Every Other Weekend(37)

“You’ll what? Move slower?”

Jeremy lunged to his feet. “You want me to knock you out right now?”

“I want you to fix the tire so we can go. Where was I not clear about that?”

The socket wrench—I think it was a socket wrench, it was pathetic that I wasn’t sure—clanked against the asphalt as Jeremy threw it down. “Do it yourself then.”

However little Jeremy knew about changing a flat tire—and it was a very little—it was still light-years beyond what I knew. I stared at the socket wrench. Then I stared at my brother. I repeated this process several times before he made a sound of disgust and squatted down in front of the tire again.

“You’re worthless, you know that?”

I did kind of know that. I didn’t bother with a response. Instead I watched my brother struggle to change a tire for probably the first time in his life. There was nothing especially heartwarming about the sight. Squatted down, his jeans dipped low in the back, revealing plenty of butt crack. He was also grunting and swearing under his breath as he wrestled with one of the lug nuts—a term I was mostly confident I had right. But I felt angry heat sear through me.

“Why didn’t Dad teach us this? Why didn’t he make sure you knew something this basic before you got your license?”

Jeremy shook his head and forced a laugh. “You don’t know when to quit, do you?” He looked up at me, and the pissed-off smile left his lips. I wasn’t ragging on him that time, and he knew it. “I don’t know. Maybe he forgot. Or maybe he didn’t have time. It’s not like we were having a party when I turned sixteen.”

All our holidays and birthdays since Greg died had been somber affairs. Without him, celebrating was the last thing any of us had felt like doing.

“Did you see Mom before we left?” I asked.

Jeremy’s hands stilled on the lug nut he’d gone back to loosening. He said nothing.

“Did you?”

“Yeah, I saw her.” He made a grunting noise as he continued forcing the bolts free.

“And?”

“And what?” Jeremy got to his feet and kicked the tire. “Damn thing’s rusted tight.”

I lowered the flashlight to my side. “Did you say anything to her?”

“Of course I did.”

“What did you say?”

Jeremy turned, first his head and then the rest of him, to face me. “What was I supposed to say? ‘Hey, Mom, please don’t spend the weekend wrapping Christmas presents for your dead son like you did last year’?”

I swung the flashlight beam up to his face and then dropped it when he didn’t bother to shield his eyes.

Jeremy finished changing the tire. Not once did he have to remind me about the light.

Without asking, Jeremy blasted the heater when we got back in the car. Stopping at the next light, Jeremy flexed his hands on the steering wheel, the red glow of the traffic light illuminating a streak of grease running across his knuckles. When a cursory search for something to wipe them with turned up nothing, he dragged the back of his hand on his jeans.

“We should be with Mom.”

“We were,” Jeremy said. “And now we’ll be with Dad tonight.”

I shook my head. “That’s wrong and you know it.”

“What’s wrong is the way you’re treating Dad. When are you going to grow up?”

“The way I’m treating Dad? Me? What the hell is wrong with you? Mom is in that house all alone right now, and Dad—”

“And Dad is alone all the time. Why don’t you care about that?”

I forced my head to turn to the window before I did something stupid like punch my brother while we were going fifty miles per hour. Maybe when we slowed down.

“You need to ease up on Dad. He’s not doing real well. You’d know that if you spent any time with him.”

“Who do you think helped him with the lights, huh?”

“Yeah, and then you didn’t say a word to him all Sunday.”

“If he hadn’t left, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation.”

Jeremy shook his head. “You keep doing that. Think about what it’s like for him. What it’s been like since Greg died. She can’t let go.”

“She’s supposed to let go when we keep leaving her alone like this?”

“I don’t know. But it wasn’t Dad’s idea to leave.”

“It wasn’t Mom’s.”

“No, it was both of them. They decided together. However mad you are at him for leaving, you better be just as mad at her.”

I squeezed my eyes shut. None of it made sense to me, but Dad leaving, even if he was agreeing with Mom, was wrong. It was so obvious after these past few months that she wasn’t coping with Dad being gone. She was crumbling before our eyes each time Jeremy and I left. If Dad was any kind of man, he’d have seen that. Jeremy knew it as well as I did.

“Dad’s alone because he’s a coward. Mom’s alone because she married one.”

I wanted to feel satisfied when Jeremy didn’t have a response, but I wasn’t.





   Jolene

I couldn’t tell you how long I spent waiting for Adam in the lobby, but it was full dark outside—and not from the weather—when I finally saw his brother’s car. I was aware of how pathetic I looked, waiting there for him, but I didn’t care enough to pretend that I’d been doing anything besides waiting. For him.