“We’ll let Adam be the tie vote,” Dad said. “Who makes the better cheesesteak? Mike’s, or are you with me and Sonny’s?”
I looked at Dad with his overly eager expression. He was desperate for this “normal” moment with his sons. A sign, I guessed, that the three of us could get through this. It didn’t even matter which place I picked. He just wanted us to be talking again. He wasn’t delusional enough to think that everything would be perfect from then on, or that his run-down apartment was where any of us would choose to be, but it was like our future hinged on this moment.
While Mom was more alone than she should ever have to be.
“I think they both taste like crap.” Then I jumped off my stool and disappeared into the room I’d be sleeping in every other weekend for the foreseeable future. After a minute, I pulled out my phone and listened to the two-year-old voice mail I’d saved, the last one my oldest brother, Greg, ever sent me.
“Adam, Adam, Adam.” His half-teasing voice filled my ear and made me smile, even as my chest tightened. “Why do you even have a phone? So, listen, I’m bringing another dog home and I haven’t found a home for Baloo, so obviously Mom and Dad can’t know. I need you to move Baloo to the other cage in the barn, the one with the blue dog bed. But watch his leg, because he’ll bite you if you pull his stitches. Maybe get Jeremy to help—” His voice grew quieter like he’d moved his mouth away from the phone. “You can? Thanks, man.” The volume returned to normal. “Never mind. Daniel’s gonna swing by and take care of Baloo. Tell Mom, okay? About Daniel, not the dog. Maybe if she’s fussing over him she won’t notice the chunk this new guy took out of my leg.” He laughed at something Daniel said. “Are you telling me you wouldn’t bite if a couple guys were trying to remove some barbwire that was embedded in your neck?” A low growl sounded, and Greg’s laugher faded. “All right, I gotta go, but I owe you, little bro.”
I had it memorized, but I replayed it two more times until my vision grew too blurry to read my phone.
The last thing I did was send a text to Mom: Heading to bed. Will call tomorrow. Love you.
Jolene
Shelly made a show of covering her mouth and nose when I reemerged from my bedroom. I didn’t bother pointing out that I’d showered. I thought my wet hair was enough of an indicator, but then again, this was the woman who, the day she’d moved in with my dad, had told me—with a straight face—that she wanted me to think of her like a sister. I’m sure I peed a little laughing, which hadn’t gone over well with my wannabe sis.
I decided not to bring up the fact that she’d opened my mail. I figured that one was on me for having something important sent here in the first place. But if I’d had the film program info sent to Mom’s house and she’d found it, she’d have assumed Dad and I were conspiring to lower her alimony by sending me away for the summer. I’d have suffered a lot more from that than I had on the balcony with Shelly. Mom would have cared too much, and I figured Dad wouldn’t care at all. That was my life in a nutshell.
Anyway, I had the info now, and there was at least a semi-decent chance that Shelly wouldn’t bring it up again. Besides, if I exhausted all my other options—and I would—and still had to go to Dad for the tuition, I’d be the one to do it, not Shelly. I’d sooner sleep with a rat in my bed.
Vermin aside, I’d intended to grab something from the kitchen and spend the rest of the evening in my room going through the film program application, but seeing Shelly’s scrunched-up face in response to my nonexistent cigarette smell made me shift directions. I settled on the sofa and stretched out my legs.
This was a game we played, Shelly and me. There was only one unspoken rule: when I entered a room, she left; when she entered a room, I left. We’d been playing for a while now and I saw no reason to change things, but every so often, Shelly would try. I could tell just by the way she was breathing—deep and through her nose—that this was one of those times.
“I’m sorry I had to do that in front of your friend.”
“Hmm?” It was harder to tune her out when she moved to perch on the opposite arm of the couch.
“I figure if we both start treating each other with more respect, things will go a lot easier.”
Hearing Shelly talk about respect was like hearing an atheist talk about God. “You mean the respect that you didn’t show me just now on the balcony? Or when you went through my mail? Or earlier in the hall, when you trashed my mom to complete strangers? That kind of respect?”
“I’m trying to apologize here.”
I let my silence speak for itself.
It had taken me a while to figure out Shelly once she’d grafted herself onto our lives. She wasn’t a gold-digging home wrecker siphoning life and money out of my dad; she was worse. She thought she loved him, and the cherry on the deluded sundae? She thought he loved her. I don’t know, maybe he had at first. But that was the thing with my dad: he could be so charming. I guess that was what made him such a good salesman. He’d sell something so hard that I think he sort of had to believe it himself. When they’d first gotten together, Shelly must have seemed like a ray of sunshine in his otherwise gloomy life. Always smiling and praising him, never complaining about the hours he worked or the way his hair was thinning. I’m sure she made him feel like a man when, for his whole life, he’d felt like anything but. And in return, he’d lavished her with gifts and trips until her head spun so much that she didn’t have to think about the wife and daughter he already had.
Now Shelly was stuck in the lackluster apartment where he’d stashed her—and me—enduring his eighty-hour workweeks and two-plus years of broken promises, including the as-yet-to-appear—and realistically never would—engagement ring.
I guess you could say that Shelly’s happily-ever-after hadn’t turned out as she’d hoped, and the fallout had been extreme. Every weekend that she got saddled with me was a fresh reminder of the lives she’d helped destroy. If I was being charitable, maybe I could chalk up her not leaving my dad to guilt in addition to reckless stupidity, but regardless, Shelly brought out the worst in me.
Her shoulders slumped. “Fine. I don’t even know why I try with you.”
“Yeah, your life is super hard.”
“But that’s just it. It doesn’t have to be.” Shelly moved to the coffee table in front of me. “Aren’t you tired of playing the bratty teenager? ’Cause I gotta tell you, I’m tired of being on the receiving end.”
“What can I say? You inspire me.”
Shelly made a half-aborted gesture to touch my hair. “I still remember what you were like before.” A ghost of a smile. “You used to let me braid your hair and ask me to teach you new yoga poses. We were friends. I know you remember.”
I couldn’t forget. When she’d started working for my parents as their personal at-home trainer, Shelly had been like a granted wish I didn’t know I’d made. She was energetic and friendly and so pretty. Unlike my parents, who always seemed to be embroiled in some pressing task that required Shelly to hang around waiting for them, Shelly would ignore her phone and focus entirely on me. She’d do my hair and tell me about college and how the guys she went out with were so immature. More than that, she’d ask about my day and my life, and listen like it mattered.
The shift had been so subtle that my thirteen-year-old brain hadn’t caught it. She’d gone from asking about soccer practice to coaxing details from me about the caustic relationship between my parents and commiserating with me once I spilled. By the time I’d realized what was going on, it was too late. Dad started meeting Shelly at his office, and Mom, not to be outdone, upgraded to a full-time fitness coach named Hugh who worked her out in ways it was illegal to pay for outside Las Vegas. Three months later, papers were filed, lawyers went to war, and Mom began a passionate affair with Jack Daniels.
And Shelly couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t let her braid my hair?
It t
ook everything I had to not flinch from her. I wasn’t thirteen anymore. I viewed her past friendship with me like the stain it was, and I wasn’t about to alleviate her occasional pangs of conscience by pretending otherwise.
I locked eyes with her. “I remember everything.”
Shelly nodded at me, once, twice, and dropped her hand to her thigh. “Okay. I get it. You hate me. I might hate me, too, except I think I might be smarter about it.”
I raised an eyebrow at that.
“I put up with a lot, and not just from you and your mom.”
I propped up my head on my arm and raised an eyebrow. “Oh no. Don’t tell me there’s trouble in paradise?”
“You’re trying to get slapped, aren’t you?”
My other eyebrow rose. For all her talk—and with Shelly there was always a lot of talk—she’d never once threatened me. I hadn’t thought she had it in her. I once saw my mom throw her out of the house by her hair, and all Shelly had done was cry. Was there an actual spine hiding behind the Barbie-doll facade?
I suppose the proper reaction to an adult threatening to hit you would be fear, but Shelly wasn’t the kind to inspire anything. She had maybe ten pounds on me—not counting her boobs—and not even as many years. I had friends with siblings older than she was.
I think Shelly realized that her scare tactic had been a bust. She sighed. “Things are going to change around here. I promise you that.”
“Sure they are.” I successfully fished the remote out from under the cushion and gestured for her to stop blocking my view. She didn’t move.
“I know you think I’m temporary, but one of us is sorely mistaken.”
I turned on the TV and leaned so that I could focus on the screen. “You don’t really think he’s going to marry you, do you?”
Shelly shot to her feet and held up a not-quite-steady hand. “Why does he want you here? Did you ever think about that?” Her eyebrows shot up. “Unlike your new friend next door, your dad wasn’t here for you, was he? It’s the weekend, and he’s choosing to be at work. Again.”
I gripped the remote tight enough to turn my knuckles white, but I kept my voice flat. “That’s one of the many fundamental differences between us. I know I’m here because my dad enjoys taking things from my mom, even things he doesn’t want.” I felt my own eye muscle twitch at that admission, convinced of it as I was. I couldn’t fully embrace the indifference I tried to show Shelly. I gave her the kind of smile usually reserved for videos of cats failing to jump over things. “You’re here because my dad thinks paying for sex is gauche.”
I think Shelly would have slapped me if she’d been within striking distance. Instead, she looked at me with tear-filled eyes, then strode purposefully into the room she shared with my dad. She slammed the door so hard that one of the pictures on the wall crashed to the floor.
I left it there.
Grabbing the nearest pillow, I found a Full House marathon and spent the rest of the evening in magical TV land. Or I tried. I maybe should have picked a show where the family more closely resembled my own. Something on Animal Planet, where the father left and the mother ate her young.
I clutched that pillow tight enough to burst it.
ADAM
I knew something was wrong the minute I woke up. It was a cacophony of little things that combined into that overwhelming roar of wrongness, like when you rent shoes at a bowling alley. Even before I opened my eyes, I felt the scratchy stiffness of my sheets when I shifted. The sound was wrong, too. No birds. Instead there was a muffled rush of traffic spilling past and the occasional blare of a horn. Then there was a clicking noise, followed by a deep, groaning wheeze as warm air gushed into the room. The wrongness didn’t dissipate when I opened my eyes, but comprehension sharpened its edges.
Thin drapes the color of rust hung over the sliding balcony doors and let the gloomy September light show me much more of the room than I cared to see. Last night I hadn’t turned on the lamp, preferring instead to let the shadows conceal details I detested on principle.
Dad had only just moved in himself and had the entire building to fix up, so it wasn’t like I’d expected him to have decorated the place, but the spartan, thrift-store furniture wasn’t helping my unease. The showstopper was the print that hung over the bed. It was an apple orchard. I wondered if Dad had hung it on purpose, or if it came with the apartment. Either way, the mockery of it drove me from my bed as though I’d been doused with water.
At home, I could have looked out the window and seen real apple trees and breathed in crisp, slightly sweet air. There wouldn’t have been the sound of one car assaulting my ears, let alone hundreds. We didn’t live on a working farm or anything, just a house nestled back from the main road surrounded by trees and quiet and, as Mom had reminded me yesterday, the occasional deer.
Had it been only yesterday? Last night, really? I sat on the bed with my back to the orchard print and fished my phone out of my jeans from the floor. It rang twice before she answered.
“Hello?”
“Mom, your phone shows my face and name when I call.”
She laughed, but it sounded relieved more than anything. “I know, but what if someone else had your phone?”
“Like if someone stole it? Why would they call my mom?”
“Not a thief then, but a Good Samaritan. Or maybe Jeremy.”
“Jeremy has his own phone, and I doubt there’s a good anything within twenty square blocks of this apartment.” I thought of Jolene and Shelly. There was a pause while Mom tried to figure out how to respond to my antipathy. I yawned audibly. “I’m just tired. The mattresses over here are sacks filled with old laundry.”
Another pause.
“That’s a joke, Mom.”
More shaky laughter. She must have had a worse night than I had. “I can’t always tell when you’re teasing me.”
“All right.” I stood up and stretched my back. “No more jokes. You okay? Did you sleep a little?”
“Oh, sure.” She forced an overly bright note into her voice. “Just whipping up breakfast for one.”
I imagined her standing in the kitchen with one hand clenching the counter in a death grip. She’d probably been up for hours. I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d repainted half the house or something.
“What about you? You have an okay time with your dad last night?”
I thought about how to answer a question I knew it had practically killed her to ask. Anything I said would hurt her. She’d feel more alone if I told her it was good, and she’d blame herself if I told her the truth. So, in a flash of brilliance or insanity, I told her the only other thing I could think of. “I met a girl.”
“You what?” Finally an unguarded response.
“She lives in the building, the apartment next door actually.”
“Wait, wait, wait.” I heard something clinking. “Let me get my coffee, and then I want to hear everything. What’s her name?”
I smiled in relief. Mom sounded like Mom for the first time in longer than I liked to think about. “Jolene.”
“Like the Dolly Parton song? I wonder if they named her—oh no. Probably not. She’s kind of a home wrecker in the song. It’s really pretty though.”
“She’s a really pretty girl,” I said, realizing for the first time that it was true, objectively if nothing else. “She has a great smile with this little gap between her front teeth and a twisted sense of humor, but I kind of like that.” I found myself telling Mom about Jolene—what I knew at any rate—and carefully omitting details that would not have added to the picture I was painting. When I was done, even I could see how I would have been crushing on this girl if things had gone a little differently.
“What did I tell you?” Mom said. “I knew you’d find something to like. When will you see her again?”
“Um. I don’t know. We only jus
t met.”
“Oh, of course, but it’s nice, you know? Jeremy won’t talk to me about girls and—well, it’s just nice.”
Greg used to talk to her about stuff like that. I felt that old-but-never-gone sadness flare up at the way her voice had thickened. I tried not to let mine do the same. “I promise to keep talking to you about her. I’ll try to see her again today.”
“Maybe you can get a picture of her,” Mom said, and then added, “She doesn’t even have to know you’re taking it.”
“Mom, that’s called stalking, and most girls don’t like it.”
“You’re teasing me again, aren’t you?”
“Yes, but I’m still not taking pictures of unassuming girls for you.”
“My funny boy. You’re just making me miss you more.”
“More than Jeremy. Not much of a compliment.”
“I miss you both the same.”
I rolled my eyes, but the effect was lost on the phone. “Right. Did he even call you yet?”
“He will. He’s probably still asleep.”
“I can fix that.” I lowered the phone and distantly heard Mom telling me not to wake my brother as I headed to the other room to do exactly that.
The blanketed lump on the couch showed me Dad was still asleep. Once in the other still-darkened room, I not so gently shoved my lousy brother over. “Get up and talk to Mom.” I left off the word I wanted to call him, since Mom would have heard.
“Adam, what the—” not-Jeremy said. Dad was blinking up at me. “What’s wrong with your mom?” He moved quicker than I did, seizing my phone before I thought to correct him. “Sarah? Are you all right?”
And then I had to listen to Mom’s muffled explanation that I was supposed to be giving the phone to Jeremy. It got more awkward when Dad explained that, after I’d gone to bed, he and Jeremy decided to change the sleeping arrangements. The conversation itself wasn’t the problem; it was listening to my parents talk as though they were strangers that hurt. Dad, with his husky sleep voice that he kept trying to mask, and Mom with her painful over-politeness. These were not people who’d been married for twenty years. Who had kids together. The strained how are yous that they exchanged before hanging up made it worse.
Every Other Weekend Page 3
