The Boyfriend Thief

CHAPTER 13





“Pass the potatoes,” Ian grunted in my general direction. He refused to look at me and only muttered a low “thank you” when I handed him the bowl.

My brother and I hadn’t spoken much since the scene at the mall. I hadn’t said anything to Dad about Ian wanting to get Trisha a Mother’s Day gift. I wasn’t sure how to bring it up. “Hey, Dad, I think you should stop dating because Ian wants to pretend your girlfriend is his mom. It’s not healthy for him.”

I wished I knew how to keep my brother detached. I had spent so much time protecting myself from everyone else, I had forgotten to teach Ian how to do that as well.

“How is your art project coming?” I asked in an attempt to mend things between us.

Ian shrugged. “Lots of photos. That’s about it.”

I smiled. “I’d love to see them.”

He studied me cautiously, as if he didn’t believe me. I kept smiling, my fist clenched around my fork. After a moment, Ian turned back to his food without saying anything else.

My shoulders slumped. I reached over and adjusted the position of my plate on the green checkered placemat until it was perfectly centered.

“How is work?” I asked, turning to Dad.

“Same as usual,” he told me. “Sales have slowed down again because of this heat wave. No one wants to be outside.”

“Maybe things will pick up soon,” I told him. My dad was assistant manager for a sports equipment store, specializing mostly in bikes, kayaks, and accessories. We didn’t get snow in our area, so winter was usually a rough time, except for Christmas when everyone wanted a bike for their kid. Each year, we faced the same struggle of trying to make ends meet while Dad worked fewer hours.

“How is the hot dog business?” he asked me, grinning. Dad always threatened to come by Diggity Dog House and take pictures of me dressed up as Bob and I always threatened to divorce him if he did.

“Smelly and busy, as usual. We debuted a slightly less fattening corn dog, with turkey instead of pork and baked instead of fried. Big hit with the older crowd. It’s selling much better than the hot dog ice cream Mr. Throckmorton thought up last month.”

Dad made a face. “The words ice cream and hot dogs in the same phrase are enough to make me stay far away.”

“I tried explaining that to Mr. Throckmorton before he added it to the menu, but he didn’t listen.”

My gaze shifted to Ian, who sat silently, tapping his fork on his mound of mashed potatoes. He didn’t even attempt to get involved in the conversation, which was very unusual. My brother usually talked so much it was hard for Dad and me to get in any words around him.

Dad cleared his throat as he wiped his mouth with his napkin and then crumpled it in his fist. “Trisha and I have been talking,” he began in a slow, nervous voice.

My chest felt as if it had suddenly iced over. I stared at Dad, unable to break my gaze away from the side of his face, my pulse pounding in my ears so loud I almost couldn’t hear him. The words I had said to my brother repeated themselves in my head: Trisha is not our mother. Trisha is not our mother.

“And we thought it would be nice if all of us did something together this weekend,” Dad went on. “Like a picnic or something?”

The breath I’d been holding in rushed out of me all at once. I flexed my fingers from the tightly coiled fists I’d been holding them in since he’d started talking. For a second, every horrible nightmare I could imagine had filled my head—Trisha moving in here, Trisha and Dad getting married, Ian buying her a lifetime supply of stupid Mother’s Day teddy bears.

“I have to work this weekend,” I said.

Dad raised his eyebrows at me. “All weekend?”

“Most of it. And the rest of the time I’m not working, I’ll be helping Zac with our business project.”

“I think maybe he could spare you for an hour or so.”

“I can’t afford to get a bad grade on this assignment,” I said. “If I fail anything between now and the end of my senior year, I definitely will not be valedictorian at graduation. Do you want that to happen?”

“Salutatorian is still a special honor,” Dad told me.

I laughed. “That’s what people who aren’t good enough say. Salutatorian means somewhere along the way I messed up and ruined everything. That’s not going to happen. Sorry, but no, I can’t come to your little picnic with your girlfriend.”

Dad opened his mouth, but it was Ian who spoke up.

“Everything has to be the way you want it to be, doesn’t it?” My brother glared across the table at me over his mushy pile of potatoes. “You can’t stand it if someone else has a different opinion than you do.”

“That’s not true,” I protested.

“It is! Maybe the rest of us want to have a picnic. Have you ever thought about what other people want, or is it ‘all Avery, all the time’?”

Dad looked completely flabbergasted at Ian’s sudden change in behavior. He blinked at my brother. “Ian, what is this all about?”

Ian’s face had turned a deep red shade all the way to the tips of his ears. He stood up, letting out a long breath. “Nothing. It doesn’t matter anyway. It never has.”

He stomped out of the room and a moment later we heard his bedroom door slam. Dad’s gaze shifted to me.

“Care to explain?” he asked.

I tried to look as confused as he did. “I have no idea. Probably too much chocolate. I think he’s been hiding it in his room again.”

Dad sighed, rubbing a hand over his face. “Let him have his candy, Avery. It’s not hurting him.”

“Should I print out studies on the effects of processed sugar for you to read again? It is in fact hurting him quite a bit.”

He gave me a hard stare. “Drop it. The candy stays.”

I threw up my hands. “Of course. Like the self-help books stay.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“You and Ian depend entirely too much on your fantasy lives, where everything is easily fixed by candy or some book written by a psychiatric quack who doesn’t know anything. Trisha is not the answer to all of your problems, Dad.”

A vein in his forehead throbbed, the sure sign that I had stepped into dangerous territory. “I never said she was. But what is wrong with me trying to find someone to spend my life with?”

“The problem is you’re hurting Ian and me.” My voice trembled slightly, but I sucked in a deep breath to try to steady myself. “Don’t you think that every time another girlfriend disappears, never to be heard from, we remember Mom’s leaving all over again?”

The soft tick of the clock on the wall over Dad’s head echoed throughout the kitchen for a few seconds as my words hung in the air.

“Not everyone is like your mom. Not everyone will leave.” Dad’s voice was low and he stared at his plate, his hands frozen above it.

“What about Vanessa? Or Pam? Or Jennifer? Kate? Julie?” I spouted off the names of previous girlfriends who had made themselves at home in our lives for a few months and made promises about the future.

But in the end, they had all gone away. It was always the same. Only the faces changed.

“Stop trying to fix us with these books and girlfriends,” I told him.

Dad slammed his fist down on the table, causing the dishes to clatter against each other. “Stop trying to control my life, Avery. You are the child here, I’m the parent.”

“You’re one to talk about controlling someone else!” I didn’t know how we’d gotten to this point, this shouting at each other across the table while Ian hid in his room, probably stuffing Hershey’s Kisses in his mouth. This wasn’t what my family was supposed to be like. “Every time I talk about Costa Rica, you change the subject. You can’t bear the thought that maybe I have different plans for my life than you do.”

“We can’t afford Costa Rica,” Dad said. “We can barely afford this house. I’m a single parent here, trying raise you and your brother on the one salary I have.”

“Well, don’t worry about it anymore,” I told him. “By next month, I’ll have all the money I need, which I earned all on my own.”

He looked at me with panic in his eyes. “Avery—”

I set my fork down parallel to my plate, stood up from the table, and then pushed my chair in so that it lined up perfectly with the table. “I may not be able to control what you do, but my own life is the one thing I do have complete control of. I’m not having a faux family picnic with Trisha or anyone else. And come summer, once she’s disappeared like the rest of them, I’ll be gone and you can figure out how to fix everything around here on your own.”