Save the Date(49)

“Okay,” I said, reading it once again, and then a third time, wondering if I’d missed something. “What about it?” I asked, picking up my bags and walking to my car—it was really getting too cold outside to keep standing around.

“She’s writing about what happened.”

“You mean the car mat thing?” I looked at my phone again. “This could be about anything.”

“Bet you twenty bucks,” Mike said, his voice clipped and angry. “After she promised—”

“Let’s not jump to conclusions,” I said, getting into the car. “At least see where she’s going with it.”

“Wow, you’re taking her side. I’m utterly, utterly shocked.”

“Mike—” But I didn’t get to say anything else, because he’d already hung up.

I wanted Mike to be wrong. I wanted this to be something my mother wouldn’t have done. But Mike had sensed it from the beginning, and the story started unfolding, nearly exactly as Mike had described it to us, culminating in his—or rather, Mark’s—near-naked run through the kitchen. (In the GCS version, he interrupted book club night.)

The night the story line ended, Mike called as I was emptying the dishwasher. My dad answered and put him on speaker—what he always did whenever any of my siblings called home, so that we could all talk. “It’s Mike,” he called, and my mom looked up from where she was reading the paper at the kitchen table. “Hey, son,” my dad said. “How’s—”

“Is she there?” Mike asked, his voice shaky, the way it got when he was really angry but trying not to show it. “Is Mom there?”

“I’m here,” my mother said, getting up from the table. “Are you okay?”

Mike let out a short laugh. “Um, no, mother, I am not okay. How could you do that to me?”

“Do what?” my dad asked.

“The strip,” I said quietly.

“Yeah, the strip,” Mike said through the phone, his voice getting louder and shakier. “Mom, I asked you not to put it in. I specifically asked you—”

“Put what in?” my dad asked, frowning as he put on his glasses and started flipping through the paper.

“Floor mat,” I muttered. “And . . . nudity.”

“Honey, I promise it’s not a big deal,” my mom said, leaning closer to the speaker. “When I mentioned it to my syndicate, they loved it. And I was just thinking about how funny we all found it—I mean, even you were laughing . . .”

“At something private,” Mike snapped. “At something that I didn’t want to go beyond our family. Why is that so hard for you to understand? Do you even get that this is my life? And that it’s not just there for you to get material from?”

“Mike, I think you should calm down,” my mother said, exchanging a look with my dad.

“Calm down? You’ve just wrecked my life with your comic strip!”

“I’ve hardly done that.”

“Oh, really? Well, guess what. Corrine’s parents read your stupid strip. And they figured out what happened. And she’s in trouble with them and just broke up with me over it.” Mike’s voice cracked on the last word.

I exchanged a glance with my dad. I didn’t like Corrine—none of us did—but that didn’t mean I’d wanted this to happen. Not like this.

“Oh, honey.” My mom had gone pale, and she put her hand over her mouth. “I didn’t . . .” She took a breath. “What if I called the Nelsons? Maybe explained things?” She shot me a look, and I could see genuine regret on her face, like she hadn’t realized until right this moment what the consequences might be.

“Yeah,” Mike said, his tone dripping with sarcasm. “That’s what I really want here. You making things better when you’re the one who caused this in the first place.”

“Michael,” my dad said, putting down the paper. “I know you’re upset, but you can’t speak to your mother that way.”

“Fine,” Mike said. “Then I won’t.” And a second later, the phone went dead.

*

I stared at the strips in front of me, still rooted to the same spot even though Danny had wandered into the next gallery. You would have thought the resolution in the fictional world of Grant Central Station was the end of it. But it wasn’t—nothing had been resolved as tidily as it had in four black-and-white panels.

Mike had stopped talking to our mother, but she was sure it was just a phase and would blow over. This was around the time that her newest collection was gearing up for publication, and a reporter from USA Today was reaching out to all of us for a human-interest piece on “Growing Up Grant.” I’d e-mailed my few sentences to the reporter after clearing them with my mom and hadn’t thought anything about it until I saw the interview, printed below the fold on the cover of the USA Today arts section.

Mike had apparently taken his opportunity to speak to a national reporter and ran with it—unloading everything he was currently feeling. He told the reporter that he loathed how our mother cannibalized our lives for strangers’ enjoyment. How he always felt like he was being pushed into the mold of a perfect son in a perfect family, when the reality was much messier than that. How much he’d hated being a Grant.