Read What Happens to Goodbye Online

Authors: Sarah Dessen

What Happens to Goodbye (2 page)

“I’ve got a good feeling about this place,” I told him. “Serious potential.”
He looked at me for a moment, then reached over, squeezing my shoulder. “You know what? ” he said. “You are one awesome girl.”
His phone buzzed again, but this time neither of us looked at it. And back in Westcott, another awesome girl sat texting or calling, wondering why on earth her boyfriend, the one who was so charming but just couldn’t commit, wasn’t returning her calls or messages. Maybe he was in the shower. Or forgot his phone again. Or maybe he was sitting in a restaurant in a town hundreds of miles away with his daughter, about to start their lives all over again.
A few minutes later, Tracey returned with the guacamole and salad, plunking them down between us on the table. “Calamari will be another minute,” she informed us. “You guys need anything else right now?”
My dad looked across at me, and despite myself, I felt a twinge of fatigue, thinking of doing this all again. But I’d made my decision two years ago. To stay or go, to be one thing or many others. Say what you would about my dad, but life with him was never dull.
“No,” he said now to Tracey, although he kept his eyes on me. Not squinting a bit, full and blue, just like my own. “We’re doing just fine.”
Whenever my dad and I moved to a new town, the first thing we always did was go directly to the restaurant he’d been brought in to take over, and order a meal. We got the same appetizers each time: guacamole if it was a Mexican place, calamari for the Italian joints, and a simple green salad, regardless. My dad believed these to be the most basic of dishes, what anyplace worth its salt should do and do well, and as such they provided the baseline, the jumping-off point for whatever came next. Over time, they’d also become a gauge of how long I should expect us to be in the place we’d landed. Decent guac and somewhat crisp lettuce, I knew not to get too attached. Super rubbery squid, though, or greens edged with slimy black, and it was worth going out for a sport in school, or maybe even joining a club or two, as we’d be staying awhile.
After we ate, we’d pay our bill—tipping well, but not extravagantly—before we went to find our rental place. Once we’d unhitched the U-Haul, my dad would go back to the restaurant to officially introduce himself, and I’d get to work making us at home.
EAT INC, the restaurant conglomerate company my dad worked for as a consultant, always found our houses for us. In Westcott, the strip of a beach town in Florida we’d just left, they’d rented us a sweet bungalow a block from the water, all decorated in pinks and greens. There were plastic flamingos everywhere: on the lawn, in the bathroom, strung up in tiny lights across the mantel. Cheesy, but in an endearing way. Before that, in Petree, a suburb just outside Atlanta, we’d had a converted loft in a high-rise inhabited mostly by bachelors and businessmen. Everything was teak and dark, the furniture modern with sharp edges, and it was always quiet and very cold. Maybe this had been so noticeable to me because of our first place, in Montford Falls, a split-level on a cul-de-sac populated entirely by families. There were bikes on every lawn and little decorative flags flying from most porches: fat Santas for Christmas, ruby hearts for Valetine’s, raindrops and rainbows in spring. The cabal of moms—all in yoga pants, pushing strollers as they power walked to meet the school bus in the mornings and afternoons—studied us unabashedly from the moment we arrived. They watched my dad come and go at his weird hours and cast me sympathetic looks as I brought in our groceries and mail. I’d known already, very well, that I was no longer part of what was considered a traditional family unit. But their stares confirmed it, just in case I’d missed the memo.
Everything was so different, that first move, that I didn’t feel I had to be different as well. So the only thing I’d changed was my name, gently but firmly correcting my homeroom teacher on my first day of school. “Eliza,” I told him. He glanced down at his roll sheet, then crossed out what was there and wrote this in. It was so easy. Just like that, in the hurried moments between announcements, I wrapped up and put away sixteen years of my life and was born again, all before first period even began.
I wasn’t sure exactly what my dad thought of this. The first time someone called for Eliza, a few days later, he looked confused, even as I reached for the phone and he handed it over. But he never said anything. I knew he understood, in his own way. We’d both left the same town and same circumstances. He had to stay who he was, but I didn’t doubt for a second that he would have changed if it had been an option.
As Eliza, I wasn’t that different from who I’d been before. I’d inherited what my mother called her “corn-fed” looks—tall, strawberry blonde, and blue-eyed—so I looked like the other popular girls at school. Add in the fact that I had nothing to lose, which gave me confidence, and I fell in easily with the jocks and rah-rahs, collecting friends quickly. It helped that everyone in Montford Falls had known each other forever: being new blood, even if you looked familiar, made you exotic, different. I liked this feeling so much that, when we moved to Petree, our next place, I took it further, calling myself Lizbet and taking up with the drama mamas and dancers. I wore cutoff tights, black turtlenecks, and bright red lipstick, my hair pulled back into the tightest bun possible as I counted calories, took up cigarettes, and made everything Into A Production. It was different, for sure, but also exhausting. Which was probably why in Westcott, our most recent stop, I’d been more than happy to be Beth, student-council secretary and all-around joiner. I wrote for the school paper, served on yearbook, and tutored underachieving middle school kids. In my spare time, I organized car washes and bake sales to raise funds for the literary magazine, the debate team, the children in Honduras the Spanish club was hoping to build a rec center for. I was that girl, the one Everyone Knew, my face all over the yearbook. Which would make it that much more noticeable when I vanished from the next one.
The strangest thing about all of this was that, before, in my old life, I hadn’t been any of these things: not a student leader or an actress or an athlete. There, I was just average, normal, unremarkable. Just Mclean.
That was my real name, my given name. Also the name of the all-time winningest basketball coach of Defriese University, my parents’ alma mater and my dad’s favorite team of all time. To say he was a fan of Defriese basketball was an understatement, akin to saying the sun was simply a star. He lived and breathed DB—as he and his fellow obsessives called it—and had since his own days of growing up just five miles outside campus. He went to Defriese basketball camp in the summer, knew stats for every team and player by heart, and wore a Defriese jersey in just about every school picture fromkindergarten to senior year. The actual playing time on the team he eventually got over the course of two years of riding the bench as an alternate were the best fourteen minutes of his life, hands down.
Except, of course, he always added hurriedly, my birth. That was great, too. So great that there was really no question that I’d be named after Mclean Rich, his onetime coach and the man he most admired and respected. My mother, knowing resistance to this choice was futile, agreed only on the condition that I get a normal middle name—Elizabeth—which provided alternate options, should I decide I wanted them. I hadn’t really ever expected that to be the case. But you can never predict everything.
Three years ago my parents, college sweethearts, were happily married and raising me, their only child. We lived in Tyler, the college town of which Defriese U was the epicenter, where we had a restaurant, Mariposa Grill. My dad was the head chef, my mom handled the business end and front of house, and I grew up sitting in the cramped office, coloring on invoices, or perched on a prep table in the kitchen, watching the line guys throw things into the fryer. We held DB season tickets in the nosebleed section, where my dad and I sat screaming our lungs out as the players scrambled around, antlike, way down below. I knew Defriese team stats the way other girls stored knowledge of Disney princesses: past and present players, shooting average of starters and second stringers, how many Ws Mclean Rich needed to make all time winningest. The day he did, my dad and I hugged each other, toasting with beer (him) and ginger ale (me) like proud family.
When Mclean Rich retired, we mourned, then worried over the candidates for his replacement, studying their careers and offensive strategies. We agreed that Peter Hamilton, who was young and enthusiastic with a great record, was the best choice, and attended his welcome pep rally with the highest of hopes. Hopes that seemed entirely warranted, in fact, when Peter Hamilton himself dropped into Mariposa one night and liked the food so much he wanted to use our private party room for a team banquet. My dad was in total DB heaven, with two of his greatest passions—basketball and the restaurant—finally aligned. It was great. Then my mom fell in love with Peter Hamilton, which was not.
It would have been bad enough if she’d left my dad for anyone. But to me and my dad, DB fanatics that we were, Peter Hamilton was a god. But idols fall, and sometimes they land right on you and leave you flattened. They destroy your family, shame you in the eyes of the town you love, and ruin the sport of basketball for you forever.
Even all this time later, it still seemed impossible that she’d done it, the very act and fact still capable of unexpectedly knocking the wind out of me at random moments. In the first few shaky, strange weeks after my parents sat me down and told me they were separating, I kept combing back through the last year, trying to figure out how this could have happened. I mean, yes, the restaurant was struggling, and I knew there had been tension between them about that. And I could vouch for the fact that my mom was always saying my dad didn’t spend enough time with us, which he pointed out would be much easier once we were living in a cardboard box on the side of the road. But all families had those kinds of arguments, didn’t they? It didn’t mean it was okay to run off with another man. Especially the coach of your husband and daughter’s favorite team.
The one person who had the answers to these questions, though, wasn’t talking. At least, not as much as I wanted her to. Maybe I should have expected this, as my mom had never the touchy-feely, super-confessional type. But the few times when I tried to broach the million-dollar question—why?—in the shaky early days of the separation and the stillnot-quite-stable ones that followed, she just wouldn’t tell me what I wanted to hear. Instead, her party line was one sentence: “What happens in a marriage is between the two people within it. Your father and I both love you very much. That will never change.” The first few times, this was said to me with sadness. Then, it took on a hint of annoyance. When her tone became sharp, I stopped asking questions.
HAMILTON HOMEWRECKER! screamed the sports blogs. I’LL TAKE YOUR WIFE, PLEASE. Funny how the headlines could be so cute, when the truth was downright ugly. And how weird, for me, that this thing that had always been part of my life—where my very name had come from—was now, literally, part of my
life.
It was like loving a movie, knowing every frame, and then suddenly finding yourself right inside of it. But it’s not a romance or a comedy anymore, just your worst freaking nightmare.
Of course everyone was talking. The neighbors, the sportswriters, the kids at my school. They were probably still talking, three years and twin little Hamiltons later, but thankfully, I was not around to hear it. I’d left them there, with Mclean, when my dad and I hitched a U-Haul to our old Land Rover and headed to Montford Falls. And Petree. And Westcott. And now, here.
It was the first thing I saw when we pulled in the driveway of our new rental house. Not the crisp white paint, the cheerful green trim, or the wide welcoming porch. I didn’t even notice, initially, the houses on either side, similar in size and style, one with a carefully manicured lawn, the walk lined with neat shrubs, the other with cars parked in the yard, empty red plastic cups scattered around them. Instead, there was just this, sitting at the very end of the drive, waiting to welcome us personally.

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