“You came to catch up?” Janie says. She looks confused, but still not mean, so I soldier on.
“And Andy? Is Andy okay?” Andy would be thirteen or fourteen now. Maybe his voice is changing. Maybe he’s smoked a cigarette. Maybe he’s kissed a girl. My heart is fluttering, not pounding, a sweeter kind of excitement.
“They’re both . . . good. Andy is at boarding school in New Hampshire. Frank plays baseball.” She clears her throat, and I guess that’s all I’m going to get about the boys who used to be my brothers. I almost never think about them, but even these two tiny details give me a rush of feeling for them. An ache. Maybe I’ll go to New Hampshire or start attending middle school baseball games.
“I miss them,” I say, a thing that isn’t really true until I say it, and then it makes me weepy.
“I wonder if they remember you,” Janie says. It’s mean and I don’t know if it’s on purpose. “So how can I help you? I’m not giving you their emails or anything. I’m not comfortable—”
“I wanted to say hi?” I say. Arizona would have had something better to say. She’d smooth over the situation and make it something good, worthwhile. I can’t imagine what I was thinking, doing this again. Janie’s in the middle of a busy lunch shift. Hipsters in plaid shirts and bushy beards are signaling at her to get them more beer, and she smells like seafood and garlic. There are out-of-season Christmas lights all over the place, not only the white kind, but colored bulbs and reindeer heads. It is not a place for a serious conversation.
Janie blinks. It looks painful, the movement of her perfectly smooth eyelids and the unwrinkled corners of her eyes. She’s had so much work done on her face it doesn’t even look like a face anymore.
“I got engaged. I’m engaged. It made me think of you. That was the best wedding. Everyone was so happy.”
Janie does math on her fingers. She shakes her head like it can’t be right.
“So you’re, like, twentysomething now? How old were you when we broke up? I’m all off. Jesus. I haven’t thought about you in years. Like, literally. Years and years.”
“Oh,” I say. I need that lobster and bacon situation immediately. I need something else to swallow down with the humiliating starkness of that particular reality. I’d rather be shoved around by Tess at this point than reminded by Janie in a dozen little ways that I meant nothing to her or to her boys.
Maybe the saddest feeling ever comes with the knowledge that you think about someone every day who never thinks of you. It’s a type of loneliness. All the time it’s been me and my memories and nothing else, even though I assumed there was an equal and opposite force coming at me from the stepmoms.
“I mean, no offense,” Janie says, seeing something in my face, surely, that turns her momentarily kind.
“I’m seventeen,” I say. “You left when I was eight.”
She laughs.
She may not remember me, but I remember so many little things about her, like her breathy laugh. I wonder if Frank and Andy blush like that, laugh like that. They can’t possibly look like her, because she doesn’t look like her. But maybe there are other things they’ve gotten from her. Maybe they even got something from me. I wonder if they still speak the pig Latin we taught them or if they’ve ever retold the scary stories we shared late at night.
“Oh, Montana. Wow. Wow. Your family, huh? A mini Sean right here.” Janie fluffs her hair. Her whole demeanor shifts from confused to cocky, like she’s been proven right about something very important and scientific. “Your family really falls in love fast and loves getting married, huh?”
“This is totally different,” I say, which is what people say when it’s not so different at all. “I’m not my dad. I’m his exact opposite.”
“Honey,” Janie says. I try to remember if it’s something she called Arizona and me when we were little. I think she’s going to say more—give me advice or a warning or a punishment or a congratulations, but she doesn’t have any of that for me, I guess. I wonder what she’d tell Andy or Frank if they came to her, wanting to get married so young. I imagine myself as a real child of hers, but I don’t know what that looks like either.
I’m lonelier than I’ve ever, ever been.
“What do you mean you haven’t thought of me in years?” I say. Something that hurts this much needs to be worth it, so I’m not leaving without lobster and bacon and answers. “We were family.”
“No, honey,” Janie says. “That’s not family. We didn’t even know each other.”