Page 30 of Haunted

Nine Years Later

“My boy is back,” Mom says, as if I’m fourteen and just home from sleep-away camp. It’s at least the third time she’s said it. Each time it sounds like she’s just discovered it afresh.

Bree rolls her eyes and helps herself to more gravy to soften up Mom’s pork loin. When I enlisted, she was still a little kid in pigtails, drawing with crayons. Now she’s seventeen, in ripped jeans and a cropped top, with a pink phone she checks every four minutes and a mouth that doesn’t quit. I don’t really know her at all.

“You don’t have to go paying rent to a stranger,” Mom says. “There’s always room here. And your father could use some help keeping the backyard mowed.”

“Now, Jackie,” Dad says. “I can do my own damned yard.”

“I’m just saying his room’s still available,” Mom adds, which is her way of saying she’d keep me here forever if she could. She was almost personally offended when I accepted the University’s offer of temporary housing while I was still looking for a place of my own, and has never given up her quiet campaign to have me think better of my apartment and come home to be her little boy again. “That Ellie Hopkins across the street asked if we needed a man to come around and do the lawn for us. I’ve never been more humiliated.”

“And what would happen when he meets someone?” Dad says, and Mom glances at me and reddens.

“I’m not really in the market for that just yet,” I say. “I’ve only been divorced for six months.”

“Good riddance,” Mom says, with a firmness that surprises me. “I’m glad that chapter is closed.”

Bree catches my eye. She knows more than Mom thinks she does. She was on the phone with me when Nash came home drunk and determined to pick a fight. She was fifteen. I should never have put that on her.

“You should get back out there,” Dad says. “Time to get back in the saddle.”

There are times when my father’s job running a feed store bubbles to the surface. Bree and I make eye contact and we both crack up. Some things never change.

Dad doesn’t laugh with us. He turns his water glass a half-turn on the tablecloth.

“He called the house,” he says. “Tuesday.”

The table goes quiet.

“Nash?” Mom says. “You never said.”

“He wanted to know how Lance was settling in.” Dad looks at me. “I told him we hadn’t heard from you in a while, and then I hung up the phone.”

Settling in. I signed that lease eleven days ago, and there is nobody outside this room who knows I’ve moved.

“He’s three thousand miles away,” Mom says, to nobody in particular.

“Sure,” Dad says, and picks up his fork.

“So, tell me about the new place,” Bree says, redirecting.

“It’s on Flint Street, next to the university. Five-minute walk to the office. It’s just a studio, but that’s all I need, and the building’s beautiful—one of those big brick ones from the nineteenth century, when the walls were built to last.”

Bree wrinkles her forehead. “Flint Street. I feel like I knew someone who lived up there. It’s not a very long street.”

“Honey, would you like some more pork?” Mom starts, picking up the serving bowl.

Bree is undeterred. “Didn’t Parker Bishop live out there after his aunt took him in?” Bree asks.

Mom freezes for a second and looks at Dad.

“Wow,” Bree says, not reading the room. “That’s a name I haven’t thought of in a while. Whatever happened to him?”

“He left,” I say. I take a bite of mashed potatoes so I don’t have to say more.

I know what happened to Parker Bishop. He sat me down in the Bean Stop courtyard the day after we kissed and told me he was going away for a while. I asked where. He wouldn’t say. I asked for how long. He said he didn’t know. I asked him not to go. He said he had to. And then he said the thing I’ve carried for nine years: that he needed to find out who he was without me.

I assumed DC, or maybe New York. Somewhere big enough to disappear into. I called the Bean Stop a week later and Liam told me he’d given his notice. I called Shelley. She was polite and closemouthed. Parker was doing well, she said, and he’d asked for privacy. That was the last real information I got.