What Happens Now(14)

Sometime later, I heard Richard come home. Voices, footsteps down the stairs, up the stairs. Raised voices.

Then, crying.

I leapt up, opened the door, and poked my head out of my room. My mom was at the kitchen table with her laptop, her head in her hands. Richard stood above her, holding Dani in his arms, her limbs pretzeled around him.

“You couldn’t hear it? Come on, Kate. I caught at least three F-bombs between the front door and the den!”

“I got involved with something online!”

Dani saw me, then scrambled out of Richard’s arms and came down the hall. Neither Richard nor Mom seemed to notice. They continued bickering.

I motioned for Dani that it was okay to come into the safe harbor of my room. After she stepped inside, I closed the door and turned to her.

“What was that about?”

“Uh. Nothing.”

“Dani.”

“I may have started watching an inappropriate movie. I didn’t mean to, I was trying to get to Nickelodeon. But I don’t know how to use the remote!”

“How inappropriate are we talking?”

“Boobs.”

“Fantastic.”

I put the pieces together. Richard was often mad at Mom for not spending time with Danielle. In most houses, it’s the mother accusing the father of that. We were Mirror Image Bizarro World Family.

And now here I was, curling up on the bed with Dani instead of reading about the War of 1812, folding her against my body so maybe she wouldn’t hear my mother’s words as they swirled down the hall.

“I just needed some downtime, Richard,” Mom was saying, her voice high and squeaky. “When do I get a break from taking care of people?”

You chose to be a nurse, I thought. You chose parenthood. How is “taking care of people” a surprise here?

Okay, so I knew it wasn’t that simple. She was tired. She was giving so much, she was losing track of herself. I understood all that; I understood more than I wanted to admit.

“They’ve been fighting a lot lately,” said Danielle. “One of them always goes to the store or takes a walk around the block. Why do they do that?”

“So that person can come back and everything can be okay.” I pressed my cheek into the back of her head. Her hair was so damn silky and she never even shampooed it.

“Was it like that with Mom and your dad?” she asked.

“I don’t really remember. I was only two.” I didn’t want to tell her that I imagined it had been like this. The muffled but angry voices down a hallway, and way too long between good memories. “But it must have been worse,” I said instead, “because eventually, my dad didn’t come back.”

I’d gotten none of the real story. Only gift cards on my birthday and Christmas from an address in Oregon that looked like a small rectangle of a house in online satellite photos. Not that I searched for it (that much).

“Do you think that’ll happen?” asked Dani. “Would Daddy leave and never come back?”

“Absolutely not,” I said, with conviction about the second part of her question. Richard would always come back, to her at least. And if he left, he wouldn’t go far. He wouldn’t go anywhere, except maybe a really sweet condo in one of those new developments with a pool and workout room. Dani would get passed back and forth like a hot potato, and she’d get used to it. Two birthdays, two Christmases. An extra bedroom to fill with new toys. There were worse things.

Like me, and how much I’d miss Richard.

And also my mom being the way she was in the years before she met him.

“It’s just a little fight and it isn’t your fault,” I said to Dani, turning her face so I could look her in the eye and she’d know I was telling the truth. “All parents have them. It’s going to be okay.”

Here’s what I discovered about talking to my sister: sometimes I said things because she needed to hear them, and sometimes I said things because I needed to hear them. It never mattered that I couldn’t tell the difference.





5




Finals were over and school was done, and the days now stretched as tall as they could go.

So here was summer, all official. The white noise of cicadas and crickets, rising and falling against the hum of my bedroom fan. The two big trees outside my window sighing with the breeze. Somewhere on the other side of them was Camden Armstrong.

When I got to Millie’s for the first day of my new schedule—nine o’clock to two o’clock, five days a week—Richard looked up from the greeting card catalog he was flipping through, putting sticky notes on the ones he wanted to carry in the store. “Hey, ducky,” he said. “It won’t suck too bad, will it? Working here? I remember what it felt like at your age, to be forced to do something.”

I adjusted the stool at the register to my height. “You understand why I wanted a different job, right? It had nothing to do with the store.” Say it, Ari. He deserves it. “Or you,” I added.

Richard’s face warmed, even though I hadn’t answered his question about the suckiness. “I do understand,” he said, “and I also understand that your mom’s in a weird place right now. She’s worked so hard to get where she is. I think she’s afraid it’s all going to fall apart any second.”