I was in and out of the Cambridge salon in under an hour. It didn't matter that the salon had no available booking times, Gretchen England had a way with words and more than enough money to offer.
Our go-to stylist Veronica didn't question the uneven ends of my hair or force me to engage in any of the usual small talk that transpired at salons. I suspected that this also had to do with Mom having a way with words, but I wasn't complaining. Instead, I sat in the plush salon chair in silence, watching the stylist in the mirror as she expertly snipped away at the hair of a girl who looked fucking miserable.
To my great displeasure, Mom did not look fucking miserable or even remotely miserable. She sat behind me on an equally plush couch with what seemed to be a thoughtful expression and occasionally sipped from the cup of tea that the guy at reception had so graciously offered to one of their most treasured customers.
After Veronica finished blowing out my hair, she sprayed it with something that gave it that model-like glossiness and left me smelling like vanilla. I delicately ran my fingers through my hair and reached the blunt ends directly below my collarbones. It was shorter than it had been in a decade, but I could still pull it up into a ponytail for lacrosse. That was all I cared about.
"It looks lovely," Mom said to Veronica, but I knew she was talking to me.
"Agreed, thank you," I added, mustering up a polite smile because Veronica deserved one. While I hadn't done a terrible job of cutting my own hair, I certainly needed the skilled hand of a professional to perform damage control.
"My pleasure," Veronica flashed me an effervescent smile in the mirror. 'I'll throw together some fresh product samples for you to take back to that fancy school of yours.'
Mom took an intentionally long gander at the wall of all the upscale hair products before picking up what I recognized as her favorite Kerastase shampoo and conditioner.
We returned to the Jaguar, and as Mom steered back into Boston traffic, I couldn't help but think that she looked far too at home behind the wheel of her ex-husband's beloved car.
Before we'd left for the salon, I heard her tell Dad that she refused to go through the hassle of obtaining a last-minute rental car and hailed a cab from Logan Airport. I doubted that this would've actually constituted a hassle, but I definitely didn't have room to judge.
"You were seven the last time your hair was this short," Mom said. "You hated going to the salon, hated all the fragrances, and said that you were going to cut it all off so you never had to go back."
I slid my gaze over to the driver's side. "Never is a really long time."
"Indeed I was so terrified that I hid all of the scissors and anything else that you could possibly use because you were so determined...but luckily, your Dad managed to strike a compromise that involved dessert and only going once per year at a little salon on Nantucket. He's always been the Chandler Whisperer."
"I don't remember wanting to cut off all of my hair, but I do remember the salon." I felt a smile lift my lips, and I stole a glance at Mom. "You and Mrs. Gunther would take Dallas and me together."
"Dallas hated haircuts almost as much as you did." The soft laugh that followed Mom's words held a hint of nostalgia. I knew she loved those summers on Nantucket, and I wondered when she looked back at them now if they seemed to exist outside of time and space as they did for me.
"I assume Dal still hates them because he still has ridiculous hair," I remarked, recalling the unruliness of Dallas's hair from when we were on Nantucket.
An arched eyebrow appeared over the lens of Mom's Burberry sunglasses.
I frowned. "What?"
"I didn't say anything," Mom mused, her attention strictly on the road.
"You didn't need to say anything because your face did."
"It's moot. Your father says there's a Trip."
"A Trip?" I snorted, heat starting to prickle in my cheeks and along my hairline.
"Yes, a Trip." Mom gave a thoughtful pause before dropping a question I never saw coming, "What's his full name?"
"What?" I choked on air.
"Trip is a nickname for someone who's a third. For example, if your father was John Lancelot England III, he could've used Trip as a nickname."
Thank god Mom had her eyes on the road because I figured my face had turned Ferrari red. There was probably some part of me that knew that Trip wasn't actually named Trip, but I'd never thought of him as anything else. Trip was always Trip to me.
Unfortunately, that wasn't enough to prevent Mom's perfectly reasonable question from setting me ablaze in the passenger seat. Embarrassment and guilt doused each other's flame in gasoline.
I didn't know Trip's full name - his real name.
I'd never asked him, nor had I thought about asking him. I was beginning to realize that there seemed to be invisible boundaries between us and that I didn't realize they existed until I blindly stumbled into them.
I had to clear my throat before speaking. "He's...a very private person."
"There's nothing wrong with that," Mom said, her voice thoughtful. "Your father was an exceedingly private person when he first moved to Los Angeles, but not in a conventional way. John was one of those people who could say so much about something, but so little about himself. He knew how to talk to people without showing his cards. It's something I wish I'd learned from him."
My mind automatically drew a parallel to Trip, and paranoia overtook my blazing embarrassment. Whether she knew it or not, Mom had hit the nail on the head. Trip was unconventionally private; his elusive charmingness was never lost on me, nor was it on everyone else at Cannondale.
This wasn't the first time that I'd contemplated Trip McKenna's private nature, how he seemed to discreetly keep me at arms-length. I'd known this about him from the start, but it was only now that the fear that something had gone terribly wrong between us kept me up at night.
The brave thing to do would be for me to close that distance between us by admitting to knowing something that maybe I shouldn't, and relieve my consciousness of that sickening weight. But the brave thing wasn't always the smart thing. I wanted Trip to let me in, but I feared the truth would only prompt him to lock me out forever.
Why would I risk giving up Trip who constituted so much of the good in my life right now? He was a star that shined in the dullest daylight, and I refused to be left in the dark, haunted by the thought of Trip walking away forever alongside a piece of myself that I would never get back.
I twisted my hands in my lap and urged a question from my lips. "But Dad eventually showed you his cards, right?"
"It took time, and that was infuriating for a headstrong 23-year-old who wanted to make movies and fall in love."
"How much time?" I asked a little too quickly, too urgently.
"Long enough for me to tell him that he needed to let me in if we wanted to make it work. Sometimes, people don't realize they have walls up with no visible doorway until someone else tries to knock them down with a sledgehammer."
I opened my mouth to ask another question but realized I was one question away from tuning our forced-proximity conversation into a mother-daughter heart-to-heart about love or what could be love. And that wasn't what I wanted. I wasn't ready to start showing her my cards again.
I flipped down the visor in front of me and opened the mirror to evaluate my hair. Its modest length and blunt ends suited me more than I'd anticipated and made me feel somehow more put together.
"Okay," I nodded, feigning sudden disinterest in our conversation. I chewed on my lip, and hoped I wouldn't regret my next words."Thank you."
I briefly felt Mom's eyes on me before she turned onto the quiet side street that she used to call home. "You're welcome."
Dad sat waiting for us on the front steps of the townhouse with an aggressively large book in hand. He stood up as we exited the Jaguar, closing the book that had its title printed in all caps across the red and blue cover: NEVER. I could tell from everything about it that it was some kind of political thriller, which was exactly the kind of fictional book he always seemed to be reading. There were scores of them throughout the townhouse.
"Glad to see you didn't wreck my car," Dad said to Mom as we passed through the chronically squeaky wrought iron gate. He stretched his arms out almost lazily like a cat in the sun and wore a curious half-smile on his face.
"Wasn't an option." Mom tossed Dad the keys, which he caught with ease. "I had precious cargo in the passenger seat."
Dad turned to me and winked, his eyes a striking blue in the evening light. "Well, Miss Precious Cargo, I for one love the new hair."
✘ ✘ ✘
I didn't remember the last time I had dinner with both of my parents at the Beacon Hill townhouse. I wondered if this uncertainty bothered me more than it should've, but I wished I could separate it from the last time we had dinner together. Because this was different. This was here at home and not out at some overrated Michelin-star restaurant in Los Angeles after they'd signed the last of the papers and assured me that nothing would be too different. In retrospect, I should've made them promise. In my experience, people felt guilty when they broke promises, not when their assurances fell short.
No one seemed to feel guilty tonight, though. The atmosphere at our kitchen table was considerably warmer and less hostile than it had been this morning when the three of us stood in the upstairs hallway. That said, I couldn't shake this eerie feeling that ghosts of the family we used to be sat among us, haunting every corner of the townhouse.
I had to look at my parents' hands every so often to remind myself that they were longer married. Dad still wore his Cornell signet ring as he always had, and Mom her two Cartier love rings, but there were no wedding bands.
I conducted these obvious observations from where I sat at the head of the table, with Dad to my left and Mom to my left. Mom had made sure of this seating arrangement by taking the liberty of bringing the plates over, loaded with food from our favorite Italian restaurant, Florina Pizzeria and Panicoteca. It used to be in the regular dinner rotation.
"It's better to do a private sale," Mom was saying. "Just think about it, John. Wouldn't you prefer to know the people who are going to live there?"
"What would you propose?" Dad asked mildly, eyeing her from over the rims of his glasses.
"I was going to reach out to our friends from the club, have them float around the details, and we can arrange some viewings. I would be more than happy to stay and oversee them."
"Stay? Stay where?" I demanded, my voice low.
"The house."
Dad and I turned indignant, which drew an unladylike snort from Mom. "You'd think I'd just upended your worldviews. It is our house, and it would be nice if I could spend some more time there."
Childhood memories from the summers I'd spent on Nantucket flitted through my mind in a vibrant montage: Dallas and I chasing each other around with sparklers crackling in our fists on the Fourth of July - standing in the soft sand, practicing the draw with my parents, Dad almost always the referee - cold Peppermint ice cream dripping down the cone and onto my hand.
It almost all seemed like a dream, and now I sat in a haunted house with visions lingering in my head.
"You mean with all the new furniture that Debbie picked out," Dad replied mildly, and tilted his head in my direction. "Chandler here was very concerned about where that big armchair we had in the front sitting room went?"
Mom laughed, and an electric current shot through my veins, nearly resulting in me dropping my fork. "The old one from West Elm," she marvelled, eyes twinkling with amusement as she looked at me. "Chan, you never liked that chair."
This was true.
I was admittedly petty over the chair's absence when we were in Nantucket, though there had almost been something entertaining about disliking it all those years. But the chair from West Elm was nowhere near the forefront of my mind.
"Please don't bring him," came my wavering voice. Hot tears prickled in my tears and I set down my cutlery with an abrupt clink against the side of the plate. "I'm sorry, but I just...I can't stand the idea of him being there, in our house, where we lived. It would ruin everything as if things weren't already ruined enough."
Whatever my parents had anticipated me saying, it certainly wasn't that, and their mutual silence arrived with the force of a thunderclap in a summer storm. Tears streamed down my cheeks too quickly for me to catch, and they crash-landed in my spinach gnocchi.
"Damn it," I muttered, my face burning as I wiped away the damp streaks on my cheeks. "Not my gnocchi."
"Oh, love, it's okay," Mom delicately took my hand in hers. On the other side of the table, Dad's chair scraped against the floor as he stood and lifted my plate from the table before heading into the kitchen. "We're no longer together."
"You're not?" I croaked out, my hand trembling in hers.
Mom shook her head. "We ended things shortly after the holidays. He's still finalising Apex alongside his wunderkind, but things became too much in the aftermath of it all. What happened on that island is...a tragedy. He has children; two daughters, both in college. They lost their mother when they were young, so the news was...different for them, but still not something they were happy about. At all."
I nodded unsure of what to say or even how to feel. Dad spared me from overthinking my response by returning to the table with the remaining spinach gnocchi.
"Fresh gnocchi for the precious cargo," Dad said, a smile existing only in his voice.
I sniffed, my sinuses tingling as I looked up at him. "You knew, didn't you?"
Dad set the plate on the linen placemat in front of me and took his seat with his fingers interlaced on the table in front of him. "I did, though I thought it important for you to hear it from your mother. It only seemed fair."
John Lancelot England, ever the referee.
Nodding, I drew in a breath. I was so, so exhausted of the tears and keeping my most volatile emotions wrapped in a barbwire cage of my own making. While I wasn't ready to set all of those emotions free, I had to start somewhere if I didn't want to stay haunted by everything I'd yet to actually lose.
I gave Mom's hand a soft squeeze. "I never did like that West Elm chair. The furniture Debbie picked out is monumentally better."
The sigh Mom exhaled was that of a marathon runner crossing the finish line, relief and pride. "I'm going to stay in Massachusetts, I'm going stay if you'll let me."
As if my heartstrings had been tangled together all these months, I felt them start to unravel and my shoulders eased. "Stay."