—
A FEW MINUTES later, I went to Finch’s room. His door was closed. I stared at it for a few seconds, thinking of how much things had changed, both quickly and gradually. When he was a little boy, his door stayed open and he often ended up in our bed. By the time he reached late elementary school, he would occasionally close it, but I felt free to open it without knocking. When he was in middle school, I did a quick knock before walking in. Once he was in early high school, I awaited his permission following the knock. And in the last year or two, all bedroom chats had become nonexistent. I barely entered his room at all, as Juana did his laundry and put away all his clean clothes.
I knocked now, then opened the door to find Finch on his bed. He was on his laptop and wearing headphones. He looked up at me blankly.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi,” he replied.
“Can you take those off?”
“There’s no sound,” he said.
“Take them off anyway.”
He did, with no attitude.
“How’re things going?” I asked, my voice sounding stilted.
“Fine.”
“Good,” I said. “And how’s Polly?”
“She’s fine, I guess.”
“You guess?” I took a step inside his room. “You don’t know?”
“Not really,” he said, expressionless. “We broke up.”
“I’m sorry. Can I…ask why?”
He sighed. “I don’t really want to talk about it, if that’s okay?”
I bit my lip and nodded. “Well, I also wanted to tell you that your father and I heard from Mr. Quarterman. Your Honor Council hearing is scheduled for next Tuesday.”
“Yeah, I know,” he said. “I got an email, too.”
“Oh,” I said. “Have you talked to Lyla?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Dad told me not to.”
“He did?” I said. “When did he tell you that?”
“Last week. After our meeting with Mr. Q.”
“Well,” I said briskly. “I’m overriding that. We’re going to see her tomorrow morning. You and I. Her dad will be there, too. It will be the four of us.”
I braced myself for resistance, but he only nodded and said okay.
“And in the meantime, I want you to think about Lyla. Her feelings. This is about her right now.”
“I know, Mom,” he said, looking a little like his younger, earnest self.
“Do you?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“So you understand that this meeting with Lyla is not a strategy for you. It’s an apology to her.”
He nodded again. “Yeah, Mom. I get it,” he said, holding my gaze.
Maybe he was humoring me or trying to avoid a lecture, but his expression really seemed sincere. It wasn’t quite a relief—I was still worried about his character—but it was a very small consolation and maybe even a source of hope.
“Are you sure you don’t want to talk about Polly? Or anything else going on in your life?” I gently pressed, feeling certain I knew what the answer would be.
“Yeah, Mom,” he said. “I’m sure.”
On Friday night, right when I thought things couldn’t get any worse, Dad came into my room and dropped another bomb on me. A stealth bomb.
“Get some sleep,” he said, standing in the doorway in a Titans T-shirt and sweatpants. “We have a meeting in the morning.”
“What kind of meeting?” I said, feeling suspicious because we never had appointments and stuff on the weekends. Dad knows that I love to sleep in on Saturdays, and it really is my only day to do so because he often guilt-trips me into going to mass with Nonna (who is sort of obsessed with being Catholic) on Sunday mornings.
“Finch Browning and his mother are coming over,” he said all nonchalantly, like I wasn’t going to notice.
I waited for the punch line, but there wasn’t one. “What? Why?” I demanded.
“To talk,” he said, taking another step into my room and glancing down at a laundry basket filled with clean clothes that he’d put there and asked me to fold the night before. Usually he does that for me—or at least refolds everything after I do a shit job (Dad is totally OCD about the weirdest things)—but I could tell he was trying to be stricter all of a sudden. As if his folding my laundry for me had been a contributing factor in my decision to drink at a party.
“Talk about what?” I said, horrified.
“What do you think, Lyla?” he said.
“I don’t know, Dad,” I said as sarcastically as I could. “That’s why I asked you—since you obviously set this up.”
“I would imagine—and this is just a wild guess—that we’re going to talk about what Finch did to you,” he said super-calmly and just as sarcastically.
I’m not sure exactly what I pictured going down tomorrow, but he might as well have just suggested that the four of us sit naked around a table playing Monopoly. Like, I really couldn’t think of anything more painfully awkward than rehashing what Finch did to me.
“Wow. So you really are trying to completely ruin my life?” I said. It actually felt like an understatement. I held my breath because I wasn’t fooled. I knew that at any moment, he could erupt. These days my dad went from zero to a hundred in no time at all. Actually, there was never a zero anymore. He was always pretty amped up and ready to explode.
“Not at all,” he said. “I’m trying to be a good father. That’s all.”
“Yeah. Well. Good fathers don’t usually try to destroy their daughters’ lives.”
I’d finally pushed his button, so he made a huffing sound, then threw up his hands like a pissed-off cartoon dad, and left the room mumbling, “You must have me confused with your other parent.”
I almost chased after him to tell him to stop playing the martyr. I mean, yeah, I get that Mom completely sucked in the parenting department. But Mom’s over-the-top sucking shouldn’t give Dad extra credit for doing the same basic job that everyone else’s parents were doing. I honestly couldn’t believe I’d never thought to make the point before and couldn’t wait to lay it on him, but I couldn’t make myself get up. So I just lay in bed low-key crying until Dad came back to my room—which I knew he would. He’d never stated aloud the don’t-go-to-bed-mad rule, but he more or less followed it. He’d always at least come back to say a civil good night. I heard Nonna once say that it was because he had “a weak stomach for conflict,” but I think it actually might have something to do with the way Mom left us.
Neither one of them had ever been entirely clear about what had happened when she jetted off in the middle of the night, but I got the gist that they’d had a big fight over me. It was something about Mom drinking too much and almost letting me drown at a pool party. (Though Mom insisted that I knew how to swim from a few lessons at the Y, Dad maintains that I’d only learned how to turn my face to the side to blow bubbles.) Anyway, Dad was furious at her “negligence”—and she was pissed off at his “judgmentalness”—if that’s even a word. She was so pissed off, in fact, that she left. For good.
“Your father made it clear that he thought you would both be better off without me. And I suppose he was right,” Mom told me one of the times she came back. She was a master at painting herself as the victim even when talking to me, her abandoned daughter.
I almost pointed out that he wasn’t beating her. Like, being judgmental just isn’t that drastic. At least not drastic enough to choose abandonment, and obviously she had another choice besides completely throwing in the towel. She could have proven Dad wrong and tried to show him that she could be a responsible, good mother. Instead, she kind of proved his case for him.