Chapter 6: Brookline

I walked out through the glass doors with my parents on either side of me.

A reporter pushed a phone toward my face.

"Ms. Whitford, is it true you're Mr. Abruzzo's ex-fiancée?"

"The judge asked both sides not to try this case on the steps," I said. "One side is listening."

Jade's face did something quick and ugly behind her tears.

Then we were in the car.

On Saturday my mother made lobster rolls for the whole street.

My parents' house in Brookline was the same as it had been when I was ten.

Big porch, a sagging hammock, a maple tree my father refused to cut back.

I'd been sleeping in my childhood bedroom all week, under a poster of a women's soccer team.

I came downstairs at noon and found my parents standing at the kitchen island in matching aprons, arguing about mayonnaise.

"Butter," my father said. "Warm butter. Mayo is for cowards."

"Your daughter can't have butter."

"She can have the cowards' version, then."

My mother handed me a knife and a bag of celery.

"Chop. And tell your father his history lessons were terrible."

I laughed for the first time in two weeks.

For five years, my father had played a retired tenth-grade history teacher every Thanksgiving.

Chris used to quiz him on the Civil War over the turkey.

"I studied," my father said, wounded. "I read three books."

"You told him Gettysburg was in Virginia."

"I panicked. He asked me in the middle of the gravy."

My mother was laughing so hard she had to sit down.

My father dried his hands on the apron and looked at me.

He wasn't laughing anymore.

"I hated it, Audrey. I want you to know that. Not the lying. I'd lie for you all day. I hated sitting at his table watching him talk over you."

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