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"Did you have a fight with Emma?" Mom comes enquiring to me later that evening, just as I'm ready to head out for dinner with the Parkers.
"No, just tired," I say wearily. It's a question I'll never escape, I fear.
Mom and dad's marriage ended with about as much drama as you can expect in a small town. He packed up and left one day and never looked back. Mom became the social pariah for awhile, the twenty-something who couldn't keep her man, and I don't think she ever really recovered from it. She made it through - obviously - but there's always that flicker of unease in her eyes when she glances from me to Emma.
"Don't forget the pie," she says as she thrusts her most precious deep-pan dish, neatly wrapped in tin foil, at me. "Don't stay too long, and tell those poor folks we're all praying for them."
I can sense my mother watching me as I turn my back and walk towards the car. I can feel it, that quiet fear in her - perhaps irrational, perhaps not - that I'll run away and never come back.
✉ ✉ ✉ ✉ ✉
The Parkers live in a quaint, rustic little cottage. I marvel at how much comes rushing back to me as I step out of the car, grab the Shepherd's Pie, and make my way down the cobbled pathway leading to their door. I'd always known where Samantha Parker lived because everyone knew where everyone lived when we were kids.
A memory creeps out from the shadows of my mind - a distant Friday afternoon, the faded nauseating smell of paint on my fingertips, the sound of Aaron's laughter as he swung his backpack at me. A water fight in June, on the last day of sixth-grade. I'd fallen and scraped my knee somewhere here as we'd walked home together. I can't remember much more.
It's exactly the kind of house that city-folk go ga-ga over. I can just imagine Emma clutching at me, gasping "Oh how gorgeous!". It's exactly the kind of place I can imagine a comfortably upper-middle-class family renting for the summer to live out their rustic country life fantasies; to grow baby tomatoes in the back-garden and work on their failing marriage, only to retreat safely back into the familiar comforts of their modernist New York apartments with the arrival of autumn.
It's not an accurate representation of the architecture of our town. In fact, it's probably the most expensive property around - flashy, for our standards. Samantha was known and sometimes resented for, being one of the more well-off kids in town.
As I find myself reaching out to knock on their door, it strikes me as a little odd that I had never once visited her home. Not even that summer when we -
