The Woman in the Photo by Mary Hogan Page A

chirpy tone is unmistakable. I want to leap over the hedge and fill Francine Larkin’s avian mouth with mud. But, of course, a lady mustn’t act on every errant thought. Instead, I take a deep breath into the expandable elastic of my bloomers and extend myself to my full height, aligning my spine just so. With the countenance of Queen Victoria herself, I slowly turn around.
    â€œWhy, hello, Francine. Hello, everyone. Lovely day.”
    I then blow a clump of unruly hair off my bloodied face and turn my back on the laughing group to trudge my muddy shoes to the bicycle waiting in the woods. Only once do I glance over my shoulder to see that James Tottinger is silently mocking me and Francine Larkin is grinning at him with her bird lips.
    Summer at South Fork. Let the games begin.

CHAPTER 14
    S OUTHERN C ALIFORNIA
    Present
    S hortly after her life imploded, Lee’s laptop crashed, too. Looking back, she viewed its incremental disintegration as a metaphor for all the life signs she’d ignored, too. Like that whirring beneath the keyboard. Wasn’t that similar to the distraction she’d heard—but overlooked—in Shelby’s voice as she packed for Malawi?
    â€œUm, yeah, don’t worry, I’ll FaceTime you.”
    And Shelby’s last text from Malawi: “There’s this boy. A carpenter for Habitat. Yum!”
    Shouldn’t she have seen that coming? The same way all those frozen Web pages foreshadowed the Blue Screen of Death? If she’d been paying attention, she wouldn’t have felt so run over when Shelby changed her relationship status on Facebook. How could her best friend since middle school change her relationship status without telling her?
    When Lee spent the night of her eighteenth birthday eating microwave popcorn in front of the TV with her mom, she realized she should have made more friends. You know, as backup. In case her very best friend left the country to have a yummy boyfriend without bothering to mention it. In case her brother decided to vanish into the woods and her dad ran away from home, leaving her mother feeling all clutchy, as if Lee were the only person left in the world.
    There were lots of other signs that things were awry, too. Like, for months, Lee’s computer had been super slow. Constantly buffering. An endlessly rotating color wheel in the center of her screen reminding her that she was going nowhere. Wasn’t that spinning symbol of impending disaster just like the foreboding of her dad’s drinking? Its downward spiral? Like the way she noticed, but didn’t fully note, that his glass of wine with dinner became two, then it included a cocktail while her mom was cooking, then scotch in a tumbler the moment he got home from work with his breath already ignitable. Hadn’t he been disappearing in plain sight for years? And taking her future with him?
    If her eyes had been open, she would have noticed that her computer was infected by something malicious; she would have begged her dad to get help before he dragged them all down with him. Had she been paying attention to all the ways her father had become little more than a prop around the house, she wouldn’t have been so knocked off her feet when he called several months after he packed up and left.
    â€œIt’s me,” he’d said.
    â€œDad?”
    â€œYep.”
    â€œWhere are you?”
    Gil sighed and muttered something about an inability to cope. Life, he said, had gotten the best of him. “I’m a human being, Lee. With flaws.”
    His speech was slow. The word “flaws” had two syllables: fill-aws . It was barely four o’clock and he was already drunk.
    Lee said, “Lots of fathers have flaws.”
    Gil Parker sighed spitily into the phone. In a confessional sort of way, he unburdened himself. “See, that’s the thing, Lee. I’ve never been father material. I realize that now.”
    â€œUm, what