In Your Dreams (Falling #4)(2)
“Yeah, well, everybody’s got one. Just putting mine to good use,” I say.
My mom rushes in behind her at the sound of my voice.
“Casey? Case? Oh…uh…wow…” She’s fidgety and nervous, and she’s waving a spoon covered in batter in her hand. I bet she’s making her own cake. I quirk a brow at my sister over my mom’s shoulder as we embrace, the dripping spoon held far over my back. Christina invited me to join her and my other sisters for lunch today, so I’m not sure why me being here is a surprise.
“It’s your birthday, and I figured…you know…since Dad won’t be home for a while, I’d…come for this lunch that Christina arranged?” I hand her the flowers, and she pulls them against her chest, her eyes flitting to and away from me in one-second intervals.
“Oh, right. Yes, thank you,” she says, glancing to my sister and then back down to the daisies.
What the hell?
Mom has always been okay with me sneaking in to see her without Dad. At least, that’s how we’ve managed the last year. I see her when she stops in at my sisters’ houses, or when she’s out on lunch errands. Always alone or without him. She doesn’t hold the grudge for me walking my own path; she just doesn’t stick up for me when my dad gets involved in my life. And I get it—he doesn’t make it easy to argue.
He doesn’t listen.
I follow her and my sister down the hallway to the kitchen and pull out a stool to sit at the counter. I glance at my sister, who just shrugs and busies herself with texting or emailing on her phone. Christina’s always working—clients, cases, opinions, making partner. That world—it’s so full of status climbing and proving oneself to other people. I could see that in my parents’ lives, too, even when I was little.
Sure, I have some fond memories from the late nights when it was one of my sisters putting a series of frozen dinners in the microwave, and we’d all climb in front of the television to eat. When I was seven or eight, those nights seemed like fun. But a thousand nights later—when I was eleven—the good vibes were replaced with a sort of abandoned kind of feeling. My sisters had their own lives, the oldest two—Christina and Myra—gone, and Marie and Annalissa wanted little to do with a pre-teen boy. I heated up my own dinners. And if I didn’t understand my homework, I went to my best friend Houston’s house, where his dad would sit at the table with the both of us and make sure we knew our fractions and understood decimals. Hell, any engineering skills I might have in my blood are really thanks to that man.
By the time I started high school, I hardly even remembered dinner with my sisters. Dinners with my parents were fictional—something I tried not to envy others for. I came home to an empty house, and I’d been trained not to even bother mentioning events in my life to my parents when we passed one another in the kitchen in the mornings—like shift changes. My senior year, I was crowned homecoming king. To this day, I don’t think my mother knows. At some point, I just didn’t want to tell her, because I could tell it would make her feel bad. Of the two of them, she was always the one who felt guilty for missing out on family time.
I didn’t bother to walk for graduation, either. Nobody from my family could come; so I figured there wasn’t much point to spending a hundred dollars on a polyester cap and gown not a single relative would see me in. I convinced my dad that it was a better investment to give me the cash he would have spent on my graduation package and put it toward my college books and fees. I used his practical logic against him, and he gave me the money that Saturday afternoon when I told him I was heading to the college book store to get a “jump on scouting out my textbooks for the next year.” Instead, I bought a hundred dollars’ worth of cheap beer and got wasted with my best friends in an alley behind the mini-mart to celebrate the end of our young-adult lives.
My dad would say that I never fully grew up. I just didn’t grow up like him.
It’s awkwardly quiet now, and I’m a little peeved I hurried over here since my other sisters haven’t even arrived yet. Seems I’m not really late for anything.
“So,” I start, gripping the front of the stool between my legs while I hunch my shoulders and lift myself slightly in the seat. I’m so uncomfortable here. I always am.
My mom rinses off the spoon, dropping it in a soaking bowl in the sink. I can smell chocolate cake baking.
“The flowers are lovely. Thank you so much. You’re a good boy,” my mom says, a little more like her normal self. She dries her hands on a towel and steps over to me, kissing my cheek as her hand cups the other side of my face.
“It’s your birthday. You know I’d never miss it,” I smile. Her gaze lingers on me for a minute along with her palm, and in that small space, she almost looks like she might cry.
“Mom, you know I would come more often. But he’s made it clear—” I start to walk through my usual diatribe about how stubborn my father is and how much I refuse to give in, when all is interrupted by the man himself.
The sound of his throat clearing comes first, followed by the shutting of the front door. I’d sprint for the back door, but he’s likely already taken in my piece-of-shit car out front. I rub my forehead and stand from my stool, pushing it back in place—exactly how I found it. I fish my keys from my pocket and have the car key poised between my thumb and finger by the time he enters the kitchen.