Free Stay by Deb Caletti Page A

circumstances
    like that, I can’t help but imagine them in junior high, worry-
    ing about who they’re going to eat lunch with,’ Annabelle had
    said, and I always thought about that later. You see a person’s
    * 67 *
    Deb Caletti
    inner thirteen-year-old and you won’t look at them the same
    way again.”
    “Probably,” I said. But I was thinking about Dad and old
    Annabelle Aurora on our deck on a summer night, and my
    mother in her room. I felt like maybe I could remember that
    night if I tried hard enough. I wondered what my mother had
    been thinking and feeling, what had upset her. Those were the
    times you really felt her absence—when you would never know
    her, didn’t know her now enough to even guess what would
    make her leave a houseguest in the middle of dinner. You only
    had these words— mood, upset —and yet you had nothing to
    hang them on. You had other words, too. But a word like French ,
    or photographer , or sensitive , they had a thousand meanings and
    pictures and your own images would be only guesses. It was all
    the things you could never understand and could never possess
    that made you ache.
    “Annabelle Aurora,” my father said. His eyes were still all
    gleamy.
    “The mother you never had?” I said. 11*
    “I wouldn’t say that, exactly,” he said. “Not at all, really.”
    “She scared me, knowing who I was like that. I thought she
    was some crazy old fan who knew your life history.”
    “She knows my life history, all right. Indeed she does.”
    11 My father’s own mother, Grandma Oates, was a conservative woman who lived in
    Iowa with her sister, my aunt Barbara. Grandma Oates made you believe it was pos-
    sible for babies to be switched in hospitals.
    * 68 *
    Stay
    I tried to read that book again before I went to sleep. I didn’t like
    that book, but I kept going for all the reasons a person hangs in
    with something that isn’t good—you feel bad about not giving it
    a chance, you’ve already come too far to give up now, you believe
    it’s going to get better. When you’re a person whose life has
    mostly brought good things, you believe in goodness. You believe
    that things will work out. Even the worst things will work out.
    You believe in a happy ending.
    But you are naive. The mostly good in your life has made
    you that way. You’ve spent so much time seeing the bright side
    that you don’t even believe the other side exists. You are wrong
    about that.
    I closed that book. I wouldn’t open it again, I vowed. It was
    time I learned something.
    * 69 *

Chapter 7
    He cal ed that night, the night I had come home from
    the park and had eaten everything in the fridge. Kissing makes
    you hungry. Hunger makes you hungry. It had gotten late. I had
    school the next day. I was getting tired, but I just wanted more of
    him, too, like he wanted of me. I was downstairs in the kitchen
    getting something to drink, speaking softly, the phone crooked
    between my shoulder and my ear, when Dad came through. He
    was turning lights off. He tapped the place on his wrist where a
    watch would be, turning his eyebrows down in concern. I know! I
    mouthed. I was mad at him, because I knew he didn’t get this, or
    even if he did in some general way, he didn’t get this .
    Christian and I talked every night after that. We were both
    taking AP classes and calculus and had too much homework,
    so we couldn’t get together, and that next weekend he had
    Stay
    plans to go to his parents’ cabin. It was almost unbearable how
    long those weeks were. I knew if he came over to study that we
    wouldn’t study, but we ended up spending just as much time
    on the phone anyway. We spent a lot of time saying I should just
    come over and If I’d have come over we could have spent all this
    time together instead of on the phone , things like that. Things you
    say. Maybe I was nervous for Dad to meet him, or for him to
    meet Dad, though I had no real reason to think they wouldn’t
    get along terrifically.