He Must Like You

by Danielle Younge-Ullman

  “You don’t want me to have to prostrate myself in front of Perry,” I press on, “but you’re one of the chief reasons I have to do it. You’ve put me in a position where I have no choice.”

  “No choice, huh?” he sneers. “You’re going to sell your integrity! Give up! I never imagined a daughter of mine would just lie down and let some scumbag walk all over her.”

  “Why not?” I say, something breaking inside me. “I let you do it all the time.”

  Mom gasps and Dad goes completely still for a moment, then says, “Pardon me?”

  “You walk all over us all the time,” I say, years of pain and held-back anger tumbling the words out. “You’re doing it right now. You steamroll over us, hammer us down until we’re exhausted and have nothing left. You have to be heard the most, and you have to be right all the time, and you have to be the only one with a valid opinion, with any opinion.”

  I’m crying furiously now, but nothing is going to stop me from saying the rest of it.

  “So of course I let Perry Ackerman walk all over me. How would I know how to fight someone like him? I’m not allowed to fight in this house, much less win. You’re the only one who gets to win. You win and win and crush the life out of the rest of us. And meanwhile, all I know how to do is roll over like a dog that’s been kicked too often and smile at every shitty thing that happens to me. Or once in a blue moon, when I’ve been pushed too far, freak out like a psycho and ruin everything I’ve worked for. That’s how I am. You’re not happy with it? Well, you’re the one who made me this way.”

  There’s an awful pause then. Jack looks devastated, Mom has shrunk back in her chair and wrapped her arms around herself, and Dad, for the moment, is staring at me, completely blank.

  “Let me get this straight,” Dad says after a few beats. “You’re a coward and it’s my fault?”

  I lift my chin and say, “Yes,” and wait for the explosion.

  “I gotta say, Dad,” Jack surprises me by breaking in, “I agree with Libby. I haven’t been here long, but there’s a lot of yelling. A lot of you yelling, and a lot of Libby and Mom being really messed up by it.”

  “How dare you?” Dad says, throwing his fork down on his plate and clenching his fists.

  “Just look at yourself!” I say, still crying but bolstered by Jack’s support. “You’re so angry all the time, Dad. You’re not well.”

  “I’m angry because the world is shitty and full of injustice, and somebody needs to fight it.”

  “I don’t think the fighting is getting you anywhere,” Jack says. “If you were actually correcting injustices, I think you’d feel better. You’d have a sense of accomplishment. Be happier. But you don’t seem happy.”

  “Of course I’m not happy,” Dad says, less volcanic for the moment, but more despairing. “I wanted to do something. Be something. And instead I’m nothing. Nothing in a nothing town that’s sucking the life out of me. I don’t need you to tell me what’s wrong with me, I know what’s wrong with me. The world is a shithole, and I’m miserable in this place.”

  Mom makes a sound of distress, and Jack puts a hand on her arm.

  “We did it for you,” Dad continues, “for you two kids. Moved here to give you good childhoods in a place we could save money for your futures. So you could make something of yourselves. But then Jack pissed it all away, and—”

  “Whoa, wait,” Jack says. “I’m not taking that on.”

  “What on?” Dad says.

  “That whole ‘I sacrificed everything for my ungrateful children’ crap,” Jack says. “You and Mom chose to have us—that’s not our fault. And it doesn’t mean you get to control who we become or what we do with our lives, or that you get to blame us for the fact that you’re unhappy, or don’t like where you live. I think you’d be unhappy anywhere you went because it’s like Libby says—you’re not well. You’re depressed.”

  “I have good reason to be depressed!”

  “And you’re taking it out on all of us, and have been for years,” Jack says, his own temper frayed now. “As for me supposedly pissing everything away—you never even asked if I wanted to go into medicine. You just started telling me that was what I wanted. And I let you.”

  “Medicine is an incredible career! A meaningful career.”

  “But it wasn’t my dream, Dad. I never even got to have a dream—I was too busy trying to live up to yours.”

  “And that’s why you went to Greece? Is that your dream?” Dad says, disdainful but also asking for real. “Bartending?”

  “I went to Greece to get away from you.”

  “Well that’s great,” Dad says, then picks up his fork, looks down at the food on his plate. “Congratulations, you succeeded.”

  “I didn’t do it to hurt you,” Jack says, like it’s being wrenched out of him. “And it wasn’t because I don’t love you. I do love you.”

  “Could have fooled me!”

  “I love you. And Mom. Of course I do,” Jack says, looking from Dad to Mom, who’s shrunken into a kind of lockdown position in her chair and only stares at him. “But you’re a lot to handle, Dad. You dominated my life. I see you meant well by it but I needed to get some separation from your opinions, and your expectations—to figure out who I am, what I want. Libby thinks I got all this amazing attention that she never got, and it was a lot of attention you gave me, but it wasn’t all amazing, Dad.”

  “That’s perfect,” Dad says, his head practically buried in his plate now, like maybe he doesn’t want us to see his face. “That’s what you can put on my gravestone, ‘It wasn’t always amazing.’”

  “Don’t talk like that!” Mom says, voice pleading and face panicked.

  “Oh, I’m not going to off myself, Andrea,” Dad says, finally looking up, eyes haunted but jaw set. “Not going to give these two ingrates the satisfaction.”

  “Dad, listen,” I say. “We’re trying to talk to you. The other day you were freaking out so much you were spitting in my face. You were trying to shut me up so you wouldn’t have to hear my opinion, and to distract me from what I was trying to do. And it works, Dad. Even now, although this stuff is important too, you’ve got us totally distracted from the question I asked in the first place—about the money.”

  “Oh for God’s sake, I’m not—”

  “No. What happened to the money, Dad?” I say, refusing to let him get me off track. “My money, and Jack’s money?”

  Dad’s glare fastens on Jack, furious again. “You told her?”

  “No!” Jack says.

  “What did you tell her?”

  “Nothing!”

  “Jack didn’t tell me anything! But guess what?” I say. “You just did.”

  “I—I . . .” Dad sputters.

  “Where’s the money, Dad?” I say, getting to my feet, insides clenching. “What happened to it?”

  “What is she talking about,” my mom says, starting to come out of her lockdown pose. “Rick?”

  “Nothing,” Dad says, ramping up to full blaze again. “She’s lying! But! If I’d needed that money it was mine to spend. I earned it and I don’t have to answer to her, or Jack, about anything. I’m the parent, the adult! And I’ve had just about enough of being blamed for everything and interrogated in my own damned house. I don’t have to put up with this shit!”

  He gets up and shoulders by me, then starts marching out of the dining room.

  Which means it’s over.

  It’s over and I failed and nothing will change.

  Except all of a sudden Mom is on her feet with a large serving spoon in hand, blocking Dad’s exit, and practically knocking him backward with the word, “No.”

  “Damn it, Andrea, let me go!”

  “No, no, no,” she says in a voice that’s high and tight and like a knife. “This is not happening again. I will not have this happen two me
als in a row, people walking out when I’ve worked so hard.”

  “What?”

  I get out of the way fast as she stalks toward Dad, and he, seemingly surprised right out of his anger, backs up and keeps backing up, all the way to his chair.

  “Sit,” she hisses.

  He sits with a grunt and I sit too.

  “Second helpings!” Mom says, and then reaches for the platter of scrambled eggs and dishes a large spoonful onto his plate, then does the same to Jack’s plate, and mine. Then she goes through each platter, dishing out pancakes, berries, and sausages, piling them onto all our plates with barely contained violence until each plate is a heaping mess.

  Dad tracks her every movement, totally gobsmacked as she finishes by discharging massive dollops of whipped cream onto the center of each plate, regardless of whether it lands on sausage, pancake, or egg.

  Jack and I exchange a glance that says, Holy shit, she’s lost it.

  “Eat,” she says, standing over Dad.

  Dad stabs at his plate without even looking down, and then lifts the fork to his mouth and takes a bite, chews it, swallows. He has never seen her like this. None of us has.

  “Now,” she says in a tone that could bring on the next ice age, “I thought all this time that it was just Libby’s money, and only because of the credit cards, and living above our means since you stopped working. But did you take Jack’s education money as well, Rick?”

  “I . . .”

  “Did you?”

  “I didn’t take it, I borrowed it. I was going to pay it back,” Dad says—seeming to crumble and at the same time already trying to scramble for a defense. “Jack told me he had enough to get through the year! I never told him to quit scho—”

  “Stop trying to make this about Jack,” Mom snaps. “Why did you need to borrow the money?”

  “Why does it matter? It’s gone.”

  “It matters because it’s not just your life! It’s not just your house, you being the parent and the adult. I have been in mourning,” Mom says, with a hundred tons of grief in her voice. “I lost my son for over two years over a lie. A lie you told me.”

  “He quit school, left the country. Didn’t tell us, didn’t consult us, never respected us enough to tell us why!”

  “What on earth would you have needed so much money for?” Mom says with terrifying focus. “Did you spend it on your political garbage, or—”

  “It’s not garbage, it’s—”

  “Dad got sued,” Jack says, loud enough to cut through.

  Dad freezes. Mom swivels to look at Jack.

  “Sued?” Mom says. “For what?”

  “Just tell her, Dad,” Jack says.

  “Why don’t you tell her, since you’re so eager to throw me under the bus.”

  “Me throw you?” Jack says with a bitter bark of a laugh.

  “You have one chance to tell me the truth, Rick,” Mom says, white-hot and pulling the conversation back on track. “And that chance is right now. I suggest you take it.”

  For a moment it looks like he’s going to bolt, but something in her eyes must convince him that bolting would be worse than talking.

  “Fine, yes, I got sued,” he mumbles, staring straight down at his still-heaping plate. “Some clients—the basement of the house I helped them buy flooded . . . long story, but they sued me, the brokerage, the home inspector, the other agent, and the previous owners.”

  “But you have insurance for that,” Mom says.

  “Y-yeah . . . usually. But . . .” He takes a deep breath. “I’d just been ousted by those assholes at the brokerage, and they were sending my mail in these big packets, and I just . . . I was so mad, and . . . I wasn’t opening them.”

  “Oh no,” Mom says, putting a hand to her chest.

  “I didn’t open the insurance company’s letters,” Dad continues, still unable to look at any of us. “Which means I then failed to provide them with the information they asked me for. I also didn’t show up in court because I didn’t know I was supposed to. So . . . because I didn’t cooperate with them on legal matters, they didn’t have to cover me. Everybody else got sued and was covered, and I got sued and wasn’t. And I was left with a massive bill.”

  “Oh no,” Mom says again.

  “I didn’t want you to know,” Dad says, finally glancing at Mom, then looking away, shamefaced. “I’d already lost my job, and I didn’t want to cause you more stress. So I went to see Jack near the start of his third year and he said he could get through on his scholarships and summer job money, or even get a loan. I was going to repay the fund. I hired a lawyer with some of Jack’s money, to fight the insurance company. It was a long process, and there was an appeal, but finally last fall it was over, and . . . we lost. So then I owed the original money, plus the lawyer fees, and . . . it was a large amount. More than we’d saved up in both of the kids’ funds.”

  Mom takes this hit with a stifled whimper.

  I feel sick—as much for her as for myself at the moment.

  “I was going to try to pay it off in installments. I put a bit on one credit card, more on another, then I got a third card I never told you about. But it wasn’t long before I could see I wouldn’t be able to keep up with the payments, and the interest was going to drown us. So then I knew we were going to need Libby’s money, too.”

  “Rick,” Mom says, “damn it.”

  “I know,” he says.

  I look from one family member to another. We’ve gone quiet in a just-hit-by-a-truck-and-rolled-to-the-side-of-the-road-to-recover-or-die-in-peace sort of way. Mom’s face is ravaged and streaked with silent-falling tears, Dad’s looks hollowed out, Jack is shell-shocked, and I feel like my insides have been pulled out, thrown around, and put back in.

  It’s Mom who starts moving first, slowly picking up a couple of dishes and walking them to the kitchen. Jack does the same, then so does Dad. I get up, grab some glassware, and follow. It’s the eeriest table-clearing ever—the only sounds the clinking of plates, cutlery, glass, until everything is in the kitchen and we start the next part—scraping the insane mounds of food off our plates, Dad not even complaining about the waste of food. It’s funny how we somehow still know how to do this as a unit, even without any eye contact at all.

  Still, I realize, we’re not quite done. I don’t want to kick Dad when he’s down, but this is the most undefended I’ve ever seen him, which means I might get through.

  Jack is filling the sink with water to wash the serving platters while Dad loads the dishwasher and Mom starts transferring leftovers into smaller containers.

  I position myself near the doorway, take a couple of breaths, and say, gently but firmly, “Dad, I think you need help.”

  “No, I’m good,” he says, placing some forks into the dishwasher.

  “No, I mean . . . help. Someone to talk to.”

  He glances up at me, and I see my mom’s shoulders tense.

  “Just listen,” I say, before he can start objecting. “Everything that happened with the lawsuit, the insurance company . . . it happened because you weren’t well. Weren’t functioning.”

  “I made a couple of mistakes in a system that’s stacked against me, that doesn’t mean—”

  “You admitted you’re depressed.”

  “I’m not gonna talk to some stranger about my feelings.”

  “Listen,” Jack jumps in to help, “you could have something as straightforward as a dopamine imbalance, or it could be serotonin-related. Chemical, in other words. And that’s something you can get tested, and then treated medically. I’m talking about a simple blood test, Dad.”

  “But you should also go talk to someone,” I urge.

  Dad, as exhausted as he looks and must be, is drawing himself up again, getting ready to fight when Mom looks at him, her expression bruised and her eyes filled with bl
eak determination, and says, “He’ll go. Or he won’t have us.”

  Dad makes a sound like he’s been punched in the gut.

  “We can’t live like this anymore,” she says.

  “Fine,” Dad says, suddenly looking as scared as I’ve ever seen him. “I’ll do it. I’ll do all of it.”

  “And your troll activities end immediately,” she says.

  “Yes.”

  “And we make a plan together to start paying that money back, even if it does require renting out the kids’ rooms.”

  “Okay.”

  “And you promise not to speak or write one word to anyone about Libby or her job or her situation with Perry Ackerman.”

  “But—”

  “Not one word.”

  “Fine,” Dad says, and I release a breath I didn’t know I was holding.

  “Good,” she says, and then turns away just as Dad takes a limping step toward her, and leaves the kitchen.

  Dad looks at Jack, and then me, and I can tell that he wants to say he’s sorry, and also that he won’t. Not yet, anyway.

  29

  KISS AND MAKE UP

  Jack disappears into the basement, Dad goes off after Mom, and suddenly I need air. I grab shoes and sunglasses and practically stumble out into the sunlight.

  I’m sort of a mess, let’s be honest. The light spring breeze feels like it could knock me over and I’m looking at the outside world with a sense of unreality, like I’m seeing it all through a wall of thick, slightly blurred glass. But I’m also okay. Or will be. Already I feel lighter, and I can tell I’m going to feel better, be better in a substantial and hopefully permanent way, once I recover.

  My steps lead, inevitably, to Emma’s, where Vivian studies me for a moment in the foyer, then gives me a big hug. Emma’s family talks about (almost) everything, so there’s no doubt Vivian knows what’s been happening, at least in regards to Perry. Still, she doesn’t say anything—just gives me one final squeeze then ushers me down to the basement rec room. Emma’s there, pacing and muttering to herself, and Yaz is on the floor in downward dog with Ben, an actual dog, lying beneath her.