Hope and Other Punch Lines(19)



“Where’s Mom?” I ask.

“Still sleeping, I guess,” he says.

My parents divorced when I was too young to question much beyond the story they told me: they still loved each other, and of course me—that was repeated over and over again—but they thought it best if they started living in different houses. Through the years, I’ve cobbled together more information. Like everything else in my life, it seems their divorce circles back to 9/11. My mother wanted to reorient their lives to helping the families of the victims, to heed what she saw as a wake-up call and a chance to find meaning in tragedy. She quit her job and went back to school, turned from investment banking to psychology.

My father, on the other hand, decided to stay at work, taking the lead in helping set up a new, temporary office in Jersey City with the few employees the company had left. Both of my parents threw themselves into their new ventures—legit coping strategies—and I guess while they weren’t paying attention, their marriage fell apart.

“So how was the party?” My dad’s clearly elated that I may have stumbled into a new social life. Box checked off the worry list. I can’t break it to him that high school friendships don’t seem to work that way. You don’t go to one party, have a surprisingly good conversation with the boy who usually looks at you and sees only Baby Hope, and then be set with friends for life. Still, surviving my first party post-Cat is a good thing. I should take it as a win.

“Fun.”

“That’s all I get?” he asks. “I hate when you go all teenagery on me.”

I pour myself some coffee and wrap my hands around the warm cup. I take a sip and revel in its bitter promise. Wait for my personality to be caffeinated back.

“Abbi! Talk to me, please.”

“It’s the crack of dawn on a Saturday. You’re lucky I’m even awake,” I say. My dad sits across from me, leans forward on his elbows. There’s a jitteriness to him that makes me think I need to drink at least two more cups of coffee to catch up. “I’m excited to see Grandma tomorrow.”

“You know she’s going to be…different, right?” he asks.

“Of course.”

“She might not recognize you,” he says. The shame makes its slow creep up my spine. Why haven’t I thought about this before? Now that my dad has said the words out loud, I realize this is not so much a possibility as an inevitability. If not this week, then sometime soon. I try to feel the feelings before they happen—what that will be like, for my favorite person to not remember that I’m theirs too, for the love I feel for my grandmother to go unrequited—but I find I can’t.

I have no trouble fantasizing about fun, unlikely things: First kisses. Someone holding my hand in a darkened movie theater. A boy tucking my hair behind my ear. But with the heartbreaking, likely things, the ones guaranteed to come with a piercing sadness, my mind goes blank with denial. I’m not naive—I know they will happen. It’s just that my instinct is not to go there until I have to.

“I know,” I lie with a breeziness that surprises even me.

My mom walks in wearing pajamas, a cute pink plaid pair, and she doesn’t seem surprised to find my father here, in our kitchen, holding the Best Mom Ever mug I made for her for Mother’s Day in the second grade. Did they plan for my dad to come over this morning to prepare me for my grandmother’s arrival, not unlike how he stopped by last week to help my mother prepare by fixing up the guest room and installing bed rails?

“Coffee?” my dad asks, and my mom nods and then slips onto the stool next to me. He pours another mug, adds a generous helping of milk and sugar, extra light and sweet, the way my mom has always liked it, and passes it to her. “Do you remember when Abbi was six and she lost both of her front teeth and for about three months she had that adorable lisp and she would chatter on and on? And sometimes all we wanted was for her to be quiet so we could read the newspaper in peace? Now look at her.”

My mom turns and appraises me, as if my dad meant it as a demand. She nods again, a little dreamy and slow. Takes a long, desperate sip of coffee. My usually chipper mother seems, if not quite gloomy, off somewhere else.

“I used to know everything that went on inside that head. Now, no idea,” my dad says, and brushes my cheek with the back of his hand with such tenderness it’s as if he imagines what goes on in my brain is something beautiful and precise. Funny, I was wondering what goes on in my mother’s head. Even though I once lived within the confines of her body, even though her blood was once my blood, even though half of me is carved from the whole of her, my mom’s thoughts are still impregnable.

As are everyone’s, I guess.

“Right now I’m pretty sure she’s thinking Leave me alone, Dad,” my mom says.

“Ding, ding, ding, we have a winner,” I say, though of course that isn’t what I was thinking at all.



* * *





Later, I lie back on my bed with my phone perched on my knees and flip through the pictures from last night. I use my secret account, the one that only a few people know belongs to me, and I click to see what Friday night looked like for everyone else.

Julia has posted a short video of her and Zach on a porch swing in Tash’s backyard. Her head is thrown back as if he has just said something hilarious, and his head is bent toward hers, and she’s filtered it so that they are in color against a black-and-white background. A sweep of fairy lights twinkles behind them as they boomerang back and forth in a blur of romantic whimsy. The video, which already has 245 likes, tells a very different story from the one she told me last night.

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