“Karissa’s family didn’t die in a car crash,” I said, and watched his face for signs of horror.
He nodded. “If that’s true, it’s quite shocking,” he said.
“Like, scary, Dad,” I said. I wanted more of an impact. I wanted to see myself reflected in him—the crazed feelings I had in the club coming to the surface on his face, in his words. “You can’t be with someone like that.”
“I said this was different,” he said. “I love her. I love all of her, no matter what. I’m working on it. That’s what you girls want, right? For me to love someone without wanting to change them?” He looked heartbroken—the down-turned mouth of someone who keeps failing even when they think they’re succeeding.
“Not, like, unconditionally,” I said. Dad sighed and rubbed his forehead. He ate some French toast pastries and poured another cup of coffee for himself, so full that it splashed out the top and singed his fingers and spotted his shirt. Normally he’d run upstairs and fix it, but he didn’t this time. He stayed with me.
“I’m trying to do the unconditional loving thing,” Dad said. “It’s not going to be perfect. But I’m marrying this girl.”
“You’ve already changed her,” I said. I wanted to tell him that every time he changed her I took it as a sign that he wants me to change too. I wanted to tell him I’d seen the terrible picture in his desk and that I may never recover from that, either. I wanted to tell him how unnecessary and depressing it all is—these problems he’d created.
But he looked so sad and small, pouring syrup on the pastries and avoiding eye contact, that I couldn’t.
“You know what your mom used to say?” he said at last. He picked up my hand, the one with the ring tattoo, and turned it over, looking at the mark.
“I have no idea, actually,” I said. I gave him a strong look, like he needed a reminder that I don’t really have a mom, not the way I’m supposed to.
“I’m not going to get it quite right,” he said. “She had a way with words, your mother.”
“I didn’t know that either,” I said. I sounded bitter without meaning to, but maybe that’s simply what I was, about my mother. Bitter.
“She used to say something about love meaning that you can see something awful in someone and not want to change it. That’s why she left me, she said. Because I didn’t get that.”
He twirled a piece of pastry around and around in the syrup, making sticky patterns.
“I probably didn’t say it right,” he said.
I wanted to hear her say it right. I wanted that bad.
And I wanted to be like my mother. This little bit. This one little bit.
Arizona’s in her old room, lying on the bed and staring at the glow-in-the-dark stars she put on the ceiling a million years ago, when Mom sent some letter about how you can see so many stars when you’re out of the city. Arizona wanted the city to be every bit as good as wherever Mom was. To prove her wrong.
“We have the dresses,” I say. I hold them up so she can get a look at the bright-red color, the ribbon straps, the too-low necklines.
“We’re not wearing them,” Arizona says.
“On board. What are we gonna do? Jeans with bikinis? Our Halloween costumes from the year we were mice?”
“He doesn’t want to marry her,” Arizona says. “That’s what you said, right? When he talked to her the other day, he told her she wasn’t family?”
“Like, sort of,” I say. I get out cigarettes and light one for each of us.
“You know I don’t smoke,” she says.
“This is a smoking conversation.”
She takes it from me and inhales. It’s weird to love something so stupid as smoking under fake stars with your sister, but I think I love it more than anything else I’ve done this summer.
“Maybe he won’t go through with it,” I say.
“That never happens,” Arizona says. She’s so much sadder than I realized. On her back her boobs stay pointed straight up to the sky, but the rest of her is drooping.
“Things change,” I say, not totally sure if I believe it.
I tell her the things he said about our mother. She gets what I imagine is the same look on her face that I had—longing and hopefulness that there’s a solution to all this. An explanation. A key.
“I want to look in the Closet of Forgotten Things,” Arizona says.
“I’ve taken a lot from it recently,” I say. I don’t want her to go scrounging in there looking for the sweatband I took when I went to see Tess, or the cardigan I wore out with Karissa that first night at Dirty Versailles. Not that Arizona would ever notice any of these things, but I’ve made so many mistakes lately I don’t want to risk it.
“I’m sorry,” I say. It’s maybe the first time I’ve ever said it out loud and without a caveat. An impossible thing that is probably true. I hold back the explanation about love and spontaneity and the need to be different from everyone else and let the words sit there, untouched.