Nothing to See Here (51)

“And so I doubled down. I tried to break her as she tried to break me. We fought a lot, over the pettiest things. She tried to keep me from playing basketball. And, whatever, I know she loves me. And I love her. At least she cared in some messed-up way, unlike my dad, who didn’t even seem to know that I existed until I got older and could be of use to him. But she hurt me. She hurt me at the moment when I didn’t need to be hurt. So when Timothy became this strange little toddler who was, like, fascinated by pocket squares, I said I would never try to curb it. I knew that the world would do that eventually anyway. So I let him be weird. I like it. It makes me happy.”

And I guess I was beginning to understand. I was used to it. It seemed like maybe he was a performance artist, a compelling mimic, and this was just how he fucked with people. What I’m saying is that all children seemed cool to me at this point.

Mary came out with her arms full of plates. The adults each got a Caesar salad with grilled chicken on top, and Timothy had a plate of homemade chicken fingers and mac and cheese. And Bessie and Roland got what they had explicitly requested: Tyson frozen chicken nuggets.

“Oh, wow,” Roland said. “Thanks.”

“Mary made sure to get what you wanted,” Madison said, and Bessie, embarrassed now that what she wanted was something nobody else would ever dream of wanting, looked down at her plate and said, “Thank you, Miss Mary.”

“It’s nothing,” Mary said. “There is no point in making children eat what they don’t want. A fool’s errand.”

“Could I have some of that salad, too?” Bessie asked, and Mary simply nodded and then returned with a small plate and a huge bottle of Heinz ketchup for the nuggets. “Welcome back to your home, children,” she said, and, man, there was some weird judgment in there, but she pulled it off like a badass. Who was gonna stop her?

“This is nice,” Madison said. “Jasper, do you want to say the blessing?”

Jasper nodded. Bessie and Roland looked dumbfounded. Madison and Timothy and Jasper all closed their eyes and clasped their hands, but me and the kids just stared at one another. Obviously we knew what prayer was—or did the kids know what it was? Did they know who God was? Did they think that their mother had made them out of clay? I had no idea. But I was not going to make them pray if they didn’t want to. We’d listen, politely.

And Jasper talked about gratitude, about infinite wisdom, about families made whole again. He talked about sacrifice and appreciation of those sacrifices. It was hard to tell who he thought was making the sacrifices. Him? Could he be that stupid? He was one in a series of Roberts men who had been given everything they had ever wanted before they even had to ask for it. Was the sacrifice simply not taking the things that other people were entitled to? Were the kids the sacrifices he was making? Maybe I wasn’t giving him the benefit of the doubt. But if he said the word sacrifice one more time, I was going to punch him in the face. He finally moved on, talking about forgiveness and the desire for new beginnings. Bored, Roland grabbed one of the nuggets and ate it in one bite.

“Amen,” Jasper finally said, and when he opened his eyes and looked up, he stared right at me, before I could even pretend that I’d been participating, and so it looked like I had been staring at him the entire time. But he held my gaze and smiled. “Let’s eat,” he said.

And it was fine. It was awkward, but it felt like the size of the mansion, how fancy everything was, would make any normal situation more awkward. It wasn’t bad. The kids weren’t on fire. That was my new measuring stick for what was good and what was bad. Eating a Caesar salad and making boring small talk was not bad, not when the alternative was pulling down a set of thousand-dollar curtains because they were ablaze.

“What is your job like?” Bessie finally asked her father, and you could see how happy it made him that she had tried, and yet it also seemed to confuse him because he wasn’t exactly sure how to respond.

“Well,” he began, genuinely considering how to answer, “everyone in the state of Tennessee entrusts me with looking after their interests. For instance, I work with other senators to make sure that the things our citizens need are taken care of. I make sure that jobs come to this state, so people can work and support their families. And I make sure that the country, the whole country, is moving toward a better future.”

“You take care of people,” Bessie said.

“Sort of,” he replied. “I try to.”

“Okay,” she said.

“Your family,” Jasper said to her, “for generations and generations, have made their home in Tennessee. It’s a wonderful state. And I make sure that it stays that way, or when it needs help, I try to get that help so it can stay great.”

“Pop-Pop said that politics is mostly moving money around and making sure that some of it sticks to you,” Roland said.

“That does sound like Richard,” Jasper replied. “But that’s not the way that I’ve tried to do my job.”

“’Cause you don’t need more money,” Bessie said.

“No,” Jasper said, “I don’t.”

“We’re studying Tennessee with Lillian,” Roland told the table.

“Is that right?” Jasper said, smiling.

“We’re doing biographies on great Tennesseans,” I told him, like I was still interviewing for the job, or maybe like I was hoping for a letter of recommendation later.