Читать книгу: «All The Things We Didn’t Say»
All The Things We Didn’t Say
Sara Shepard
For my mother, Mindy Shepard
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Dedication
PART ONE
Prologue
1
2
3
PART TWO
Prologue
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
PART THREE
Prologue
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
PART FOUR
Prologue
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
PART FIVE
25
26
27
28
29
30
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Novels for young adults by the same author
Copyright
About the Publisher
PART ONE
Brooklyn, New York,
December 1992
fun saver
Prologue
Behind you was a poster for the DQ Butterscotch Sundae, and next to you were the gleaming, shuddering machines that dispensed the ice cream. Mark catapulted over the counter and gave you a big hug. ‘Here she is,’ he said, clapping his hands on your shoulders. You looked familiar. It was probably that I’d seen you around-at a picnic, in the halls at school, in the bleachers, in the aisles of Charles Kupka’s Drugs, The Finest Apothecary in Western Pennsylvania. You smiled at me and extended your hand, so formal. ‘Hello,’ you said. You smiled with all your teeth. ‘Hello,’ you said again.
You lived down the street from Mark. When you were little, you stole tomatoes from his garden. He used to chase you with a garden hoe with his eyes closed, chopping and chopping. But then, a month or so ago, Mark was up on a ladder, touching up the eaves of his house with white paint, and a bee came and scared him and he fell off. When he opened his eyes, flat on his back on the grass with the wind knocked out of him, the ladder still tilted against the roof, you were standing there with your wavy blonde hair and your milkmaid face and your wide, vine-ripened mouth. ‘I realized I loved her right then,’ Mark told me. He had been dying to introduce you to me for a while, but I’d been working so much that summer and had hardly been around.
I don’t know what made me go into Dairy Queen alone the next time, knowing what I knew. Mark had been my best friend since third grade, when we were both punished for sticking chewing gum to the underside of our desks. Perhaps it was because you said hello twice. Perhaps it was because Mark joked, that first time, ‘Now, don’t go stealing her away, Rich. She’s mine.’ I don’t know why he said that-I’d never stolen anything from Mark in my life. But maybe it got into my head, started whirring around. Maybe it was your dove-gray eyes, the way your hands were chapped and red from the Dairy Queen freezers, the way you swayed a little, winsome and uncertain, when you dispensed the ice cream into the pale yellow cone. The first time I went in alone, you pretended to forget my name. All you said was, ‘You’re Mark’s friend, right?’ The second time I came in, you said, ‘It’s freezing. All this snow, in October. You seriously want ice cream?’ The fifth you told me bits and pieces about your life.
You told me that you and Mark were secretly engaged. He wanted to get married as soon as you graduated-you were a grade behind us, so it was still a whole year away. You sat on the steel sink in Dairy Queen’s back room, surrounded by ice cream mix, boxes of rainbow sprinkles and glamour shots of the Buster Bar and the whorish, frothy DQ Float-Go ahead and splurge! Get it with Tab®! You told me how afraid you were, that you weren’t sure if Mark was the guy you were supposed to marry, how you thought love was supposed to hit you like a spark and you weren’t sure that had happened. ‘But I’m a good person,’ you always said when we pressed against the shelves of the walk-in, your lips tasting like caramel syrup. ‘I still do chores and everything.’ ‘It’s me, I’m the terrible one,’ was what I always said next. I wanted you to be blameless, pure. ‘He’s my best friend. I’m the bad person here.’ I touched the six freckles clustered together by your right eye, a constellation. I even gave the freckle-cluster a name, though I can’t remember it now. That’s probably a side-effect of what I’ve been through-so many precious memories have been yanked away forever.
The eighth time I told you everything about me. That winter, I took you to the old, abandoned drift mine, one of my favorite spots in all of Cobalt. We looked into the black, gaping mouth in the side of the hill to avoid staring at each other. You shivered and said coal mining had to be the scariest job in the world, trekking into those dark, uncertain caves. ‘I’m sure miners get used to it,’ I replied, but you shook your head and said you couldn’t see how. I told you that my father looked perfect on the outside, but he hardly ever ate dinner with us anymore. I couldn’t remember the last time we’d had a conversation. It was always sports on TV, or long hours at work, or time spent at the new golf club closer to Pittsburgh. He wanted me to play golf, too-he got me a membership to the country club a few Christmases before. ‘Golf is a good skill for your future,’ he said gruffly, ignoring my lack of enthusiasm. ‘I’m grooming you for better things.’ The only thing I’d wanted that year was a set of encyclopedias, but my father said I could just use the encyclopedias at school. When new encyclopedias showed up on our doorstep a few weeks later, my father frowned, thinking it was a mistake. ‘It’s not,’ my mother said quickly. She’d gotten last year’s set at a discount from a door-to-door salesman, practically for free. When my father turned his back, she winked at me. I read those encyclopedias cover to cover, starting with A and ending with Z. I loved M; it was so thick. There were so many fascinating things in M. Myelin. Mummification. Melanoma.
I told you about the scholarship to Penn State-first that I’d applied, next that I’d been interviewed, and that I was waiting to hear if I got it. ‘You will,’ you assured me. ‘But that means you’ll leave me.’ I told you I’d never leave you. I told you I’d take you to college with me. ‘I’ll pack you in my suitcase.’ I took your small, tan hand and said, ‘I’ll marry you right now.’ I said I’d go get my minister’s license so I could marry us myself. You took a whack at me-you liked to slap the air when things were funny-and said we would need witnesses. I said, ‘How about this mine? It could be our witness.’ The coal was as silent and solemn as God. You looked away then. ‘You know we can’t,’ you said. We were quiet for a while after that.
Then there was the party at Jeff’s house. I had gotten there late, so we met in the hall, me holding an empty cup, on my way to the keg, you holding a sleeve of Ritz crackers. I couldn’t wait to show you the letter I’d received that very day, the one I hadn’t shown my family or anyone else yet. It had Pennsylvania State University’s prowling lion logo on the top. I unfolded it, thinking you’d be proud of me, but your expression clouded. And then you told me-you just blurted it out, two words. I said, ‘Are you sure?’ And you said, ‘Yes.’ And then I was talking and not thinking, or perhaps thinking too much and talking to avoid saying what I was thinking. Just as your eyes started to fill, Mark approached. We straightened up fast. ‘What are you two talking about?’ Mark asked, swaying, his breath acrid and hot, so wasted and not even an hour into the party. He touched your boob right there in front of everyone, his beer sloshing over the lip of the cup.
Mark took your arm and you turned away. Jimi Hendrix came on the stereo. I walked over to the plate of crudités on Jeff’s parents’ kitchen table, but they tasted like sawdust. When the song ended, you found me again. ‘Mark wants to go, you said. But he’s…’
You looked at Mark, swaying in the doorway. It was obvious what you were asking-you’d just gotten your permit but didn’t feel comfortable driving Mark’s car yet. This was usually a treat for us-Mark would drink too much at a party, and I’d drive you both home, dropping him off first, making sure he got into his house, sometimes even guiding him to his bedroom. Then you and I would drive for hours, rolling slowly across the bridge, along the winding roads to the woods, past the junkyard and lot of abandoned tires. Talking about everything and nothing, simply being together.
But we both knew there would be no after-hours drive that night. Looking back, if only I’d have ushered Mark into the back bedroom so he could lie down for a while. If only I’d have breathed, put things in perspective. I should have taken your hands and said, ‘I’m sorry. This is great.’ Instead, I rolled my eyes and said, ‘Give me the keys.’ On the way to the car, you said loudly to Mark that you didn’t want to run away and get married anymore, that you wanted to do it right here. You wanted to invite all of Cobalt. Mark threw himself into the backseat, groaning, and you got in the front, next to me. When you stared at me, imploring, I should have stared back, but I gunned the engine hard, gritting my teeth as Mark made a gagging sound. What you’d said in the house throbbed inside of me. The words paraded in front of my eyes, obscuring my vision.
I started down the slick, twisting road. One minute, it was peaceful, dark. The next, there he was, paused right in front of us, blinking in the moonlight. I saw his antlers first, then his broad, brown chest. You screamed. My foot fumbled for the brake. I met the animal’s wet, shiny eyes, and then there was that groan of metal. Things were white and chrome and loud and then quiet. Leaves fluttered to the ground. I came to with my head on the steering wheel. I saw your rose-petal hand first, folded neatly in your lap. The glass from the shattered windshield, shimmering on the dashboard and Naugahyde seats, looked like thousands of diamonds. I thought that I could mount a shard in a gold band and give it to you.
‘Hello?’ I cried out. No one answered.
I saw you once after that. The hospital walls were a sterile green. You were in a gown with faded blue flowers all over it, something you never would’ve worn in real life. I was afraid to touch you. Plenty of other people were there to do it for me. They did all kinds of things to you, tubes in places, bags in others, needles in veins, tape covering up half of you, a metal cage around your head. Did they find tiny Ritz cracker crumbs in your mouth when they tried to breathe for you? Did they remark on the strawberry smell of your hair? What did they do with your charm bracelet? Where did they put your diaphanous, paisley-printed blouse, the one that hid so much?
They say I should write letters to everyone, even those that are difficult to write, even to those to whom letters cannot be sent. But my hands feel like they’re being pulled toward the center of the earth, like they have extra gravitational properties. My thoughts plod like dinosaurs. I’ve had so much done to me in the past few years, so much prodding, so much electricity jolted into my head; and so much of it, I fear, hasn’t really helped. But through it all, I have never forgotten you, nor have I forgotten the secret you and I share forever. I hope you know that I am desperate to always remember. I hope you know I’ll cling to everything about you as hard as I can. Although, I guess you don’t know anything, now. I guess you don’t.
1
She’d been away for just a few days when a biology substitute told my class the most important and wonderful piece of information I’d ever heard.
And then he was pulled out of the classroom forever.
Before this, Mr Rice had been invisible. The blazers he wore to Peninsula Upper School-one of the finest schools in the Brooklyn Heights-to-Park Slope radius, to quote the promotional materials-were never wrinkled, and he always combed his thin, wheat-colored hair into wet-looking lines. There was nothing extracurricular in any of his previous lessons, and with his droning monotone, he made the processes of cell division and photosynthesis and the intricate innards of a paramecium seem far less fascinating than they truly were. But on this particular day, Mr Rice drew a double helix on the board, tapped it with his piece of chalk and said, ‘Everyone, this is what your whole life is all about. It’s all you need to know about anything.’
The class fell silent. ‘DNA makes up everything inside of you,’ he boomed. ‘It determines what you look like and how you think, if you’re going to get sick and whether you’re smart or stupid. All you need to know about yourself is right here in this little molecule. Everything about your future, everything about your past. Nothing else matters, and you can’t change it. It’s passed down, directly, from your parents. You can’t escape your parents and your parents can’t escape you, as hard as either of you might try. You’re tethered to them for life.’
Everyone murmured. Jennifer Lake raised her hand, then put it back down quickly. ‘Even the DNA that may not code for anything,’ Mr Rice went on, his voice swooping up and down, the way a hawk climbs and dives. ‘The stuff that’s called junk DNA. It does code for something-something huge. It codes for the secrets, stuff we never admit to anyone. Once we crack its code, we’ll have the answers to everything, but right now, I think the only beings that understand junk DNA’s secrets are the aliens.’
Mr Rice turned and drew a dish-shaped spaceship on the board. An eggplant-headed alien peeked out the top, and Mr Rice etched a dotted line beaming right to the helix of DNA. The sweat on his forehead reminded me of the beads of water that gathered on the outside of a plastic bottle on a hot day. A couple of boys at the back coughed insults into their fists. But Mr Rice’s words echoed in my mind. This is what your whole life is about. You can’t escape your parents and your parents can’t escape you.
Before this, our school’s principal had missed every other instance of unorthodox teaching, so it was something of a surprise when his face appeared outside the classroom door. Then there was a knock. ‘Everything okay, Mr Rice?’ He stuck his head in. His eyes glided to the slapdash spaceship on the chalkboard.
I stared at the spaceship, too. There were so many things I worried about. I’d always been a worrier-my father said worrying was in our blood. Just one week before, one of my most pressing worries had been that I would drop my set of keys to the apartment onto the subway tracks. I was so obsessed with the precarious danger of it, I flirted with the idea of pitching the keys down there willingly, just to know what would happen. But if I did, I would have to sit on the stoop in front of our apartment building, keyless, until my mother returned home from work. I didn’t want to imagine what she would say, the pinched, disappointed shape her face would take.
I used to worry about the lone gray hairs I often saw sprouting from my mother’s head, terrified that she was showing signs of advanced and debilitating age. When she started to shut herself in the bathroom for hours at a time, talking quietly on the phone, I worried that she was hiding a horrible sickness from the rest of us. I pictured a devastating disease ripping her apart, her skin peeling off in curls, her heart blackening. When we received a catalogue from the Vitamin Shoppe in the mail, I put it by her plate at breakfast, convinced its glossy pages contained a miracle pill. But she pushed the catalogue aside. My father absently flipped through it instead, commenting on the high price of spirulina tablets and chromium picolinate diet pills. In all my what-if scenarios, I never envisioned my father physically ill. The dark hours he spent under the covers were due to something different, not sickness.
What had happened to my family a few days before this was something else entirely-something far bigger than anything I’d even dared to consider. But Mr Rice’s words made me think that maybe I didn’t have to worry about it after all.
The substitute’s shoulders slumped as he walked into the hall with the principal. As soon as the door shut, one of the fist-coughing boys snorted, ‘What a loser.’ Someone threw a balled-up piece of notebook paper at the alien spaceship. One by one, like dominoes falling over, everyone began to talk, to forget. I was the only one who didn’t laugh.
The following day, when my father told me that Claire Ryan and her mother were coming over to visit in a few minutes, I was struck dumb. Just because I was friends with someone a couple years ago didn’t mean we liked each other now. I thought my father understood this.
‘Claire?’ I shrieked. ‘Are you sure? Why?’
‘Her mother wants to talk to me, that’s why,’ my father explained. ‘And she’s bringing Claire because she thought it would be nice for you two to see each other again.’
The doorbell rang. I looked at my father. He was wearing plaid slippers and had the same Pfizer t-shirt he’d been wearing for days. Our house had magazines piled by the fireplace, empty soda bottles on the coffee table, and a crooked, undecorated Christmas tree in the corner, needles all over the floor. It was amazing how messy things could get in just two weeks.
When my father opened the door, Mrs Ryan looked right-perhaps a bit thinner, a little ragged, her blonde hair not as smoothly blow-dried as it used to be-but Claire was different entirely. Her eyes were the same, those blue-green eyes everyone used to be so jealous of. As was her thick blonde hair, the hair she used to toss over her shoulder so effortlessly, and her pretty, bow-shaped mouth, the mouth every boy wanted to kiss. But her cheeks were puffy. The rest of her body was, too.
I couldn’t stop staring. Look at the way her t-shirt clung to her arms! Look at the pink flesh around her neck! I actually gasped, although I tried to pass it off as a hiccup, hitting my chest for effect like I was working something down my esophagus. Everyone knew Claire was back from Paris and her parents were divorcing, but no one knew this.
Mrs Ryan looked at me. ‘Hi, Summer. It’s so nice to see you again.’
She pushed Claire forward. ‘Say hi, Claire.’
‘Hi,’ Claire mumbled.
‘How was France?’ my father cried. ‘You two look great.
Very European.’
He didn’t even notice how different Claire looked. My mother wouldn’t miss something like this.
My father asked me to take Claire to the roof to show her the view of the city, as if Claire hadn’t seen it thousands of times before. Although her view wasn’t from this side of the river anymore-what everyone also knew was that Mr Ryan was retaining his apartment on Pineapple Street in Brooklyn Heights, near us, and Mrs Ryan and Claire were renting a place in a mysterious Manhattan neighborhood called Alphabet City.
‘Go on,’ my father said, making a shooing motion with his hands.
When we reached the roof, Claire looked at the buildings across the East River. Back when we hung out a lot, we had names for each of the buildings we could see from my apartment-the tall pointy one was Lester, the squat one on the harbor was Fred, and the twin towers were Scooby-Doo and Shaggy, the only two characters on the show worth caring about. I glanced at Scooby-Doo-One World Trade-and counted twenty-two flights from the top and three windows over. My mother’s office. I’d never been inside it, but I was certain there was an official-looking name plaque on her desk, Meredith Heller-Davis. The room was still dark. I squinted hard, willing the light to come on.
Claire ran her finger along the edge of the charcoal grill. There was rust on it, but we used to cook out on the roof a lot. All four of us, my mother, father, my brother Steven and me, we would come up here and point at the boats and buildings and eat hamburgers. My father used to bring up a boom box and put on a bunch of old jazz tapes, even though my mother preferred music that, as she put it, ‘actually made sense.’ When it was time to eat, my dad turned his back and whipped up a condiment that he said was his Aunt Stella’s Famous Special Sauce. Once, I remarked that it tasted like nothing but mayo and ketchup mixed, and my mother snorted. ‘Stella probably got the idea from Burger King,’ she said with a laugh. My father chewed his burger. ‘Stella’s a good woman,’ he said stiffly, not that it was in question.
Later, my mother and I would watch the boats on the East River through binoculars, making up stories about some of the yachters. The man in the sailboat named Miss Isabelle still lived on his parents’ estate. The man in the yacht with a naked woman figurehead had made his fortune by patenting the long plastic wand used to separate one person’s groceries from another on the belt-how else could a man with such a tacky comb-over own a boat that big? When it was Steven’s turn with the binoculars, he always aimed them at the buildings across the water, watching the people still in their offices, working. ‘What do you think they’re doing in there?’ he asked out loud on more than one occasion. ‘I bet they’re doing math,’ my mother or I always suggested, struggling to remain straight-faced. Steven’s love of math was an ongoing joke between my mother and me; we were convinced that he slept with his graphing calculator under his pillow.
Claire’s belt was fastened on the very last notch. ‘So my new neighborhood is weird,’ she informed me, as if we’d been talking every day. As if I knew everything about her-which I kind of did. ‘Last night, I saw a man dressed as a woman.’
‘How did you know?’
‘I looked at his arms.’
I’d never been to her new neighborhood before, this mythical Alphabet City. When kids at our school traveled into Manhattan, they went to SoHo to shop, or to the Upper East or West Sides to visit grandparents. No one ventured into the East Village, and definitely not to the avenues with the letters.
The Staten Island ferry chugged away from the west side of the island, spewing a contrast of black oil and crisp white waves behind it. ‘So.’ Claire tapped the top of the grille. ‘What’s new with you?’
‘Not much.’ I kept my eyes on the ferry. ‘Same old, same old.’
Claire curled her hand around a rusted spatula. ‘I heard about your mom.’
A hot fist knotted in my throat. What did everyone know about my family?
Before I could reply, a noise interrupted us. Claire’s mother clomped up to the roof. My father followed. ‘Time to go,’ Mrs Ryan announced.
Claire crossed her arms over her chest. ‘We just got here.’
Mrs Ryan gave her a tight smile. ‘We have a lot of things to do today.’
‘You have a lot of things to do. I don’t.’
‘Well, you have to come with me.’ Mrs Ryan’s expression didn’t falter.
‘I can ride the train by myself.’
‘Seriously. Time to go.’
Claire put her head down. ‘Fuck off.’
My father’s eyes widened. Mine did, too. I’d never heard Claire swear.
Mrs Ryan swallowed, then stood up straighter. ‘Fine.’ She turned around stiffly and started back down the stairs. My dad and I stood there, waiting to see if Claire would move. She didn’t. My father looked blank. He wasn’t good at dealing with things like this.
Claire sighed. ‘Unbelievable,’ she eventually said, and stood up. The doorway down from the roof to our apartment suddenly looked too narrow for her to fit through.
My father and I walked them to the door. We watched them out the window as they marched toward the subway, not talking, not touching. The wind blew, shaking the plastic bags caught in the trees.
‘Did Claire ask you anything about it?’ my father murmured out of the corner of his mouth.
I shrugged. ‘It’s none of her business.’ Or yours, I wanted to add.
‘Claire’s your best friend.’
‘Was. Two years ago. For like a second.’
He jingled loose change in his pockets. ‘It’s okay to talk about it, you know.’
‘I don’t need to talk about it. There’s nothing to talk about.’
He looked at me desperately. The jingling stopped.
‘There isn’t,’ I repeated.
He pressed his thumbs into his eye sockets, breathed out through his mouth, and made a funny choooo noise, like a train pulling into the last station stop and easing on its brakes. Then, he patted my arm, sighed, and went into the kitchen to turn on the TV.
Claire was born one year, one month, and one day before I was. When we were friends for like a second two summers ago, she liked to remind me of this when she held me down and tickled me: ‘I am one year, one month, and one day older than you,’ she would say, ‘so I have full tickling privileges.’
She was going into ninth grade and I was going into eighth. We were forced to be around each other a lot that summer because our mothers, who both worked in the events department of Mandrake & Hester, a high-end private bank, had become best friends and rented a share on Long Beach Island. When my mother told me about it, I panicked. Spend eight weeks at the beach with a girl I didn’t know? I didn’t even like the ocean. And I wasn’t very comfortable with strangers.
My mother wanted me to like Claire-and even more, for Claire to like me-and at the beach, it didn’t seem that hard. Claire’s long, ash-blonde hair became knotted and caked with sand, and her full, pretty lips were constantly coated with Zinc. She wore ratty t-shirts and cut-offs, and she roughhoused, tackling me into the surf. She indulged my need to spy on our mothers, who liked to sunbathe on the beach and read magazines. We had a foolproof system: the lifeguard stand was on a mound by the dunes, and all we had to do was duck behind where the lifeguards hung their towels and our mothers had no idea we were there. They talked about chauvinistic men at the office, places they wished they could visit, the new male teacher at their ballet studio in Tribeca. I waited to see if my mother would talk about me-maybe in a bragging way, hopefully not in an irritated way-but she never did.
In July, our mothers signed us up to be junior counselors at the town’s day camp. Claire was the only person I spoke to and who spoke to me. Everyone loved Claire, though. She could play the guitar, beat anyone in a race across the sand, and she petitioned the camp to let us build a twenty-person ice cream sundae, exhausting the kitchen’s supplies. Three different junior counselor boys had a crush on her, and kids followed her around as if she was made of cake icing.
That fall, I switched from St Martha’s, a private Catholic school in Brooklyn Heights, to Peninsula Upper School, where Claire went. Seventh through ninth graders were in one building, and high-school sophomores through seniors were in another. Claire was the only person I knew who went there, but I certainly didn’t know who Claire was. If I had, I wouldn’t have acted like such a juvenile around her, stealing stacks of orange-yellow 500s from the bank when we played Monopoly, constantly playing the beach house’s Nintendo even though I barely touched our console at home. And I certainly wouldn’t have done that dance when I won the Mega Man Six tournament, the finale of which involved flashing Claire my pink bubble-printed underwear.
On September 3, I barely noticed a tall, beautiful blonde girl climb aboard the school bus. ‘Get your butt over here!’ a guy at the back of the bus screamed at her. Other guys made whooing noises. ‘Where’ve you been all summer, Claire?’ a girl cried.
Claire? I started up, alarmed. The blonde girl in the pink shirt and form-fitted jeans took off her pale sunglasses. There were those familiar blue-green eyes, that lush, pink mouth, but her hair was so smooth, her clothes so brand-new. She whipped her head around, as if looking for someone. I slumped down in the seat and pretended to be fascinated by my lunch, a cold can of Coke that had sweated through the brown paper lunch bag, a smushed PB&J, crammed into a Ziploc. Finally, Claire walked to the back and fell into a seat with one of the girls.
‘Anyone sitting here?’ asked an Indian boy who I would later learn was named Vishal. My hand was still saving the empty seat next to the aisle for Claire. I curled it away into my lap and squeezed myself as close to the window as I could.
When the bus pulled up to our school on Lincoln Street, I stood up, but Vishal grabbed my sleeve. ‘I think we’re supposed to let them off first,’ he said, in his loopy I-didn’t-grow-up-here accent. And there they came, Claire among them, shoving each other and laughing, all of them with clear skin and hiking backpacks even though there was nowhere around to hike.
Claire noticed me cowering behind Vishal. ‘Summer!’ She stopped short, holding up the line in back of her. ‘When did you get on?’
‘I was here,’ I said quietly. ‘I got on before you.’
‘Claire, c’mon!’ A girl behind her shoved her playfully.
But Claire didn’t move. ‘I didn’t see you.’ She seemed honestly sad.
‘I was here.’ My voice sounded pathetic. Claire noticed, too; her lip stuck out in a pout.
The next day, she made a big point to sit with me on the bus. The day after that, too. The whole time, she was up on her knees facing the back of the bus, laughing with them. ‘Just go back there,’ I said on the third day, pressing my body against the cold, drafty window, my knees curled up to my stomach because I’d stupidly chosen the bus seat above the wheel.
‘No, it’s okay.’ Claire moved her knees to the front. ‘So what’s been going on with you? Are you liking school? Wasn’t I right-isn’t it easy to find your way around?’
‘I’m busy reading this,’ I snapped, staring at the oral report schedule for my American History class. I was to give a report about the Gettysburg Address on November 14, more than two months away.
‘Summer.’ Claire wore shiny lip gloss. Her earrings were dangling silver pears.
‘Just go.’
Claire shrugged, then monkey-barred from seat to seat, listing sideways when the bus went over bumps. Maybe I should’ve told her to stay and sit with me. Maybe I should’ve asked why she hadn’t suggested that we both go back and sit with them. But I was afraid what the answer might be-what fatal flaw of mine prevented her from introducing me around. I told myself I was being charitable, a real friend, letting her go off there alone. I’d given her a gift.
By the time the end of the year rolled around, if Claire and I passed each other in an empty hall, all she might say was, ‘Steal any Monopoly money lately?’ I hated her by then. I’d begun to blame Claire for everything that was going wrong-that, two weeks before, I had woken up and realized I’d peed in the bed. That a window in our front room had been broken, and my father asked my mother to call to have it replaced but she argued that he had fingers, he could call to have it replaced, and it still wasn’t replaced because they were at some sort of standoff, and there was still a huge crack in the window, sloppily sealed up with duct tape. That I would probably die an old maid without ever kissing a boy. That my father had begun to spend whole Saturdays in bed, and that my mother didn’t take me shopping anymore.
One late May afternoon, I was in keyboarding class, typing line after line of the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. Two girls in the front row leaned close together. ‘Claire Ryan is moving to France,’ one whispered to the other. ‘They’re taking the Concorde.’
I typed a whole line of nonsense so it seemed like I wasn’t listening. France?
I found out later-not from Claire-that her father had taken a position at his company’s Paris office. They had rented a three-bedroom apartment in someplace called Montmartre. I wanted to ask Claire about it, or wish her well, or tell her good riddance, but so many people always surrounded her, all the way up to the very end, that I never had the chance.
The excited chatter that Claire was returning from France had started a few weeks ago. Claire hadn’t told anyone the news herself, but someone’s father worked with Mr Ryan and had found out the details. Claire would be attending Peninsula again, but she would be in tenth grade with me, not eleventh. People nudged Devon Reyes, Claire’s old boyfriend, saying that Claire had probably learned a few tricks, living in a country that was so obsessed and open about sex. And me? I didn’t have any reaction to the news, and no one asked me for comment. The time we were friends felt as far away as my birth.
But it surprised me that Mr and Mrs Ryan were getting a divorce-Claire had never seemed worried about her parents’ marriage. After Mrs Ryan and Claire left our apartment, I followed my father into the kitchen. ‘Perhaps Mrs Ryan just needs a private vacation,’ I called out to him, as if we’d been dissecting the Ryans’ divorce for hours. ‘You know, some time to herself. And then, after a while, she’ll move back into the Pineapple Street apartment, and everything will be fine. It’s probably what all couples need, I bet.’
My father looked at me for a long time. His eyes were watery. ‘Maybe,’ he said, eating from a bag of pretzels, letting loose salt fall to the floor. He tried to laugh, but it came out as more of a sniffle.
2
The night after Claire came over, my father declared we had nothing to eat in the house, which wasn’t an exaggeration. We hadn’t gotten the hang of shopping for ourselves yet. But now that we were on our own, we could go out to dinner wherever we wanted, which usually meant Grimaldi’s.
Grimaldi’s was this pizza place down under the Brooklyn Bridge. The pizza was so good that people lined up on the streets for a table. My mother hated eating there because the tablecloths were checkerboard, there were too many children, and they only served pizza for dinner. She hated that all the tables had wobbly legs, and that the wine specials were on a little card-stand next to a pot of fake flowers. As my father, brother, and I piled into the little dining room, I tried to see Grimaldi’s imperfections through her eyes; I scoffed at the place’s paltry selection of sodas, offering Pepsi instead of Coke. I sneered at the paper napkins. That awkward autumn when Claire was pretending she was still my friend, she came here with my family. Just as we were sitting down in a booth, Claire spotted some of the girls from the bus across the room, sans parents, sharing a basket of mozzarella sticks. Claire waved at them enthusiastically, but I shrank down in my seat. ‘Why aren’t you waving?’ my mother hissed. I shrugged; Claire pretended not to hear. Later, I heard my parents talking in the kitchen. ‘Summer should have more girlfriends,’ my mother said in a low voice. ‘Does it matter?’ my father answered. My mother murmured something I couldn’t hear.
I caught a glimpse of Claire this morning in the courtyard at school, just as I was dashing outside to the breakfast cart to get coffees for the popular girls in my first-period French class. Claire was talking to Melissa Green, one of her old friends. Melissa had a frozen, terrified smile on her face, trying to focus only on Claire’s eyes and not the rest of her body. When Claire said goodbye and turned away, Melissa’s expression twisted. She ran back to a gaggle of waiting girls and they started whispering.
‘So what do you think Mom’s doing right now?’ I asked my father as our Grimaldi’s waitress took our order and trudged away.
‘I don’t know, honey,’ my father said wearily.
‘You should try and call her,’ I suggested.
‘She’ll call when she’s ready.’
‘Mom probably wants you to call,’ I said. ‘She could be surrounded by younger guys, wherever she is. She could get tempted, just like Mrs Ryan was tempted by that younger French man.’
My father set down his fork. Even Steven, who had been poring over advanced calculus problem sets-he was a freshman at New York University, but lived in our apartment instead of the dorms-looked up with mild interest. ‘Excuse me?’ my father sputtered.
I repeated what I’d heard from the girls in French class. ‘She had an affair with a younger Frenchman from their local boulangerie. Claire caught them. And that’s why she’s so fat: she ate to console herself. It makes perfect sense.’
‘That’s ridiculous.’ My father looked aghast. ‘And Claire’s not fat. She looks fine.’
‘Fine?’ I echoed. ‘Fine?’
He sighed wearily and excused himself to the bathroom, squeezing down the narrow hall next to the brick oven, which was covered almost entirely with black-and-white snapshots of scowling old women in aprons. My mother once remarked that it was disgusting how many people in New York City-in the whole of America, really-were getting so fat. My father retorted that obesity sometimes wasn’t someone’s fault. What about genetics? What about depression? And my mother sighed and said, ‘Honestly, Richard, what would you do without me? You can’t go telling Summer being fat is okay!’
I wanted to call my mother right now and tell her that I would never, ever believe being fat was okay. And if only she’d seen me doling out coffees to the French class girls in the courtyard this morning-there were such grateful smiles on their faces, and we’d all walked to French class together in a happy, laughing clump. She could’ve dropped by the school; other parents did it all the time. That’s my daughter, she would’ve thought, if she’d have seen me. And maybe her mind would’ve changed about us-about everything-just like that.
When I came home from school the next day, my brother was sitting at the kitchen table. He was always parked at the table doing math, even though he could’ve used NYU’s facilities instead. His glasses made his eyes look enormous.
‘Did anyone call?’ I asked.
‘Nope.’ He didn’t raise his head.
My smile drooped a little. I continued to stare at Steven until he finally looked up. ‘What?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Then go somewhere else!’ Steven had my mother’s angular face, but we both shared my dad’s oversized nose. When we were little-when Steven and I were sort of friends-we started a secret club called The Schnoz. Our father mystified us both back then, with his brilliant white lab coat and all his tics-the specific pastries for breakfast, the long runs often at night, the dark, dreary moods that would come over him like a thick wool blanket. We decided that he was secretly a superhero, a mix between a mad scientist and a stealthy GI Joe-Steven was obsessed with the military. Our club mostly consisted of spying on my father while he watched television in the den, looking for superhero clues. But then, Steven turned ten and announced that if he didn’t win a Nobel Prize by the age of 20, he was going to enlist in the Special Forces. My father laughed and reminded Steven how clumsy he was-he’d probably shoot himself in the hand while trying to clean his gun. The Schnoz disbanded pretty much after that.
When he got older, Steven went to Stuyvesant High, the smart math and science school in the city. My mother didn’t ask if I wanted to take the test to go to Stuyvesant. My parents had a huge argument about it-my father said Stuyvesant was the best place for me, but my mother insisted that Peninsula was better because it encouraged the liberal arts. ‘But she’s not interested in liberal arts!’ my father bellowed. ‘She likes science! She won three elementary and middle school science fairs at St Martha’s!’ My mother rolled her eyes. ‘We should let Summer choose for herself,’ my father bargained. ‘She’s going to Peninsula,’ my mother said. ‘End of story.’
Even though my father was right-I wasn’t that into art or history or English-I liked Peninsula fine. And anyway, girls who went to Stuyvesant were nerds who never got boyfriends. Everyone knew that.
‘Do you want a soda?’ I asked Steven, turning for the fridge.
‘No.’
‘We still have the orange stuff Mom bought for you.’
‘Mmm.’ His pencil made soft scratching sounds against the paper.
‘It looks like you’re running out, though. But Mom will probably be back in time to buy a new case.’
He kept writing. Steven had hardly said a word about her since she’d left, so I didn’t know what I thought I was going to achieve, fishing. Steven had hardly spoken to her anyway, except to ask if she could wash a load of his whites. He probably didn’t even care that she was gone. Although, was that possible? Yes, she and Steven were very different-she was so glamorous-but Steven had to have some thoughts about it. Just one teensy feeling, somewhere.
‘Summer, there you are.’ My father appeared in the doorway. ‘I have a favor to ask you.’
He led me to the living room, and we sat down on the couch. ‘Mrs Ryan just called. She wanted to know if I could tutor Claire in biology.’
I stiffened, surprised. I’d looked for Claire at school today but hadn’t seen her anywhere. ‘You said no, right?’
‘I said I was too busy.’
I tried not to laugh. Lately, my father’s version of busy was piling magazines for recycling and watching the home shopping channels-he liked the old people that called in. He probably hadn’t even gone to the lab all week.
My father picked up one of the little plastic figurines from the toy ski slope he’d bought on a trip to Switzerland. It came with four little Swiss skiers, each with a blanked-out, stoic Swiss expression. Steven had been obsessed with the ski slope when my parents brought it home, but it had become more of a Christmas decoration. Last night, on the walk home from dinner, there were suddenly fairy lights on our neighbors’ banisters and Christmas trees in their front windows. It made our naked, untended-to tree in the living room seem so obviously neglected, so I went down to our basement storage space, found the Christmas box, and brought everything up myself-the ornaments, the Santa knick-knacks, the ski slope, even old holiday photos of all of us unwrapping Christmas gifts, my father inevitably wearing a gift-wrap bow on the top of his head. The stuff wasn’t that heavy. And it was sort of fun to decorate on my own.
‘Perhaps you’d like to tutor Claire instead,’ my father suggested.
I shook my head. ‘I’m kind of busy, too.’
He rubbed his hand over his smooth chin. ‘Busy with what?’
I didn’t answer.
‘Well, I’ve already set it up,’ he breezed on. ‘She’s coming over in ten minutes.’
‘Dad.’
He placed the plastic skier at the top of the hill and let go. The skier zipped down. My father caught him at the bottom, tweezed his little plastic head between his thumb and pointer finger, and guided him back up the side of the slope, simulating a chairlift. He made a brrr sound with his lips, impersonating a motor.
When I was down in the basement getting all the ornaments and stuff, an invitation fluttered out from a box. It was for a Christmas party at Claire’s house from that first year I’d attended Peninsula. The night of the party, my mother asked why I wasn’t getting ready. When I said I’d rather watch the Christmas marathon on TV-they were playing Rudolph, Frosty, and The Year Without a Santa Claus back-to-back, a stellar lineup-my mother blew her bangs off her face. ‘It’s not a crime Claire has other friends,’ she chided. ‘It wouldn’t kill you to be friends with them, too.’
As if it had been my decision. As if I’d orchestrated things that way.
The doorbell rang. Mrs Ryan stood in the hall. ‘Claire’s down at the deli,’ she said, walking right in. ‘Thank you so much for doing this, sweetie. It’s a huge help.’
I grumbled tonelessly.
‘Is your dad home?’ She looked around. ‘He invited me over for coffee, but I wasn’t sure if he was mixed up, since it’s so early. I didn’t think he’d be back from work yet.’
I felt a flush of embarrassment. ‘He had a half-day.’
Mrs Ryan walked into the foyer, smiling at our family pictures on the wall, many of them over ten years old. She reached into her pocket and pulled out a disposable camera. It was covered in green paper, and there was a picture of a woman and a little kid, probably meant to be her daughter, sitting on the edge of a motorboat, smiling so blissfully that their teeth gleamed blue-white. ‘Fun Saver’, the camera was called.
I pointed at it. ‘My mother uses those, too. But she also has a Nikon. That’s probably what she’s using for her trip.’
Mrs Ryan advanced the camera slowly. ‘How are you holding up, Summer?’
‘I’m great. Really excited for Christmas.’
‘Your mother…’ Mrs Ryan shook her head. ‘It’s so unexpected. I mean, I just talked to her a month or so ago. She gave no indication…’
I stared her down. ‘She’s on a trip. No big deal.’
Mrs Ryan blinked hard, as if she’d just run smack into a wall without noticing it was there.
‘I mean, it’s not even worth talking about,’ I went on. ‘Like, not to Claire or anything. She probably has enough on her mind anyway, right?’
Mrs Ryan shifted her weight. Then, she peered into the hall. ‘Oh. Here we are, honey.’ She gestured Claire inside.
Claire wore a heavy blue polo shirt and a long black crinkle skirt. The elastic band stretched hard against her waist. There was a blossom of acne around her mouth. Before she left, Claire’s skin was clear and glowing. Maybe France poisoned her.
‘How about I get a picture of you two?’ Mrs Ryan suggested, holding the Fun Saver to her face. ‘The friends reunited.’
Claire rolled her eyes. ‘God, Mom. No.’
‘Come on. Just one. Stand together.’
There was a frozen beat. Finally, I took a step to Claire. We used to pose for pictures with our arms thrown around each other, our tongues stuck out. Now, it felt like the corners of my mouth were being held down by lead weights. Claire gave off a heated radiance, as if shame had a temperature. There was a fluttering sound. When the flash went off, bright, burnt spots appeared in front of my eyes.
‘Beautiful.’ Mrs Ryan advanced the film and placed the camera on the little table in the hall. Claire and I shot apart fast.
My father emerged, saying, ‘Hi Liz’, and that he’d put a pot of coffee on. The adults migrated toward the kitchen. Suddenly, I didn’t want my father hanging around Mrs Ryan. Sometimes he gave up too much of himself. And Mrs Ryan was tainted with marital strife. Some of it might somehow rub off on him, like a grass stain.
Claire disappeared down the hall to the bathroom, but I stayed where I was, glowering at the Fun Saver on the hall table. I wanted to tear off the wrapping and rip it into thousands of pieces. I slid the camera into my pocket. If Mrs Ryan asked, I would tell her I had no idea where it went.
I found Claire standing in my bedroom doorway. Her eyes swept over the piles of clothes in the corner and the holiday trees and singing Santa Clauses on my dresser-I had Christmasized my room as well. ‘I forgot how big your room was,’ she said after a pause. ‘My room on Avenue A is so small. And my room in Paris was even smaller.’
There was a flowered bra on the floor, the kind that hooked in the front. I noticed a gray flannel nightgown, too, the one with the kitten silk-screened across the chest. A speech bubble above the kitten said, ‘I love to sleep’. I stood on top of it.
‘So,’ I muttered. ‘Biology?’
Claire shrugged. ‘Sure, if you want.’
‘So what’s the deal? Didn’t you take it last year?’
‘Yeah. But I totally sucked at it.’
But you used to be so good at everything, I wanted to say.
I looked around my room and realized there was nowhere for us both to sit. This probably would’ve made more sense at the kitchen table. Finally, I pulled my chair over to the bed, and Claire sat down. I plopped on the bed, pulled my biology book out of my bag, and opened it. ‘How far behind are you?’
‘I got lost around cells and genetics.’ Claire sat very upright in the chair, her hands folded in her lap.
‘Because it was in French?’ I asked.
‘No.’
Because you’re fat? I pictured fat clogging up her brain, impairing her memory.
I flipped to the start of the genetics chapter. Claire leaned over and tapped a drawing of a tightly wound coil of DNA. ‘I heard a Peninsula sub freaked out about genetics on Monday.’
I raised an eyebrow. ‘Kind of. I was in the class.’
‘What happened?’
‘It was this guy, Mr Rice. He was subbing for Mrs Hewes -she’s on maternity leave. He told us that DNA is magnetic. We’re stuck with our parents, and they’re stuck with us, whether we like it or not. DNA can explain everything we do, except we’re too stupid to understand that yet. Only the aliens can understand it.’
‘Aliens?’ Claire giggled. ‘Even my teachers in France weren’t that messed up.’
‘He didn’t seem messed up, really.’ I clutched a pillow close to my chest, curling away from Claire. ‘Maybe our school is just being narrow-minded.’
Claire stared at me. ‘You believe him?’
‘I just think it’s an interesting theory. I don’t believe the part about the aliens.’
She shifted positions, moving closer. ‘So why do you think it’s interesting?’ Her tone of voice was curious but delicate. It was the same voice she’d used when we were friends, as if I were the most fascinating person in the world.
After a thoughtful moment, Claire added, ‘Is it because you like the idea of everything happening for a reason? Or that, if you looked hard enough, you’d be able to understand why people do the stuff that they do? Like why they go away without telling you where they’re going?’
If she said one more thing, I would punch her puffy face. I would point out that she wasn’t one to talk-she’d found her mother fooling around with that young Frenchman, after all. I pictured Claire throwing open the double doors to her parents’ bedroom, seeing Mrs Ryan and the boulangerie baker tangled in bed together, the sheets on the floor. The baker was wearing a black beret and nothing else. The soles of his bare feet were dirty, and so were his hands.
Claire pressed her lips together coyly. Even in her current state, she could be her old self with me-the one who always said, It’s okay. You can tell me. I’ll still like you. But she didn’t like me in the end, did she? She didn’t let me into her world; there was something horribly wrong with me. Maybe it was an obvious thing, something a lot of people saw.
Still, I thought about the thing bumping around inside of me. The thing I was afraid to admit, even to myself. Part of me wanted to tell her. Part of me needed someone to tell.
‘Do you remember when we used to roll down the hill in the park?’ Claire asked quietly.
I bit my lip hard, startled. ‘We used to have races.’
‘Rolling races.’ Claire made a small smile. ‘That was fun.’
‘And we used to play a lot of Monopoly,’ I said, as if just recalling.
‘You were always the guy on the horse.’
‘And you were always the shoe.’
‘And I used to tickle you.’ Claire giggled.
‘I hated that.’
‘C’mon. It was so much fun.’ Claire looked thoughtful, then wily, almost like she was considering tickling me right then. She moved toward me. In anticipation, I moved back on the bed and jerked my foot away quickly, sideswiping the softness of her stomach. It felt substantial and…mushy.
Claire jumped back and crossed her arms over the spot on her stomach that I’d kicked. I tucked my foot underneath the bed skirt. ‘Sorry.’
‘I was just getting my highlighter,’ Claire mumbled. It had fallen on the floor; she reached down for it. At that moment, the holiday tree came on. It was on a timer, playing a different Christmas song every fifteen minutes. This time, it was Perry Como singing ‘Mistletoe and Holly’. Claire and I both jumped.
The mood changed fast, from light to awkward. Claire sat back down and we went through the rest of the biology chapter on genetics and then I took her through cells. She got it right away, which made me wonder if she’d really failed biology at all. I duly explained mitochondria, the nucleus and vacuoles, evolution and natural selection, the chemical composition of proteins and carbohydrates. I left out fats on purpose. Claire pretended not to notice.
When my father was young, he was in a car accident. He and his friends were driving home from a party, and they were going down a twisty road and hit a deer. This was when my father lived in western Pennsylvania.
It felt like a story I’d learned in history class, repeated again and again each year. My father’s friend’s name was Mark, and Mark’s girlfriend’s name was Kay. Kay was sitting in the front passenger seat. The car crashed in such a way that her side was crumpled, but Mark and my father were unharmed. My father got out of the car and saw the deer, dead and bloody on the ground. Then he ran over to Kay’s side and took one look at her and passed out. He woke up later in the hospital. Kay was in a coma. Later, she died.
My father brought it up at the oddest of times. The last time he talked about it, we were walking into the Village Vanguard jazz club-I was the only one in the family who would go there with him. ‘I basically saw the girlfriend of my best friend die,’ he whispered, just as an older black man hobbled onstage to the piano. ‘Sometimes I think about how different my life would have been if that accident hadn’t happened.’
Different how? He wouldn’t have gone to Penn State or met my mother? He had been a senior, and my mother had been a freshman. They’d met in line at one of the university’s dining halls. But my mother paid my father no attention. Even though he was handsome, he had a strange accent. He was from a part of Pennsylvania that people from the Philadelphia area shunned.
My father won my mother over with persistence. There were gaps in the story; next, it jumped to the part about my mom getting pregnant with Steven. My father was in med school by then. He’d gotten an offer to intern at the NYU Downtown Hospital. My mother, who was fascinated with New York, dropped out of her sophomore year of college, moved to New York with my father, and had Steven.
I once asked my mom if she and dad would’ve been friends in high school. ‘Probably,’ my dad said right away. ‘I was well liked back then.’
Behind her hand, my mother shook her head. When my father left the room, she said, ‘We grew up in very different places.’
My father was a collector. He collected fossils, bugs preserved in blobs of amber, ships in bottles, and snow globes. ‘I like things that are trapped,’ he explained. ‘Too many things leave us forever.’ He even had a way of trapping memories-every time we got a ticket from a parking garage, he wrote a few details about where we’d parked and where we’d been and what we’d seen on the back of the stub. He did this with drycleaning slips, movie-ticket stubs, restaurant receipts, throwing it all in a big leather box at the foot of the bed. ‘All of these things are important,’ he said. ‘We’ll want to be reminded of it later.’ He’d been doing it the whole time I’d been alive.
Sometimes, when my father spent whole weekends in bed, I crawled in with him, and we watched cartoons. My father laughed at them as much as I did. When I got out of bed, he stayed, but I still thought I’d accomplished something. ‘Mom thinks you’re being lazy,’ I said to him once, not that long ago. ‘I’m not lazy,’ he answered, ‘I’m just sad.’
He got sad a lot. Once, my father started crying in a line at the movie theater, putting his face in his hands and shaking. My mother made him go around the corner to an alley because everyone was staring at us, wondering what was wrong. I thought I should go after him, but my mother grabbed my arm. ‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘He’ll be fine.’
‘What’s he crying about?’ I asked.
My mother just shrugged and rolled her eyes. ‘It’s so embarrassing,’ she hissed. ‘I don’t know why he can’t just pull himself together. But it’s like he can’t help it.’
I wanted her to explain. What was so embarrassing? Crying? Feeling? Should I be angry at him, too? The movie posters blurred in front of my eyes. When it was our turn to buy tickets, we bought three, one for me, one for my mother, and one for my father. We waited for him to return from the alley, and then we went in the theater together.
Last Friday, when I came home from school, I found my father sitting at the kitchen table, looking at an envelope. His name was written on the front in my mother’s handwriting. She’d made the R in Richard very big, but the letters got smaller and smaller, descending into almost nothing. The d at the end wasn’t much bigger than a pencil point.
‘What’s that?’ I asked.
‘Nothing.’ He covered it up with his hand.
We went to the ice cream parlor on the Promenade despite it being early December and cold. My father, well over six feet tall, towered over everyone else in the little shop. He was wearing the black wool overcoat my mother had bought for him. His face was clean-shaven, his thick, light brown hair combed off his forehead. He bought me an espresso milkshake, which I loved, even though they made me twitch. We sat in a little booth in the back, and he ate a whole scoop of butter pecan before he told me that Mom had gone on a work trip. She’d probably be back in a week or so; in the meantime, could I help him keep the house clean?
I said sure, no problem. I’d been helping keep the house clean for the past few months anyway, ever since my mother’s job had become more demanding. But I could tell there was something more. It was so easy to tell when my father was lying-his cheeks got very pink, and it looked like he was literally holding something in, like a sneeze. ‘Okay, okay, Mom isn’t on a trip,’ he blurted out, as if I’d harshly interrogated him. ‘She’s gone.’
His facial features seemed scrambled, like those tile puzzles where you have to move the pieces around to make a coherent picture. ‘What do you mean, gone?’ I asked.
He blotted his eyes with his sticky ice cream cone napkin. ‘She wrote a letter. But it wasn’t very clear.’
I felt an uneasy stab and let out a whimper. ‘No, Summer, please don’t cry,’ he said desperately. ‘I don’t know what to do.’
He bent over until his head touched the top of the table. His shoulders shook up and down. A few minutes went by, and he didn’t stop. ‘Dad?’ I touched his shoulder. ‘Come on.’
‘I just don’t know why this happened,’ he blubbered.
By this time, a horrible feeling was sloshing through me. I thought of the things I’d done wrong, all my shortcomings. This could be because of me. Because of something I wasn’t.
But I couldn’t have my father sitting in the ice cream shop, bawling. ‘Dad.’ I took him underneath the arm and pulled him up. ‘She’s probably just…overworked. I saw it on Oprah. People in this country get only ten days of vacation, but people in Europe get thirty. She probably went somewhere where there aren’t any ringing phones.’ It poured from inside me. When I finished, I reviewed what I’d just said, not sure if it made any sense.
He raised his chin. Some old ladies in the next booth over were staring. ‘Do you think?’ my father asked, his face red and wet.
‘Yes.’ I said it so confidently, I almost convinced myself.
My father ran his hand over his hair. ‘Jesus, Summer.’ He bumped into me, hugging my head to his. ‘I’m sorry I just did that. That’s the last thing you want to see, huh? Your crazy old dad, losing it in the ice cream parlor?’
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