then lost all over the entire property, scribbled on cocktail napkins at the bar and taped to the stainless steel fridge in the kitchen. I find one that just says CHLORINE scrawled on the activities chalkboard by the pool. By the time I’m pretty sure I’m found them all I’ve filled seven pages of old Star Lake Lodge stationery, back and front.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Penn says when I knock on her office door and hand them over, her desk buried under a jumble of purchase orders and receipts. There’s a trace of New York City in her exasperated voice. She and her kids—six-year-old Fabian plus a little girl named Desi who can’t be more than four and said not one word the entire time I was in the room—moved here from Brooklyn last spring, she told me this morning. She didn’t say anything about their dad, and I didn’t ask. “Okay. I’ll look at these after the staff meeting, all right? Come on, I told everyone two in the lobby. I meant to get donuts. Did I say that to you, or did it just languish in my brain all day?”
“You told me,” I promise, following her out the door of the office and down the dim, wood-paneled hallway. “I ran out and picked them up at lunch.”
“Oh, you’re good,” Penn says, but I’m not quite listening anymore, frozen in the tall arched doorway to the lobby. A couple dozen people are crammed onto the chairs and couches around the big stone fireplace, faces so familiar that for a moment I literally can’t move—Elizabeth Reese, who was student council secretary three years running; Jake and Annie, who I’ve known since pre-K and who have been dating just about that long. She nudges him when she notices me, her immaculately tweezed eyebrows crawling clear up to her hairline. She makes a big show of turning away.
I think of the note on my windshield—dirty slut—and feel my skin prickle hotly, imagining everyone here somehow saw it, too, or wrote it or is thinking it even if they didn’t do either of those things. This is what it was like before I left. Julia once called my house phone and left a message, pretending to be from Planned Parenthood saying my STD test had come back positive, and I remember being grateful to her when it happened because at least nobody witnessed that one but my mom. I deserved it, maybe, the way everybody seemed to turn on me as soon as the book and the article came out, like I had some kind of social disease that was catching. But that doesn’t mean I want to go through it again.
If Penn notices people noticing me—and they are: a restless kind of weight shifting, a girl from my junior English class whispering something behind her hand—she doesn’t let on. “Did everybody get a donut?” she begins.
It’s a fast meeting, welcome to the new lodge and how to use the ancient time clock. I look around to see who else is here. There’s a middle-aged chef and his sous, who I met this morning as they were prepping the kitchen, and the housekeepers who’ve been airing the guest rooms, the old windows flung open wide. A trio of Julia’s cheerleading friends are perched on the leather sofa all in a row like birds on a wire, three identical French braids draped over their skinny shoulders. I work to keep my spine straight as I stand there in the corner, not to wither like an undernourished plant at their triplicate expressions of casual disdain: The one on the left looks right at me and mouths, very clearly, the word skank. I cross my arms across my chest, feeling totally, grossly naked. I want to slither right out of my skin.
Afterward, I take my donut outside to the back porch overlooking the lake, picking at the sprinkles and trying to pull myself back together. There’s a girl about my age in shorts and sneakers hosing down the lounge chairs, her red hair in a messy bun up on top of her head—she startles when she sees me, alarm painted all over her face. “Crap,” she says, checking her watch and looking back up at me, pale eyebrows furrowing. “Did I just miss the meeting? I totally just missed the meeting, didn’t I. Crap.”
“I—yeah,” I tell her apologetically. “It’s probably okay, though. And I think there’s still donuts left.”
“Well, in that case,” she says, dropping the hose and climbing the steps to the porch, holding her hand out. Her skin is alabaster pale underneath the pink flush of sunburn. “I’m Tess,” she says. “Head lifeguard, or I guess I will be once there’s anybody to swim here. For now I’m just a hose wench.” She wrinkles her nose. “Sorry, that sounded a lot less filthy in my head. Did you just start?”
I laugh out loud—the first time all day, and the sound is sort of startling to me, unfamiliar. “First shift,” I tell her. “Well, sort of. I’m Molly, I’m Penn’s assistant.” I explain how I used to work here, that I moved away and I’m just back for the summer. I take a big, self-conscious bite of my donut when I’m through.
Tess nods. “That’s why I didn’t recognize you, then,” she says. “I’ve only lived here, like, a year. I came in as a senior.” She gestures at my donut. “Are there really more of those inside?”
“There are,” I promise, opening the flimsy screen door and following Tess back into the cool, dark lodge. “Bear claws, even.”
Tess snorts. “I’ve got that going for me, at least,” she says as we head through the old-fashioned dining room, hung with half a dozen dusty brass chandeliers. “I don’t know if I thought this was going to be glamorous or something, working at a hotel? My boyfriend’s gone for the summer, though, so I was basically like, ‘Give me all the hours you can, I’ll just work all the time and have no social life.’”
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“That’s pretty much my plan, too,” I agree, glancing around for Julia’s coven of nasty friends and leaving out the part where the whole no social life thing isn’t exactly a choice. I like Tess already; the last thing I want to do is identify myself—or worse, have somebody else identify me—as her friendly neighborhood adulteress and family-ruiner. “Where’s your boyfriend?” I ask instead.
The lobby’s cleared out by the time we get back there; Tess picks a glazed chocolate donut out of the box and takes a bite. “He’s in Colorado,” she tells me with her mouth full, reaching for a napkin and swallowing. “Sorry, I’m rude. He’s doing some volunteer firefighter thing. I think he saw a Lifetime movie about smoke jumpers or something. I don’t even know.”
She’s joking, but I don’t laugh this time; my heart is somewhere in the general vicinity of the faded dining room carpet. Whatever’s replaced it cold and slimy and wet inside my chest.
He didn’t see a Lifetime movie, I think dully. He’s wanted to fight fires since we were little kids.
“Is your boyfriend—” I start, then break off, unable to say it. She can’t—there’s no way. There’s no way. “I mean, what’s his—?”
Tess smiles at me, easy and careless. There’s a bit of donut glaze on her upper lip. “Patrick Donnelly?” she says, the affection palpable in her voice, the way you talk about your favorite song or movie or person. “Why, you know him?”
He was my best friend. He was my first love. I had sex with his big brother. I broke his fucking heart.
“Yeah,” I say finally, reaching for another donut and forcing a weak, jellyfish smile of my own. “I do.”
There’s a moment of silence, Tess still smiling but her eyes gone cloudy and confused. Then I watch her figure it out. “Molly,” she says, like my name is the answer to a pie-piece question in a tied game of Trivial Pursuit, like she’d known it somewhere at the back of her head but hadn’t been able to come up with the word in time. Like she lost. “Wow, hi.”
“Hi,” I say, executing the world’s most awkward wave even though she’s standing a foot away from me. Jesus Christ, why do I insist on leaving my house? “I’m sorry; I wasn’t trying to be a weirdo. I didn’t realize—”
“Yeah, no, me neither.” Tess swallows the rest of her donut like a shot of Jameson, wrinkling her nose and setting the balled-up napkin down on an empty side table. For a second neither one of us talks. I imagine her calling Patrick in Colorado, I met your trashy ex-girlfriend this morning. I purposely don’t imagine what he’ll say in response.
“It was nice to meet you,” I tell Tess finally, wanting to get out of this lobby like I haven’t wanted anything since I got here. I wonder if she’s made friends with Julia. I wonder if she helped egg my house. It was stupid, to feel hopeful like that for a second. It was stupid of me to take this job at all. “I . . . guess I’ll see you around.”
“I guess so,” Tess says, nodding, raising one hand in an awkward wave of her own as I head toward the hallway that leads to the kitchen. I imagine I can feel her behind me the rest of the whole afternoon.
I’m sitting at the reservations desk in the lobby near the end of my shift, making a list of magazines and websites for us to advertise with, when the front door to the lodge swings open and Imogen walks in. “Uh, hey!” she says when she spies me, clearly startled—she’s got that same look from the coffee shop the other morning, like I’ve surprised her and not in a good way. “Are you working here again?”
I nod, tucking my wavy hair behind my ears and trying for a smile. I hate how colossally awkward it feels between us, like puzzle pieces that got wet and warped and don’t fit correctly at all anymore. Imogen never treated me like a pariah before I left. “Grand opening in a couple weeks,” I try anyway. “Games and fireworks. You here to sign up for the three-legged race?”
Imogen shakes her head, smiling the kind of tolerant smile you’d use on a little kid who just asked if your refrigerator was running. “I’m actually supposed to pick up my friend Tess.” Her dress has buttons up the front and is printed with tiny leaves. “She works here, too. We were gonna get food and maybe drive over to Silverton and see a movie.”
I bite the inside of my cheek—of course they’re friends, of course they would be. For a second I think meanly of that movie All About Eve that my mom likes, where the young actress takes over the other woman’s whole identity. “I met Tess,” I say. I’m dying to ask Imogen if she and Patrick are serious—if they’ve been together ever since last September, if he loves her more and better than he ever loved me. “She’s nice.”
“You want to come with?” Imogen asks now, her voice high and uncertain. “We’re probably just going to the diner or something, but you could . . . come with?”
God, that’s a non-invitation if ever I’ve heard one. “I’ve got some stuff to finish up here,” I tell Imogen, shaking my head. I miss her, though. I can’t deny that. When we were little we always wore our hair exactly the same. “But maybe we could get dinner sometime, just you and me, catch up? I’ll get cake, you could do my cards?” Imogen’s mom has been crazy for tarot for as long as I’ve known her; Imogen got a deck of her own for her thirteenth birthday. She used to read for me all the time, laying out the spread slow and careful on my fluffy duvet, the quiet flipping sound as she turned them over: four of swords, seven of pentacles. The hanged man. The sun. I always repaid her in German chocolate cake from the diner on Main Street, which I maintain is dry and crumbly and gross—cake and diner both—but which Imogen loves beyond all others.
She shrugs at the invitation, though, blunt bangs swinging as she shakes her head. “I’m not really doing that so much anymore,” she tells me. “Cards, I mean. But sure, let’s get dinner, absolutely.”
I’m about to suggest a day when we both spot Tess coming in across the lobby, holding a piece of watermelon. Imogen’s gone so fast I don’t get a chance to say good-bye.
“I gotta go,” she calls over her shoulder. The door to the Lodge thuds shut.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
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day 9
I’m wiped when I get back from the Lodge the next afternoon, having spent the better part of my shift helping clear the old furniture out of the dining room so the ugly old carpet can get ripped out in the morning—work I liked a lot, actually, because it meant nobody could talk to me. All I want is a shower followed by a face plant directly into my bed, but my mom’s in the kitchen, cutting up lemon slices to float in the iced green tea she drinks by the gallon whenever she’s working on a book, wearing jeans and a silky tank top, barefoot on the hardwood. She grew up in this house, has walked these same creaking, wide-planked floors since she was a baby. She was born in the master bedroom upstairs.
I was born in a county hospital in Farragut, Tennessee, to a couple younger than I am now who couldn’t keep me: The night Molly came home was a staple bedtime story when I was a kid. “I chose you,” my mom liked to tell me, both of us tucked under the duvet, my small feet brushing her kneecaps and my hair a tangled mess over the pillows. She never was much for braids or bows. “I chose you, Molly baby. All I wanted in the whole world was to be your mom.”
Diana Barlow, if nothing else, has never lacked the imagination to craft a tall tale.
Okay, possibly I’m editorializing a little. Still, for somebody who wanted a baby so badly, it’s always been kind of funny to me how emphatically not maternal my mom is. Not in an ice-queen, TV, Flowers in the Attic kind of way—she was never mean or cruel, she always told me she loved me, and I believed her—but in a way where she was just kind of bored by kid stuff, Patrick and Julia and me yelling our heads off in the yard all day long. It was like she’d woken up one day to find some foreign storybook creature living in her house with her and she wasn’t entirely sure what to do with it. Maybe that makes sense, though—after all, she wanted a baby.
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And that baby turned into—well. Me.
“You’re filthy,” she observes now, dropping the lemons into the pitcher and sticking the whole outfit into the refrigerator. “What do they have you doing over there, huh?”
“Hog wrestling, mostly.” My muscles are aching. I probably smell. I fill a glass of water at the tap, waiting for it to run cold as I can get it. She’s done work on the kitchen since I left, different appliances and countertops, and I pull the peanut butter from the pantry with its new sliding barn door. My mom hadn’t written a book in five years when she stole my worst secret and turned it into a best seller. The novel she put out before that, Summer Girls, was a giant flop. Not writing made her angry, had her stalking around the house like a zoo animal in a too-small cage; I remember how glad I was when she disappeared into her office again my junior year, how happy she seemed to be back at work. “I cleared the block!” she crowed, toasting me with her coffee cup one morning over breakfast. I had no idea she’d used me as the dynamite to do it.
“Oh, you’re funny,” she says now, shaking her head and smirking at me a little. “I mean it; I thought you were doing a personal assistant thing over there, not physical labor.”
I shrug, taking a big gulp of my water and fishing a spoon out of the drawer. “I do whatever she needs me to do.”
“You don’t have to be doing it at all, Molly.” My mom turns to look at me. “You don’t have to spend this summer working, I told you that. It’s your last summer before college; you should be spending it relaxing, not making hotel beds for ten dollars an hour.”
“I’m not making hotel beds,” I argue. “But even if I was—”
“You don’t have to work at all,” she counters, and I have to make an actual effort not to roll my eyes at her. She used to ring this bell all the time when the book came out and all holy hell broke loose, as if somehow her cannibalizing my darkest secrets was some generous act she did for my benefit. It never seemed to occur to her that the last thing I wanted was her payoff. “That money is yours.”