“Scott,” she said, “don’t be foolish. The magazine is paying for me to take the kids and eat our way through Italy. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”
My mother had this idea about my father’s new life, that it was filled with champagne and perfectly flaky crust, with a country house and a loft in the city, with cocktail parties and black-tie events. For the most part, she was right. What made her feel even worse was that in just one year, my father and Ava were married with a baby of their own, a little girl named Zoe. They were a family. They were a family and we weren’t. We were three people who lived unhappily in a run-down house in Providence. I wanted to be a part of my father’s real family more than anything, except being a saint. If I wasted my time making lists, number one, I would be a saint, number two I would live in New York City in my father’s real family, and number three, I would be in a full-time ballet school.
Another bad habit of my mother’s was to tell and retell the same old story to anyone who would listen. Mrs. Harrison had probably heard it all a million times by now, how the winter before the divorce my father went to Idaho on an assignment about helicopter skiing. They had just bought the house, and the article would earn them enough money to pay for the renovations. The avalanche happened and everyone except Dad and a dentist from Chicago was killed. My father turned his article into a bestselling book called Avalanche: Skiing Toward Disaster, moved to New York City, married Ava Pomme, and had a new baby.
For a while, we couldn’t even turn on the television without seeing Dad and Ava. He told his harrowing tale on the Today show and Oprah, and Ava stood teary-eyed and lovingly beside him. “As if she had been the one waiting for the calls from the Sun Valley Hospital to see if he was all right,” my mother said in the same old story. “As if she was the one who waited for him at Logan Airport when he returned, the one who stayed up with him at night, waiting for him to talk about what he had lived through.” Oprah had turned her moist eyes on Ava and said, right on national television, “This must be so hard for you to hear,” and Ava Pomme, the Tart Lady, had nodded, had dabbed at her eyes with a linen handkerchief, had put her hand over his—“Possessively!” my mother added dramatically, pathetically, endlessly—while we all sat, miserable and abandoned, in our unrenovated house.
The thing is, while we watched him on television last year, we were all miserable for separate reasons. I liked seeing my father on famous television shows with a glamorous woman and I felt miserable that instead of waiting in the Green Room with movie stars I was sitting with a mother who screamed and threw shoes and Legos at the TV set. I asked Dad if I could go with him when he taped one of these shows, but he said my mother needed me more.
By the time the trip of a lifetime negotiations began, Zoe was born and a whole year had gone by. Even though he wasn’t on TV so much anymore, his cell phone was always ringing and he was always e-mailing editors from his BlackBerry. He was famous. He was in demand. And even though I missed him like crazy, from my point of view, my father was anything but foolish.
I almost forgot I was listening in on their phone conversation. Then I heard my father saying, “First of all, Madeline doesn’t even want to go.”
“You mean second of all,” Mom said.
“What?”
“First of all was I hadn’t asked your permission,” she said. “Second of all, Madeline doesn’t want to go. And I can save you third of all because Cody doesn’t want to go, either.”
“So you go and the kids will spend the summer here with us.”
I held my breath. It was only three in the afternoon, but already the sky was dark, threatening still more of the cold rain that had marked most of January. In New York City, gray skies looked romantic. Here, they only looked dull.
“You know,” Mom said, “I started to build a playhouse for the kids last fall. I thought I could finish it, but it was harder than I expected. I had to keep redoing it.”
“Alice,” Dad said, and I could hear the dread in his voice. My mother could very quickly deteriorate into an ex-wife from soap operas, all tears and accusations. “Don’t.”
“What I am trying to say is, I make plans and I work on them until I get them right.”
“Okay,” he said carefully.
“And I’m planning this trip and we’re all going. All three of us. You can see them before and you can see them after. But for one month this summer those kids are mine.”