As if my parents had a radar for stealth projects in their own home, they called at the precise moment I removed their Fifty by Fifty napkin manifesto from the kitchen wall to scan for Dad’s video homage. The normal “Hellos” and “How are yous” were so quickly dispensed with that I had barely mumbled a “My ankle’s getting better” when Dad began describing every single tropical fish they’d seen over the previous four days.
“The colors were so bright, it’d have been impossible for even me to miss seeing them. And nurse sharks! Gorgeous,” Dad said, his voice incredulous. It had been a long time since I’d heard him so invigorated. “I’m really kicking myself that you and Max aren’t here. I should have sold the truck.”
There it was, Dad’s sacrificial generosity again, putting everyone before himself. I limped over to the couch to get more comfortable. “I got to see Machu Picchu, and Max gets to go to Guatemala with you. This is Ash’s trip with you.”
“I know, but still…” He cleared his throat. “So, kiddo, we looked at your video.”
“You did?” I asked. That morning before school, I had e-mailed them the link to the rough cut. “Already?”
“Your mom forced the hotel manager here to let us onto her personal computer. Then she made all of us watch the video at least five times.”
“Just twice!” I heard Mom protest off in the distance before she commandeered the phone from him. She told me, “It’s ready to roll.”
“Not yet.” I propped my leg onto a throw pillow, my ankle swollen from the lap around the block earlier. “The transitions are choppy. And I need you to edit it. And Dad to do the voice-over. This was all placeholder.”
“Post it.”
“It’s not ready!”
“You mean you’re not ready. Spending five more hours on this, let alone another fifty, isn’t going to change its emotional impact,” said Mom before I heard a scuffle on the line. “Wait, Dad wants to tell you something.”
There was a little static before I heard Dad say, “Besides, too much time has passed between the mudslides and now. You’ve got to post it.”
“But it’s not about the mudslides,” I protested, running my fingers through the tassels on the throw pillow.
“It’s better that way. I mean, how many videos asking for donations after tsunamis and earthquakes have focused on doom and gloom?” asked Mom, sniffing. “After a while, it’s almost like you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. And I don’t mean to be callous, but from a viewer’s point of view, there’s only so much suffering you can witness before it all looks too hopeless.”
Another truth. When Stesha had called to check in on me this afternoon, she told me that donations for the relief effort in Peru had slowed from a sickly trickle to mere droplets. So who knew how long reconstruction work would take because of the lack of funding?
“You know,” Dad said thoughtfully, “the story you told isn’t about destruction at all.” He paused. “It’s about the human spirit.”
I moved the computer back onto my lap and studied the final still, two kids playing in front of a destroyed home that even in its best days had been little more than a hovel. Mom sniffled.
“Mom,” I said, “you aren’t crying, are you?”
“Honey, a girl may have started the Inca Trail, but a woman finished it,” she said.
That made me sniffle. Whatever people sought from Stesha’s tours—a pilgrimage to a spiritual mecca or closure to a difficult relationship—I couldn’t argue with Mom: Not only had the trip knitted my parents back together but I had changed in ways I didn’t know, maybe hadn’t even considered, and hoped I would one day discover.
Dad must have grabbed the phone from Mom, because his voice boomed in my ear: “You’re both going to make me cry if we don’t get off the phone. Adios, sweetheart.”
“My parents,” I told Auggie as I tossed the phone onto the sofa, “are the best, but boy, are they weird.”
Her tail thumped. I interpreted that as agreement.
The simple act of releasing my video was a lot harder than I thought. At least with TurnStyle, I knew that because new posts constantly refreshed the site, no one scrutinized any single photo for long. Plus, I knew how much I needed to learn about video production. But Mom always said about her own PowerPoint work, no matter how many people review and rework a presentation, somehow a mistake always slips through. That’s being human for you.