Family Game Night and Other Catastrophes

by Mary E. Lambert

“Wait. Why is that supposed to be funny?” says Jenny.

  “It’s not funny. That’s my point,” Melanie says.

  I wash down a mouthful of syrup and pancake with a big gulp of milk. I think about explaining the pun to Jenny, but I’m too tired and I don’t want to get dragged into this conversation. I wish my problems could be summed up with embarrassing T-shirts and fanny packs.

  “Who cares what your dad wears?” Rae asks. “As long as he lets you wear what you want. I bought this really cute bikini to sunbathe in when we’re at the lake house, and my dad said I had to return it.”

  “Ugh, I hate how everyone’s leaving,” says Jenny. “When do you go?”

  “I think early Friday,” says Rae.

  I silently agree with Jenny. I hate how Rae and her family leave for almost half the summer every year. It’s so depressing when she’s gone.

  “I told you your parents wouldn’t like that swimsuit,” Melanie says, returning to the main point. “It was pretty scandalous.”

  “Was not,” Rae says.

  Melanie and Rae start arguing about the bikini, then Jenny says something about how her mom almost didn’t let her come to the sleepover because she heard that guys were invited … and it goes on from there.

  Curfews. Dating. Grades. Allowances.

  Complaining about parents is sort of like an Olympic sport. But I don’t compete. The kids with real problems never do. I hear the same things at school all the time. “My mom’s such a jerk. She made me go to bed before the movie was over” or “I hate my dad. He wouldn’t let me go out because it was a school night.” But you almost never hear the other stuff. “Mom was drunk again.” Or “Dad didn’t have the money for bail.” Or “My mom saves all her fingernail clippings in old baby food jars.”

  Even Dad thinks that one is weird.

  But, to tell the truth, Dad isn’t much better than Mom. He teaches English literature at the community college and calls himself “a Sherlock Holmes aficionado.” He spends half his life sitting in his den, wearing his deerstalker hat and fiddling with his pipe, which he only smokes when things are really, really intense. The worse Mom gets, the more time he spends in the nineteenth century with Dr. Watson.

  Amanda is the only other person at the table who doesn’t complain. She barely looks up from her pancakes, just keeps eating like she’s a starved woman.

  I wonder what her damage is.

  Chad picks me up around noon. Leslie can be kind of high-strung, so I haven’t been as worried as I could have been until Chad’s ancient truck comes rattling up the drive. He would never volunteer to pick me up, which means Dad made him, which means Leslie’s Death Files succeeded where the collapse of a hundred newspapers failed. Something must have pulled Dad into the present. I’m sure it will be a temporary condition. But it’s enough to make me wonder if the fight last night was worse than I thought.

  Rae walks me out to Chad’s truck. I throw my sleeping bag and overnight sack in the back and hop in the passenger seat, waving goodbye as we cruise toward the open road.

  It’s one of the Glorious Days.

  I don’t say that out loud. If I said those kinds of thoughts out loud, people might not understand. It’s the sort of thing Amanda sometimes says and then Melanie and Rae make faces at each other behind her back. But in my head, I call days like this Glorious Days.

  Deep blue sky. Fluffy white clouds. Early summer so the grass and trees are still that bright-alive shade of green. Glorious. While we drive, I watch the cloud shadows drift over meadows and collide with the Rocky Mountains. Seriously, the drive home from Rae’s house looks like an advertisement for the Colorado Tourism Office. How can it be so beautiful out here when inside everything is such a mess?

  Chad and I don’t talk at first. I can’t decide which question to ask, and even if I could decide, I’m not sure I want to hear the answer. So instead I roll down my window, put my feet on the dash, turn my face toward the sun, and doze. Chad flips through radio stations for a while. When he can’t find anything to settle on, I shift in my seat and open my eyes.

  “Were you home last night?”

  “Nope,” he says.

  “Out partying?”

  He flashes a quick grin. “You could say that.” Melanie’s and Jenny’s parents might have super strict curfews, but I don’t think it’s ever occurred to Mom and Dad to set one for any of us.

  “Do you think it was bad?”

  “Leslie does.”

  “Yeah, but Leslie calls it a fight if you burp and forget to say excuse me.” I pull out my phone and force myself to turn it on. I scroll through her texts. “She keeps saying they were using the d-word.”

  “Which one?” asks Chad. Like he doesn’t know. “Dreamy?”

  I roll my eyes. Chad keeps going.

  “Dynamic? Daring? Dazzling?”

  “Now you’re just listing words you wish people would use to describe you.”

  “Oh, it’s what the people say about me.”

  Even though I’m stressed out and worried, I laugh. This encourages Chad, who says, “Although, knowing Dad, it was probably something British-sounding.”

  “What about dodgy?”

  “Good one. Or dimwit. Or divvy. Or duffer.”

  “Show-off,” I say, laughing a little more. We’re quiet for another minute before I finally ask: “Do you think they’ll really get divorced this time?”

  Chad shakes his head. “No, the parents might fight it out every now and then, but they’ve gotta know that neither of them will ever find anyone else who can put up with them.”

  Call me a romantic, but I think this is Chad’s way of saying that he thinks our parents still love each other. After all, what is love if not putting up with someone else? Putting up with them through thick and thin. And our parents have put up with each other through a lot of thicks and thins. Forget love; sometimes when Dad holds Mom’s hand while they watch the news, or when Mom slices Dad’s toast for him even though he’s perfectly capable of doing it himself, I think our parents still actually like each other.

  And it’s not as if this has never happened before. Every now and then, Dad notices that the house has metamorphosed into a giant storage shed for Mom’s garbage and that we still can’t get into the Forbidden Room. I really do wonder what she’s keeping in there. The world’s largest bottle-cap collection?

  And whenever Dad does suddenly notice that our house should be declared a National Disaster, he starts throwing around all these royal decrees. Usually, it’s something along the lines of: “If you don’t clean out the house and unlock that door, we’re through. I’m getting the kids out of here.”

  It’s all very imperial of him. But what can you expect from someone who spends all day teaching books from a hundred years ago? Unfortunately, we all, even Mom, know that the drama king is full of empty threats. Well … Leslie might not have figured it out yet.

  After a day or two of issuing proclamations, King Richard disappears and Dad resurfaces. He goes back to sipping Darjeeling tea and reading E. M. Forster, blissfully unaware that the view from his room has been blocked off by about a million cans of Bush’s baked beans. (Mom uses his den to store her canned-foods collection.)

  Chad stumbles across a song he likes on the radio and turns up the volume. I play with my phone, trying to decide if I should text Leslie. I end up texting Rae and Melanie and Drew instead. Three different times, I start to write Leslie a message, but nothing sounds quite right, and before I can decide on anything, we’re turning up the gravel drive to our house. Everything looks the same, just the way I left it yesterday, and I succeed in convincing myself that Chad is right. Mom and Dad aren’t getting a divorce. The fight last night was all a part of their routine. As usual, Leslie was overreacting.

  This feeling lasts until I walk in the front door and trip over a can of Bush’s baked beans.

  I’m still flat on my back when Dad comes crashing out of the den, briefcase on his shoulder and red suitcase in hand.
Canned vegetables scatter in his wake. The suitcase wheels keep getting caught on the cans, but Dad just yanks on the handle, sending the bag airborne. My father, the spacey, mild-mannered professor, is in the middle of a full-fledged, royal tantrum. I blink up at him.

  “Oh, hello there, Annabelle,” Dad says, and his suitcase lands a few inches away from the spot where I fell. “I didn’t realize you were home. How was the party?”

  I stay on my butt and blink up at him. Our entryway looks like the canned-goods aisle of a grocery store after a major earthquake. And he wants want to know how the party was?

  “Dad, what’s going on?”

  He glances toward our blocked-off parlor window. “Oh, nothing much. I’m just off for the UK tour.” Dad takes a group of community college students around England, Scotland, and Wales every summer. Their first stop is always 221B Baker Street. The Sherlock Holmes Museum in London. You’d think they would head for Westminster Abbey or Buckingham Palace first. But not if my dad is your tour guide.

  “I thought that wasn’t until next week.”

  “Yes, well … ” He shifts slightly from foot to foot. I might not have noticed his fidgeting except, for some reason, I haven’t picked myself up from the floor yet. I sit there and watch him squirm. “I thought I would head over a little early this year. It’ll give me some time to do a little research for a paper I’m writing.”

  “Since when?”

  “It was a snap decision,” he says. Then he sighs and squats down next to me. “You might as well know. Your mother and I had a little tiff last night.”

  I snort. I can’t help it. Anything that would end in canned vegetables scattered everywhere has to be a lot more serious than “a little tiff.” My mom might be a neurotic collector, but she is also neurotically systematic. Everything in our house has its place, its proper pile, its own room assignment. And the canned vegetables are always stacked like store displays in Dad’s den.

  “—we had a little tiff,” Dad repeats firmly, as though I hadn’t snorted at him. “And I decided it would be for the best if I left on my trip sooner than planned. Your mother knows what I expect of her while I’m gone. Try to help her out, Annabelle. She hasn’t learned to let things go like you have.”

  “Does Chad know you’re leaving?” I ask, feeling betrayed that he didn’t say anything while we were in his truck.

  Dad shakes his head. “Your mother and Leslie know, but I haven’t spoken with Chad yet. Where is he?”

  “Putting the truck in the garage. He said he was gonna check the oil or something.”

  A horn honks from outside. I look through the dusty windows that surround our front door. I can just make out a blurry green car in the drive.

  “Ride’s here,” Dad says. “I’ll stop by the garage and speak to Chad on my way out.” He pulls himself up from his squat. He grunts a little, and I hear his knees pop. “I’ll see you in a few weeks.” He doesn’t offer me a hand up.

  “Wait, when?” I ask. “When are you coming home?”

  Dad doesn’t answer. He’s already out the front door.

  I stand, dust off my shorts, and take my stuff upstairs, wondering if this really is the end of Mom and Dad’s marriage.

  I wish we could go back to the way we were before.

  I go right past Leslie’s bedroom. Her door is closed, which is unusual. She doesn’t like being shut up in the Toy Catacombs. I think about checking on her. But I can’t. Not now. I have something I have to do first. Have to, have to, have to. During the school year, I do it every day as soon as I get home. In the summers, I only do it if I’ve gone somewhere. If Dad ever remembers his promise to take me on his UK tour, I’ll need to bribe Leslie or Chad into helping me. Oh, who am I kidding? Of course Leslie would help me. Bribe or no bribe.

  Once I close the door to my room (unlike Leslie, I keep my door closed as often as possible), I start by unpacking from the sleepover, careful to put everything in its proper place. Then I walk the perimeter of my room in a clockwise direction, starting at the door. I walk with my feet as close to the wall as possible. When I reach a piece of furniture, I walk around it, still remaining as close to the wall as I can. The furniture always slows me down, because that’s where I have to check the most closely.

  I reach the desk first. I open each drawer, examining it for anything new, anything I haven’t personally put in there. Then I have to look under the desk, under the chair cushion, and, most important, behind the desk. When I first started the ritual, I didn’t think to check behind the desk, and by the time it finally occurred to me, there were already fifteen or twenty Real Simple magazines wedged back there.

  I reach the bed next and go through the same thing, remembering to lift the mattress. That’s another place I’ve found old papers piling up. Then I check the nightstand, the dresser, and the closet.

  I know it makes me sound a little crazy, and I haven’t exactly told anyone about my system. But what’s one more secret in a house piled up with them? And the ritual is necessary. It keeps my room clean.

  See, when I was younger and stupider, I wasn’t quite as careful as I am now and a few weeks after my tenth birthday, I noticed things were starting to pile up in my room again. It wasn’t obvious at first. I would bring clean laundry up to my room, and there would be color-coordinated clothes that didn’t belong to me tucked in the pile. A couple of pieces of junk mail would, somehow, navigate their way onto my desk.

  My room slid from pristine to comfortably messy and, before I caught on, it was getting cluttered again. That’s when I realized that rather than a head-on confrontation, Mom was using stealth. My room—all that lovely empty space—had to be filled. She’s like a goldfish growing to the size of its bowl.

  So I purged my room again. This second time, I carried it out in trash bags rather than sending it out the window. After that, I started checking my room on a daily basis.

  On this particular sweep, I don’t find anything, which makes me even more nervous about whatever went down last night. If Mom didn’t take advantage of the fact that I was gone for over twelve hours to at least tuck a candy wrapper under my desk, then things must have been bad. Really bad.

  Just as I am finishing the ritual, Leslie’s voice interrupts me.

  “Oh good, you’re home,” she says, appearing in my doorway. She looks awful, like she got even less sleep last night than I did. “Annabelle, I think I made a huge mistake.”

  “Leslie, it’s not your fault that Dad left early for his trip.”

  “That’s not what I mean,” she says. “It’s worse than that. Much worse.”

  What could be worse than Dad leaving?

  I just stand there like an idiot, staring at Leslie and trying to figure out what on earth she’s saying. Being tired makes me slow.

  The skin around Leslie’s eyes has turned this horrid purply-gray color. Neither one of us is a pretty crier. Whenever either of us cries, we turn into these horrible, puffy-eyed zombies. So I don’t cry. But Leslie is younger, and she doesn’t have very good control over her emotions.

  “What happened?” I ask.

  “Didn’t you get my texts?”

  “I might have seen a couple.” I shrug. “But, you know how it is. We were swimming and watching movies and I had my phone off for most of the night.”

  “But you never turn off your phone.”

  Guilt makes me blurt out a dumb excuse: “Well, all my friends were at the party. It’s not like I was expecting to hear from anyone important.”

  Leslie winces. I want to pull the words back.

  “I didn’t mean—” I start trying to explain, but at the rate that today is going, I’ll end up in China before I stop digging a deeper hole. “Never mind,” I say. “Just tell me what’s wrong.” I can almost guarantee that whatever happened, Leslie has already found a way to blame herself.

  She was born with a conscience the size of Alaska. Sometimes I wonder how she doesn’t collapse under the weight of it. Personally, I think
Jiminy Cricket is an awesome conscience. He’s small. Portable. Easy to squash. I think most of us have a conscience that’s sized something like an insect. But every now and then, a Leslie is born—someone who makes it a little harder for the rest of us to squash our crickets.

  “Everything’s wrong,” says Leslie. “I never should have told Dad those articles belonged to me. At first he thought they were Mom’s.”

  “Why did you tell him, then?”

  “He asked.” Leslie says this as if it explains everything. And actually, it does. It wouldn’t occur to Leslie that she could lie. Really, she’s the sister who should love Pinocchio. But, no, her favorite old Disney movie is Sleeping Beauty.

  “Listen,” I say, “Dad is not going to divorce Mom. And even if he does, it’s not your fault. This is about them and their problems.” Their many, many problems.

  “But I’m the one who left the folder in the hall.”

  “No, I’m the one who left it there. I threw it out of my room.”

  “But I told Dad about my nightmares. That’s what made him so angry.”

  “Did he ask you about that, too?”

  “Well, yes, but—”

  “And you had to answer him, didn’t you?” The good thing about Leslie having a conscience the size of Alaska is that it makes her really easy to manipulate.

  “I guess … ”

  “Then it’s not your fault.”

  “But … it is my fault that Grandma Nora’s coming.”

  I’ve never been electrocuted, but I bet I know exactly how it feels. A shock runs through your body, and your chest gets tight. You can’t breathe for a second, and your stomach turns into a massive knot and then, when it uncurls, you feel queasy and singed.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I called her.” Leslie is speaking in a whisper now.

  “You didn’t.”

  Leslie nods.

  “Why?” I have to ask. “What were you thinking?”

  “I—It’s just that—You weren’t answering my texts and Chad was out and I was all alone and Mom and Dad were fighting and it was really bad. I didn’t know what else to do.”