He looked at me, clearly trying to read the stay or go in my face, but I couldn’t send a message I didn’t have.
“Another time,” he said finally, slipping his sunglasses back on. “The Ten Thousand Dollar Pyramid is calling my name.” He paused on his way up the stairs. “Oh, and Dex, you might want to wash out that glass before your mother comes home.”
So he had noticed, after all. And he was still on my side.
“You didn’t tell me your dad was cool,” Lacey said once he was gone. It was like a benediction, and most of me was proud.
AFTERNOONS AT MY PLACE BECAME, at Lacey’s instigation, a regular thing, and it was only a matter of time before my mother insisted we have “this Lacey” over for dinner, so she could see for herself this miracle worker who had her husband digging through the attic for his guitar and her daughter into what appeared to be a trucker’s castoff wardrobe.
“Mom’s going to be all weird, isn’t she?” I said, as my father and I sorted through the stack of Publishers Clearing House stickers. My father was the family’s designated dreamer, the buyer of lottery tickets and keeper of an ever-growing list of inventions he’d never build. It was, he always said, why he’d never taken what my mother called a real job. Only make-your-own-hours employment—like his current gig managing Battle Creek’s only movie theater—afforded him the free time he needed to fulfill his yen for get-rich-quick scheming.
This particular scheme had been our shared private ritual for years, since the days when I thought carefully licking those stamps and sealing the envelope with a lucky kiss might actually summon the oversized million-dollar check to our doorstep. I’d long since lost the slip of paper carefully inscribed with all the crap I’d buy when I was rich, but I liked the mint chocolate chip ice cream that came along with the tradition, and the way my mother wasn’t part of it. There was music playing now, which wasn’t part of it, either, but my father said that the Cure was a universal cure for what ailed us. Wait till Lacey gets here, he said. She gets it.
She was due in an hour. My mother had made lasagna, the one thing she knew how to cook.
“Go easy on your mother, kid. I think one thing we can agree she’s not is weird.”
He was right: Normal was her religion. She’d never implied that she wanted me to be popular—the impossibility of that probably spoke for itself—but she encouraged me, at every turn, to fit in, to be careful, to save my mistakes for later. “You’ll have more to lose when you’re older, but at least then you’ll have something left when you lose it,” she told me once while we were flipping through photo albums, old ones that showed her awkwardly jutting into adolescence, bulging in all the wrong places, only a single page turn between apple-cheeked college freshman and bleary-eyed mother with an infant on her caftanned hip, as if all the pages that should have been between had fallen out, and maybe that was how she felt about her life, that something had gone missing. “The younger you are, the easier it is to give everything away.”
Dinner was a fright show. The four of us in the wood-paneled dining room huddled at one lonely corner of the long table we never used, pushing around burnt lasagna on chipped Kmart plates, my mother scowling every time a mist of garlic bread crumbs floated from Lacey’s mouth onto the plastic tablecloth, Lacey pretending not to notice, too busy fielding rapid-fire questions about her mother’s job and her stepfather’s church and her nonexistent college plans, each of them more excruciatingly conventional than the last, all of them humiliating enough—but nothing compared to the withering look on my mother’s face when I volunteered that I’d also been thinking about taking a year off after graduation, because, like Lacey said, college had been co-opted by a capitalist system only invested in producing more drones for its financial machine, and my mother said, “Stop showing off.”
I wondered if mortification qualified as an excuse for justifiable homicide.