The Whole Golden World (30 page)

44

A
s long as she lived, Dinah would regret making Morgan answer the cell phone.

But she didn't like to talk on the phone while driving, certainly not with her hands shaking on the wheel, thinking of the stupid risk she'd taken to meet the teacher's wife, and all for naught, for her daughter to somehow be ever more convinced the bastard truly loved her.

So the phone rang, and when she could see it was Joe, she told Morgan to answer it, not thinking fast enough to give her daughter a ready lie for where they'd been when they were both supposed to be home.

She'd heard him blare right out of the phone into the car, “Where the hell are you? Let me talk to your mother. Now.”

Morgan had looked sick and greenish, and even more so when Dinah had to tell her why Joe was calling.

Now, facing the damage with the insurance agent taking pictures, ignoring the reporters trying to talk to her, Dinah mapped out her course.

There was a time when Dinah would have balled up her fists, pushed up her sleeves, and vowed to come back better than ever. She'd have applied the same “never say die” attitude she had always deployed with the boys and their challenges, with founding the business in the first place, and she'd have been right in there, sweeping up glass and hiring architects to expand the place, in fact, destruction be damned.

She stepped around the shards and pushed open the door. A chill air from the damp morning swirled around the café tables, and Dinah believed it would never feel warm again.

She marched up to her office, where Helen Demming's envelope stared up at her from the recycle bin at her feet.

 

Dinah spent most of that day on the phone. Morgan remained holed up in her room, having seemingly become genuinely ill after their morning's errand and having seen the damage to the Den. Morgan had insisted on seeing it for herself, telling her mother she'd only imagine something worse, anyway.

In the end, Dinah had conceded and driven her past it, reasoning it would be on the news anyway. “Oh my God,” Morgan had squeaked out. At home, she'd taken the steps two at a time to her room.

When the police asked Dinah if she had any enemies, she'd cocked one eyebrow and said, “Other than the obvious?” Their serious veneer never cracked as they waited for a genuine answer. So she sighed and dutifully told them about that hoodlum Justin kid who'd knocked over a chair and coffee table at her place, not believing they'd ever be able to prove it was him, or even whether she believed it was him. She also mentioned Helen Demming's desire to buy the Den, but as much as she couldn't stand that hoity-toity bitch, she also couldn't imagine her with red spray paint in hand, or interacting with unsavory types to arrange for the vandalism. No, Helen would sooner take her out via capitalism and politics, the more public the better.

The police promised to increase surveillance at their home.

Henry called, apologizing as if on behalf of all Arbor Valley. Never mind, Dinah told him. Not your fault.

Dinah stood up and stretched in the kitchen. She had a little time before the boys got home, so she fetched the electric screwdriver from the garage and walked upstairs.

“Morgan. Come help me here.”

Morgan picked her head up off the pillow as if she barely had the strength. She spied the tool in her mother's hand and cocked her head.

“Come hold your door. I'm putting it back on.”

“Why?”

“Because I feel like it. And I can't hold it myself. So get over here.”

Morgan approached the door, holding it in place, while Dinah pushed the screws in with a satisfyingly loud whirr from the screwdriver.

“Mom. Your phone.”

Dinah paused and took the phone out of her pocket. She saw who it was and took the call. “Yes. Yes, I think that's a fair price. . . . I appreciate you not trying to gouge me. Considering . . . Of course . . . Send the papers over to the house.”

She clicked off, sticking the phone back in her pocket.

“Mom?” Morgan asked. “Fair price for what?”

Dinah bent down for a new bunch of screws. “I'm selling the Den. Morgan! Hold the door, I don't have enough screws in yet.”

“Why, just because some asshole trashed it?”

“Not just. Lots of reasons.”

“But . . . you love that place.”

“I did once, yeah. You know how some things you just know? That you don't have to reason out, because you just know it so completely? It's less like a realization than like you discover a fact that's always existed.” Dinah paused to drive in another screw. Then she began fiddling with lining up the next screw just so. It seemed to take all her effort to get the point of the screwdriver into the slot. “I poured so much of my energy into that place, believing it was somehow going to make me special. It was supposed to be my trophy. Entrepreneur by day, Supermom at night. You know, I think I even believed it made people like me. But in the end, it was just a place that earned some money and sucked up too much of my attention away from my family. It was just a place, after all, and I don't want it anymore.”

“But . . . you're just upset because of today . . .”

“No. It's been coming. I didn't realize it until now, but it's been coming.”

“What will you do?”

“I don't know. Okay, you can let go, now.”

“You didn't sell it to that old bitch, did you?”

Dinah smirked. “Now, that's not nice.” It had been a direct quote from Dinah, as she'd ranted about Helen Demming at dinner the night of her offer. “Anyway, nope, I sold the license and fixtures and equipment to my landlord. He might open a hookah bar. That'll get 'em all lathered up.”

Morgan laughed a little, but her eyes were wet.

Dinah tilted her head and put down the screwdriver. “Honey? I'm sorry, are you upset about the business? I didn't think you cared that much about it.”

Morgan tucked her chin down. “I don't know. I don't know what I feel. Everything's just so crazy.”

Dinah pulled her daughter close. “I know, baby. Totally crazy.”

“I'm sorry.”

Dinah answered reflexively, “It's not your fault.”

“Well.” Morgan pushed back, straightened up. She was looking away, her face knotted in a grimace. “Well, yeah, it kind of is. I keep saying he didn't force me, and he didn't.”

Dinah's heart thudded. Another opening for reason, another chink in her fortress glimmering with daylight. “I know.”

“We love each other, we really do; that's what no one gets. I didn't ruin everything for nothing, or because I'm a stupid kid, who didn't know better . . .”

Dinah bit her lip against her retort.

Morgan said, “You don't believe me.”

“I . . . I would like to believe you . . .”

Morgan turned away and flounced back down onto her bed. “Thanks for my door back. Could you close it, please?”

 

The dinner table conversation about the Den hadn't gone well. The boys were surprisingly upset. Connor went so far as to slam his door upstairs. Jared just fiddled with his glasses and asked where they were going to work when they got older, sending another crack across Dinah's heart to think that was the only future he saw for himself.

Joe had stared into his plate of chicken, muttering, “It woulda been nice to have a conversation about something like this . . .”

He didn't finish the thought, instead letting a black cloud seethe out around him, blanketing the dinner table and silencing any more chatter.

The kids finally scattered to their rooms. Morgan must have been reveling in a door again, and the boys had papers to work on. Dinah threatened them with computer grounding if she heard one electronic noise from up there not related to homework, and Joe beckoned her to the basement home office before she'd even washed a single dish.

“Come on down here. I have to talk to you.”

Dinah descended the three stairs to the sunken den, feeling her guts climb into her throat.

Joe turned around without sitting down. “They offered me early retirement.”

Dinah blinked and reared back. “What?”

“You heard me. They want me gone, so they offered me retirement and promoted Kate to principal. They're gonna fill Kate's old job with some brownnoser from the middle school with no experience and not even replace me. 'Course they're saying it's all budgeting and shit and making it sound like a good thing. So it woulda been nice if you'd at least called me for five minutes before cutting away half our income stream.”

“Hardly half, but anyway, we'll work it out,” Dinah said, clenching her fists to stop her hands from trembling.

“We'll frickin' have to, won't we? With tuition bills coming, assuming Morgan doesn't run away, that is. Lovely.” Joe collapsed onto the overstuffed sofa. “What did we do to deserve this?”

“We don't deserve it. Bad things happen to good people all the time. I guess it's our turn.”

Dinah settled on the other end of the couch with extra care, as if Joe were some fragile object she could break by jarring him.

He muttered, staring at the floor in front of him. “You coulda asked me about the door, too.”

“It was time, Joe. She's suffered enough and deserves her privacy. We shouldn't be punishing her. We should be helping her.”

“She lied to us.”

“Kids lie. Don't tell me you never lied a day in your teenage years.”

“Not like this. About this.”

“No shit, Joe, but look at it from her point of view. She was in love. They were Romeo and Juliet as far as she was concerned. Hell, pursuing true love is practically noble to a teenage girl.”

“True love,” he sneered.

“Hey, I'm thinking like Morgan, here.”

Joe curled forward and put his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands. “How are we gonna get through this trial?”

Dinah scooted over next to him and put her arm around his broad shoulders. Her hand barely reached to the other side of him. “I don't know. But we will. Because we have to.”

“Why doesn't that bastard just admit it? Plead guilty and get it over with,” Joe muttered into his hands.

“That I can't tell you.”

Dinah flashed to the tiny, angry teacher's wife with her round belly. She wondered if TJ wasn't hoping for some divine intervention to get him out of the mess. Or he could be the type of criminal who believed his own lies. Maybe he'd edited his own memory and truly believed her daughter to be crazy, because that was the only way he could face his wife.

Dinah squeezed her husband again. “We'll get through it. In the scope of a whole life, this will be a blip.”

“Blip?” He laughed, equal parts scorn and exhaustion. He sat back, this time wrapping his arm around Dinah. She curled into his side, under his arm, feeling as safe as a grown-up ever could while her life spins out of control.

“Sure. An awful one. But a blip.”

“Did I ever tell you I love you for being an optimist?”

“Yes. But say it again.”

“I love you for being an optimist. Because personally, I think we're doomed.”

Dinah chuckled, bleakly, then settled her head over his low, thrumming heartbeat and closed her eyes.

“Yeah. Maybe so.”

45

M
organ paused with her hand on the car's inside door handle and adjusted her mortarboard again. The hairpins tugged her hair. She growled with frustration and yanked it off, tossing the hairpins on the car's floor and setting the stupid hat back on her hair, where it would slide around, no doubt, but would be the least of her worries.

She could feel herself in the middle of a bubble of watchful anxiety. Her lanky brothers were crammed in the sedan's backseat next to her, and they were uncharacteristically quiet. The back of her parents' heads bore a listening-but-trying-not-to look of a slight turn toward the back.

The whole remainder of the school year she'd felt like a specimen being observed and noted, a rat in a maze. And this night, what should have been her night of celebration, it would only be worse.

She and her parents had gone in circles for hours one night debating whether to even attend. Dinah was angry about the Den's trashing and the community silence about who had done it (“Maybe they don't know,” her dad had ventured, and her mom had snapped back, “Bullshit, somebody knows but it's like the goddamn Mafia”), and she wanted to boycott the graduation as a form of giving Arbor Valley the finger.

But they were also planning to recognize Joe and the other retired faculty for their years of service, and in the end, Morgan decided that it couldn't be much worse than prom. She didn't want to skip her graduation. I mean, what were they going to do, boo her? Catcall? Screw them then, she'd said with a toss of her hair and a jutted chin that was all bravado.

But now in the car, her hand on the door and her family silent and pretending not to stare at her, she'd changed her mind. They should have stayed home.

However, here she was, in her godawful mustard-yellow cap and gown, with the crease lines because she hadn't unfolded it until that night, and her white NHS sash and honor cords, and she finally thought,
Well, hell, I've gone this far
.

She shoved open the door. “Are we going in or what?”

A television van was in front of the school. Her mother said softly, “Oh, no.”

Joe said, “It can't be for us. They're just covering graduation in general.”

Connor piped up, “They never have before.”

Jared chimed in, “Shut up, moron.”

Dinah reached around Morgan's shoulders, but Morgan shrugged away. “Mom, don't. Just be normal, because this is a normal thing, okay? I'm graduating, that's it.”

“Hugging you is normal,” she retorted in a small voice, but she folded her arms anyway.

They all walked past the cameras trying to act casual. Morgan wanted to look down and away, but she froze her face in a flat expression and walked on as if she was just another nobody, which was really all she ever wanted to be.

The current of graduates and families swept them along the hallways to the fieldhouse. The stormy weather report had forced relocation of the ceremony inside, which promised a stifling few hours. Morgan already felt her armpits growing sticky. When she considered she could have been at home with a bowl of ice cream and the television, she wondered what the hell she was trying to prove.

It came time for Morgan to join the line of graduates who would march in to good old “Pomp and Circumstance.” Last year, Morgan had played the cello for that procession and looked on with envy at those graduates done with high school and childhood at last, still feeling pangs for her recent breakup with David.

This time, she stood in alphabetical order between Peter Miller and Linh Nguyen. She wondered where Olivia Nelson had gone. They all held their names, spelled phonetically in case of confusing pronunciations, written on index cards, so the faculty announcing the names wouldn't have to rely on the grads staying in exact order.

Linh smiled shyly and looked down. Peter acknowledged her presence with a briefly raised chin and turned away to talk to Lauren Lucas.

The chatter around her grew louder, but everything began to sound muffled, like she were hearing it through a shroud.

She sucked in a deep breath and looked up at the ceiling in the hallway. Almost over. All of it was almost over. The trial date had just been set for next week Wednesday—Morgan realized that must be why the cameras showed up, to get graduation footage at Arbor Valley they could play behind the reporter talking about the trial—and in any case it would all be over, and before long she'd be eighteen and it would finally be concluded, for better or worse.

Morgan had already nixed her mother's plan to have a charade of an open house. “Who would come?” Morgan had snapped. Dinah had stuttered around about grandparents and cousins and Morgan said they could have a cookout at the house for family but she wasn't having an “open house” where kids would parade in and out of the notorious girl's yard . . . or worse, like the prom.

Morgan looked down at her black flats, borrowed from her mother because all her shoes clashed with the awful sickly yellow of the girls' gowns. She had suggested to Britney that they all go to the prom in one big group, and Brit had blinked at her twice with wide eyes, then chirped, “Sure! Why not!” She was pretty sure Britney and David were sleeping together by then but she didn't much care; she just didn't want to be left alone on what was supposed to be a fun night, and she knew all their friends, including Nicole, and the flute-playing girls, were going, whether they had dates or not.

She'd suggested, at lunch one day, sitting next to Britney, that they all try to wear the ugliest dresses they could find, just to be ironic and funny. They'd all laughed, said it was a great idea. Morgan had gone to thrift stores until she found some floral bridesmaid horror from 1991 or something, with a giant bow on the butt . . . and she was the only one who had actually done it. Everyone else wore the prom fashions you'd see in
Seventeen
or on mall mannequins.

Brit had stared at her and when Morgan demanded to know why everyone hadn't gone along, she'd whisper-hissed at her that they'd only laughed at the idea, not committed to actually doing it.

No one talked to her at the dance itself. Half of them had gotten tipsy before they even showed up, having snuck off somewhere to pass around some vodka. Her dad himself, in his role as dance chaperone, had tossed out Courtney and Justin, calling their parents to come pick their drunk asses up.

Once in a while, one of her friends would say, “Hey, how are you doing?” and then rush off to dance or giggle with someone else before listening to her answer.

Ethan had been across the room with some girl Morgan didn't know. He'd made as if he might want to come talk to her, so she turned away and crossed her arms.

After an hour, without telling any of her girlfriends, she called her mom to come get her. Britney would later swear the problem had been Morgan's, that she'd been prickly and unapproachable. Morgan allowed that she'd been in a bad mood, but she didn't deserve shunning. Britney made a big show of apologizing and Morgan let it go.

Morgan looked up and saw a TV journalist across the lobby. She gasped and turned to the wall. They might be trying to catch her on camera, though she knew they technically weren't supposed to, based on their own stated policy, since she supposedly was a “victim.” But they might sweep the middle of the line of students, hoping to catch the “M” names.

She felt a nudge in her side. It was Linh who whispered, “They're gone.”

Morgan smiled back. “Thank you,” she replied in her own whisper, and she wondered why she'd never talked to Linh before, all these years.

“Pomp and Circumstance” began, and all the mortarboarded heads snapped up from what they were doing. A few girls emitted giddy squeals.

Beginning of the end,
Morgan thought.

 

She and Linh didn't say much during the ceremony, though they did share an eye roll for one of the valedictorians, Conrad Jansen III, pronouncing their class one of “innovation, inspiration, and intelligence.” He sounded so much like his uncle, the state senator, Morgan assumed his uncle had written the speech.

Morgan stiffened during Pete Jackson's remark about a “difficult” year in Arbor Valley. She could well imagine her mother getting really pissed off about that.

She wondered suddenly what Britney was doing, if she was giggling, or what. What she'd be saying if they'd been allowed to sit together. Britney was probably relieved she didn't have to. Though maybe she would have enjoyed the reflected attention, just as she seemed to in the hall, walking with a protective arm around her, playing the role of Caring Friend to Suffering Friend.

And what was he doing tonight? On a night when teachers dust off their own silly mortarboards? Was he bringing his wife ginger ale and crackers? Was he leaving her? Was he talking to his attorney? Was he afraid of jail?

Was he thinking of her?

Her row of students rose and began the march to the podium at last. Her mortarboard was slipping again, and she adjusted it.

Despite Pete Jackson's order that no one cheer until the end, for all, there was a smattering of rebellious applause for each name, sometimes gleeful hoots and whistles. Some moron had brought in an air horn. Morgan began to panic about what would happen after her name.

She turned to glance over her shoulder at the door behind her, next to the bleachers. She could bolt now, throw away her name card that was damp with sweat. It's not like they handed out the real diplomas anyway, here. Those would be mailed home.

Only that would be worse, wouldn't it? The Runaway Grad. They'd be able to track her progress, hear the slapping of her shoes across the floor for several yards before she actually escaped.

It was Peter Miller's turn. Off he went, leaving the empty expanse of the stage in front of her to cross.

Her chest was heaving under her gown, and stars were sparkling at the fringes of her vision.
God, don't let me faint.

She never heard her own name, rather felt Linh poke her in the back. She crossed the stage at first with her head down, but then she raised her chin, remembering she came here because she deserved her graduation, if nothing else; she had earned this with her grades and studying and hard work; she was a good student, still. She always was.

There was applause. Polite, restrained, as in golf. She heard one “Woo!” from a guy, not able to tell if it was sarcastic, a form of catcall, or if someone was genuinely happy. Ethan? One of the twins? No way to tell, and then she was in front of Principal Jackson.

“Good for you,” he said quietly, with a wink so fast and subtle she might have imagined it. He gave her hand an extrafirm shake.

“Thank you,” she whispered back, and she concentrated on getting off the stage without falling, as she imagined the entire Arbor Valley community exhaling, having endured that moment together.

Walking along the side of the seated graduates, headed back to her row, she glanced at the crowd, with scant hope she'd actually see her family.

Then she spotted the twins, who were leaping up and down like jackrabbits, waving their arms. Connor whistled with his fingers. Morgan waved and flushed at once, and Dinah and Joe yanked them down in tandem.

She waved and mouthed,
Thanks, Mork and Dork.

Much as they drove her crazy most days, she would truly miss them once she turned eighteen and got the hell out.