Our New Normal (ARC)

by Colleen Faulkner

“Ty—” Suddenly I realize that his voice sounds weird. Almost like he’s going to cry. And I know something is wrong. Something bad. “Ty, it’s okay,” I say quickly. I stand in the doorway of the living room, hugging myself with one arm. Everyone is wandering around, talking, laughing. Except Granddad, who seems to be glued to that end of the couch. Christmas music is still playing on the Bluetooth speaker.

  “You don’t have to come,” I say to Tyler, gripping my phone. “It’s okay. It’s boring anyway. We’re going home soon. I’ll just, I’ll get your card. I can just tell Gran—”

  “I want to break up with you,” he blurts.

  I get light-headed and my knees are wobbly. I feel like I’m going to faint.

  No, like I’m going to just melt into the floor in a puddle and just . . . just evaporate. “Ty—” My voice cracks. “I can come over. We can talk. Where are you? I can come.” The words come out in a rush and I sound so pitiful. I sound like an eleventh grader who got knocked up by her immature boyfriend, who should have known he was never going to stay with her. Who knew that no matter how much she loved him, he couldn’t stay with her because he’s not that guy. Never could have been.

  “I gotta go,” he says.

  “No, Ty. Please . . . Ty, you can’t break up with me.” Tears start to run down my cheeks. “We’re going to have a baby.” My voice cracks.

  That’s when I realize everyone in my family is quiet and they’re looking at me. Even Granddad is looking at me.

  I’m so embarrassed. Because I’m crying. Because I just told my boyfriend he couldn’t break up with me, even though I know he doesn’t want me. Talk about pathetic.

  I turn around and step into the hall, leaning against the wall so my family can’t see me. I’m holding on to the phone like I just jumped off the Titanic and it’s the only life jacket there is. “Tyler, please don’t do this,” I plead. “I love you.”

  “I gotta go,” he tells me. “Gotta bring in the tree.” His parents run late getting ready for Christmas.

  “Ty, what did I do?” I beg. I can barely talk. “Please,” I whisper, knowing even as I say it that nothing I can say is going to change his mind. That he probably wanted to break up with me weeks ago. Months ago. That this has been coming for a while. Maybe I even knew it was coming.

  “So, um. Merry Christmas. And . . . and I guess I’ll see you in school.”

  And that’s it. Nothing about the baby. Nothing about making plans to take care of his son because of course he wants his son. Even if he doesn’t want me. Tyler just hangs up.

  I slowly slide down to the floor, my back against the wall in the hallway. I’m still gripping the phone. “Ty?”

  And then my mom comes around the corner from the living room and I look up at her. “Mom,” I sob.

  “Oh, Hazel,” she says so quietly, I barely hear her.

  “He broke up with me,” I blubber as she reaches down, takes my phone, tucks it into the back pocket of her jeans, and then reaches out for me.

  “Ty broke up with me. He doesn’t care about me. He doesn’t care about his b-baby.” I can barely get the words out I’m crying so hard.

  “Come on,” Mom says, pulling on my hands. “Get off the floor. Let’s go lay down on Gran’s bed. You’re tired and . . . oh, sweetie.” She sounds like she’s going to cry.

  I let her help me to my feet, and when she wraps her arms around me, I start sobbing again. “What am I going to do? Tyler doesn’t love me anymore. He—he doesn’t love our baby.”

  “Shhhh,” Mom soothes, holding me as close to her as she can with my big belly in the way. “It’s going to be all right.”

  “No. It isn’t,” I moan, laying my head on her shoulder. “Mom, I’m going to have a baby.”

  She strokes my hair, not caring that I’m snotting all over her pretty sweater. Possibly in her hair. Definitely in mine. “It’s going to be all right, Hazel,” she soothes in the quietest, gentlest voice. “Things have a way of working out, sweetie. Even if they’re not the way you think they will.”

  21

  Liv

  “I can’t believe I’m finally getting this done.” Amelia pulls a long strip of wet wallpaper off the wall and drops it into the trash bin behind her in the middle of her bathroom. “It’s been on my to-do list for . . . what? Two years?”

  Standing on a step stool, I tuck the scoring tool into the back pocket of my jeans and grab the spray bottle of glue solvent and begin to spray it on the area I just scored. With Amelia two panels behind me, our timing is working well. I score and spray, and by the time she gets to the next section, the paper is loose.

  “I’ve been telling you for months I’d help you.” I give the next section of bamboo-print wallpaper a spritz.

  Amelia groans. “But you’re so busy.”

  “Not so busy I can’t help you.” I glance at her. “Do I give you the impression I’m so busy I don’t have time for you?”

  Amelia pauses, a long strip of paper in her hand. She looks cute today. She’s dyed her hair a shade of light brown that’s much closer to her natural color than her usual bottle blond and she’s let it grow out a little so it’s not quite so severe-looking. And she looks happy. Mostly because she is. She started dating a new guy just before Thanksgiving. The owner of a small local land survey company. And so far, so good.

  She frowns. She’s wearing a lighter foundation on her face and I like it. I always thought she went a little heavy-handed with the makeup, using a full-coverage formula. She thought she needed to use it to cover signs of aging. I think she looks younger with her freckles showing through.

  “You are busy.”

  “Not too busy for you.” I give the wallpaper another spritz. “What made you think that? You didn’t ask for my help.”

  “Hit a nerve there, did I?”

  Her tone makes me look at her again. “What?”

  She arches one eyebrow. “Scraper? I’ve got a place that’s stuck.” She points at the wall.

  I pull the three-inch-blade putty knife out of my other back pocket and hold it out to her. “Sorry. I just . . .” I shake my head. “Mom. Oscar. They both—” I stare at the wall in front of me. Take a breath. Exhale. “Mom says they’re not seeing enough of me. Hazel is going every day, but I want to start work on the new job the beginning of February and there are only so many hours in a day. And I can’t be in two places at once. Don’t they realize that?”

  “The Anselin project is finally wrapping up?” Amelia gently pries up the edge of a piece of wallpaper, just the way I showed her, to keep from damaging the drywall behind it. The wallpaper is outdated and ugly to boot and I’m so glad she finally decided to strip it and paint the room. I even convinced her to give the vanity a new coat of paint and a granite top. A remnant that didn’t cost her more than she would have paid for a faux-granite top in one of the big home improvement stores.

  “Yup, we’re wrapping it up. Well, not quite.” I give the wall another squirt. “They want to remodel their master bath suite now. That wasn’t part of the original quote. Or schedule.”

  “Ah.” Amelia strips off another piece of wallpaper. “So, your mom wants you at her place?”

  I shake my head. “I know she’s overwhelmed. Dad has really good days, but then . . .” I exhale. “Then he does something crazy or . . . says something that really hurts Mom’s feelings.”

  “Something that hurts Bernice Cosset’s feelings? I have a hard time believing that. That woman is a marble statue. What’s he say that hurts her feelings?”

  “Saturday night Dad walks out of his room all dressed up. Wearing his suit, shaved, hair slicked back.” I chew on my lower lip, thinking back to my mom telling me the story. “When she asked him where he was going, he told her he had a date. With a pretty, young thing he met at a party.”

  “Your dad’s going to parties where he meets women? Without your mom?”

  I make a face. “Of course he isn’t. Amelia, he drools now, if you don’t tell him to wipe his
mouth.” Just saying that cuts me to the core. My father is fading before my very eyes. Fading fast. “He got angry when Mom told him he couldn’t go out. He told her she wasn’t his wife and she was holding him against his will and that he was calling 911.”

  “Liv, I’m so sorry.” Amelia reaches for her mug of hot tea from the sink’s counter and offers me mine.

  I come down the ladder, accepting the tea. It’s bitterly cold out today with blizzard-like conditions. Typical for mid-coast Maine in January. I hadn’t intended to come to Amelia’s today and start on this project. Oscar and I had made plans to do something together. We hadn’t decided what yet, but I’d specifically told the Anselins that I would not be by today. That I was taking the Saturday off even if the electrician was coming back to do some work. He could do it on his own. Something I’ve struggled to get my clients to understand—that I don’t have to be on-site at every moment work is being done.

  Turns out I could have worked. Or gone to Massachusetts to see Sean or . . . just gone with Hazel to my parents’ because, knowing he had plans with me, Oscar agreed to work for someone today. Which is out of character for him. He never agrees to cover anyone’s shift on a weekend. Taking one for the team is for younger PAs.

  Oscar did it just to avoid me. I know it. Thursday night we had a fight about whether or not the baby should have its own bedroom. He thought the baby should and wanted to clean out Sean’s room and repaint it. I said Hazel didn’t get two rooms. That seventeen-year-olds who get pregnant don’t get the luxury of having a nursery for their babies. When we had Sean, he slept in the room with us. We didn’t have another bedroom. And when he got a little older, he slept in the living room. Or we did. It wasn’t until we moved to the place we live now that Sean got his own bedroom. That Oscar and I got our own room. And we’d both earned a college education and worked for a living.

  “We had to have Mom and Dad’s house phone disconnected,” I tell Amelia, going on with my sad tale. “They’ve had that number for more than fifty years. But Dad kept calling 911. He’d call if he couldn’t find the bananas, if Mom told him to leave his snowy boots in the laundry room, if he couldn’t figure out how to recharge his iPad.”

  Amelia smiles, then frowns. “Liv, I don’t know what to say.”

  “Mom didn’t want to disconnect the phone, but it was the only solution I could come up with. I told her Dad could be arrested for making unjustified calls to emergency services. That he could be charged with something legally.” I take a sip of my chocolate mint tea. “She asked if they would put her in jail. She sounded hopeful.” I eye Amelia over the rim of my mug.

  She laughs. “She thinks, had you been there, your dad wouldn’t have made the calls?”

  “No. Yes. I don’t know. Maybe.” I shrug. “She’s frustrated.”

  “I know she is.” Amelia sips her tea. “And Oscar? He’s saying you don’t have time for him?”

  “Yes.” I cross my arms over my chest, still holding on to the hot mug. “But what he means is that I’m not available when he wants me to be. That I’m not there at his beck and call anymore.”

  “Is that a little harsh?”

  “No.” I glance up at her. “Yes.” I hesitate and then drop my head. “Maybe.” I roll my eyes, à la Hazel. “I don’t know what’s going on. Everything he says, everything he does, annoys me. He does this thing with his fork when he eats. Like . . . he touches it to his teeth. He’s been doing it as long as I’ve known him, but all of a sudden I can’t stand the sound. I can’t stand to sit at the kitchen table when he makes that sound.”

  “I thought you said you guys were getting along better after Thanksgiving.”

  I sip my tea. “We were, but then . . . I don’t know. Things got crazy. Christmas. Tyler breaking up with Hazel.”

  “And they haven’t gotten back together?”

  “No. The week after Christmas they were talking again, but then she found out he was texting with some other girl and—” I shake my head. “I think she’s done with him. But then that caused a new set of problems because Oscar thinks we should talk to Ty’s parents about financial responsibility after the baby is born. About how he’s going to spend time with his child. How visitation with Cricket and B.J. is going to work.”

  “I think it’s J.J.,” Amelia says.

  We both chuckle.

  “Anyway,” I go on. “My feeling is that the less contact we have with those people, the better off we’ll be. Hazel and the baby.”

  “Where’s Hazel fall on this?”

  I cut my eyes at her. “Where do you think?”

  “Ah, so you think Oscar is siding with her again.”

  “I don’t think. I know he is.” It comes out louder than I intended. Loud in the small room.

  We’re both quiet for a minute as we enjoy our tea.

  It’s Amelia who breaks the silence. “Look, Liv. I know I probably shouldn’t be giving marriage advice. Considering the fact that I’m divorced, but . . . You and Oscar love each other. This . . . this is a bump in the road.”

  I give a little snort. I’m pissed at Oscar today. Really pissed. Because he makes me out to be the bad guy, the one who doesn’t want to work on our marriage, and then he’s the one who cancels on our plans to take a shift for someone when he doesn’t need to.

  “A big bump in the road, I’ll give you that.” She nods. “But you two belong together, Liv. You need to stop being so combative and work it out.”

  I stare into my mug. “You think I’m being combative?”

  She doesn’t answer.

  I look up. “Maybe I am being combative, but, Amelia—I’m overwhelmed.”

  “I bet Oscar is overwhelmed, too.”

  I groan and set down the mug. “You’re probably right. This is my fault.”

  “I’m not saying it’s your fault.”

  I start picking at a corner of wallpaper I’ve already scored and sprayed with stripping solution. “I feel like it’s my fault,” I say quietly. I move my head one way and then the other, stretching it. My neck is stiff because I fell asleep on the couch last night. Oscar didn’t wake me and tell me to come to bed. I always wake him up. “I feel like it’s all my fault.”

  Amelia starts peeling wallpaper beside me. “You’re not responsible for Hazel having unprotected sex with a cretin.”

  I look at her. “No?”

  “Nope.” She drops a piece of dripping wallpaper into the trash can behind us. “But you are responsible for how you respond to it. And how you deal with the friction the pregnancy has caused in your marriage.”

  “Am I responsible for my dad trying to make popcorn on the stove and burning up Mom’s favorite pot?”

  “Nope. Not responsible for that, either.”

  We laugh and I feel a little better. And maybe a little more hopeful because, as long as I keep my sense of humor, there is hope, isn’t there? Hope I can get through this. That my marriage can survive it.

  22

  Hazel

  I stand in Dad’s sweatshirt, a pair of wool socks, and my panties in the laundry room, waiting for my fat-girl jeans to dry. I’m just staring at the dryer, watching my jeans go around and around through the glass window. It’s warm in the laundry room and it smells good, like the lavender detergent Mom uses.

  My jeans thump every time they go around, a harder thump and then two little ones. Three syllables. Three beats.

  I hate him.

  I hate him.

  I hate him, I say in my head.

  Tyler. I’m so done with him. So over him. He’s an idiot. Or maybe I am for ever going out with him in the first place. For thinking I saw potential in him. A future with him. For letting him stick his teeny-tiny dick in me. I didn’t even like it. All that buildup, the big deal adults make about sex, and it was a big flop as far as I’m concerned. I see blurbs on the front of women’s magazines in line at the grocery store talking about women getting more out of sex with their man. Next boyfriend I have, I want to get something o
ut of it. I want some of the fun it’s supposed to be. Maybe when I’m lying around after the baby is born, I’ll start reading up on good sex, just to be ready.

  My jeans continue to thump as they go around and around.

  I hate him.

  I hate him.

  I hate him.

  Tyler’s completely abandoned me. Abandoned our baby. But that’s okay, I’ve decided, because Charlie and I will be better off without him. Tyler’s going nowhere. He’s going to be a nobody and he’s never going to leave this town. And not because he couldn’t be somebody, not because he couldn’t leave. Because he doesn’t want to. He’s content to drive around in his piece-of-crap truck, poisoning himself with the exhaust while he poisons himself with nicotine and other carcinogens rolled up in white paper, and never dream about having something more. Something more to give to someone else. I bite hard on one of my cuticles. Someone like me. And our baby.

  “Hazel!” Mom calls from the kitchen.

  “Yeah?”

  “Breakfast?”

  “Nope. Running late!” I yell above the sound of the washer and dryer. Mom put in a load to wash a few minutes ago. She does wash every morning before she goes to work. Now she’s renovating two houses. And some guy has called her about turning an old house into some kind of store right here in Judith, as part of a downtown revitalization program. She seems really excited about doing a commercial property.

  I check the time on my phone. I don’t want to be late because there’s this guy who parks near me in the school parking lot. He’s a senior. He always pulls in at the last possible minute, so if I’m there before he is, I can just sit in my car and pretend I’m fixing my hair or something and wait until he’s getting out. Then we can walk into school together. We’ve done it twice this week.

  His name’s Jack. He’s super cute and super nice. He asked me about the baby, but it didn’t seem like a big deal to him to be walking into school with a pregnant girl. He treated me normal. And he smiled at me when we said good-bye.

  “Hazel. Egg sammy?” Mom says. “To go. I can wrap it for you.”