A Midsummer's Nightmare(3)

The worst part, though, was that Dad never said a bad word about her. She didn’t know it, or she was too bitter to see, but Dad still cared about her feelings. That was the reason he’d said no when I’d asked to live with him four years ago—he said it would break Mom’s heart if I moved out.

I never told Mom I’d asked Dad that. But over the years that followed, I became more and more certain that he was wrong. She wouldn’t have even noticed if I left. She could bitch to a houseplant just as well as she could to me.

With my head hurting even worse, I yanked the curtains closed to block out any trace of sunlight and fell onto my bed, burying my face in the pillow with a groan.

I felt something stiff and crinkly under my stomach and sighed. The room had finally stopped spinning now that I was lying down, and sitting up seemed like a bad idea. Moving as little as possible, I reached beneath me and pulled out the offending object, holding it up to examine it. It was the thing Trace had sent me. A blue envelope with my name written across it with a pretty pink gel pen. Emily’s doing, for sure. My brother’s penmanship was shit.

With slow, unsteady movements, I opened the envelope and pulled out the card inside. you’ve come a long way, the cover said. What a cliché. Inside, though, my brother had crossed out all the cheesy poem crap and written his own message. Of course, since Trace wrote it himself in his sloppy boy handwriting, it took me a few minutes to decipher.


hey kid—

so proud of you. so is emily. we wish we could have been there, but here’s a fat check to make up for it but dont go spending it all on booze. call you soon.


Love, the best big brother ever

and Emily and Marie, too


I smiled. It was a mark of how much I loved my big brother that I found his lack of punctuation and proper grammar endearing.

Emily and Trace had been married for about two years. They met when Trace got his job as the assistant to some talent agent out in Los Angeles. Emily was an actress—which means she was a waitress—who was originally sleeping with Trace’s boss, trying to get parts. But then she met Trace, and he claims it was love at first sight.

Normally, if someone told me that, I’d gag, but I bought Trace’s story. After they met, Emily dumped agent-man (she wasn’t getting any gigs anyway) and started dating my brother. I figured that would be a conflict of interest with Trace’s job or something, but I guess that kind of crazy stuff happens all the time in Hollywood because he’s still working for the guy. He even got promoted after that. And Emily had Marie, their first daughter, just last month.

That’s why Trace hadn’t made it to my graduation. Marie is too little to fly, and Trace didn’t want to leave Emily at home with the baby by herself.

I didn’t blame him. He had a lot going on. And picking up and flying all the way out here for just one night would have been stupid. I mean, Dad hadn’t even been able to make it because of work, and he lived within driving distance. It was no big deal. The ceremony was dumb anyway.

But it would have been nice to see Trace.

Next year, I thought, putting away the card and check he’d sent before curling up on my side and closing my eyes to fight off the headache. Dad and I will fly out to California together during his vacation. No work, no Mom driving us crazy. It’ll be great. Next year…

And with that thought, I drifted off to sleep.





2


After the divorce, my mother insisted on moving as far from Dad as possible. I think she was shooting for California or Hawaii or something, but instead we wound up only two hundred and fifty miles away, just far enough so our antenna didn’t pick up Channel 34.

My dad was this hotshot news anchor. He was, like, the most popular television personality in the tristate area or something. Channel 34 had the lowest ratings of all the local networks before they hired Greg Johnson to do the morning news. And everyone fell in love with him. Women wanted to date him, and men wanted to go fishing with him. Suddenly, Channel 34 was the most popular station in the area.

So, naturally, my mother wanted to move to a place where no one had ever heard of my dad. Even if that meant I was living far away from him, too.

At twelve, I was already old enough to realize how selfish my mother was being.

She moved us to a city four and a half hours from Dad—all the way to f*cking Indiana—yet she had the nerve to bitch about how he didn’t spend enough time with me. For God’s sake, it wasn’t his fault that she wasn’t mature enough to live in the same state as her ex or that he had a job that took up a lot of his time, even weekends. Because of her, any traditional custody agreement just wasn’t feasible. So Dad and I worked out a more convenient system.

I’d spent every summer for the last six years at my dad’s condo. He lived only a few miles from Kentucky Lake, so I wasted most of the hot days stretched out on a towel, getting a tan on the beach. At night, Dad would fire up the grill, and last year he’d even mixed us a few drinks, making me promise Mom wouldn’t find out. Sometimes his girlfriend—whoever she was that month—would come over, but he’d never let her stay long. The summer was our time. Our time to make up for the months spent apart.

And this was the last summer before college. I imagined sitting on the beach with Dad, talking about his days at University of Kentucky—where I’d be starting in September—him telling me the crazy stories from his fraternity days while we drank together. Maybe he’d even help me figure out what to major in when I got to UK. Mom said I should focus on business, but Dad knew me better than she did. That could be our project for the summer, deciding what I should do for the rest of my life.