Tate needed to get a life.
She needed a boyfriend.
Barrett!
She didn’t want to think about it.
After lunch she swam in the pond, ignoring common wisdom to wait an hour for her food to digest. She was floating on her back when she saw something move in her peripheral vision. She stood up-the water was chest deep-and squinted. It was another person trekking out to Bigelow Point. Tate recognized the blue terry-cloth cover-up and the floppy white hat that had belonged to her grandfather.
It was Birdie!
Tate waved. She was relieved. She had wanted company, though she was too proud to admit it to herself. Spending all day at the beach alone was beyond her. Her mother realized this and had come to the rescue. She was such a good mother.
Birdie didn’t wave back. Her face held an expression that Tate couldn’t place, though one thing was for sure: she didn’t look happy. She picked her way out onto the slender sandbar that jutted into the water.
Tate called out, “Mom! I’m over here!” Surely her mother had seen her? She didn’t look over. “Mom!” Tate squinted. That was her mother, right? It was her mother’s blue cover-up and her grandfather’s floppy white hat, which he used to wear when he took Tate and Chess crabbing in the flat-bottomed rowboat.
It was her mother. And now Tate noticed that she was on the phone. That couldn’t be right. But yes, Birdie was on the phone. She was talking to someone. She was gesturing. The phone call was brief. Two minutes, maybe less. She folded up her phone and slipped it into the pocket of her cover-up.
Tate waited. Her mother gazed out at the ocean for a moment, then took a heaving breath and walked toward the pond. Tate swam to shore.
Birdie approached without a word or a smile. What was wrong? When she was close enough to speak to, Tate found she didn’t know what to say. And rather than say something stupid, she was quiet. She waited.
Together they walked to Tate’s towel and sat down. Birdie said, “I’m sorry. I know you wanted to be alone today.”
“Actually,” Tate said, “I was dying for company.”
“I was just on the phone with Hank,” Birdie said.
“Who’s Hank?” Tate asked.
“He’s a man I’m dating,” Birdie said.
“Really?” Tate said. She felt a sharp, clean slice through her gut. She had held out hope that since neither of her parents were seeing other people, they might someday reunite. She knew it was juvenile, wanting them back together, but that was how she felt.
“Really,” Birdie said.
“Why have I never heard of him?” Tate said.
“He hasn’t been around very long,” Birdie said. “I met him at the end of April. I met him at the same time that your sister broke her engagement. So there have been a lot of distractions. And I’m not sure how serious it is.”
“Are you in love?” Tate said, praying the answer was no.
“I’m in love,” Birdie said. “At least, that’s what I’m calling it in my head. He is not in love with me, however. I thought he was, he said he was, but our conversations since we’ve been here tell me otherwise. He sounds positively uninterested.”
Uninterested, Tate thought. Like Barrett.
“Hank is married,” Birdie said.
“Mother!” Tate said. She tried to sound shocked, though she wasn’t at all. She knew how the world worked; she knew that betrayals were as common as anthills.
“His wife has Alzheimer’s,” Birdie said. “She’s in a facility. She’ll stay in the facility until she dies.”
“Oh,” Tate said.
“So here’s the thing I don’t understand, still, at my age,” Birdie said. “In the two years between the time your father and I split and the time I met Hank, I was fine. I was reasonably happy, I had hobbies and interests-my gardening, my reading, the house, you kids, my friends. Then I met Hank. And he likes to do things-go out for dinner, go to the theater, spend the night in nice hotels, go dancing. God, it was intoxicating to have someone to do things with. You have no idea. I’d always been alone, throughout my marriage, alone, alone. The problem is that my happiness, now, depends on Hank.” Birdie clenched her fists. “It’s not fair that someone should be able to affect me this way! But I don’t want to go back to how things were before I met him. I was lonely. Then, with Hank, I was not lonely. And now, without Hank, I’m even lonelier than I was before.”
Tate watched her mother. She wasn’t happy to hear about Hank, but she understood. She felt the same way. She had been in love with Barrett Lee either since she was seventeen or for the past six days-but either way, it wasn’t fair.
“I don’t understand why he won’t talk to me,” Birdie said. “I don’t understand why he’s pulling away. Just now I called and he was with his three-year-old granddaughter at the farm at Stew Leonard’s. I want him to tell me that he misses me and he loves me, and all he wants to tell me is that it’s ninety-two degrees in Connecticut and the cow’s name is Calliope.”
“You got him at a bad time,” Tate said.
“It’s been a bad time every time I’ve called.”
“Have you called him every day?”
“Every day since the Fourth.”
Tate had noticed that Birdie wandered off around this time each day, but she figured her mother was on some typical Birdie mission: picking wildflowers for the dinner table, or hunting down chives for the salad.
Tate said, “If it makes you feel any better, I’m in love with Barrett Lee.”
Birdie gasped. “You are?”
“Oh, come on, Mom,” Tate said. “Tell me it’s not obvious. I’ve loved him forever. I’ve loved him since I was a child.”
“You have?” Birdie said. “I always thought it was Chess who was interested in Barrett.”
“Of course you did,” Tate said. “Chess always gets to play the romantic lead. Why is that?”
“Oh, Tate-”
“No, I’m curious. Why is she always the one who gets to fall in love and have relationships, and never me?”
“It will be you, soon enough,” Birdie said.
“I’m thirty years old,” Tate said. “How much longer do I have to wait?”
“I didn’t know you were in love with Barrett Lee,” Birdie said. “I’m sorry. It helps to know now. I’ve been trying to throw him and Chess together.”
“Can you stop?” Tate said. “Please?”
“It’s not working anyway,” Birdie said.
“He asked me about Chess this morning, and then he asked her out-I saw them talking by the Scout-but I think she said no. Did she mention it?”
“Not a word,” Birdie said. “You’ll be glad if she said no?”
“It doesn’t change the fact that he wanted to ask her.”
“Love is perfectly awful,” Birdie said. “I’d forgotten how awful it was. I don’t remember feeling like this with your father. Grant and I found each other, and we knew. There wasn’t any game playing. We joined forces and we moved through life-he worked, we bought the house, I had you and Chess. Then I lost those two pregnancies right in a row, which was upsetting, but I recovered. Your father was free to worry about making money and playing golf and I could worry about returning the library books on time and getting you girls to dance class. I never remember feeling this addled. Loving your father was frustrating, but it wasn’t painful.”