The Most Fun We Ever Had

by Claire Lombardo

  “It doesn’t,” he said.

  “But you can’t be sure that you won’t feel differently in—”

  “Are you trying to talk me out of being with you, Violet?”

  “No, I just want to make sure you know what you’re getting yourself into.”

  He kissed her. “I’m sure,” he said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Grace was aware, for the first time, of having the upper hand with a member of her family, age-wise. She got to be the cool aunt, the autonomous elder with an apartment and a debit card and a couch on which transient visitors could crash. She’d clocked the power dynamic early—practically from the moment Jonah had entered her house, though he’d caught her braless and depressive and watching a docudrama about the Craigslist Killer.

  “We finally meet,” she said. “How’d you get my number? How’d you know where I live?”

  “Your dad made me store everyone’s info in my phone,” he replied.

  Having the upper hand allowed her to tamp her gut reaction, which was to burst into tears. “How is he?” she asked instead. “Why didn’t anyone tell me you were…” But his appearance caused her to back off, the ghostly glow of his skin that betrayed a lack of sleep, nails bitten to the quick, fear on his face as though she might turn him away.

  “Sit down,” she said, feeling big-sisterly for the first time. “Let me get you some water.” To be in the company of one of her family members, albeit one who was still technically a stranger, was an unspeakable relief; she was face-to-face with someone who’d been with her dad before everything had gone south. He looked less like Violet than she’d expected. She felt her eyes fill and turned away, pretending to busy herself with filing her single fork into a drawer. “You hungry?” she asked, then realized, quickly, that the stale pita chips had been the only remaining edible items in her house. She surreptitiously checked her bank balance on her phone. It was technically money allotted for the next two weeks of groceries, but the thought of riding on the bus with him to the market made her soul-crushingly exhausted.

  So they ended up at the Comeback. The Irish bartender smiled when he saw her, waved from behind the bar. She felt herself flush.

  “Who’s that?” Jonah asked.

  She flushed even more deeply, because it was not a promising personality trait to be on a casual-greeting basis with barroom staff. “No one.”

  “We can sit at the bar, if you want.”

  She narrowed her eyes at him. “You’re fifteen years old, are you not?”

  It was fun, playing the role of the patronizing older sister. She’d had such good teachers.

  “Sixteen, actually,” he said, and she thought she saw him suppressing a smile.

  She studied his face. He did seem older than a high school sophomore, but he was still wearing those big Kleenex-box skater shoes and there was a waxy galaxy of acne across his forehead. “Let’s take a booth,” she said. “We have stuff to talk about.”

  He didn’t protest, and they sat down together, the high backs of the booth muffling the bar’s ambient noise.

  “So you were with my dad. When it happened?”

  He squirmed, fiddling with his straw wrapper. “Kind of.”

  “Wendy said you called the ambulance. Thanks for doing that.”

  “You don’t have to thank me. I did what any normal person would do.”

  She leaned back, startled. “I just meant—”

  “Sorry. Whatever. You’re welcome.”

  “Can you tell me— I mean, was he— What happened, exactly, was he—”

  “He was—like, he started acting really weird. Then he fell. It happened in, like, a nanosecond. Just, like, splat.”

  She shuddered. She couldn’t quite bring herself to envision it, her formidable father dropping to the ground like a rag doll. It went against the rules of her cognition. It wasn’t a thing that was supposed to happen.

  “Sorry,” Jonah said. “I didn’t mean, like—splat.”

  “Can you stop saying that word?”

  “Have you heard anything more?” He seemed to know almost nothing about her father’s condition. When she’d told him, at her apartment, that her father was, at least, stable, if not conscious, some of the tension had flooded from his face; he’d looked like a kid for a second.

  “I’ve tried calling my sisters,” she said. “Nobody’s answering. So I’m assuming— I mean, I don’t really have a choice but to assume that no news is good news.”

  Their food arrived and Jonah dug into his burger as though he hadn’t eaten since March. She picked listlessly at hers. Had she brought him here because the food was cheap, or because she hoped that Ben might show up? Then her stomach clenched anew, for allowing herself to even think about Ben, for the fact that she was at a bar with her teenage nephew just two days after her father had suffered a major heart attack. She reached for the vodka soda she’d ordered and casually set between them on the table, nodding at Jonah like See? I’m cool. Have a sip.

  “My dad’s in the hospital,” she said, “and my whole family is with him and I’ve returned to the site of my recent breakup to get drunk with a teenager.” She closed her eyes and pressed her forehead to the hard edge of the table.

  “I wasn’t sure where else to go,” he said. “And I…”

  “No,” she said, and she reached across the table to touch his wrist, because she’d learned in the last two hours that you were allowed to be motherly with younger people. “It’s actually really nice to have you here. Even if you won’t tell me why you’re here and why you have my dad’s car and whether or not anyone knows you’re gone.”

  “Who’d you break up with?”

  She sighed, allowing him, once again, to dodge the subject, taking full custody of the cocktail. “It’s stupid to even call it that. We weren’t even really together.”

  Weakened by fatigue and vodka, she told him.

  “He sounds like kind of a tool,” Jonah said.

  “He was being honest with me.” She had never understood why men were so quick to throw each other under the bus. “How does that make someone a tool?”

  “Sorry.” He nodded toward the bar. “What’s the deal with that guy?”

  The Irish bartender was chatting with an older man by the top-shelf liquor, but it was undeniable that he kept glancing over at their booth. “Nothing’s the deal.” She pushed the drink across the table toward him. She could not recall if it was their third or fourth. Time had been moving weirdly since she’d gotten the call about her father.

  “What’d you say his name was?”

  She felt her face heat up again. “I didn’t. Luke. Why?”

  Jonah crunched an ice cube. “No reason.”

  “Can we talk about what happened?” she asked. “My father’s in the hospital.” Her voice broke, startling her, and Jonah, as well, apparently, because he sat up straighter.

  “I wasn’t— I didn’t mean to…”

  She paused, feeling a creeping sensation at the back of her neck. “Didn’t mean to what?”

  “I shouldn’t have let him go up there in the first place. I’m like a thousand years younger than he is. I had one job and I couldn’t even—”

  “My dad’s been climbing around our house for decades. There’s no way you could have stopped him.” She watched him, her sisterly upper hand now allowing her to feel a pang of sadness for him, this confused kid without a family, now caught in the tornadic swirl of hers. “And Jonah, he— My dad wanted to hang out with you. That’s just how he—” She faltered before using the word is. “My dad cares about like six things in the world. Spending time with us is one of them.” The shift in the power dynamic, for whatever reason, was enabling her to speak without getting choked up. “My parents are crazy about you, Jonah. My dad asked you to help him with the tree for the same reason he use
d to ask me to rake leaves with him. So he could spend time with you.”

  His eyes were an unearthly blue and swimming with tears. “Yeah, but I— It was the fucking dog. He got loose and he startled me and I would’ve been holding the ladder otherwise.”

  The creeping was replaced by a heavy sadness. “Jonah, it’s just a thing that happened. What could you have done? Broken his fall? He still had a heart attack.”

  “But I should’ve been the one to go up there. I shouldn’t have let him—”

  “Jonah, I— How bad did he look?” she asked, and her voice broke on the penultimate syllable. “Seriously. Don’t tell me the—”

  “Really bad,” Jonah said, and he looked down, and he seemed like a little kid again, shoulders caved inward and hands pulled into the sleeves of his shirt.

  She tried to imagine what that meant. She pictured her dad blue and bleeding; she wondered what it would sound like if he screamed. Her dad, who’d sat with newborn her in his arms, at her mother’s bedside, not knowing if she’d ever wake up. Her dad, who’d never not been there. She closed her eyes and took a few breaths. “Why doesn’t my family care that I’m alone here? Why are— I mean, no offense, but why are you the one who’s here instead of one of my sisters? Why are they not calling? He’s, like, my favorite person in the world.”

  “Sorry,” Jonah said.

  “It really is nice to have you here,” she said finally. “It’s nice to have a person who—looks like people who I look like. No one’s been to visit me in a while.”

  “You think I look like your family?”

  She cocked her head, felt it dip a little too much to the left, heavy with drink. “I do. Not—well, not in the way that my other nephews do. But you definitely seem familiar to me.”

  His eyes bored holes into the table before him. “Do you know anything about my dad?”

  She realized anew how much differently from her this kid had experienced the world. To not know your father’s fate was one thing, but to not know your father at all was another entirely. The curiosity reminded her, again, of how young he was, how lucky she was, grand-scheme.

  “Violet had this boyfriend for a while,” she said. He straightened to attention. “I don’t remember his name, but I—I remember thinking at the time that he was probably really smart, but in hindsight it just seems like he might’ve been super douchey.”

  His face fell. She remembered both her audience and the carelessness of what she was saying, that if asked to describe her own father she could go on for hours, cataloging his nuances, his quirks, his favorite things, his dumbest jokes, all the times he’d been there for her, cared for her when she was sick, tucked her into bed, moved her into dorm rooms and apartments. Her dad, assembling the cheap Swedish heft of her bed. It’s in my dad contract.

  “I don’t mean— I was in like second grade, so my memory isn’t…And just because someone’s dad is shitty doesn’t mean that…”

  “You aren’t really the authority on shitty dads,” he said.

  “You’re right,” she said.

  He glanced at her empty glass, then looked up at her. “You’re in law school, right?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “If you’re in law school, why do you live in, like, a shed?”

  Her eyes filled again, this time in shame.

  “No offense or anything. It just seems weird that you— I don’t know.”

  “I’m not—in law school, per se,” she said. “Not exactly.” All the times she could have confessed—should have confessed, prior to this. To be speaking the words aloud now, to the only member of her family younger and more helpless than she, was almost kind of funny. And then she took a breath—weak, terrified, and for the first time in ages in the company of someone who had some of the same genes she did. “I didn’t get in anywhere. I’ve been lying to everyone. I do live in a shed. I have no idea what the fuck I’m doing.”

  Jonah looked sort of uncomfortable. “Wow. Your parents are, like, super proud of you. They talk about you all the time.”

  She bent her straw, angrily, into a knobby spiral. “That’s funny,” she said, “that they’d talk a lot about someone who they basically forgot existed.”

  “Dude,” he said. “Your bedroom’s like a shrine. Although I was way more impressed by your TV on the Radio poster than I was by the Coheed and Cambria, by the way.”

  She colored. “I was fifteen.” Then, remembering her new role: “You’ll have to dip back into the annals of your memory to recall what that was like.”

  “Seriously, it’s like you’re still a little kid. Like they’re just waiting for you to come home and revive your Tamagotchi.”

  “Which is part of the problem,” she said. “Everyone refuses to see me as an adult, and because they’ve been denying the fact that I can ever be an adult, I’m a total fucking mess.”

  “I actually saw it more as, like, two people who really like their kids and are sad they’re not living in their house anymore,” Jonah said. “It’s actually really nice, I think.”

  She crumpled, at that, and after about fifteen seconds Jonah was sitting next to her, not the most comforting presence but trying nonetheless, patting uneasily at her shoulder with one hand and holding an ineffectual wad of napkins in the other. Finally, less because she was finished crying and more to put him out of his misery, she dried her eyes and snarfed in her snot.

  “You’re a really nice kid, Jonah,” she said.

  “I really have to pee,” he replied with apology.

  When he disappeared she tried to compose herself, checked her phone fruitlessly for nonexistent messages from her family members. She sent off identical texts to Wendy, Violet, and Liza: Any updates? I feel really out of the loop.

  “Hey,” Jonah said, appearing at her elbow. “That guy at the bar likes you.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “He asked if I was your little brother.”

  “Ah, yes. Inquiring after one’s siblings. The natural aphrodisiac.”

  “I can just tell. He seems nice. You should go talk to him.”

  She scoffed. “Okay, Casanova.”

  “I’m really tired anyway. I can go back to your house. I promise to let you in when you get home.”

  “You’re acting as though I’ve already agreed to this.” But she looked up, and Luke the Irish bartender met her eyes and offered her a genial little salute, and she was reminded of the night of her faux-breakup with Ben, how kind he’d been. She smiled at him.

  “See you in the morning,” Jonah said, snatching the keys from her hand, and he was gone before she could change her mind.

  As she watched him go, her phone dinged with a reply—from Wendy; characteristically underwhelming: All good. Go to bed.

  She shoved the phone in her pocket and made her way to the bar.

  * * *

  —

  He knew he should probably call someone. Wendy. She’d give him an update. But if the update was bad, then he’d have to break the news to Grace, and he couldn’t handle telling Grace.

  It wasn’t his fault. Was it? As Grace had said, it wasn’t as though he could have cushioned David’s fall. What had even happened? God, what if he’d watched someone die and didn’t even know it? Watched David die. David, who was so dorky and dad-jokey, who worried so much about his daughters, who actually seemed to enjoy the time he and Jonah spent together rehabbing the sick basement shower and watching the Blackhawks. There was no way he’d forgive Jonah—obviously not if he was dead, but also not if he was alive and learned that Jonah had stolen his car and driven to Oregon and set his daughter up with an Irish bartender. Jesus.

  A knock on the door caused him to jump nearly a foot in the air, even though he’d promised Grace he’d wait up. It was almost midnight. Fortunately, it hadn’t sounded forceful enough to be a cop. He went to
the door, holding one of Grace’s pathetic string cheeses, and opened it to find a twenty-something guy in a Pearl Jam T-shirt. “Yeah?” he said, as though he had a leg to stand on, squatting in a city he’d never been to, on the lam, eating someone else’s cheese.

  “I— Did I get the wrong—” The guy looked past him, seemed to take stock of the photos, the curtains, all of Grace’s little efforts to make her house look less like a psychiatric hospital. “Where’s Grace?”

  “Out.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Who are you?” He missed these kinds of banal confrontations, he was surprised to realize, marking one’s territory, the way he’d learned to fight with other guys at Lathrop House over who claimed which bed or what they’d watch on TV. He was good at it. Wielding authority, his Krav Maga instructor called it.

  “Is Grace okay? Is she—”

  “We’re related,” he said, because the guy seemed nervous, and he didn’t want him calling the cops.

  “You and Grace? Related how?” Then a moment of recognition. “Are you Jonah?”

  It moved him, a little bit, that there was a stranger in Oregon who’d heard about him, who knew his name because his aunt had told him it.

  “I’m Ben,” the guy said, holding out his hand. “I’m a friend of Grace’s. Is she around?”

  “No.” He released the handshake.

  “Are you staying with her?”

  “Just temporarily.”

  “She hasn’t been answering my calls.”

  It struck him, then, that this was the breakup guy Grace had mentioned at the bar. The guy who’d dumped her. “I doubt she’s coming home tonight,” he said, and it took a minute for the guy’s face to rise and fall with the realization.

  “Oh,” Ben said. “I— Do you know where she— Never mind. Nice to meet you, man.”

  “You too.” He watched the defeated slump of the guy’s back as he retreated. “I’ll let her know you stopped by,” he called, but Ben didn’t turn around, just raised a hand in thanks and kept walking. He felt a little bad; he’d just been messing around, trying to fuck with the guy a little bit and see how much he could get away with—kind of, it occurred to him, like how he’d been trying to keep up with Ryan and had gotten carried away and blabbed about Liza’s hookup. And he realized that he’d done it again, fucked things up for yet another member of the Sorenson family.