The Tailgate by Elin Hilderbrand Read Free Book Online Page B

O’Brien? We’re doing yearbook together.”
    Phil smiled at me. My vision blurred. I teetered. Smile! I thought. Smile back! But it felt like I was going to cry instead.
    Phil said, “You serve at church, right? You’re an altar girl?”
    I felt flames of embarrassment licking my cheeks. Rosy indeed. I nodded, and then made a chirping noise like a sparrow. Who wanted to be recognized as an altar girl? And yet, I was an altar girl, and I had been since I was ten years old. It wasn’t exactly a secret.
    Phil said, “My mother makes me go to Mass once a month, and I see you there whenever I go.”
    â€œI’m not surprised you noticed Ginger,” Dabney said. “She’s gorgeous.” With that, Dabney hooked her arm around my neck and kissed my scorching hot cheek. “See ya, gotta go! My dad is here!”
    She bounded out the door to the back parking lot, but her father wasn’t waiting. Lieutenant Kimball drove a squad car, which I would have noticed. There were no cars waiting. Dabney was walking home, abandoning me at a time when I needed her to prop me up. I decided I would never forgive her.
    But then Phil asked if I liked basketball and I said yes, and he asked if I wanted to come watch him play for the JV team the following afternoon, and I said sure. He said he would have a lot more playing time in that game, and I said, Okay, great. And he said, Well, I’ll see you tomorrow, don’t forget me! And I felt like a flock of birds had startled in my chest.
    Phil and I have been married for twenty-nine years and we have four beautiful sons, the youngest of whom plays power forward for Villanova University.
    Rosy indeed.
    Â Â 
    Dabney left the Chamber office at four-thirty as usual. All preparations for Daffodil Weekend were in place; Dabney could have organized it in her sleep—thank goodness, because her afternoon had been consumed with rereading Clen’s email and then obsessing about it.
    I suffered a pretty serious loss about six months ago, and I’ve been slow recovering from it.
    What kind of loss? Dabney wondered. Did he lose a good friend, a lover? Dabney had lost her father from a heart attack a decade earlier, and her beloved chocolate lab, Henry, had died at the age of seventeen just before Christmas. But neither of these losses compared with the loss of Clendenin.
    Not a day has gone by—honestly, Cupe, not an hour—when I have not thought of you.
    She would be lying if she said that she had not thought of him, too. The love of her life, her perfect match, her Meant-to-Be. The father of her child. How it had pained her to break off contact. But years and years later, Dabney was stunned by the wisdom and maturity of her decision.
    The only way I am going to survive is with a clean break. Please respect my wishes and let me, and this child, go. Please, Clendenin Tabor Hughes, do me the favor of never contacting me again.
    He had been so, so angry. He had called Dabney in the middle of the night, and over the staticky, time-delayed phone line, they had screamed at each other for the first time in their relationship, often stepping on one another’s words until Clen ended the call by saying We all make choices and slamming down the phone. But he had let her do things her way. He had not contacted her.
    IMPOSSIBLE SITUATION: I could not stay, and you could not go.
    That was about the size of it.
    Despite this, Dabney had thought Clendenin might appear at the hospital when she gave birth. She had thought he might materialize in the back of the church on the afternoon she married Box, and just like in the movies, he would interrupt the priest at the critical moment. She had thought he might attend Agnes’s first piano recital, or show up at Dabney’s fortieth birthday party at the Whaling Museum. She had thought he might come back to the island when his mother, Helen, died—but Helen Hughes had been cremated and there was