Chapters (46)
- Cover
- Other Titles
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Friday
- ONE
- TWO
- THREE
- FOUR
- Saturday
- FIVE
- SIX
- SEVEN
- EIGHT
- NINE
- TEN
- Sunday
- ELEVEN
- TWELVE
- THIRTEEN
- FOURTEEN
- FIFTEEN
- SIXTEEN
- SEVENTEEN
- EIGHTEEN
- NINETEEN
- TWENTY
- TWENTY-ONE
- TWENTY-TWO
- TWENTY-THREE
- TWENTY-FOUR
- TWENTY-FIVE
- Monday
- TWENTY-SIX
- TWENTY-SEVEN
- TWENTY-EIGHT
- TWENTY-NINE
- THIRTY
- THIRTY-ONE
- THIRTY-TWO
- THIRTY-THREE
- THIRTY-FOUR
- THIRTY-FIVE
- EPILOGUE
- ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
An elderly couple holding hands stares at them as they walk past. “Shh,” Finn whispers.
“Don’t fucking shush me, Finn! Do you have any idea what it’s like to have to get up every morning and wonder what messed-up thing Mom is going to do today? To wonder if I’m going to have to go down to Safeway and explain to the security guard that she just forgot that she had to pay for that watermelon? Or if I’m going to come home from work to discover that she’s ripped her entire bedroom apart looking for a pair of boots that she hasn’t had since 1972? If I’m going to have to do all of that and then come home and make supper for my kids and my husband and just pretend that everything is all right? Do you know what that feels like, Finn? Do you know anything about us? Anything at all?”
Finn stares at her. “I know you’re cheating on Hamish.” She doesn’t say “Dallas.” She doesn’t have to. His name has been hanging unsaid in the space between her and Nicki for years.
“Yeah, well,” says Nicki, her gaze narrowing. “Guess I won the goddamn jackpot on that one.”
“Don’t do that! Don’t make it seem like you didn’t choose this, Nicki, like you’re a fucking martyr. You slept with my boyfriend. Why does everyone keep forgetting that!”
“He shouldn’t have been your boyfriend!”
Finn laughs again. “Oh, right, because he should have been your boyfriend, is that it?”
“No!” yells Nicki. “Because you fucking deserved better!”
“I…what?”
Nicki takes a deep breath, and Finn can feel her own diaphragm contracting, her own lungs expanding, air travelling down her bronchial tubes and filling her alveoli, oxygen dispersing through her capillaries. “You were going to get out,” Nicki says. “If any of us were going to get out, it was you.” She rests her elbows on the breakwater wall. “He wasn’t going anywhere. But you, you could. And you did.”
Finn thinks of Nicki’s map of the world, her little pins. “You could have, too,” she says.
“No,” says Nicki, shaking her head. She traces a pattern on the cement wall with one ragged fingernail, head bent low. “I was never going anywhere.”
They both look out over the water. Finn suddenly finds herself thinking about the night that Dallas got Nicki pregnant. Finn had been at their apartment, in that old run-down house behind that church in Current River, sulking. He had wanted Finn to come out with him that night. “You never come out anymore,” he said. “The guys are all starting to think you don’t actually exist.”