“Lila,” I say. God, it feels good to say her name again. It’s been too long.
“Yeah, that’s right,” she says. “You totally had the hots for her.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You were always checking her out when you thought no one was paying attention,” she says.
“Yeah, well, she was pretty. And I’m a red-blooded American male. That’s kind of what happens when you put those two things together.” I know I sound like a chauvinistic asshole, but I have to downplay this. If Ashlan gets so much as a whiff or inkling that I feel a certain way about Lila, she’ll tell her mom … who will tell my mom … who will innocently tell Granddad under the guise of thinking it’s a cute story to share. “She’s not my type though.”
“Obviously,” Ashlan laughs. “She was kind of weird.”
“Definitely.”
“Did you guys ever hook up?”
“God, no. I’m not that desperate.”
“Okay, now answer this: who’s hotter? Me or her?” she asks.
I have no choice but to tell her what she wants to hear. “You. Hands down. All the way.”
“Aww, I love you so much,” she says, singsong-y. “Do you love me?”
“Of course I love you,” I say, but only to get her to shut up.
“Say hiiiiiii to everyone.” She raises the phone and zooms in on me before tapping the screen.
“Did you just take a video?” I ask.
“Yeah.” Her nose crinkles. “Why?”
“You need to tell people when you’re filming them. Delete that.”
“No, I will not delete that. It’s adorable,” she says.
I reach for the phone, and she tucks it behind her back and lays on my bed. If I want it, I’m going to have to pin her down and wrangle it out of her hands, and I think she’d like that too much.
“Seriously, Ash, delete it,” I say.
She sits up, her phone still clutched in her hand. “You’re way too sensitive sometimes, you know that? Did you say something in the video that you don’t want people to hear?”
“No,” I lie.
“Okay, then you have nothing to worry about.”
I’ll watch her social media accounts the next few days to see if she posts it, and if she does, I’ll file a copyright infringement so it’s taken down immediately. Thank God Lila doesn’t have a computer or internet access on the island, and as far as I know, she doesn’t know Ashlan’s last name, so even if she did have those capabilities, there’s no way she’d see the video.
Chapter 44
Lila
Thirty-one-hundred miles.
We pull up to a roadside motel outside a little town called Summerton not far from the Oregon coast. Shortly after reaching the Rose Crossing mainland and getting the keys to the shiny economy-sized car Bertram gifted us, we hit the road driving west, stopping first in Pennsylvania for gas, where I bought a prepaid smart phone so we could use the internet for navigation.
We were halfway across Iowa when I found Summerton on a list of “most desirable places to live in the Pacific Northwest.”
“Top-rated schools,” I read off the list to them as we drove down I-80. “Twenty thousand people, low unemployment … You want to see the pictures?”
With all the lush vegetation and evergreens, it almost looked like a West Coast version of Maine, but it was described as being progressive and laidback, which reminded me of California. I showed them both photos on my phone as we drove and an hour later, we’d settled on Summerton.
“We’re supposed to call Bertram when we get here,” I remind them. All those hours in the car meant I had plenty of time to read over the NDA as well as the little instruction sheet he had typed up for us.
We were halfway across Pennsylvania when I finally had the nerve to ask my grandparents about my mother and Ari Caldecott and … me. It turns out she was working for Bertram the summer after Ari married Lorelai and as part of their wedding gift, Bertram gifted the newlyweds a housekeeper: a young, naïve Mary Hilliard.
She was sent to Connecticut to live with Ari and Lorelai, and shortly thereafter Lorelai fell pregnant with the twins and spent nearly four straight months on bedrest. It was during that time Ari became smitten with my mother, pursuing her relentlessly. My mother was pliable and impressionable and made the foolish decision to get involved with a married man. By the time she realized she was pregnant, she was almost three months along and Lorelai was due to give birth any day.
Shortly after the twins were born, Lorelai asked her father if he’d be willing to swap out a housekeeper for a nanny and he agreed without hesitation, but when my mother returned to the island it wasn’t long before her pregnancy was glaringly obvious.
She was five months pregnant when Bertram cornered her and got her to tell him everything. He prefaced the conversation as though he was concerned and wanted to help her, only to flip his narrative as soon as she admitted the baby was Ari’s.