“Morning,” my dad said as I stepped into the kitchen. He was hovering around the coffeepot, but in a way that made me think he wasn’t actually having coffee and had instead been waiting for me to come down.
“Hi,” I said, rubbing my hand across my eyes as I went to the fridge in search of orange juice. He was wearing a button-down shirt and a suit jacket, but no tie—his I’m professional but not stuffy outfit he always wore when campaigning in the summers. His hair, though, was as sharply parted as ever. “So,” I said, after taking a long drink and waiting for my brain to start waking up, “You have that campaign event today?”
“Kind of,” my dad said, giving me a shrug. “It’s the governor’s campaign. He just wanted to me to say a few words.”
I nodded as I took another drink of my juice, convinced that even after all these years, I would never understand how politics worked. The governor and my dad had privately hated each other for years, but maybe he was trying to get a piece of my dad’s redemption arc. It was all going to start unfolding at a press conference on Monday, with Peter laying out every step of it.
“But there’s actually something I wanted to show you,” my dad said, smiling at me, and I realized he really had been waiting for me to get up.
“Okay,” I said, looking around the kitchen.
“Outside,” my dad said, walking toward the side door. “Ready?”
“Sure,” I said, setting my glass down, utterly baffled as to what this could be. I honestly wasn’t sure there was anything I wanted, unless standing on the driveway would be Palmer, Toby, and Bri, all having made up, having forgiven each other and me, along with Clark and Bertie, everything somehow fixed and okay. I stepped outside, and the heat hit me like a slap in the face. “Ugh,” I said, wincing. It was boiling already, and humid, like I’d just walked face-first into a hot shower.
“Yeah,” my dad said, grimacing at me. “It’s going to be a hot one today.”
“Going to be?”
“Okay, let’s go to the garage,” my dad said, talking fast, sounding excited. I had a sudden Christmas-morning flashback of both my parents sitting on the couch watching me open my biggest present, waiting to see my reaction. But it wasn’t Christmas, and it was nowhere near my birthday. So what was this, exactly?
I followed my dad to the garage door, which was closed, and looked around, in case I was missing something. But a second later my dad pulled out the garage door opener from his pocket and took a breath. “Okay,” he said, his thumb on the button, but not pressing it yet. “This is something that I hadn’t planned on doing just yet, but . . .”
A loud, low-pitched BEEP! made us both jump, and I looked over to see a bus chugging up to our driveway. It started to turn in, but then stopped and backed up a few feet with a beep-beep-beep sound that seemed unnecessarily loud on our totally quiet street, sending some birds from nearby trees into flight.
“What the heck?” my dad asked, striding down toward the end of the driveway, sounding annoyed. I followed a few paces behind, and as I got closer, felt my steps slow.
There was a giant picture of my dad’s face on the bus, taken from his last campaign photo shoot. WALKER FOR CONGRESS, it read in giant red and white letters. Underneath this, but only slightly smaller, was printed, TOWARD THE FUTURE.
“Peter!” my dad yelled, as he walked up to the bus. His face was starting to turn red, and since he’d been fine just a moment before, I had a feeling this was due to the bus and not the heat.
The doors opened with a squeak and a sound of air releasing, and a moment later Peter was striding down the steps and smiling at us. “Morning,” he said, then winced. “Jeez, it’s hot out today. Luckily, the bus has AC.”
“Why is this even here?” my dad asked, staring at it. “When did we decide we were going ahead with this?”
“We didn’t,” Peter said as he pulled out his BlackBerry. “An intern forgot to cancel, and it had already been paid for, so it showed up this morning. Along with the driver, Walt. Hey, Walt,” Peter called into the bus. The driver—Walt—who had a short blond crew cut and looked to be in his late fifties, just lifted an eyebrow at Peter before raising the paper in front of his face, hiding it from view. “Anyway, thought we might as well get some use out of it. Ride to this rally in style.”
My dad just looked at the bus, a small frown still on his face.
“Great,” Peter said as though my dad had agreed, eyes on his phone screen. “I’ve got to catch up on some e-mails, but let’s plan on leaving in ten, okay?” He looked up and frowned at me as his eyes drifted down to the pajamas I was wearing. “Andie, you’re, uh, not coming, are you?”
“No,” my dad and I said at the same time.
“Gotcha,” Peter said, relief clearly etched on his face. “See you later, then.” He climbed back onto the bus, fingers already flying over his keypad.
“Bye,” I called, even though I had a feeling Peter could no longer hear me. Behind the wheel, Walt lowered his paper and rolled his eyes before raising it again—he’d clearly had more than enough of Peter already.
“Okay,” my dad said, holding up the garage door opener, smiling at me again. “Ready to do this?”
We walked back up the driveway, the asphalt warm under my bare feet. I looked back toward the bus for just a second, my dad’s huge face giving a confident but trustworthy smile to the street. Despite whatever Peter had said, campaign buses didn’t show up by accident—not unless there was a campaign that would require them. “Dad—” I started, right as the garage door opened and I found myself looking at a yellow ’65 Mustang.
“Surprise!” my dad said, making a little flourish with his arms, smiling big as he looked from me to the car.
“Is that . . . ?” I asked, taking a step closer to it. “Is it Mom’s?” It looked just like it, but I couldn’t be sure. “Didn’t you say you didn’t know where it was?”
“I said that, yes,” my dad said, grinning now, and I could see that he was incredibly pleased with himself. “I didn’t want to give the surprise away. It’s been in a storage facility upstate. Your mother asked me to give it to you when you turned eighteen, but when you started asking about it, I thought maybe now was the moment.”
“This is great,” I said a beat too late. “Really great,” I repeated, trying to bring some enthusiasm into my voice. “Thank you.”
“I’ve made sure that it’s ready to be driven,” he said, walking toward the car, running his hand along the side of it. “It got fully overhauled, detailed, everything. And I’ll have to teach you how to drive stick, but after that, you should be good to go.” He looked at me and his smile faltered a little.
“Awesome,” I said, making myself smile, knowing I wasn’t reacting the way he wanted me to. I felt terrible about it but wasn’t sure I would be able to fake it. Because there was a bus with his face on it at the bottom of the driveway, reminding me of everything that was going to happen and how little I could do about it. When was he planning to teach me how to drive a stick shift if he was going to be not only working, but campaigning in the fall’s election? I looked at the car, pretty sure that it was going to sit there, undriven, for a very long time.
“Sorry,” my dad said, his excited energy ebbing away as he ran his hand over the back of his neck. “Maybe . . . this was probably the wrong day. But when they called and said it was ready, I just wanted you to have it.”
“No, it’s great,” I said, feeling even worse than I had a moment ago. “Really, Dad. Thank you.”
“Well,” my dad said, after an awkward silence had fallen, “I hope you like it, Andie.”
He turned to head inside, but before he’d reached the door, I blurted out, “You’re running again, aren’t you.” It didn’t sound like a question because it wasn’t one. All the proof I needed was sitting at the bottom of the driveway.
My dad turned back to me. “I told you, I haven’t decided anything.”
“You can at least tell me the truth.” I said,
shaking my head, realizing that I should not be getting mad at him right after he’d given me a present, but knowing that it was happening anyway.
My dad raised his eyebrows. “I am,” he said. “I’m still weighing my options.”
“It’s just . . . this summer, having you around, it’s been really . . .”
“Alex!” Peter was standing on the bottom step of the bus, tapping at his watch in a hugely exaggerated manner, like we were involved in a game of long-distance charades. “We have to get going. Walt can’t make traffic miracles happen!” Peter stepped back inside the bus, and I looked back at my dad.
“I . . .” My dad looked down at me for a moment. “I won’t decide to run without talking to you first. Okay?”
I looked back to the bus, which was contradicting everything he was saying. “Right,” I said, nodding and looking away from him, my voice flat. There was no point in arguing if he was just going to leave anyway. “Sure.”
• • •
Ten minutes later I sat in my mother’s Mustang as the bus made a painfully slow three-point (in this case, more like an eighteen-point) turn before heading back down the road. I realized as it departed that TOWARD THE FUTURE was printed on the back of the bus as well, and the very slogan seemed to mock me for ever doubting that this was the choice my dad would make.
I’d gotten into the passenger side out of habit—I’d been years away from driving the last time I was in this car. I shut the door behind me and looked around. I had hoped, in some absurd way, that it would still somehow feel like my mom. That even after five years in storage, her perfume would be lingering or there would be the feeling I always had in this car with my mother—that adventure was somehow just around the corner, that any minute now, exciting things were going to happen.
I sat there for just a moment, looking through the motes of dust in the shafts of sunlight to the empty seat where my mother should have been sitting, the view I’d always had. When that got to be too much, I slid over to the driver’s side, pulling the seat forward and placing my hands on the steering wheel for the first time.
I flipped down the visor mirror, expecting the keys to drop down into my lap, because that’s where they always seemed to be in the movies. But there was nothing there, and a quick glance around the car didn’t show them to me either. I realized as I looked that I actually wasn’t sure how the car had gotten here—if it had been driven or towed.
I opened the glove compartment and starting flipping through the papers—mostly what appeared to be sale and insurance documents—and found them toward the back, the car keys on the key chain that I’d gotten her for Mother’s Day when I was nine, a bright-purple heart dangling from a chain. I smiled as I held it up now, the silver of the chain catching the light and reflecting it back at me. When I’d bought it from a mall kiosk eight years ago, I had been convinced that there had never been anything so beautiful. Now, though, I could see just how tacky it was—and how wonderful my mother had been, to carry it around for years after that anyway, just because I had given it to her.
I started to put the papers back inside the glove compartment when I saw my name. I started flipping through them more slowly, and there, almost at the end of the stack, I saw it—a plain white square envelope with my name written across the front of it—in my mother’s handwriting.
I just stared at it, holding it with both hands, not wanting to even breathe in case this somehow went away or disappeared. I looked at my name on the front of the envelope, in the handwriting I hadn’t seen in so long—the looping A, the circle over the i. I turned the card over, and what I saw there made me let out a short laugh with a sob mixed into it. Across the back flap she’d drawn the Mustang with a horse in sunglasses sitting in the driver’s seat, one elbow out the window. Lots of horsepower! she’d written below it, and I laughed, even though I could feel tears prickling the corners of my eyes. The drawing wasn’t as sharp as the ones she usually did—the lines were a little unsure and wavy, and I knew just by looking at it that this was one of the ones she’d made toward the end, before even picking up a pencil hurt her hands too much, before she lost all the energy she’d once used for things like drawing mustangs in Mustangs.
I took a deep breath, then slid my hand under the flap and pulled out the note, which had been written on her stationery. MOLLY WALKER was printed across the top in raised letters, and I ran my finger over them once before I bit my lip and started to read.
Andie!
Hello, my love. Happy 18th birthday! I so wish that I could be there to celebrate with you.
I have loved this car, and I’m so happy it’s yours now. I hope you’ll use it for so much more than getting around. This car, like you, is made for extraordinary things.
So have adventures. Go exploring. Drive around at midnight. Feel the wind running through your hair.
Life is so short, my darling. And there’s no day like today.
Drive safe. Have fun. I love you so much.
(But of course you knew that already.)
—Mom
PS—I know you already are, but take care of your dad for me. He needs help sometimes, even if he’s bad at showing it.
I set the paper down in my lap and wiped under my eyes, not trying to get myself to stop crying, just trying to dry my face off a little. I looked down at the note, still a little unable to believe it had happened—that my mom had left something behind for me after all.
I read it through again, still crying, when one line jumped out at me—no day like today. And I knew, just like that, what I had to do.
I had to find Clark and tell him how I felt—how I really felt—and see if he might want to give it another chance. Even if he said no, at least I would have tried. At least I would have tried to be as honest as I could be. Because right now I was just running away when things got too real.
I carefully put her note back in its envelope, folded over the flap, and placed it back in the glove compartment, closing it and then resting my hand there for a moment. Then I got out of the car and ran full speed into the house.
• • •
Fifteen minutes later I glanced at my reflection in my bedroom mirror and decided it was the best I could do under the circumstances. I hadn’t wanted to take much time, but even I knew that when you are going to tell someone that you love them and want them back, it’s probably best not to do it in the T-shirt you’ve slept in, especially if you’ve stolen it from them. I’d thrown on a skirt and a white T-shirt after rejecting almost everything else in my closet, since nothing seemed right for this—even though I had never done this before and had no idea what one actually wore for it. But I could feel my heart pounding as I ran a brush through my hair and slicked on some lip gloss. I needed to do this now, soon, before I lost my nerve, before I actually started to think about what I was going to do.
I stepped into my flip-flops, then took the stairs two at a time. I had a very strong feeling this was a have-in-person conversation, and even though I knew I probably should, I didn’t want to call first, didn’t want him to be able to tell me not to talk to him anymore. I wanted to see him—to talk with him face-to-face. To tell him how much I missed him.
I launched myself out the front door and hurried to my car. I’d just tossed my bag in the front passenger seat when I saw someone walking up the driveway.
I lifted my hand to cut the glare, then let it fall it when I saw it was Palmer.
I stood by my car, not really sure what to do. My heart was hammering as I raised a hand in a wave. I half expected that at any moment Palmer would change her mind, but she kept coming toward me until we were only a few feet apart.
“Hi,” Palmer said. She gave me a nervous smile, then stuck her hands in the back pockets of her jean shorts. “Sorry for just showing up like this.”
“No, it’s fine,” I said, smiling back at her, hoping she hadn’t come over here to tell me that she’d decided we could never be friends again. “You know you can always come by.”
Palmer nodded and took a breath. But before she could speak, I jumped in. “I really, really messed up,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”
“I know it was coming from a good place,” Palmer said, shaking her head. “But—”
“I know,” I said. “I was trying to control everything, because the thought of not having you guys . . .” I let out a shaky breath. “But I shouldn’t have interfered like that.”
Palmer nodded. “I know you were trying to help, in your own, very not helpful way,” she said, and I smiled. “But I overreacted. And I’m sorry, Andie.”
We just looked at each other for a moment, and then Palmer reached out to hug me, and I hugged her back, tight, neither of us moving for a few moments. When we broke apart, it felt like I’d just put down a really heavy burden I’d been carrying for too long, like something had finally been set right.
“What’s happening with them?” I asked when we stepped apart, hoping somehow that would have worked everything out.
Palmer shook her head, and those hopes were dashed. “Bri’s trying,” she said, shaking her head. “She’s apologized over and over again, but Toby won’t listen. I’ve barely seen her.” She looked over at my car and seemed to notice the keys in my hand for the first time. “Wait, are you leaving?”
“No,” I said, then hesitated. “Well, kind of. I was going to go talk to Clark. . . .”
“Clark,” Palmer said, her eyes widening. “Really? I was sorry to hear about you guys. . . .”
“Well—” I started, taking a deep breath, “Here’s the thing. I need to go tell him that I love him.”
“Andie!” Palmer looked at me like she wasn’t exactly sure who I was.
A beep sounded from my bag on the passenger seat, and we both looked over at it, just as another one sounded. “Just a second,” I said, leaning in and pulling it out. “It’s Topher,” I said, looking at the screen, turning it so I could read it in the glare.
Palmer raised a disapproving eyebrow at me. “Topher?”