The Foreseeable Future Read online

  She wanted me on her team. And while I understood that Dad’s behavior was infantile, I couldn’t take her side. She’d cheated. The experience had left her fascinated.

  “Time to talk,” Mom said firmly.

  “About what?” Rosie asked.

  Dad held his drink with the bottleneck already angled toward his lips. “Your mother is having a midlife crisis, I’m afraid.”

  I expected Mom to object to this diagnosis, but she remained placid as she said, “That’s one way of putting it. The truth, guys, is that my trip to Naples wasn’t just for work. It was also designed to give your father and me some time apart.”

  “Apart?” Jake echoed.

  “A trial separation,” Mom explained.

  “Your words, not mine,” Dad said.

  “Why?” Rosie squeaked, her tiny face crumpling.

  “Good question,” Dad said.

  The four of us looked to Mom for the answer.

  “I’ve been feeling . . . trapped,” she said. “Trapped and tired.”

  “Maybe you should get more sleep,” was Dad’s helpful suggestion.

  The kid from school deposited a basket of bread on the table. By the time he scurried off, our mother had abandoned her calm. Pointing a finger at our father, she said, “Don’t make me play the villain. We both agreed a long time ago that we’d always present a united front.”

  “Darling, we agreed to a lot of things a long time ago.” Dad began buttering a slice of the complimentary bread. He appeared to be casually losing his mind.

  “This is the message you want to send to our kids? That I’ve been miserable and you’ve been perfectly satisfied?”

  “I have been perfectly satisfied. Everything was fine before you left.”

  “Oh, really? Then why didn’t you go with me?”

  Dad almost choked on the wad of sourdough in his mouth. Wordlessly, Rosie nudged his water glass toward him. He took a long drink, recovered, and said, “Why didn’t I go with you to Italy?”

  “Yes.” Mom fumed.

  “I don’t know, Iris! Don’t you think it would have been too much—with the kids, and my book?”

  She rolled her eyes. “You haven’t finished a book in eight years.”

  Jake and I shared a look of confusion. Was that true? Had Dad really been working on the same novel since I was ten?

  “And it’s not just Italy,” Mom continued. “You didn’t come to Berlin three years ago when I was invited to speak at the Free University. And you refused to move to New York when Columbia offered me the visiting position.”

  My brother’s jaw dropped.

  “New York gives me anxiety!” Dad protested. “You know that!”

  Rosie burst into tears. She was always doing that— repressing her emotions until they conquered her so fully, she couldn’t breathe.

  Mom leaned across the table and took Rosie’s trembling hand. “Sweetie, the plan right now is to continue our separation. We haven’t made any final decisions yet. One of my colleagues, Professor Hale, has offered to let me stay at his beach cottage for the rest of the summer. I’ll just be a short drive away.”

  “You’re moving out?” I asked, just as Jake asserted, “I’m going with you.”

  Mom didn’t argue with either of us.

  “I can’t believe you told Bernie Hale about our personal problems,” Dad said.

  “I didn’t tell Bernie Hale anything,” Mom snapped. “I said I needed a quiet place to work on my manuscript.”

  Even though I hadn’t forgiven my mother for her affair, the last thing I wanted was to resume living alone with Dad and Rosie. It was obvious that Mom was essential. Her presence translated our jokes into affection, our insults into intimacy. Without her, our house wasn’t home; it was just a dumping ground for the flotsam of our separate lives.

  “If you went to Italy to get away from Dad . . .” Rosie sniffled. “Then why’d you come back early?”

  Mom hesitated. She looked to me, like maybe I would supply her with a convenient explanation. Mom came home because I embarrassed her on the Steeds County News. Mom came home because I took my stunt of a summer job a step too far.

  Or maybe: Mom came home because she was tormented by guilt.

  Mom came home because adultery isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

  Before anyone could answer Rosie’s question, our server returned, weighed down by the enormous Pirate’s Platter. The fifty-dollar appetizer included crab cakes, calamari rings, baked oysters, Tater Tots, clam strips, and grilled prawns with their coral-colored shells and beady eyes still intact.

  Everything smelled delicious and nauseating at the same time. The way, I imagined, food smelled when you were dying.

  I needed to get out of here.

  As my family—all of them despondent, but apparently ravenous—loaded up their plates, I texted Seth beneath the table: Hey, can you pick me up from Beachcomber Bill’s?

  I knew he had the night off; we always requested all the same shifts from our respective supervisors. Maybe he was on the beach with his high school buddies—the jocks and the cowboys about whom I never, ever asked. Maybe he was playing poker with his dad. Maybe he was with Cameron at the hospital.

  Wherever he was, his reply was an instant Sure!

  In the language of texts composed on Seth’s dumbphone, an exclamation point indicated pure joy.

  I leaned over and whispered my plan in my little sister’s ear. And then, as if only headed as far as the restrooms marked BUOYS and GULLS, I made my way across the restaurant, back through the gift shop, and out the door.

  TWENTY

  “I love this place,” Seth said, gazing fondly at the entrance to Beachcomber Bill’s.

  I shuddered as I buckled my seat belt. “I wish you hadn’t told me that.”

  “Haven’t you ever been there on your birthday? They sing to you.”

  “I’ll remember that. Maybe for my twenty-first.” I tried to smile at him, but the idea of living in Crescent Bay three years from now was, frankly, devastating.

  “What’s wrong?” Seth asked as we turned south on the highway.

  “Nothing,” I claimed.

  “You seem down.”

  “Not anymore. What’d you do today?”

  Seth kept his eyes on the road. “Not much. Had lunch with my dad. Saw Cameron.”

  “That’s great.” I could hear a slightly manic quality in my own voice, and I hoped Seth wouldn’t notice. I had to force myself to ask, “How is she?”

  “Good,” he said, calm and careful. “She’s back home now.”

  “That’s great,” I said again, meaning it more this time. Cameron at home seemed like less of a threat than Cameron hospitalized. Now, instead of an ex-girlfriend in mortal danger, she would be merely an ex-girlfriend. Everybody had one of those.

  “Where are we headed?” Seth asked me.

  “Can we go to your house?”

  Seth looked at me for as long as the curves of the highway allowed. “My house?”

  “Will your dad care?”

  “If you come over? Of course not.”

  “Will he care if we . . . ?”

  I wanted to feel like my life was mine, my family a footnote. I wanted to feel like the adult I technically was. More than anything else, I wanted Seth.

  “Uh.” I appreciated his nerves. Seth’s usual confidence was charming, but it was nice to overwhelm him, sometimes. “Are you saying . . . ?”

  “I’m saying when.”

  Part of me worried he’d try to talk me out of it. Sara had warned me, years ago, that guys were psychologically fragile and liked to maintain control over a relationship’s milestones. Lines like But you’re upset! and It just doesn’t feel right were usually boy-code for This wasn’t my idea.

  Seth didn’t say anything like
that. His eyes were bright, the skin around them slightly creased by the suggestion of a smile. The smile—had he given into it—would have said exactly what I wanted to hear.

  * * *

  * * *

  Outside Seth’s house, two Labradors chased the Jeep into its parking spot. We got out of the car and the dogs stopped barking, pressing their noses into our knees, tails moving back and forth like rudders. Seth greeted them by name—Faith and Tim—prompting me to wonder which member of Seth’s family was such a devoted fan of country radio. I was too nervous to ask. Seth was already taking my hand, leading me up the porch steps. We pushed through the front door, and then—because the house had no entryway—we were standing in a dim living room. On a faded gray couch, Seth’s dad sat drinking a beer and watching a baseball game. A bowl of popcorn rested between his knees.

  Mr. O’Malley looked at me, and I immediately stopped touching his son. I was painfully aware, in that moment, of Seth being someone’s son.

  “Hey!” said Mr. O’Malley, evicting the bowl of popcorn from his lap and standing to greet us. His tone and his body language suggested he might try to hug me; I was glad when he didn’t. It could have been the contrast of the lamp-lit corner of the couch with the darkened rest of the room, but there was a glint in his eyes that didn’t match his grin, and my heart raced in response.

  “You must be Ashley,” he said, reaching to shake my hand. His palm was dry.

  “Audrey,” I said.

  “Audrey, sorry. You guys want to hang out? Have a beer?”

  “No thanks, Dad.” Seth didn’t sound half as wary as I felt. “We’ll be in my room, okay?”

  “Ah,” said his dad, disappointed, sinking back into the couch. “Okay. The offer stands, if you kids change your mind.”

  “Thanks,” Seth repeated, reclaiming my hand and pulling me down a carpeted hallway.

  “Is your dad all right?” I whispered to Seth as he flipped the light switch in his own room.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Seth said. “He’s fine. He’s just lonely.”

  I knew that Seth’s mom lived in southern California with her second husband, and also that he had two older brothers who had already moved out.

  “Doesn’t your dad know you don’t drink?” I asked.

  Seth hesitated. “I drink with him sometimes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it makes him feel bad if I don’t.”

  “But that makes no sense. You’re eighteen.”

  “He’s weird.” Seth took a breath. He cupped my face in his hands. “Hey,” he said.

  I was dizzy, confused—but who cared if Seth sometimes had a beer with his dad?

  “Hey.” I looked into his eyes, which were damp, but focused.

  “I missed you,” he said. It had been about fourteen hours since we’d last seen each other, but I knew exactly what he meant.

  “Me too.” I pressed on his chest so that he moved backward and flopped against the bed. A cat meowed, vacated Seth’s pillow and then the room. Neither of us mentioned the cat as I straddled Seth’s hips. My hair fell everywhere, and I thought he might offer me a rubber band from the permanent collection on his wrist. Instead, he just swept my hair aside and kissed me with a kind of urgency that made me ache between the legs, but also felt partially born of nerves, or fear—something less than sexy.

  I could feel him getting hard, and even though the same thing had happened every time we’d ever made out, tonight the tension in his jeans took me by complete surprise.

  “You okay?” Seth said, separating his lips from mine.

  “Yup,” I said, and tried to cover up my alarm by tugging on his shirt. Seth wore his clothes fairly tight for a boy, and the T-shirt got stuck around his shoulders, forcing him to finish the job himself.

  Somehow, despite looking the way he did and living by the ocean, Seth was not the kind of guy who seized every opportunity to be gratuitously shirtless. I had only seen his bare chest in the context of the two of us hooking up, and I normally took a not-so-subtle second to stare at the perfect boyness of him. But tonight, he seemed panicked to be the only one half undressed, and he fumbled for the edges of my tank top, and then the back of my bra.

  “There’s no clasp,” I said. It was the sort of lacy, glorified sports bra I had to peel from my boobs, one by one, and then pull over my head. Having made no plans to lose my virginity tonight, it hadn’t occurred to me to put on my favorite underwear. I hadn’t perfumed my neck or applied more than a few cursory strokes of deodorant after getting out of the shower. My only plan for the night had been to endure a semicivilized dinner with my family—but that plan had fallen through.

  Now, I willed myself to forget about the Nelsons. They were my blood relations, but I hadn’t chosen them; they were basically roommates to whom I’d been randomly assigned at birth. Seth was different. Seth and I had picked each other.

  We were sitting up on the bed. He had one hand on my hip, guiding me into his lap, and one hand moving somewhat frantically from my neck to my left breast. From the living room, we heard his dad wail “Nooooooo!” in the despairing way of men watching sports.

  Laughing, we fell onto our backs. The interruption was both a relief and a disappointment.

  “I’m sorry,” said Seth. “I can’t stop shaking. I swear I’ve done this before.”

  “Thanks for the reminder.”

  “Sorry.” He repositioned his body over mine. Only now, as my heart rate regulated, did I realize how fast it had been racing. Looking into Seth’s eyes, I felt certain.

  I had felt a lot of things this summer, but not always certain.

  “You still want to have sex with me?” he asked.

  “Yeah. I think we just need to calm down.”

  So we did, with deep breaths. And then we kissed for a half hour, or maybe longer—however long it took for our pants to seem superfluous and for our hands to explore every region of each other. Our nervous laughter returned during Seth’s unwrapping and graceless application of the condom—but by then, the stakes felt somehow lower. Like maybe we had the rest of our lives to get this right. Like maybe beneath all the awkwardness and the embarrassment was a tough layer of love that could survive an infinite amount of both.

  At first, he tried to push inside of me and he slipped, pushing against the mattress instead. I said something romantic, like, “Uh, that’s not me.”

  A wave of discouragement threatened to pull me under, just because I didn’t think I could bear a repeat performance of my attempt to sleep with Cole Hendrix—I would have to seriously wonder if there was something wrong with my anatomy—but Seth just winced, and tried again. This time there was a flash of pain that vanished almost immediately, replaced by a feeling that wasn’t at all bad.

  I was struck by a memory of my sister trying a raw oyster for the first time. She had been six, and after placing the empty shell back on the ice she announced, “I don’t know if I like this now, but I can tell I’m really going to like it someday.”

  I laughed out loud. Seth said, “What’s so funny?” his breath hot against my cheek.

  “Nothing. I’m just happy.”

  “Same,” he whispered.

  Afterward, we lay sprawled and sticky across a tangle of sheets. On Seth’s nightstand, an electric fan twisted from side to side, blowing stray pieces of our hair into our faces every few seconds.

  “You okay?” he asked, kissing my sweaty temple.

  “I’m good,” I said. “Are you good?”

  “I’m great.”

  An hour earlier, I hadn’t been able to think about anything but putting distance between the Nelsons and me. Hundreds or maybe thousands of miles were required to mute the sound of my family splitting in two. Now I had to wonder if any city would ever make me feel as free as I felt in Seth O’Malley’s bed. He may have been ponytailed and much too frie
ndly—he may have been Crescent Bay incarnate—but he was mine.

  Pressing my cheek against a Seth-scented pillow, I said to him, “Hey, did you win one of those senior superlatives? Like Most Likely to Succeed, or Class Clown?”

  He rested his hand on my bare stomach. Pleasure pooled beneath the surface of my skin. “You mean you didn’t vote for me?”

  “I didn’t vote for anyone.”

  “Yes.” He sighed. “I won.”

  “For what?”

  Struggling and failing to keep it in check, Seth said, “Best smile.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  I had promised Seth I would introduce him to Tamora, warning him that, by Crescent Bay standards, Tamora was not exactly friendly. Seth dismissed my concern, confident that he and Tamora would get along the same way he got along with everyone.

  If there was one thing Seth took for granted, it was his own popularity.

  On our lunch break one night, toward the end of July, Seth showed up in Tamora’s room right on schedule. He delivered to the foot of her bed a tray heaped with breakfast food—slices of quiche, Tony’s famous muffins, sausage links, and three mugs of reheated coffee.

  I gave Tamora a look: impressed yet?

  Without breaking eye contact, she shrugged and popped a sausage link into her mouth.

  “Sit, both of you,” she ordered, gesturing to the chairs by the darkened window. I grabbed two and pulled them to her bedside. Next to me, Seth smelled like the kitchen—like cooked vegetables glazed with cleaning supplies.

  “I’ve heard a lot about you,” Seth said to Tamora, reaching for a cup of coffee. I was already devouring a muffin. Working at the nursing home every night meant I never realized how hungry I was until food was literally under my nose.

  “How strange,” Tamora said. Her voice became extra husky with someone new in the room. “Because I’ve heard almost nothing about you.”

  Turning to me, Seth clutched his heart. “You don’t brag about me to your friends?”

  “Just to the press,” Tamora said.