A half hour later Carrie said, “You’re pacing, Gina. Call Mac. Maybe he’ll have some advice.”
Gina sat at the kitchen table and punched in his numbers. “Mac, I have a problem. As far as I know, no one has seen or heard from Ashley since about one o’clock this afternoon. She skipped her last two classes, didn’t go to cheer practice, isn’t taking or returning calls. Eve hasn’t seen or heard from her and Downy isn’t picking up.” She felt her voice go all warbly. “I’m worried. I don’t know what to do. I’d go look for her, but I don’t know where to look. Could Downy be playing ball? Maybe that’s why he isn’t picking up?”
“Stand by, let me check,” Mac said. A moment later he said, “No game today. The next game is in three days and it’s a home game.”
“My God, where could she be?”
“Leave another message for Downy. Maybe call some of her other girlfriends?” Mac suggested.
“Okay, I’ll see what I can find out.” Gina disconnected and placed another call to Downy. This time she used her mother voice. “Crawford Downy, I can’t find my daughter. If I don’t hear from you in five minutes, I’m going to call the police.” Then she clicked off.
“You did call the police,” her mother said, placing a glass of wine in front of Gina. “Calm down. What are you so afraid of?”
She looked at Carrie imploringly. “That she’s in some kind of trouble. That she’s missing. That she ran off with Downy or something...I don’t know. This really isn’t like...” Her phone twittered. “Downy,” she said to her mother. She picked up the call immediately. “Where’s Ashley!” she demanded.
“Easy, Gina,” Downy said smoothly. He’d grown up in Thunder Point, just like Ashley had. He’d known Gina and her mother since he was a little kid. “She’s on her way home. She’s fine.”
“On her way home from where?” she demanded.
“She came here, to State, to Corvallis.” He took a breath. “She wanted to talk about our...ah...situation. I was going to talk to her in person after our weekend game—I was coming home mostly to talk to Ash. But she couldn’t wait and drove up here.”
Gina sank weakly onto a kitchen chair.
“She’ll be home in a couple of hours or less,” he said.
“She drove all the way to Corvallis to ask you why you don’t pick up or return her calls and you say she’s fine? Downy, what the hell is going on?”
“Can you just ask Ash about that, okay? Because it’s—”
“Is my daughter pregnant?”
She felt rather than saw her mother sit straighter, even more alert. Gina had been an unmarried teenage mother.
“No! God, no!” Downy nearly yelled into the phone. “Listen, really, if you’d just talk to Ashley about this when she gets home...”
“Tell me right this second, Crawford Downy! My daughter has been upset about your relationship and she lied to me to take my car, drove three hours to Corvallis to talk to you and she’s just now on her way home? Tell me right now or I’ll call your mother!”
The young man took a deep breath. “I don’t want to tell you this, Gina. It’s really between us, but...I felt like we might be getting too serious. I thought we should take a breather, maybe date around a little, you know.”
Gina felt her stomach tie itself in a tight knot. Oh, God, her poor girl. No one could know better than Gina how something like that felt.
“Let me guess, there’s someone at State you’ve started dating a little?” she asked acidly.
“Come on, hey. I’m all the way up here, only see Ash a couple of weekends a month at the most. It got kind of old, sitting around my room alone twenty-six days of the month. She should be getting out more, too. It’s not that big a deal. We just need to lighten up a little, y’know?”
“Why didn’t you tell her this before she drove all the way to Corvallis to find out what’s going on?”
“I didn’t want to say it over the phone! I wanted to be decent about it!”
And he hung up on her.
It was just as well. She was going to have to kill him, anyway. Downy was eighteen. His behavior was hardly odd for a boy his age. Still...
Gina looked at her mother. “I would not have let her drive all the way to Corvallis alone. Driving home alone. At night.”
“I know. But she’ll be okay,” Carrie said. “She’s a bright girl. There’s no rain tonight. She knows the way as well as you do.”
“God, I hope she’s okay,” Gina said.
There was a knock at the door. “Mac!”
Carrie got up from the table and let him in. “Hey, Mac,” she said.
“Hey, Carrie. What do we know?”
Carrie just inclined her head toward Gina.
“She drove to Corvallis to talk to Downy, who, I gather, dumped her and sent her back home.”
Mac lowered his gaze and shook his head.
“She’ll be home in a couple of hours,” Gina said. “But what if she’s so upset she’s not safe and something happens?”
Mac walked into the kitchen, slipped a strong arm around Gina’s waist and pulled her against him just briefly. He put a finger under her chin and looked into her eyes. “Never a good idea to drive when upset, but try to be realistic—if teenagers who just had a breakup had accidents, the accident rate would be too shocking to imagine. The road is good, the weather is good, she’ll get here. And she’ll need some comforting, I imagine.” He lifted one of her hands, which was trembling. “I think the wine is a good idea. Just calm down and be ready to be wise and understanding.”
“What if I have to go get her or something?”
“I’ll do it. Or Carrie will. Gina, honey, stuff like this happens. It’s not deadly.”
“It sure feels that way,” she said in a small voice.
* * *
Gina and her mom sat at the kitchen table together talking quietly, waiting for Ashley to arrive, while Gina sipped on a glass of wine. They were two women who knew how deeply a girl of sixteen would feel the trauma of a breakup. Leaving the two of them to talk, Mac stepped away, into the living room, where he used his phone.
When Ashley started dating Downy, Gina was brutally honest with her about the possible consequences of too much love too fast. She tried to discourage the dating, but there was little she could do—they saw each other at school every day and it was a match made in heaven. Gina had worried about what would happen when Downy moved on to college, leaving Ashley—who was two years younger—behind. But they had managed to make it work. Downy was back in Thunder Point most weekends, especially during football season and for holidays, and they talked and texted every day, many times a day.
And then, in the peak of spring, with love all around, suddenly and without warning, Ashley said, “Something is wrong. Downy sends me right to voice mail and he doesn’t call me back. Mom, something is wrong.”
Gina had said, “He’s probably overwhelmed. He’s got baseball and, academically, he sometimes struggles. Try to be patient.” Downy was a jock, but not a strong student, which presented problems for some college athletes.
“It never happened like this before,” Ashley wailed. “He’s said about ten words to me in a week. He’s busy, he says. He’s studying, he says. He doesn’t call me back because he doesn’t have time. He doesn’t answer my texts. He always texted more than me—right during class. I think he might be with someone new.”
“Did you ask him?”
“Of course! He said no! But he’s lying. I can tell he’s lying. And he’s never lied to me before!”
“Ash, he’s only eighteen. You’re only sixteen. Let’s try not to go crazy here. Maybe this is a little adjustment of some—”
“He said he loved me! What am I going to do?”
The poor darling, Gina thought. Shattered and helpless. She took another sip of wine. Glancing at her glass she said to her mom, “Good suggestion.”
“It’s always more dramatic when it’s your daughter. It cuts deeper,” Carrie said.
“I don’t want her to ever hurt.” Gina whispered.
“I know,” Carrie said. “Believe me, I know.”
Gina hadn’t taken Ashley’s pout over Downy too seriously. After all, he was the scholarship kid with the atomic arm, gone to State to play ball and it was spring—baseball was the game of the day and Downy, a freshman, was starting pitcher. He was busy with practices and games, maybe too busy now to text and call Ashley all day. But Gina’s attention was definitely snagged by Ashley’s flight to Corvallis and Downy’s explanation that, stated simply, he was done with her. There was not a woman on the planet who didn’t know how much getting dumped could hurt. And as for mothers? It hurt more when your little girl suffered than when you suffered yourself.
Mac came into the kitchen, poured himself a cup of coffee and sat down with Gina and Carrie. “I called my aunt Lou and told her what was going on and that I’d be staying with you until we knew a little more. Lou will manage the family while I’m here. And I talked to Eve. She knew Ashley was all sideways about Downy and she was worried about her, but she didn’t know she’d driven to Corvallis. I find that strange—they usually know everything the other is doing. Eve thought Ashley just skipped out on practice. So I’ll stay with you until she’s home.”
“You need to get home to your own family, Mac,” Gina said, but inside she thought if he left her now, she’d collapse. “It’s just a broken heart.”
“There’s no such thing as just a broken heart,” he said.
And he should know, Gina thought. His young wife left him with three little kids when he was twenty-six years old and even though Gina hadn’t known him then, she knew him now and knew he hadn’t been with a woman in the ten years since. Until Gina. They were two single parents who had waited a long time to find each other.
Mac muttered something about how, given a choice, he would never want to go back to those youthful days—those young years are so serious and painful. Gina said even more painful was when your kids hurt.
“I’ll never forget when Ash wasn’t invited to the very first boy-girl party ever because the mother of the little girl throwing the party didn’t approve of me, a never-married single mother. Ash didn’t understand that, but she was devastated by being excluded and I had at least six months of guilt and pain.”
“When Eve was six,” Mac said, “after Cee Jay left us, she didn’t want to go to school. She was afraid her mother might come home during the day and Eve didn’t want to miss her.”
“When I was a young mother,” Gina said, “there were very few other young mothers with small children who were friendly toward me. Certainly none who were sixteen...”
“Small towns are brutal,” Mac said. “The best thing about Thunder Point was leaving Coquille, where I made all my mistakes. Of course, they followed me—my kids were soon known as the kids of the deputy and the woman who abandoned them.”
“Is there any way to keep them from paying for our mistakes?”
“Yeah. They’ll eventually make enough of their own to take the heat off. Meanwhile, we just have to stay strong and know we are doing the best we can.”
Carrie got up from the table and started rummaging around in the refrigerator. Being the owner of a deli and catering service, she always had special meals on hand. She did a little slicing and scooping, microwaved a couple of plates—tri-tip, red potatoes, Broccolini spears, a little dark au jus. She made a large helping for Mac, smaller ones for Gina and herself and the three of them ate, though not with big appetites. Everyone at the small kitchen table had personal experience with this kind of heartache. Then Carrie cleaned up and put a pan of her healing chicken soup on the stove. “She might not want anything to eat, but if she does at least it’ll be something soothing,” Carrie said.