You Are Here(14)

He was in Peter’s bedroom, of all places, his back to the door. He seemed to be deep in thought, contemplating the maps still spread out across much of the floor.

“Sometimes I just like to sit out there,” Peter said to his dad’s broad back, and he saw the muscles in his shoulders tense and then slacken again. “It’s not like I was going anywhere. I didn’t even have the keys.”

“Exactly,” Dad said, spinning around, fixing him with a hard look. “So answer me this: How does someone get into a locked car without keys?”

Peter pushed at his glasses and looked away. This was a famous tactic of Dad’s, the pseudorhetorical question. It was far more effective than a simple accusation, in that it required an answer. And he had no problem waiting around until he got one.

“I was just sitting,” Peter said, surprised to hear the resentment in his voice. “Is there a law against sitting these days?”

“In stolen property, yes.”

Peter snorted. “It was hardly stolen.”

“Whether or not you had intent to steal it is beside the point,” Dad said, pacing a little circle around the room, the maps fluttering in his wake. “You were trespassing.”

“Dad, come on,” Peter said, suddenly weary. “Can’t we just talk normally?”

His father raised an eyebrow. “Normally?”

“Without the cop jargon,” he sighed. “You’re off duty.”

“Sure doesn’t feel like it,” Dad said. “Not when I come home and find that my kid’s broken into an impounded car.”

“I wasn’t—”

Dad cut him off. “I don’t care,” he said, his eyes flinty. He spread his palm over the globe on Peter’s desk and then spun it hard. “If you want to run as far away as you can next year, then that’s fine with me. But for now you’re still living in my house.”

Peter lifted his chin. There was hardly any point in arguing with Dad even when he was in the right—which was definitely not the case now that Peter’s frequent break-ins had been discovered—but still, something in his throat felt tight, and the backs of his eyes were burning, and he couldn’t explain the anger that gripped him except to wonder whether it had always been there and he just hadn’t realized.

He knew, even before he said it, that it was a stupid thing to do. But he cleared his throat anyway. “It’s my house too.”

“Really?” Dad said, looking almost amused by this. “Because you sure as hell don’t act like it. You can’t wait to get out of here, turning your nose up at a good paying job and spending all your time over at the Healys, talking about books or whatever it is you do.” His face was nearly white as he took a few steps closer, and for a brief and unreal moment Peter wondered if he might hit him. But then his voice grew quiet, and he straightened his shoulders. “Like this family isn’t good enough for you.”

Peter had always known this is what his father thought of him, but hearing him say it out loud was like being stopped short, like running up against a brick wall. It struck him for the first time ever that maybe his dad was actually jealous of the Healys, of what they meant to Peter, of what they represented. But instead of feeling sorry or sad, Peter only found himself getting angrier. Because what right did Dad have to be so resentful of the Healys’ time with Peter, when he never showed the slightest bit of interest himself?

“I grew up in this town,” Dad was saying now. “Your mother grew up in this town. She loved this place. And it’s not good enough for you?”

He flicked a hand through the air as if to swat at a fly, but Peter just stood there, stunned and reeling. It felt like a betrayal of some kind, bringing up his mother in the midst of an argument like this, and it caught him completely off balance.

For as long as Peter could remember, Dad had held onto his grief with a silent and stoic determination, retaining a sorrowful monopoly on all those things that mattered, stories and memories and pictures. Because of this, Peter knew astonishingly little about his mother.

When he was younger, he used to make an effort, a kind of pitiful doggedness to his attempts. At dinner Dad would pass him a casserole dish of green beans, and Peter would immediately demand to know whether his mother had liked them.

“No,” Dad would answer shortly, grabbing for the salt. The same held true for carrots and potatoes, chicken and steak, apples and bananas, until Peter began to wonder if his mom had eaten anything at all. If he were to believe his father, she didn’t like sprinkles on her ice cream or dressing on her salad. She didn’t like mittens or porches, Christmas trees or the ballet, teddy bears or fresh snow. Each of his questions was always punctuated by a short “no,” and once he was old enough to understand that his mother probably had liked things like soap and flowers and socks—that his father’s answers had simply become a habit, a reflex as rote as saying “bless you” after someone sneezes—he stopped asking altogether.

He couldn’t help feeling sometimes like he wasn’t entitled to the same kind of sadness as Dad, who had known her and loved her and laughed with her, who must have seen her make a sandwich and fly a kite and bite her fingernails and cry at the movies. He’d been witness to all those things that made her who she was, and he seemed to have decided somewhere along the way that all this was his alone to bear.