by Piper Lennox
“You’re not exactly the most responsible person, Cohen. Since we’ve been dating you’ve let your phone and power cut off—”
“So I forget some bills now and then, sue me.”
“You overdraft your card constantly.”
“Fine—I suck at budgets. I suck at remembering dates. I smoke too much pot and I play around at work, whatever.” I close the gap between us, stepping to the side when she tries to push past. “But I work hard and I do shit right, when it counts. It really offends me that you think I’m some slacker.”
Juliet kicks at the floor with her tennis shoe, not responding.
“Levi fired me because we got in a fight, and now he’s throwing a little bitch-fit. That’s not my fault.”
“You still should have told me. You didn’t have to lie about where you were and all that crap with the van.”
I let out a breath. “You’re right. I’m sorry. That part was immature.” I lower my head and kiss her. Eventually, she kisses me back.
“There you guys are!” Viola emerges from the stairwell to our section. “Come on, it’s starting!”
We follow her up to our seats. I take Juliet’s hand; she lets me.
“Forgive me?” I ask, then lick that spot behind her ear after we’ve sat down, reminding her of all the ways I can make it up to her, tonight.
“Not yet,” she says, but smiles when I do it again.
20
“You know what my favorite part about this show is?”
I lean closer to Juliet to hear. The game is over, but the stands are even louder, everyone stretching and ready for the fireworks. “What’s that?”
“My dad’s face.” She nods at the end of our row, where Paul watches the pyrotechnics team set up a small rig in the outfield. These are new, apparently: a “pre-show display” added to the lineup this summer, while the bulk of the fireworks are set up in their usual launch site outside the stadium.
“Watch,” she whispers. “I bet he’ll complain about that little display on the field. Something like, ‘Oh, sure, let’s show the sausage being made, that’ll be magical.’”
“Excellent impression.”
“Shh,” she laughs. “Just wait. You’ll see.”
A few seconds pass. In the outfield, one of the techs gives a thumbs-up to another. They jog away and adjust their safety glasses. One has a remote in his hand.
Music blasts through the speakers, rattling like tin cans. Vaguely, I decipher a few bars of “America the Beautiful.”
The pyro guys signal each other again. Two shells launch from the board in the field, followed by two more as the crowd cheers.
“What the hell are those boys doing?” Paul shouts. “Folks don’t want to watch the launch, they just want the pretty parts! We going to show ’em how their ballpark franks get made, too?”
I turn my body toward Juliet’s as we laugh.
“That,” I manage after a minute, “was a scary good prediction.”
Her face is flushed while she catches her breath. “No, I just know my dad really well.”
With the small show out of the way, the crowd grows twice as restless. The music clangs its way into “God Bless the U.S.A.,” right when the real fireworks begin.
“That’s a peony, right?” I ask Juliet, pointing at the first group.
“Yep. All except that one—that’s a palm.”
“What’s the one that kind of crackles, while it falls?” I mimic it as best I can with my fingers. “Those are the best.”
“Willows,” she answers, and leans into me as the music grows deafening. I risk putting my arm around her, like earlier, and she rests her head on my chest. Good to know the fight’s truly over.
At the start of the finale, I look down at her, expecting her to be transfixed on the sky like everyone else.
Instead, she’s looking at her dad.
“He must really miss this,” I tell her, both of us studying the understated smile on Paul’s face. Juliet nods. She doesn’t look back at the sky until Abigail and Viola shout, “Look, Jules, your favorite!”
We turn. There’s a crop of smiley faces off to the side, just like the one Paul let me launch in his backyard.
“That’s your favorite?” I’m actually shocked. I expected it to be something more elaborate and rare; after all, she’s seen thousands throughout her entire life. She knows them inside and out, literally, just like her dad.
“That’s my favorite,” she nods. “Know why?”
I shake my head.
Juliet holds up her finger until another smiley face erupts, then points at the strangers across the aisle, then her own family. They’re all visibly happy, laughing or grinning back at the sky.
“That’s why,” she says, half-shouting into my chest. “Everyone smiles at a smile.”
The fireworks show and drive home feel hazy, like I’m dreaming. I can’t get back that happy, relaxed feeling as Cohen kisses me in the darkness of Dad’s van, no matter how hard I try.
“You’re not still mad, are you?”
I have no idea what I am. All I can picture, suddenly, is Cohen telling me he can’t buy diapers for the week because he overdrafted his debit account. Him getting fired every time he and Levi have some stupid fight. Me putting our baby to bed in one room of a house, Cohen getting high and playing video games in another, oblivious.
Us living in my loft or his tiny, mildewy apartment forever, that imagined house already forgotten and out of reach.
Don’t do this, I tell myself. I can’t let those doubts take over.
After we leave Dad’s, Cohen steering my coupe through the late traffic on the highway, I can’t stop myself: “Why don’t you have a car?”
“What?” He laughs, confused. “I told you, I got in a wreck a few years ago.”
“Was it your fault?”
Cohen hesitates and changes the radio station. “DUI. I was young, though—it was my twenty-first birthday.”
“Well...why didn’t you get a new car?”
“Because I was broke and my insurance shot through the roof. Now...I don’t know, I guess I don’t have one because I got used to not having one, that’s all.”
“We need at least one car to put a car seat into. This one would be too hard, always having to push the front seat forward.”
He reaches for me and touches the sunburn on my shoulder, his skin like ice by comparison. “I’ll tell you what—when I get my job back…”
I start to relax: he’ll come up with a plan and make it happen. He’ll fix the problems. I’m worried over nothing.
“...we’ll strap a car seat to the cotton candy cart, in the back of the van.”
“Cohen.”
“Come on,” he laughs. “I’m obviously joking.”
“That’s your problem—everything’s a joke to you. I’m trying to have a serious, adult discussion about our car situation, which we only have a few more months to fix, and you can’t stop kidding around for two seconds.”
He glances my way, but I’ve folded myself against the door. I hate myself for doing this tonight. Letting all the old worries back into my head.
Actually, what I hate most is that I knew all those doubts and worries were valid from the start. And I still let myself fall for him, anyway.
His cough shatters the silence. “Okay, you’re right: we need a bigger vehicle for the baby. I’ll get us one.”
If I had the energy, I’d scoff.
“You can pick it yourself,” he offers, as we turn onto my street. “I’ll take your coupe to work, you use the minivan. Or whatever we get.”
I brush his hand away from mine. “Why wouldn’t I keep my car?”
“We’d share both. But I’d use yours for work, because you’d have the kid during the day, right?”
In the passing streetlights, Cohen’s face looks alien. My anger feels like all those weeks of intense, instant need: uncontrollable. Raging. Way out of balance. But still real.
“Mac and cheese?�
�� he asks, when we get up to my loft. Mara’s out at a bonfire; she’ll most likely crash with whatever guy catches her eye for a few hours.
I wish I could be like her. Living so deeply in the moment, I can’t possibly think about the future, much less worry over it. Mara doesn’t even think about tomorrow.
I blink myself back to this moment: Cohen, shaking a box of macaroni by the stove.
“I guess.”
The sound of pots and pans clanging scrapes the inside of my skull. God, is he trying to make as much noise as possible?
“All right,” he announces, when the water’s boiling and the macaroni’s in, “eight minutes until a spectacular dinner.”
“Why do you assume I’ll stay at home?”
Cohen taps the spoon on the pot and sets it on the countertop. It drives me crazy that he doesn’t use the spoon rest, not two inches away. “Huh?”
“In the car. You said you’d take the coupe to work, because I’ll have the baby during the day.”
He perches himself on the end of the sofa. “I can’t be the stay-at-home parent. After Levi hires me back and I do the Wallman party, I’ll be in charge of the entire warehouse. Event coordination, staffing events, everything. It’ll be, like, the official start of my career.”
“But he hasn’t even hired you back yet.”
“He will. Stuff’s going to align. Don’t worry.”
Big dreamers. Lots of talk and stars in their eyes, but little to no action.
My shoes hit the ground with a clatter; I pull my feet underneath me and undo the rubber band holding my shorts closed. A pro tip from Abby. “Okay,” I say evenly, “but I’m not giving up my job, either.”
He hops up to check on the macaroni. “Then who watches the baby?”
“We’ll hire a nanny, when my maternity leave ends.”
He makes a face I can barely read, but which somehow enrages me all over again. “You’d really want somebody else raising our kid?”
I think of Viola, that day in the clinic. “But you don’t even want kids.”
“I was raised by babysitters,” he goes on, licking his thumb when he burns it. “It sucked. Until Levi was old enough to watch me, we had a sitter basically every second we weren’t in school.”
You don’t even want kids.
“And I know it’s not really the same, since my mom worked, like, three jobs, nightshifts and shit, and you’d only be doing nine to five, but...I don’t know. I always figured my wife would stay home and I’d be the provider. The typical setup, you know?”
“Good thing I’m not your wife, then.”
He taps the spoon again, hard. “I haven’t gotten that far in the pregnancy books, yet—is this week when your hormones double-up, or something?”
It feels like hours before we talk again. He finishes the macaroni and hands me my bowl without a word. I can’t stand the smell but dig in, anyway, trying to remember what it felt like in the stadium. No doubts. That happy, weightless feeling. His family congratulating me, my family laughing at his jokes.
“Your mom stayed home with you guys, right?” Cohen sets his empty bowl on the coffee table and wipes his mouth. “See, you’re coming at this from a totally different perspective than I am. So unless you’ve experienced both sides, you can’t really say my opinion is wrong.”
The television’s nothing but a strobe of color. I can’t remember turning it on, can’t remember what show we picked.
“My mom did stay home with us.” I cross the room, set my bowl in the sink, and swallow the nausea in my throat. Somehow, I know it’s not from hormones. “And she was miserable because of it.”
“Just because she didn’t like being a stay-at-home mom doesn’t—”
“No: my mom didn’t ‘dislike’ staying home with us. She wasn’t just sad or bored. She was literally miserable.”
Cohen slides from the armrest to the seat, finally shutting up.
“Full-fucking-blown depression.” I run water into my bowl and scrub hard enough to crack it. “Do you know how many times the woman showered, the last year she was alive? Twenty. And that’s being generous.”
He mutes the television. In the reflection of the window, I see him watching my back. “Was that.... Did she get depressed because of her cancer treatments, or something?”
I stare at this mirror image of him, translucent, the blinking lights of the city blurring his features. “My mom never had cancer.”
“Oh.” His voice is oddly soft. “It’s just—your dad had all those breast cancer ribbon shells, in his basement.”
“Those were from a charity event at the stadium, before he retired.” I shut off the water. The sink draining is the only sound in the loft. Even my breath, heavy as it feels, is quiet.
“Did she…. The depression, I mean—is that how she....” He doesn’t finish the question. He doesn’t have to.
“Yeah. General consensus.” I don’t know why he’s talking to me in such a low voice, like comforting a crying person. My eyes are dry. Twelve years and two therapists made sure of that.
Then he hugs me. I smell sharp, blunt grass and the trapped smoke from the stadium, all the shells and stars.
How he moved across the floor so quickly and seamlessly, I don’t know. I’m just relieved, in this moment, for his hands pressing into my back. The scent of his aftershave, surfacing from the smoke. The simple fact he’s here.
21
Twelve Years Earlier
“Julie? I need you for a second.”
Mom’s voice sighed its way through the hallway and underneath my door, which I’d slammed shut for exactly this reason: I hated the way she called to me, out of the choking silence, for any whim and need that entered her mind. It was like living with a ghost who only haunted you for favors.
“Busy,” I shouted, and hit the Play button on my stereo.
I knew it would just lure her into my room to ask me in person. Maybe that was all I wanted—to see her upright. She’d spent the last two weeks in her bed.
“Julie,” she drawled. “Can you turn that off, please?”
Her bathrobe swished against my doorway. It made my skin crawl. The robe was dirty. She was dirty. She hadn’t showered since Viola’s dance recital, which she’d only attended because it happened to fall inside one of her Good Weeks. For the last eight years, ever since she had Vi, those weeks had grown rarer. I watched that unwashed robe touch my clean, cream-colored doorjamb and wanted to puke.
I sighed, turned my music off, and spun to face her. “What?”
“We’re out of milk.”
Great. I knew where this was going.
“And?”
From her pocket, she produced a tiny folded bill. “Run to the store and get me some, please. The girls want cereal for dinner. You know Abby won’t eat it dry.”
“Mom.” I flipped my head over and gathered my hair for a ponytail. “I’m logging online in, like, two seconds.”
“You can talk to your friends after. It’ll take you ten minutes to walk to the store for me.”
For me. There they were, the words that beckoned me into the stale cave of her bedroom, time and again. They coaxed me to supermarkets and mini-marts. They glossed over my mom’s selfishness and told me, It’s an illness. She needs you.
I almost went, too. I always had. No wonder I grew up to be such a perfect doormat: Mom groomed me for it from the start.
But for some reason, those words didn’t work that day. I would never understand why, no matter how many nights I picked apart the fire in my brain, desperate to learn.
“You could go get it yourself, you know.” I plunked into my desk chair and booted up my computer. Her stare clung to me like that old bathrobe on her body, bloated from her medication and softened with so much time in bed. “Or cook the girls something real for dinner.” It would be my one and only comfort, for years to come, that I resisted the urge to add, “For once.”
Mom shifted her weight from foot to foot, the floorboards crea
king, while I logged into the chatroom and pretended to read the conversation my friends started without me.
“Okay,” she said suddenly. It wasn’t angry, or even hurt. Just simple agreement. “Will you watch the girls, at least? I’ll bring them up here—you can stay on your computer. Just keep an ear out.”
The wispy twang of her voice was almost normal. I looked up in time to watch her run her fingers over her matted hair, like she’d forgotten it wasn’t washed.
“Okay,” I echoed.
She took the car. The convenience store was maybe half a mile away. But she was gone for hours.
My memory scrubbed itself clean of most details, over time, but some would never fade: our front porch washed in chilled blue, then bright red. Our grass, synthetic-looking under the flashes.
My hand on the brass doorknob as I pushed it shut behind me, trapping the girls inside when the policeman took off his hat to talk to my father.
That burn of gunpowder in my nose when Dad put his hands, still dirty from a show at the stadium, on my shoulders.
I sat against the door and felt every jolt of the girls’ kicks and punches while they whined for me to let them out so they could see what was going on. “Come on, Juliet! This isn’t fair!”
The metallic twinge when I bit my lip and licked the blood away, while I watched my father cry for the first time in my life. I heard neighbors’ doors opening, the boughs of rumors stretching to me through the dusk as, one by one, they learned the news right alongside us.
22
I’m afraid to move her, like she’ll break, as we sit on her kitchen floor and she tells me the rest: the police fishing her family’s van out of the river that night; the hunt for a note, a clue, anything. An autopsy that revealed nothing, just her mother’s usual medications, in the usual amounts, through her system.
“So it...might have been an accident,” I offer. It’s not much. It’s nothing, actually—just speculation. But I want so badly to lessen her pain, I can’t think to say anything else.
