What We Saw(9)

“Who knows? She’s constantly afraid of not having enough cash, or enough . . . anything, ever since Dad took off.”

I can feel the curtain fall in his voice. We never talk about his dad. Ever. It’s as if Brian Cody never existed. “Ben, she wants you to go to college. She’ll be so excited if you get a full ride.”

“Just afraid I’ll come home to shelves in every room. Whole damn place will be packed full of crap from Ajax to Zyrtec.”

I squirt some ketchup across the top of my fries, and wait. If he wants to tell me what that means he will. A guy on the basketball court yelps and goes down. The players gather around him as he rolls onto his back and grabs at his ankle.

“She’s been hiding stuff in the house again.”

I glance over at Ben, who keeps his eyes on the injured player. After a minute or two the guy’s friends get him up off the ground, and he starts limping toward a bench between two buddies.

“I thought you said she agreed to keep all her bargains on the shelves in the garage.”

“Oh, she did. Then the other day I walked by the guest room and the closet door was open a little. Whole thing was stacked with Rubbermaid bins packed full of tube socks and boxer briefs.”

“For you?”


He sighs. “I can buy my own goddamn underwear.”

A woman with a booming voice calls her kids to the picnic table. Ben chews his cheek, watching as they obey in double time. “I know I’m a total tool for feeling this way. It’s just, Mom’s obsessed. There’s enough crap in the guest room to fill every sock drawer I own from now until I’m seventy.”

“Maybe she’s just trying to show you how much she cares about you.”

“Maybe. But wouldn’t it be better to show me she cares by sticking to our agreement? Those Rubbermaid bins aren’t for me. They’re for her.”

“If you can nail down a scholarship do you think she’ll chill out?”

He looks at me with a sad smile. “I don’t think it works that way. Pretty sure I have zero power where this whole coupon-hoarding thing is concerned. It’s like some bad reality show on cable.”

“I understand,” I say. “Sort of. I mean, my parents have their own crazy. Dad makes bad bets in his fantasy football league with the guys on his construction crew, but he’s always on my case about saving more money. Mom is always complaining about how she needs to lose ten pounds, but she’d rather try crazy diets than just eat more fruit and come running with me.”

Ben smiles. “Remember when she did that grapefruit diet when we were in elementary school? Your dad told her if she didn’t watch it she was gonna squirt herself in the eye every time she peed.”

“She got so mad at him,” I say. “And then at us because we couldn’t stop laughing about it.”

We both giggle at the memory. A breeze rustles the new buds on the elm branches above us and blows a strand of hair over my face. I reach up to brush it away.

“I like my mom and dad,” I tell him, “but sometimes, I wish they’d admit they don’t know everything.”

“All parents have that thing they don’t know about themselves,” says Ben. “It’s like a room they aren’t aware exists. They don’t know it’s there, so they can’t even look for the light switch.”

Before I can agree, Ben tosses aside the DQ bag full of empty fry boxes and ketchup packets. He stretches full length on the grass under the tree, lays his head on my leg, and closes his eyes.

The words on my tongue float away. My first instinct is to run my fingers through his hair, but I stop my hand midair. It floats over his head for a minute, before I press it against my lips, and slowly drop it back into the grass. I relax against the tree, attempting to breathe normally.

After a few minutes, my heart stops pounding. I can feel the weight of Ben’s head pressed against my thigh, keeping me from floating away. The basketball game has resumed, minus one, and as I watch I realize how lucky I am that my parents and their crazy isn’t so bad in comparison to Adele’s. Losing fifty bucks or ten pounds isn’t going to land you in a psychiatrist’s office or take over your life. Still, it might be easier to relate if we could all just turn on the lights.

Of course, to them, we’re just kids.

One day, they say, we’ll understand.

But I wonder if maybe I’m the one who does understand.

Sometimes I get the feeling they’ve asked me to hold this big invisible secret for them, like a backpack full of rocks—all these things they don’t want to know about themselves. I’m supposed to wear it as I hike up this trail toward my adulthood. They’re already at the summit of Full Grown Mountain. They’re waiting for me to get there and cheering me on, telling me I can do it, and sometimes scolding and asking why I’m not hiking any faster or why I’m not having more fun along the way. I know I’m not supposed to talk about this backpack full of their crazy, but sometimes I really wish we could all stop for a second. Maybe they could walk down the trail from the top and meet me. We could unzip that backpack, pull out all of those rocks, and leave the ones we no longer need by the side of the trail. It’d make the walk a lot easier. Maybe then my shoulders wouldn’t get so tense when Dad lectures me about money or Mom starts a new diet she saw on the cover of a magazine at the grocery store.