The cream carpet, updated since I’d left, sank beneath my feet. My heart was pounding. I didn’t even know what I was doing in here. The walls were painted a sage green my mother would have liked. He still had their mahogany four-poster bed, but there was now a gray duvet instead of their paisley comforter. The bed was made clumsily, the duvet pulled up to cover the pillows. The room smelled artificially clean, like the rest of the house, as if someone—Andrew, I somehow knew—had been liberal with the Febreze before we arrived. Underneath there was something sour and unwashed.
My fingers moved by muscle memory as I opened the first dresser drawer, shifting folded boxers and balled-up socks, skin catching on the unfinished wood lining. I took it drawer by drawer, fast. He’d kept mini bottles in here sometimes, tucked into undershirt collars and glasses cases. I’d never gotten rid of his booze again after the time I’d hidden his flask in the tree. But there was nothing worse than wondering if he was secretly drinking. I’d always needed to know how soon I could expect our world to fall apart.
On the fifth drawer, my hands stopped at something hard and cool—a small leather photo album. I glanced at the doorway, stepped through to the bathroom so no one would see me if they walked by. I was almost nauseated with the fear of being caught. I also felt reckless and wild, wanting to turn the whole house inside out to expose everything hidden in its folds.
The photos were of my mother. A teenager in a maroon Sooners T-shirt, standing on metal bleachers, mouth open in a cheer. In bed, taken in bad light with a cheap camera, blond hair half-askew in its scrunchie, arm beckoning the photographer closer. At a bowling alley, arms up in a V over her head, all the pins scattered. Reading something at a microphone during the school talent show, wearing a paper crown. In bed again, this time on her side, eyes closed, one swollen breast out of the white nightgown, eclipsing the tiny head that nuzzled up to it—me. The photo took my breath away. The intimacy. The transfer of milk and heat from her body to mine, my father moved enough to capture it.
“What are you doing?”
“Oh!” I dropped the photo album on the tile. “My God—Andrew. You scared me!”
He was standing in the bathroom doorway with an odd stern set to his lips. He gestured to the album. “What’s that?”
“I— Nothing.” I felt protective of it. “I was . . . I wanted to talk to Dad,” I lied.
“He’s in the kitchen.”
“Yeah. I figured.”
“Can I see?” Andrew held out a hand, and I gave him the photo album, watching as he flipped through. “I’ve never seen these before.”
“Me neither.”
The photos were so ordinary and anachronistic, yet somehow, they didn’t feel random. It was as if my father had collected pieces of her that, together, hinted at her fullness.
Andrew looked up at me. His eyes flickered with something. Not pain, exactly. Longing. “What was she like?”
“Dad doesn’t talk about her?”
“Yeah, but I want to hear it from you.”
Had I never talked about her with Andrew before? Maybe I’d never wanted to remind him of what he’d lost—what he might think he’d taken, his life for hers. But he must feel the mother absence all the time, just like I did. How did withholding memories help? Maybe I didn’t know how to talk about her without also talking about it—the drinking, the violence, the silence. Maybe I’d forgotten who my mother was apart from being a victim, an accomplice, a disappointment.
“She was funny,” I said. “And really good at reading books out loud. She probably could have been a voice actor, she was that good. She took me to volunteer at the Salvation Army every few months because she believed everyone needs help sometimes, and if we could help, we should. She was”—I thought of us watching Dateline, assembling our cutout insects amid Charlotte’s web—“a great teacher.”
Andrew’s lips were pressed hard together.
“Does he date?” I asked suddenly. “He still wears his ring. Has photos of Mom up. This album . . .”
Andrew nodded. “He’s had a couple of girlfriends I’ve met. Nothing that serious, I guess.”
I couldn’t imagine my father with anyone except my mother, but it had been twelve years—he wasn’t a monk. “What were they like?” I asked. “Was he ever—” How could I ask if he’d been violent?
Andrew frowned. “What?”
“Never mind. You know what?” I chanced a grin at him. “I think we should keep the album. Take it with us to Austin. What do you say?”
Andrew’s fair eyebrows lifted in surprise. He grinned a little back, conspiratorial. Our first true moment of connection. “Okay.”
I slung an arm across his shoulder and tucked the album under my shirt, holding it in place with my elbow as we walked out of the bathroom together. He glanced at the dresser; the fifth drawer still open.
“You know,” he said, “it’s kind of fucked up that you just got here and started snooping.”
The swearing startled me, and I didn’t know what to do about it. If I was going to be his guardian, should I tell him to watch his language?
“I wanted to see if he had any alcohol hidden,” I said finally.
“Oh.” Andrew shut the drawer for me, and we stepped into the hallway. “Did he?”
“Not in the dresser.”
“Yeah. I think I got everything while he was in the hospital. He wasn’t really hiding it, though.” He squinted at me, something falling into place. “Did he used to hide it when you were here?”
My heart clamped.
“Guys!” my father called, his voice nearing. “Dinner! Oh—” He stopped short at the sight of us, our tucked heads and low voices. He glanced at his bedroom door.
“I was showing Cassie my room,” Andrew said, clearing the hair from his eyes.
The leather album was warm against my skin. The bulge felt obvious. “I’m just going to use the bathroom. I’ll be right there.”
My father stared at me a beat too long. He pushed up his glasses, wincing when they caught the scab on his nose. “Sure. See you in a minute.”
I squeezed Andrew’s shoulder, unnerved by the smoothness of his lie. I used the bathroom—my bladder painfully full, I hadn’t even realized—and then shoved the album in my duffel bag.
In the kitchen, Duke had made garlic bread, butter melted golden when he peeled back the foil. Andrew told Alexa to play some music, but it was all wrong, Ariana Grande instead of Stevie Nicks. My father struggled to drink from his glass of Dr Pepper with the neck brace. He noticed me noticing his hand tremble. I looked away.
“So, Andrew,” Duke said, “play any sports?”
Andrew paused with a haphazard mountain of pasta halfway to his mouth. “I’m an orange belt in karate. I’m testing for first-degree green in two months.”
Duke looked suitably impressed. “Wow. Can you show me some moves later?”
Andrew grinned. For the first time he looked like a kid. “Yeah, if you think you can keep up.”
Duke laughed, and so did I. My father smiled, meeting my eyes with a silent, tentative question: Isn’t this nice? We’re having a good time, right? As if this were a normal family gathering, introducing my fiancé to my father for Thanksgiving.
God, this feeling. The strain of pretense, the forceful forgetting. The way it sometimes made me doubt what I’d seen the night before, the images rearranging into something milder, more palatable, the facts shifting beneath my feet. Sometimes I’d wished he would hit me, too, just so I’d have a physical mark to assure me it was real.
My old mattress squeaked with every movement. I used to hold so still as I read. If the rumble of my father’s voice got too close, or I heard a distant clatter, I’d pull my headphones from the first drawer of my nightstand as if I were performing surgery, silent and precise. But I never actually used them. I didn’t want to be caught off guard.
The house was drafty, and I’d taken a thick wool blanket from the trunk and laid it over the white coverlet. Duke’s chest was warm against my back.
“So,” he murmured, “your dad seems sober, doesn’t he?”
“Nothing like a four-day hospital stay to force a detox.”
I could feel Duke’s irritation. “I’m just saying, it seems like he’s trying.”
I didn’t respond, and the silence became hard to bear.
“What?” I said, turning around.
Duke reached forward, running a strand of my hair between his fingers. I couldn’t see more than the shine of his eyes. “It’s—it’s such a big move, taking Andrew with us. Are we sure about this?”