God, please not Solomon. “Tell me what?” I crack the can of Coke and take a sip.
“I’ve invited Claire and her family over for dinner.”
I almost spit out my drink. God, please not Claire and family, I’ll trade three hours with Sol. “What? Why? Why would you do that, Mom?”
“Something wrong, honey?”
“Well, yeah, something’s wrong. Are you kidding me?”
She stops cutting and looks up. “Your father will be on his best behavior, Kyler, I’ve warned him. Claire’s family has been through a rough time. It’s a good thing to do, have them for a night where everyone can relax and enjoy good food and some company. Besides, if you’re getting close with this girl, meeting her isn’t the strangest request. I am your mother, Kyler.”
I roll my eyes, but she arches an eyebrow and uses the giant knife in her hand as an extension of her pointer finger. “Go change, please. I need your help to set up the patio.”
I pinpoint the inflection in her speech. It’s the mom voice. The linguistic equivalent of a clarion call only heard by reckless teenagers who recognize when they’re teetering on the brink of an outbreak of Momzilla. This is not a request; it’s an order, and we’re not discussing the possible ramifications of having everyone in the same space, so here we are about to have dinner on the patio with my family, including my dad and hers. So much for celebrating.
An hour and fifteen minutes later, I’ve switched the place settings twice to make sure there isn’t so much as a hint of red showing, and there’s a knock at the door. Macy is in the kitchen with Mom, who is putting finishing touches on what will be a masterpiece, and Dad is seated at the dining room table reading something on his laptop, so I go and open the door.
Jacob pushes himself past my legs and steps inside, proudly wearing his cape. “I can’t wait to see your room,” he blurts out.
Poor kid doesn’t know what he’s about to walk into. “Hey, Jake.”
Claire steps forward, too, and reins him in with a firm hand on his shoulder. “Jacob, baby,” she says, “y’all wait to be invited into someone’s house, otherwise it’s vulgar.”
“He’s fine,” I say to Claire. “Jacob and I are friends.” I step to the side. “My mother is in the kitchen, we’re eating poolside.”
Andrea, standing to the left of Josh, rolls her eyes, and Lennon, to his right, looks up from her shoes and gives me a shy smile.
“Is that the Davises?” Mom asks from the kitchen.
No, Mom, it’s a Girl Scout selling cookies. I raise my voice so she can hear me. “Yeah.”
“Come in, Claire. We’re in here.”
“Can I see your room?” Jacob inquires again.
“How about I show you after dinner? That way we can hang out there and not have to come down to eat in ten minutes.”
He nods, satisfied with my answer.
Fifteen minutes later, we are all seated at the poolside patio set underneath the giant pergola that sits on the west side of our swimming pool. The sun is dipping in the sky, and Mom has firefly lights strung across the top of the trellis, so it appears as if we’re dining a few feet under the stars instead of a million miles away from them.
We’re eating the first course, the appetizer, garlic lime shrimp for everyone except Jacob, who has a homemade chicken strip served with carrot sticks.
“How’s work?” Dad asks Josh.
Josh finishes chewing his shrimp and takes a sip of water to wash it down before he clears his throat. “It’s going really well, thanks. Some exciting projects coming up, which is good timing coinciding with Claire’s and my annual event.”
The annual event he’s referring to is a party that Claire and Josh throw every year. Always happens at the end of June. A slew of music industry people show up for what starts off as a formal affair, but after a few years of observing from my tree house, I can tell you things turn wild once the guests who show up only out of courtesy leave. I recall one year involving tequila shots, a limbo bar, and a few pairs of breasts from women who’d obviously shed inhibitions. I was fifteen. And until Lennon came around, it was literally the greatest day of my life.
Josh continues. “I’m trying to set up a few bands this year to play. We need to find new talent for some of our clients who are seeking original work for some online streaming shows and a few movies. It’s been a challenge, but I think we’re almost there.”
Claire smiles stiffly. “Honey, I thought we agreed on my idea for that.”
“We didn’t. I’m not sure I want to book one single band, Claire. Putting all your eggs in one basket never seems like a wise idea.”
“It’s a favor for a friend,” Claire says. She scowls, then, realizing everyone is looking at her, seems to conclude there’s a better time and place for this conversation. She turns to my father. “How about you, Greg? Living the dream at the law firm?”
Dad picks up his red wine and takes a sip. “You have no idea,” he replies.
We sit through five courses of almost painful small talk from everyone except Andrea, who has said only two words, repeatedly and only directed at my mother, who has been serving her food: “Thank you.”
It’s the quietest Andrea’s ever been and a refreshing change.
We finish off our dessert trio, bite-size servings of mango yuzu brûlée, some German chocolate mousse with an edible flower, and a side of mixed berry crumble. I’m the first to set my napkin down, rise, and pick up my plate. I gather the plates from my mom, Claire, Lennon, and Jacob, but everyone else is still eating. “Thanks for dinner, Mom. Can we be excused?”
By we, I mean Lennon and me, but Jacob is shifting around his chair like the thing is made of nails. “Can I see your room?”
I look from Jacob to my mom, then back to Jacob. “Waiting for my mom to excuse us from the table, bro. It’s a rule around here.”
“I want to see his room,” Jacob says excitedly. Just in case my mom didn’t hear him the fifteen times he’s mentioned it over dinner.
“Lennon and I have homework,” I tell my mom. “Project is due in two weeks.”
“How’s that coming?” my dad asks. He’s asking to look like a more invested parent than he is.
“Good,” I say. “Mom?”
Mom waves her hand. “Go on. You’re excused.”
Andrea uncrosses her arms and slumps in relief. “Can I go home? Please.”
Claire glares at her, so she forces a smile. “I mean, thank you so much for having me, Mr. and Mrs. Benton, dinner was delicious.” She looks at Claire again desperately. “Liam and Jess are coming over, Mom. Please.”
“Run along,” Claire says. She looks at my mom. “I can help with dishes.”
Macy stands and waves her hand. “You’re a guest.” She looks at our mother. “You cooked all afternoon, sit. Lennon and I can do the dishes.”
I glare at Macy, determined to put the brakes on her volunteering Lennon to do dishes. “Lennon is a guest, too,” I point out. “Besides, she has homework. With me.”
“Relax, Romeo. Jacob wants to see your room. Show him. Lennon can come do homework when we’ve finished the dishes. You don’t mind, do you, Lennon?”
I wish she did mind, but she shakes her head. “Happy to help.” She smiles warmly at me. “Go on,” she says, “I’ll be up soon.”
I mind, but Macy won’t care about that. I issue a silent stern look of warning to Macy not to cross any lines, then I bend down so I’m eye level with Jacob. “Ready, little man?”
“Yep.” His head bobs up and down.
“Cool. Follow me.”
I open the door to my room, and Jacob shoots through it like a balloon that’s been let go, free to fly crazily through the world when it loses its air. Once he does a full lap, he stops at my bed, his hand dragging across the blankets. “Your room is huge.”
“I know.”
“Like ten times huger than mine.”
“It’s too big,” I say. “More space for things to feel empty.”<
br />
He looks at the shelves that line two full walls and are filled with records. “You collect those?” he asks.
“Yeah,” I say. “Kinda.”
“Lennon has lots of them, too,” he says.
I don’t recall seeing a single record. “She does?”
He walks around my room, surveying first, then inspecting everything closely. He’ll select an object, pluck it from the shelf, and turn it over in his hands curiously, a sense of wonder clear on his face. I wish I’d enjoyed being five more, but I guess there was no way for me to know back then that age five would be the last year of my life without a curse on my skin. “Yep,” he says. “Lots of boxes of them. In storage till her room is done. She said they’re her mommy’s.”
He laps the room again, his hand settling on my acoustic guitar. It’s propped in one corner on a guitar stand. “Can you play?”
I nod. “Yeah.”
“Are you good?”
“Better than some.”
He continues examining my room. “What else do you like to do? You have lots of stuff.”
“I write a lot.” I gesture to my desk. Jacob saunters over to it and looks down at my notebook. It’s closed, but to be honest, I’m not exactly concerned with a five-year-old reading my words and looking for the deeper meaning in them, if he can even read yet. I try to recall how old I was, or even Macy, but I blank.
“You have so much paper,” he observes.
“I do.”
“You must write a lot. Do you want to be a writer when you grow up?”
“No,” I say, walking over to stand beside him. “I do it for fun. Want to know what else I do for fun?” I reach into the bottom drawer of my desk to pull out a letter-sized sheet of paper that’s a higher stock and heavier weight than average. “I make paper airplanes, too.”
Amazed, he looks at the paper in my hands. “Can we make one?”
“Yeah,” I say, grabbing a few more sheets of paper. “We can make as many as you want.”
I don’t have to tell him twice. He sits down at the desk and waits patiently. I put a piece of paper in front of him and sit on my knees so we’re the same height. I fold creases into the paper. “The trick is folding the tail of the plane,” I tell him. “Or sometimes, adding weight to its nose. I’ll show you.”
Jacob and I make twenty-three airplanes in an hour.
FACT (DEFINITELY): WHEN KYLER BENTON TEACHES
ME TO PLAY GUITAR, I FORGET WHERE I AM.
ON FIRST IMPRESSION, MACY COULDN’T be more different from her brother. As I follow her into the kitchen, she spins to face me and beams. Her teeth are perfect, her eyes the same intense blue as her brother’s, which I now know they’ve both inherited from their mom. “Thanks for helping,” she says. “My mom has been cooking for most of the afternoon. I figured dishes were the least I could do.”
I nod and try to smile back. I don’t know what, if anything, Kyler has told his sister about me, so I assume she thinks I’m boring-slash-normal. “It’s no problem at all. I’m happy to help.”
She opens the dishwasher and loads plates while the sink fills with hot, soapy water to wash pots and pans. She hands me a dish towel and pauses. “Wait. I didn’t ask, do you want to wash or dry?”
I hold up the dish towel. “Drying is fine.”
We get to work. I think what she says next is meant to be casual, but it’s obvious she loves her brother and is trying to determine if I’m good enough for him. “Kyler seems different since he met you.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah,” she says, “I mean, I’ve only seen him walk around school without his hoodie a few times before in all of his life. Last week, he did it twice. That’s incredible.”
I remember Kyler’s excuse for anyone curious enough to ask. “He lost a bet,” I say.
“He loses bets to Silas all the time,” she says. “He’d never lose the hoodie for Silas. I guess my point is, I’ve never seen him so settled in his own skin before. He can be himself with you. I love seeing him this way.”
I’m not sure what to say, so I continue drying a pan while she keeps talking. “We both know it’s because of you, and I want to say one thing.” She pauses, waiting for me to acknowledge that what she’s about to say is important.
“Go ahead.”
“My brother, he pretends to be a lot tougher than he is, you know. I worry.”
Understandable. If anyone knows what it’s like to worry, it’s me. “That I’ll hurt him,” I supply.
She cringes when I say the words out loud. “Yeah. And I’m sorry if that’s unwarranted or silly, I mean, you seem nice, but he’s the only brother I have, and I feel some need to protect him. He’s a good guy, Lennon.”
I nod and set the clean pan down on the island before retrieving another. “I know he’s a good guy,” I tell her. “He’s a great guy. I’d do nothing to hurt him. I promise.” What Macy doesn’t know is I would do anything if it meant I’d protect him from pain or hurt. Like flipping a light switch, tapping the floorboards, door jams, walls, windows, my thigh, or my wrist, or entering a locker combination fifty-five times. I’d do all those things on an endless cycle if it meant he would be safe and happy. I don’t tell Macy that. Instead I look at her as sincerely as I can. “I like your brother,” I tell her. “I swear I do.”
Relief flares across her features. “Thank you, Lennon. He deserves it.”
“Yeah,” I say, “he does.”
We finish up and Claire tells me it’s time for Jacob to go to bed and asks if I’d mind sending him down when I go up to start homework. Truth be told, I’m not confident homework is on the agenda anymore, but I tell her I’ll do that and head up the stairs to Kyler’s room.
I pause at the door, bracing myself for his creative chaos. I have a general idea of the layout, but I’ve never fully seen inside; he’s usually at his desk or standing by the window. When I swing it open, it’s worse than I thought. His room is massive. The huge window where Kyler can see into my room is right behind a long, sleek black desk entombed in papers. Mammoth panes of glass stretch along the walls, flanked by shelves. Tons of them. They begin to the left side of his desk and extend in an L shape down another fifteen feet of shelving filled with records.
The wall opposite is covered with framed pictures and artwork of musicians, album covers, vinyl records encased in shadow boxes, and the last wall, maybe the most impressive of them all, showcases guitars. Five. It’s my favorite wall.
“Holy crap,” I mutter. I knew he liked music. I never knew how much.
Kyler and Jacob are seated on the bed while Kyler tries to explain aerodynamics. At my words, they both look up. Kyler rises from the bed and hurries to his dresser drawer, pulling out a couple of handfuls of fabric. He moves fast and drapes them over some of the music memorabilia that decorate his walls. I realize what his objective is, because he’s covering anything that has a hint of red with his T-shirts.
“You don’t have to do that for me,” I mumble.
“I know,” he replies. “I want to.”
Jacob is still seated on the bed, so I turn my focus to him. “Jake,” I say.
“I don’t want to go,” Jacob says.
“Your mom says it’s time to go to bed.”
His head hangs down and his shoulders fall. “But I’m having fun.”
Kyler touches Jacob’s arm. “You know what? I don’t have band practice or anything next Wednesday, maybe you can come over and we’ll make more cool stuff.”
Jacob blinks. “Really?”
“Yeah,” Kyler says. “I had fun, too. Macy doesn’t appreciate the skill in building paper airplanes.” He walks to his wardrobe and retrieves a box. He removes something, puts it back in the bureau, and returns to Jacob with the box. “Here. Put the planes in this, you can fly them outside tomorrow if you take them home.”
Jacob loads the planes into the box before pausing, grabbing one in each hand, and racing to the desk. He picks up one of Kyler’s pens, wri
tes something on the wing of each, caps the pen, and returns, proudly offering his gift.
The wing of one plane says K, while the other is marked with an L.
“These are for you two. So you can have your own planes.”
Kyler grins and takes his plane. “Thanks, that’s cool.”
I ruffle Jacob’s hair. “Thanks, buddy.”
He grabs the box and turns. “See you at home, Lennon. Thank you for making airplanes with me, Kyler.”
“It was awesome,” Kyler says. “Good night, Jacob.”
“Night,” he says, and leaves. I can hear him hollering at my Dad and Claire, asking them to guess what he made, before he’s even down the stairs.
“You’re great to him,” I say.
Kyler shrugs and sits on the bed, leaning against his headboard. “He’s a cool kid. Makes it easy. How was doing dishes with Mae? I’m sorry she volunteered you. She worries about me.”
“I know. And it was nice. Your sister is sweet.”
He laughs. “That’s only because you’ve never pissed her off.”
I grab an acoustic guitar from its stand and sit beside him, the guitar across my lap. I position my hands, one underneath to reach the frets on its neck, and one slung over the top. “My mom used to play guitar.” A knot forms in my throat. “She’s the reason I know a lot about music. I remember watching her while she played, thinking she was the prettiest woman on the planet. She was so beautiful.”
“You must look exactly like her, then,” he says. “Because you’re beautiful.”
I press down on the frets to make a C chord and shake my head. “I can’t play. Not really. Just notes. A few things I remember from watching her play.”
“Do you want to know how to play?”
I nod. “One day.”
Kyler sits up and slides closer to me. He lifts one leg over and behind my body, so I’m between his legs, my back pressed to his chest. His breath is in my ear, his words, spoken so low, so deep, they vibrate my eardrum. “Today.”
His arms slide through the space between the guitar and me as an electric current pulses through every nerve in my body. His fingers glide on top of mine on both hands, and he positions them on the frets. “I’ll push, you strum.”
All Our Broken Pieces Page 18
