up her empty bowl to put it in the dishwasher that Lauren noticed the two pink streaks in her hair.
“What have you done to your hair?”
“I woke up with it this way. Weird, huh? Fairies or gremlins.”
“Mack—”
Her daughter sighed. “I dyed it. And before you flip out, everyone is doing it. All the other mothers were fine about it. Abigail’s mom helped her do hers.”
This was her cue to be like “all the other mothers.” It was a pass or fail test, and Lauren knew she was going to fail. “Why didn’t you discuss it with me?”
“Because you’re such a control freak you would have said no.”
“You have beautiful hair. Is this about trying to fit in?”
“I don’t care about fitting in.”
They both knew it was a lie.
Lauren picked her words carefully. “Honey, I know it’s hard when you’re teased, but it happens to a lot of people and—”
“That does not help, by the way. It makes no difference to me how many other people have been through it.” Nonchalance barely masked the pain and Lauren felt the pain as if it were her own.
“Your individuality is the thing that makes you special. And you need to remember that most people are thinking about themselves, not anyone else.” She decided that this wasn’t the time to raise the school issue again. “I know you’re upset. Has something else happened?”
“You mean apart from the fact that my mother is always on my case?”
“I’m trying to be supportive. We’ve always been able to talk about anything and everything.”
Mack scooped up her phone. “Yeah, right. Anything and everything. No secrets in this house.”
Her tone made Lauren feel uneasy.
“Mack—”
“I need to get ready for school. My mother had a place at an Ivy League college, so nothing short of Oxford or Cambridge is going to be good enough for me. Education is everything, right?”
It was too early in the morning to deal with teenage attitude. Lauren opened her mouth to remind her to wish her father a happy birthday, but Mack was gone.
Another slammed door. Her world seemed full of them.
No secrets in this house.
Feeling a burn of stress behind her rib cage, she took herself downstairs to the basement gym they’d installed and tried to run off her anxiety on the treadmill. She flicked on CNN, giving herself a taste of home.
Storms in Alabama. An alligator thirty feet long in Florida. A shooting in Brooklyn.
A wave of homesickness almost knocked her flat. She yearned for morning runs on South Beach, the smell of the sea, the taste of seafood caught fresh that morning, the sight of the sun setting near her sister’s house in Menemsha.
Twenty minutes later Ed appeared. He was dressed in cycling gear and had his phone in his hand.
Lauren breathed a sigh of relief. This was routine. Ed cycled to the office and changed once he got there, and it seemed that today was no different except that he was running later than usual.
“Have a great day, birthday boy.” When he didn’t answer, she muted CNN and slowed the treadmill until it stopped. “You seem really distracted today. Does it bother you being forty?”
“What?” He glanced up from his emails.
“Forty.” Maybe she’d treated the whole thing too lightly. She needed to make sure he knew he was still handsome and desirable. More sex wouldn’t hurt. Sometimes the days slipped past and she’d realize it had been a week. Sometimes longer. The truth was sex between them had always been comfortable rather than urgent.
Was that normal? She had no idea because it wasn’t a topic she’d dream of discussing with friends.
Maybe he was having an affair?
Even though she’d stopped the treadmill, her heart rate continued to accelerate. No. Ed wasn’t like that. They didn’t lie to each other. That was what they’d agreed that first night they’d met. Lauren trusted Ed implicitly.
And they were happy. Happy couples didn’t have affairs.
“Are you worrying about Mack? I know she’s been difficult lately.”
She decided not to mention the pink hair. Let him notice it for himself later.
“All teenagers are difficult. I remember your mother saying your sister was a nightmare.”
Lauren realized she’d forgotten to call her sister the day before. Preparations for Ed’s birthday had eclipsed everything.
“All my mother wanted to do was paint, and she was irritated by anything that disturbed that.” Still, when Lauren thought back to some of the things she’d done with Jenna, it terrified her.
They were lucky to have come through childhood unscathed. Or mostly unscathed.
“She’s growing up.” Ed was calm. “She doesn’t have to tell us every little thing. She’s pushing for independence, and we’ve always encouraged that. And as for being difficult, it’s nature’s way of making sure teenagers want to leave home and that parents are ready to push them out of the door.”
“She’s sixteen, Ed. It’s years until she leaves home. And you know what the school told us. Mack is skipping homework and failing English. She’s always been a straight-A student. English is her best subject.”
Ed frowned. “Physics is her best subject. Last year she wanted to do aeronautical engineering.”
“That was before those girls started teasing her for being like a boy. Remember that horrible Facebook page they set up? Mack-the-man.” She’d been so upset she’d wanted to charge into school and chop off their damn princess hair with rusty scissors. It had taken a lot of maneuvering to have the page taken down and Mack had been left wounded. “She is smart. She could do what she likes, providing she works hard, but that’s the point. She isn’t. If she carries on like this, she’s going to fail her exams.” Unless there was an exam in sarcasm. Mack would ace that.
“There’s more to life than being a straight-A student, Lauren.”
“I know. But I also know how competitive the world is now. If you mess up your exams then you don’t get into a good college, and without a good college you don’t stand a chance of getting a good internship because there are literally thousands of people applying for every position. Sue Miller’s eldest graduated last summer and since then she has put in one hundred and fifty applications and hasn’t had a single interview. One hundred and fifty.”
“Calm down. Mack is going to be fine, Lauren.”
She
