“Big job, getting that wallpaper off,” he said idly.
“Yep.”
“That master bedroom’s thirty by thirty, I believe.”
“The length of a football field, if you ask my scapulas and trapezoids and the rest of the muscle gang.”
“Boy, there’s like five more rooms that size. And then you’re going to what, paint them?” He mimed big up-and-down paint roller motions.
“Yes. I’m going to paint them.”
All of those words—I’mandgoingandpaint—made her want to sink deeper and deeper into the water.
“Wow. That’ll take youdays.For just that one room.”
He was a sadist.
“Yes.”
“Where are you going to start painting?”
“I thought I’d go with the main room, downstairs.”
“Have you ever painted a room before all by yourself, Avalon?”
She hesitated. “There’s a first time for everything.”
That sentence was suddenly fraught.
He seemed to know it.
They both stopped talking.
Still, she had kind of the sense he was working up to something.
“You know that main room? The one you put the giant couch in? My mom used to play the grand piano and sing there.”
She widened her eyes. “Really?”
She remembered seeing the piano that day she’d been inside. It was pretty hard imagining Mac’s mom abandoning herself to song. She was like Mac’s dad: beautiful in an otherworldly way. She sounded as rehearsed and elegant as Jackie O giving a tour of the White House whenever she spoke. She seldom joined them out on Devil’s Leap, and when she did she was a politely remote figure arranged neatly on a towel, as if someone had brought their favorite doll out for an airing.
“Yeah. She liked the acoustics.”
“I remember thinking your mom was so pretty. Her hair was shiny and straight like my Barbie, and no other mothers I ever saw had hair like that. She never seemed like a mo...”
She stopped herself in time.
He shrugged with one shoulder; the water moved a little, rippling toward her. “It’s okay. You’re right, shewasn’tvery mommish. Not like your mom was, with the snacks in her purse and the Band-Aids with Sponge Bob on them and the flip-flops shoved in the car door pocket so there was always a spare pair when someone broke one, and how she was just sort of part of everything you did. Momming really wasn’t my mom’s thing.”
He said it easily enough. But it was hard to hear that he’d been fully aware of what he lacked in the midst of all he had.
Even back then Avalon must have sensed that he’d needed to be loved. And she had loved him.
Even if he cared for things, it was entirely possible he just didn’t know how to love back.
“It could have been a lot worse, honestly. Hell, how many kids do you know who got an Audi convertible for their sixteenth birthday?”
He was being glib, but his voice was soft, soft as the water, soft as the muted colors of the sky.