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?Aunt Carolyn is rolling out pie dough on the kitchen island. “Finn!” she announces with a mixture of excitement and trepidation, like a colonial sailor spotting land, when she spies me plodding down the stairs.
“Still not an early riser, I see” is my mother’s warm welcome. She looks different. Her hair is shorter and she’s wearing it natural in tightly coiled curls. I’ve never seen her without her hair pressed except in the grainy, yellowing photos of her childhood. She looks up from the enormous turkey she’s basting and gives me an indulgent smile as I shuffle over to the ancient Mr. Coffee machine in the corner.
I open the cabinet above the coffeemaker in search of one of my mugs. My mother never worked. This house was her work, always dusted within an inch of its life and redecorated every five years, like she was on high alert for a drop-in from Architectural Digest. Legos, Barbies, and anything plastic weren’t allowed outside our rooms. Her only concession to chaos was our family’s clashing collection of mugs amassed from sports teams and charity fundraisers. I flinch as I push aside a #1 dad mug (the irony!) to look in the deepest part of the cabinet for my favorite, a green mug from my senior year on the track team that says track: it’s better than playing with balls.
But there are no signs of any of my mugs. I pull down a purple mug from Amanda’s Girl Scout troop and pour myself a cup of coffee.
“Can I help with anything?” I ask.
“We’re all set in here,” my mother says, not looking up from her basting.
“Do you want me to peel the potatoes?” This was my job when I was younger.
“Already done,” Aunt Carolyn says, sounding pleased with their efficiency.
“Oh.” I marvel at how completely I’ve been erased from this family over the past ten years. I wonder if they took down the school pictures of me on the photo wall in the living room. I wouldn’t put it past my father.
“It’s hotter than the devil’s armpit in here. If you don’t need anything, why don’t you help Amanda polish the silverware,” my mom says, and I realize that maybe she doesn’t want to spend time with me any more than I do with her. Why did I even come?
I find Amanda at the dining room table. All the doors to the china cabinet are flung open like a poltergeist tore through the house before I woke up. Her elbows rest on the gleaming wood table, her face buried in her phone.
“What’s up, doofus? Nice of you to finally join us. Mom never lets me sleep that late,” she says without looking up from the novella-length text she’s composing.
“She doesn’t seem to care what I do. She kicked me out of the kitchen,” I tell her as I slump into the upholstered chair beside her. They’re new and decidedly more modern than the wooden chairs we had last time I was home.
“Must be nice. She’s up my ass about what I’m going to do after graduation.”
“Do you want help?” There’s a mountain of unpolished silverware in front of her, the real kind with filigree rosettes on the handles that we only use for company. A wedding gift from Grandma Everett.
At least things aren’t strained between me and Amanda. I worried our relationship wouldn’t survive my leaving. She was eleven at the time. It’s not like I could swoop in under the cover of darkness and hang out with her while she lived under my parents’ roof. So I sent her emails: links to the announcement that the Jonas Brothers would be playing the Philips Arena or an article about the new bookstore they were putting in the outdoor shopping center downtown. I would have called, but she didn’t have a cell phone and I was terrified my father might answer if I called the landline. But I wasn’t going to lose my sister.
I was shocked but also elated when she made good on her promise to visit me in New York when she turned eighteen. She came over spring break with money saved from lifeguarding and various babysitting gigs, lying to our parents and telling them it was a senior class enrichment trip to job shadow notable alumni of the high school we both attended.
Hannah, Theo, Priya, and I took her to see Wicked and snuck her into the basement at Home Sweet Home to dance with a crappy fake ID purchased on St. Marks Place. When she left, I wasn’t sure which she was more in love with, the city or Theo, who she followed around like a puppy, hanging on to his every word.
She’s come every spring break since. There’s only one more left before she graduates from Emory. I wonder if she’ll come to LA for this one, but even if she does, I know it won’t be the same without Hannah, Priya, and Theo.
Now that I’m awake, Mom and Aunt Carolyn have turned up the Whitney Houston in the kitchen. I recognize the album as Mom’s favorite. The cassette had a permanent home in the tape deck of her Mercedes station wagon. We’d blast “How Will I Know” and sing along on the short drive to school. But the music was confined to the car, Dad didn’t like it to be loud in the house.
A bark of Aunt Carolyn’s laughter wafts out from the kitchen.
“Oh, you’re bad,” Mom says, also laughing.
“They’ve been like that all morning,” Amanda informs me. “It’s weird, right? I keep waiting for Dad to come out of his office and tell them to quiet down because he’s on a work call. And then I remember.”
“Yeah, it’s super weird.” This is true of the whole trip for me, not just the laughter. I’m not sure what qualifies as weird around here anymore. “She seems good, though?”
“She’s happy to have you here.”
“I don’t know about that.”
“She hasn’t stopped talking about your visit all month. She’s bringing back macaroni and cheese this year because she knows it’s your favorite.” I try to square this with the chilly reception I received in the kitchen, but can’t. “She’s just . . . adjusting,” Amanda continues.
We all are. It’s bizarre for me to be back in this house, too. Back at this table. Where it all went to shit. Where I told my parents I was gay and got expelled from my own family.
My father’s response was an adamant “No.”
Just no. Like the sheer force of his objection could change my sexuality.
And a year earlier, it might have. I would have said, “Yes, sir,” and asked out one of my many female friends who were always leaning a little too close and touching my arm a little too long, like they were giving me a green light to kiss them.
But the summer after my freshman year of college was different because I’d been dating Sean Grady for most of spring semester. Sean was my first real boyfriend.