“You’re staying right here with us,” Mom says—looking me in the eyes like she does when she is telling the truth—and then she kisses me on the cheek.
We go down to the kitchen, where she cooks me some delicious eggs scrambled with cheese and tomatoes, and I actually swallow all of my pills because I feel I owe it to Mom after knocking her down and upsetting my father.
I am shocked when I look at the clock and see it is already 11:00 a.m. So I start my workout as soon as my plate is clean, double-timing everything just to keep up with my routine.
The Dress-up Dinner
Ronnie finally comes to visit me in my basement and says, “I’m on my way home, so I only have a few minutes.”
As I finish my set of bench presses, I smirk because I know what that statement means. Veronica does not know he has come to see me, and Ronnie needs to keep it quick if he does not want to get caught doing something without Veronica’s permission—something like saying hello to his best friend, whom he has not seen for a long time.
When I sit up, he says, “What happened to your face?”
I touch my forehead. “My hands slipped yesterday, and I dropped the bar on myself.”
“And it made your cheek all puffy like that?”
I shrug because I do not really want to tell him my father punched me.
“Man, you really have trimmed down and bulked up. I like your gym,” he says, eyeballing my weight bench and Stomach Master 6000, and then he sticks out his hand. “Think I could come over and work out with you?”
I stand, shake his hand, and say, “Sure,” knowing the question is only yet another one of Ronnie’s false promises.
“Listen, I’m sorry I never came to see you when you were in Baltimore, but we had Emily, and well, you know how it is. But I felt like the letters kept us close. And now that you’re home, we can hang out all the time, right?”
“As if—,” I start to say, but then bite my tongue.
“As if—what?”
“Nothing.”
“You still think Veronica hates you?”
I keep my mouth shut.
He smiles and says, “Well, if she hated you, would she be inviting you over for dinner tomorrow night?”
I look at Ronnie, trying to gauge whether he is serious or not.
“Veronica’s making a big meal to welcome you home. So are you coming, or what?”
“Sure,” I say, still not believing my ears, because Ronnie’s promises usually do not come with specific words like “tomorrow” attached.
“Great. Be at my house at seven o’clock for drinks. Dinner’s at eight, and it’s going to be one of the wife’s formal candlelit three-course meals, so wear something nice, okay? You know how Veronica is about her dress-up dinners,” he says, and then hugs sweaty me, which I tolerate only because I am so shocked by Veronica’s invitation. With a hand on my shoulder, Ronnie looks me in the eye and says, “Man, it’s good to have you home, Pat.”
As I watch him jog up the stairs, I think about how much trash Nikki and I would talk about Ronnie and Veronica if apart time were over and Nikki was going to the dress-up dinner with me.
“Dress-up dinner,” Nikki would say. “Are we in elementary school?”
God, Nikki hates Veronica.
If I Backslide
Knowing that if I wear the wrong thing, Veronica will say I have ruined her night—the way she did that one time when I wore Bermuda shorts and sandals to a dress-up dinner—I can’t stop thinking about what I am going to wear to her dinner party, so much that I don’t even remember it’s Friday, and therefore, time to see Dr. Patel, until Mom calls down in the middle of my workout, saying, “We’re leaving in fifteen minutes. Hit the shower!”
In the cloud room, I pick the brown chair. We recline, and Cliff says, “Your mother tells me you’ve had quite a week. Want to talk about it?”
So I tell him about Veronica’s dress-up party and how my old dress clothes don’t fit because I have lost so much weight, and I have no swanky clothes other than the shirt my brother has recently given me, and I am pretty stressed out about going to a dinner party and wish I could just spend some time alone with Ronnie lifting weights, so that I would not have to see Veronica, who even Nikki says is a mean person.
Dr. Patel nods a few times like he does, and then says, “Do you like the new shirt your brother gave you? Do you feel comfortable wearing it?”
I tell him I absolutely love my new shirt.
“So wear that one to the dress-up dinner, and I’m sure Veronica will like it too.”
“Are you sure?” I ask. “Because Veronica is really particular about what you should wear to dinner parties.”
“I’m sure,” he says, which makes me feel a whole lot better.
“What about pants?”
“What’s wrong with the pants you have on now?”