Ashley is and I’m really worried. Have you heard from her? Call me please.”
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
