“We’re in it together,” Arizona said. She sounded twelve. She sounded eighteen. She sounded a hundred.
“I don’t know what I’d do without you two,” Dad said, coming back to life. “You’re everything to me. You are. We can do this. We can survive this together, okay?”
We nodded, and I was unsure of what exactly we were agreeing to.
Dad wiped his eyes and cleared his throat, and we tried not to ask questions about Mom maybe wanting us back. We tried not to care about that.
Later that night, Arizona snuck into my bed.
“We made Dad cry,” she said.
“We can’t ever do that again,” I said. We gripped pinkies. We kissed our fists. We slept in the same bed and tried and tried and tried not to miss our mother.
June 20
The List of Things to Be Grateful For: The What Love Is Edition 1 When everything seems small because love is the biggest word there is.
2 Knowing that Bernardo likes things that are serious and strange. Foreign films. Big books. Unlikely statements. Veiled hats from vintage stores. Me.
3 The sensation of holding in laughter, which is not unlike the sensation of holding in the words I love you or other things that seem like they should be secrets but aren’t meant to be secrets. Both start in my stomach and flutter around and come out all at once when I have no more muscles to tense up as defense.
twenty
As promised, I’m invited to Brooklyn to meet the parents.
“I’m scared,” I say on the phone. I hate the phone. It reminds me of claustrophobic conversations with my mother on my birthdays, and I don’t want to associate Bernardo with anything like that.
“Well, what would make you less scared?” he says. Bernardo is a guy who likes to solve problems. Or at least likes to solve my problems.
“Don’t know.”
“When are you least scared?”
“When Roxanne and Arizona are in charge,” I say. What I mean is that I’m least scared when I’m barely there, when I’m background noise.
“Well, bring them,” he says. “We’re a ‘the more the merrier’ kind of family.”
“If you mean that, you’re my hero.”
“Then I guess I’m your hero,” he says.
Arizona says no.
Arizona says she is reaching her capacity for crazy requests from people, and she’s going to get a tan in the park instead.
Arizona says I’ve known this guy for a week and there’s no reason to bring the whole crew to some crazy Brooklyn dinner.
Arizona says I have no idea what I’m doing.
Roxanne says okay because Roxanne is down for adventures. Plus, she likes the idea of Bernardo, or at least the idea of me getting wilder and dreamier and sexier.
Roxanne also says okay because she’s bored in New York this summer. She misses Bard. She misses her roommate. She misses college.
I try not to hear her when she says it. I want to be enough.
Roxanne and I wear dresses that seem like the kind of dresses parents would like. I think Dad’s annoyed when he sees me flounce downstairs. He wishes I’d wear something like this for his dinners, for meeting Karissa, for the diner even.
He’s doing work at the kitchen counter. There are pictures of women’s faces and he’s drawing on them and it’s depressing. He has manila folders with before and after photos from old cases, and he brings them too close to his face, making a humph noise every few seconds.
When he looks up at us, he still has his doctor glasses on and a face-lifted “after” picture in one of his hands. If I had a couch cushion I could use like I did back when I was little, I’d hide my face in it now, not wanting to be seen by him.
“Wear that Friday, to the park,” he says, envisioning a perfect proposal where not only does Karissa say yes, but his youngest daughter has her hair back with a headband covering the pinkest parts and a navy polka-dot sundress flaring out over her hips and making her look almost like she has curves on top too. “Don’t you feel good and confident all dressed up like that?” he says. I don’t answer. “It makes me happy to see you so happy. This is what I’ve always wanted for you.”
I know what he’s always wanted for me. If I were a different girl from a different home, I’d ask him about the gift certificate right now. I’d take the opening and make him apologize for it or at least acknowledge its existence.
I am not that girl. I shrug.
“Such a pretty girl,” he says. It should sound nice and complete, but as usual I hear everything that’s wrong with me too. I hear such a pretty girl, but. I hear wouldn’t you like to use that gift certificate as soon as you turn eighteen in a few months? I wonder if he’ll ask, on my birthday, what I plan on changing about myself. “You and Arizona. Both so pretty,” he says, and I hate that too.
It’s possible I would hate anything he said right now. We haven’t made up since the day at the diner. We haven’t even spoken about it.