Free The Possibilities: A Novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings

again.
    “I just want to know everything,” I say. We walk toward the door.
    There really is nothing else to do but know the things we want to know.
    •   •   •
    I LOOK OUTSIDE the living room window at my quiet street, the empty second homes. When I’m off Main Street, sometimes I feel like I live in a ghost town, especially with the warmth this year and lack of snow. We live off snow. Our economy could simply melt away, the mountains undress. I look down at the driveway, the thin layer of snow that has begun to settle. What were you doing, son? Was it just a phase? Did I not provide enough, nurture you enough? What was the point of school and college, the point of all those extracurricular activities, the point of playgrounds? Did I give you too much?
    “You girls hungry?” my dad asks.
    “We’re going to go out,” I say. “Just real quick.”
    “Not quick,” Suzanne says. “We are heading out on the town. I’ll have her back before dawn.”
    Suzanne takes her sweater off the stool and my dad looks at me and widens his eyes.
    “I’ll be home in a few hours,” I say.
    “You up for meeting Mirabelle first?” Suzanne asks. “She might head to Relish.”
    Mirabelle is a woman who hired a conductor to tutor her four-year-old when he picked up a stick and started waving it around. She and her husband are always offering their various homes to me: Maui, Park City, LA, making me feel like a Make-a-Wish kid. I’ve never taken them up on it knowing that these people collect people and soon enough I’d be trotted out at dinner parties as their “TV show friend,” and then I’d be asked if I could feature a friend’s new line of jewelry. I’ve learned my lesson. Just say no to these kinds of people. Not that I don’t get along with many of them and have fun when Suzanne asks me to join them all for drinks, but there’s a big difference between me and her other friends. I’m the only one with a job, something they find to be honorable.
    We just discovered my son was a drug dealer. We just emptied his room. I don’t want to meet Mirabelle and endure her head-to-toe catty scans.
    “Come on,” Suzanne says, seeing me hesitate. “It will be good to socialize.”
    “I’ve been out of the house all day, socializing. Maybe if we could just get a quick drink.”
    She is looking down at her phone. “Change of plan,” she says. “She just texted. Says to stop by the rink. Something I have to see.” She looks up. I haven’t put on my coat.
    “You know?” I say. “I’m kind of beat.”
    “Please,” she says. “It’s just the After-School All-Stars thing at the rink. Laurie’s chairing and”—she looks in the mirror by the bar and puts on makeup—“we can just drop by.”
    This is so typical of her, to change plans and assume I’ll follow. I’m putting my foot down. Even though my problems have outperformed hers for a while now, I will not go to a sporting event.
    “You girls go have fun,” my dad says.
    “I’m just not feeling up to it right now,” I say. I try to make eye contact so he can help me out, but he’s looking at Suzanne with an intensity.
    “Hey, Suze,” he says, “those future plans—your husband’s lawyers should probably stop saying there’s no link between peak and base expansion. EPA knows otherwise. People will warm up to it anyway. The ones who’ll complain will be the same ones who just bought their condos at One Ski Hill.”
    “I don’t talk to Dickie,” Suzanne says, finishing her glass. “He left me.”
    My dad says, “I hope not because of the weight gain? Now, that’s not fair.”
    Oh my God. “Okay,” I say. “Let’s go.” I put on my coat.

Chapter 6
    We walk to her car, parked twenty calories up the street.
    “Sorry, but will you drive?” She gets into the passenger seat before I can respond. I roll my eyes—my passive response—and get behind the wheel. I don’t mind. If anything I’m a good driver. I love to parallel park and I