Chapter 19

AUSTIN

My father is preternaturally loud. His inside voice can only be classified as a shout; his outside voice is so deep and booming it sounds like it’s coming from the earth’s core—like a seismic, apocalyptic event orchestrated with the express purpose of blowing out all of humanity’s eardrums at once.

When he bellows, “Mouse!” at me from the front porch of Patsey’s, all three people within a twenty-foot radius flinch. I motion at him to lower the volume, pushing my hands up and down through Austin’s soupily humid air. We’ve been in Texas for two days and the Colorado girl in me is still having trouble breathing.

“Please don’t scream,” I say as he hops the two steps off the porch toward me and lifts me clear off the ground. When he spins me around, he shouts right in my ear: “Sorry!”

I wince, and he sets me back on the sidewalk. “Are you taller?”

I look down at myself: tank top, flip-flops, denim shorts with my phone shoved in one pocket. Two unanswered, outgoing calls to Ethan sitting in its log. “No?”

“You look taller,” Dad says, holding me at arm’s length with both hands on my shoulders. He’s in his customary band T-shirt and jeans, gold aviators he’s had my whole life. “Maybe I’m shrinking in my old age.”

Maybe if you saw me more, you’d remember how tall I am.But I don’t say it, just swipe a hand over the top of his head. His hair is the same dark brown as mine. “Doubt it.”

“Where’s your mother?”

I feel myself frown, my whole face pinching with it. Dad landed in Austin this morning for a show along the tour he’s managing this summer—we have exactly three hours of overlap in our schedules. Three hours that we discussed explicitly would be Camilla-free.

“She wasn’t—” A white town car slides up to the curb right beside me, its back passenger door clicking open. My mother’s ankle juts out of it, and I watch her leather Hermès sandal make contact with the sidewalk. “—invited.”

“I invited her,” Dad says. “And really, mouse, you forced my hand by ignoring all my calls.”

“I didn’t—” I splutter, but he’s already hugging Camilla, and the rest of my sentence disappears into the commotion of them reaching over me to get to each other.

He eyes me over her shoulder. “You did.”

God damn it. I look back toward South Congress, the twenty-minute walk I took to get here from our hotel. Of course Camilla drove. Of course my dad would ambush me like this. Of course I can’t get out of it now.

I’ve spent the days since Taos holed up in my hotel room, catching up on the Penn readings and course notes Ethan’s sent. But we haven’t talked through anything but email; every time I’ve tried to get ahold of him, he’s sent me straight to voicemail.

“Hi, honey,” Camilla says, finally letting go of Dad and turning to face me. I sat with Sadie and the interns again on the flight from New Mexico, and to be honest I haven’t seen her up close in a few days. Avoiding, self-preserving, whatever you want to call it—we aren’t really speaking. “Thanks for including me.”

I can’t quite tell if this is a dig or she’s just that blithe, that used to the world reorienting itself around her.

“Ames?” the hostess calls, southern twang ringing over the front porch of this house-turned-restaurant. “Roger Ames, party of three?”

“Here!” Dad hollers, and before I realize what’s happening, Camilla and I are looking at each other, our simultaneous eye rolls connecting behind his back. So loud, she mouths at me, and I jerk my gaze away before this can turn into A Moment.

Dad’s rented out the private back room of the restaurant, a bricked-in space that looks like it was a sunporch in a past life. Half the eyes in the restaurant follow us through to our table, the other half jerking hastily our way as soon as someone points out my mother. I forget, when I’m away at school, what it’s like to move through the world with the conspicuous obstacle of Camilla next to me.

“I’ll send your server over right away,” the hostess says, hesitating behind Camilla’s shoulder like she’s debating whether or not to say something. Don’t, I think, and she doesn’t, and we sit.

When the door to our room is firmly shut, Dad says, “My girls.” He reaches over to squeeze both our shoulders, and I lift my menu to cover my face. “The apples of my eyeballs. Tell me everything.”

This is for my benefit, I’m sure. Clearly Camilla has been tattling on me to Dad, or he wouldn’t have staged this reunion-brunch-turned-intervention. But my mother just looks at me across the table, smiling patiently.

“Mouse?” Dad prompts, when neither of us have spoken.

“Can I at least order a coffee before the firing squad begins?”

“Hey, there’s no firing squad here—”

“Roger, honestly,” Camilla says, glancing toward the glass panes in the door. A few people in the dining room are still staring. “Lower your voice.”

Dad ducks his head, leaning closer to us over the table. His lowered voice is one decibel below the kind of projection you’d expect at an a cappella performance. “Of course you can order a coffee, Audrey. But we aren’t a firing squad; we’re your parents. We love you.”

I look at him as he says it. I can feel Camilla watching me, but I can’t bring myself to glance her way. She lets his we do the heavy lifting and keeps her mouth shut.

“Okay,” I say slowly. “What do you want to know?”

“Are you having fun?” Dad says. The question is so off base I don’t know how to begin answering it, but he keeps going. “Are you learning with Dr. Stone? Is something going on that you want to tell us about? Because you don’t seem yourself.”

He’s right, something whispers inside me, reverberating with truth. I’m not myself—I haven’t been myself. I don’t know how to be myself, this far out of context.

“Good morning!” a bright voice chirps, the door to our room jangling open. A waiter in a waist apron steps inside and starts passing out water glasses, carefully looking at anything but Camilla. There are three types of people in public: those who have no idea who she is, those who know exactly who she is and slobber all over her, and those like this guy. Who clearly knows who she is and is going to do everything in his power not to act like it. My favorite type. “Can I start y’all with anything to drink? Coffee, tea? Mimosas?”

“Mimosa?” Dad asks, pointing at Camilla. She shakes her head, smiling up at the waiter. “Chamomile tea for me, please. Lemon wedge and honey on the side, if you have it.”

“We sure do,” he says, taking notes on a little pad. “Mimosa for you, sir?”

“Why not?” Dad booms, and I order my coffee, and the guy leaves. Both my parents swivel to look at me, and I feel heat rise to my cheeks.

“Honey?” Camilla prompts softly, like she’s trying to compensate for Dad’s volume. She sounds so sincere I actually think, for a moment, that she’s really going to try here. That my dad—too wordy and too loud but genuine down to his bones—might actually have brought out the good in her. But then she says: “Tell us why you said what you said in Santa Fe.”

And that’s what it’s about; that’s what it’s always about. Me marring her public image, failing to fit into whatever box she’s constructed for me on whatever given day. It doesn’t matter to her that I don’t seem myself. She doesn’t know what I seem like when I’m myself.

My phone buzzes, half-wedged into my hipbone. I wrestle it out of my shorts’ pocket and, seeing Ethan’s name there after two days of resolute silence, unlock the screen. He’s texted me twice: one photo, one message beneath it. The message is just three words: Who is this? And the photo is of a social post with nearly three hundred thousand likes, a candid shot of Silas and me. Silas and me. Silas and me, on a gossip magazine’s feed.

ST. VRAIN STRIKES OUT, the overlay says. Beneath it: Silas leaned forward with his elbows suspended on his knees, Puddles’s leash knotted up in one hand. She’s between his feet, tongue hanging to the side. And the photo, it’s—shit. It’s not that Silas is looking at me, because he isn’t. It’s not that we’re touching, because there are two solid feet of space between us. We aren’t even smiling. The problem is me—the way I’m looking at him, captured so clearly there in full color. Like Silas is a math problem that I haven’t figured out yet; like he’s the only thing I want to spend my time on until I’ve cracked it. I’m so absolutely focused on him.

It’s a dishonest portrayal, of course. It’s showing something that isn’t there, a trick of timing. The photographer must have captured me in the exact, exact moment I was scrambling for something to change the subject after Silas told me how lonely my life seems.

“I have to go,” I say, pushing back my chair.

“What?” Dad’s wide eyes track me as I make for the door. “Audrey, sit back down, we aren’t—”

“I’ll be right back.” Camilla is the last thing that registers before I leave the room, the way she looks at my dad, like: See? She’s impossible.

I know I’ve made myself look like the problem. I know. But as I dial Ethan’s number and push through the restaurant, phone lifted to my ear, I also know I can only put out one fire at a time.

“Audrey,” he says by way of greeting. I step through the restaurant’s front door, looking for somewhere quiet. I hang a left and beeline down the porch toward a pair of unoccupied rocking chairs.

“Ethan.” I sit down so forcefully the chair whacks into the house. “How did you find that?”

There’s a beat of silence. “Does it matter?”

“I, no—I mean, I guess not.” Ethan’s hardly on social media; someone must have showed it to him, which somehow makes it worse. “I just can’t believe anyone would follow me, or even want that picture? It doesn’t make any sense.”

“It makes perfect sense,” he says calmly. “You’re the child of a celebrity. And it looks”—he hesitates, the word coming awkwardly like he’s forcing it through a straw—“suggestive.”

Oh, Ethan. Oh, Christ. “It’s not,” I say quickly. “Ethan, I barely know him.”

“Who is he, Audrey?” He doesn’t give me a chance to answer. “You cancel our last call, and then I barely hear from you—and here I am, thinking you’re so busy with the tour, and with Dr. Stone, and then I find you on the internet eating ice cream with this person you’ve never even mentioned to me?” He draws a breath, and I press my eyes shut. “I’m sorry I haven’t been returning your calls, but I didn’t even know how to bring this up. It took some time to process.”

“Ethan,” I whisper. My chest feels like someone’s taking a hammer to it from the inside, cracking each of my ribs in turn. How have I let everything get this bad, this fast? Who would I even have, if I didn’t have Ethan? I want to transport us to Miami, where we’ll be together in person—where nothing will feel this wrong. “He’s nobody, I swear. He’s just one of the interns.”

“I thought you said the interns were annoying?”

“They are annoying,” I say. “We have nothing in common. I didn’t even want to be around them, but it was right after the show in Santa Fe, and I kind of tried something there and it didn’t work out, and it made things really tense with my mom, and going on this road trip with the interns kind of got me out of doing something with her and I didn’t feel like I had a choice; I shouldn’t have slipped on the readings, it’s just honestly been a lot, but I’m going to get it back together, I’ve read all of this week’s lecture notes and I’ve been wanting to talk to you about them but I haven’t—”

“Hey.” Ethan’s voice comes through the line, softly, like a hand pressed to a racing heart. “Audrey, slow down.”

I suck in a rush of air, open my eyes. My dad is coming right at me down the porch, looking none too pleased.

“Ethan, I have to go, I’m so sorry, my dad is coming to get me—”

“Your dad is there?”

“Yeah, he met us in Austin and I kind of cut out of brunch to call you, but look, I’m sorry, okay?” I hold up a hand to my dad, who stops a few feet away and just stands there, watching me. “That picture isn’t anything. That guy isn’t anything. I’m sorry.”

“Okay,” he says. There’s a pause; I think I can hear him breathing, but it might just be my own panicked inhales. “Can I call you later?”

“Yes,” I say, relief moving down my body in a wave. That’s lonely, Silas told me. But I’m not lonely; not with Ethan. “Yes, please.”

“Okay,” he says again. I love you, I want to say. A flickering impulse that feels maybe more like an olive branch than something I really feel in this moment, panic-stricken on an unfamiliar porch. But I don’t say it, and Ethan says, “Okay,” one more time, and I say, “Okay,” and then we’re hanging up.

“Okay?” Dad asks, eyeing me.

“Okay,” I repeat, but I’m pretty sure neither of us is convinced.

“Can we go back inside?”

I stare up at my father from the rocking chair. I feel rooted to it, leaden. “I really don’t want to be around her right now.”

Dad’s eyebrows twitch together, and he lowers himself into the seat beside me. I hold up my phone, open to that photo of me and Silas, and watch his eyes track across it.

“I don’t want this,” I say. “I don’t want to do this with her and deal with all of this.” The anger rises in me like carbonation, fizzing frantically, looking for a way out. “She’s using me, Dad. She’s using me for her career bullshit, and it’s snaking into my own life, and she doesn’t even care that—”

“Audrey.” It’s so rare he calls me by my name that my mouth snaps shut. “Your mother loves you, and she’s not trying to use you.” He leans closer, eyes scanning mine. “And you know she can’t control every action of the press, right?”

I squeeze the arms of the rocking chair. I shouldn’t be surprised that he isn’t on my side. “I wouldn’t have to deal with the press at all if she hadn’t brought me here.”

He sighs heavily, reaching out to jiggle my arm. He’s always cutting the tension this way—picking me up, jostling me, wrapping me in some big bear hug. It’s easier for him, I think, than finding the words. “We’ll see if Magnolia can help. But cut your mom some slack, all right? She’s been through the ringer, too.”

“Really,” I say. “Like when?” I wave my phone at him. “I don’t see the press actively dismantling her relationships.”

“You deserve to be mad about this,” Dad says. “All I’m asking is that you give your mom the benefit of the doubt every now and then, okay? You don’t know everything about her.”

I lean back, searching his familiar face. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing, mouse. Just that you assume the worst of her, and she doesn’t always deserve it.” He stands, reaching for my hand. I don’t want to take it, but I do. “Come inside and eat your breakfast.”