Our house, though, is particularly special. It’s an original Craftsman from the days when the neighborhood was just being built. But it’s two stories, which is rare, my mom says. It’s a corner lot, making it a real presence on our street. My room is right on a corner, so I get all the magic morning light.
My parents bought the place twenty years ago, when Venice was mostly made up of artists and bohemians and a lot of people who lived out of their vans. There’s a campaign around these days called Keep Venice Weird. Old shacks are being turned into three-million-dollar moderns. An incense shop on Abbot Kinney was just turned into an artisanal donut bakery. You can’t find a coffee for under five dollars. People are afraid we’re losing our edge.
When I come downstairs for breakfast, my family is crowded around the dining room table, leaning over the Arts section of the Los Angeles Times. Someone has picked up coffee from the expensive new place on Electric Avenue, which means we are either celebrating good news or receiving bad. When I get a closer look at the paper, I see a picture of our house, smack in the middle of the front page.
“I didn’t know it would be on the front page!” I exclaim.
“Of course it’s on the front page,” my dad says, putting a hand somewhere between my mom’s shoulder and the lower part of her neck. “It’s exactly where it should be.” My mom gives a tight smile, and a funny feeling bubbles up through my chest. They used to act this way all the time. A hand on a shoulder, someone’s feet propped on someone else’s lap while they watched a movie. But I haven’t seen it in a while.
A couple months ago a woman named Mathilda Forsythe showed up at our front door. Mathilda was doing an article on The House, my mom explained, for the LA Times. She spent the afternoon trolling the floors and examining all the surfaces, asking details about where things were sourced and what was sustainable, jotting notes down in a Moleskine. Then she returned the next day with a beefy, man-bunned photographer named Silas who took a few shots of the family on the deep-blue couch in the living room, and one with my mother out on the porch, her arm resting along the railing, a smile on her face that said, Yeah, I got this.
“This is so cool,” I say now. “We have to get it framed! So meta to have an article of your house in your house.” I’m making a joke, the kind of joke we usually like, but nobody laughs, and immediately, I catch a look between my parents. My brother, too, seems to be in on whatever I am missing.
“What?” I ask.
“Here,” my dad says, pushing the coffee cup in my direction across the table. “I got your favorite; I even remembered to add the cinnamon.”
I do not make one move toward the coffee, even though it smells amazing. I now understand that these coffees are not good-news coffees. They are deceitful ones. “What’s going on?” I ask again.
“Maybe now isn’t the best time,” my father starts, but my mother stops him, her voice low but still perfectly clear to me.
“We have to, Ezra. She will hate us more later if we don’t tell her now.”
I do hate secrets. I hate ambiguity. I don’t like to wonder; I need to know. I consider reminding them of this, but the fear creeping up my throat is preventing me from doing very much.
“Your mother and I have been doing some thinking,” my dad says. “About our life here. We think it may be time for a change.” He stops for a second, and I can see he is really struggling to get the words out. My mom jumps in.
“We’d been mulling it over, and now with this article coming out, Dad talked to Aunt Sandy, and she said this is the perfect time.”
I squint at them, trying to read them better. “What are you telling me exactly?”
“They’re selling the house, AB,” Sam cuts in impatiently.
My mom sighs, and my father puts a hand over his eyes. “Thank you, Sam,” he says.
I shake my head. “Why would you do that? This is our home. And”—I jab a finger down on the Times article—“it’s famous! Why would you want to sell a house that is famous?”
A strange silence falls over the entire table. Nobody is jumping in for anybody. Neither of my parents says a word. Not even Sam pipes up.
“Aunt Sandy is a real estate agent in Florida,” I push. “What does she know?” Why does it feel like nobody is ever paying attention? Like I have to teach them how things work?
“I told you this wasn’t the best time,” my father says softly. “I told you she would have more questions.”
“Then when was, Ezra?” my mother asks curtly. “When two moving trucks pull up?”
Now my father looks at her in a way I’ve actually never seen. Like he barely knows her. It scares me, and I get the feeling this is not about the house at all. There is something bigger happening here. Maybe it’s been something I’ve been feeling for a while.
“Why would there be two moving trucks?” I ask, and it comes out in a whisper.
My father clenches his jaw, and then he says it all in one breath: “Your mom and I have decided it would make sense to live apart for a while. We really didn’t want to tell you this part now. We wanted to tell you about the house, in case any real estate agents show up this week. It wasn’t supposed to go like this.”
I look at Sam. “Did you know?”
Sam won’t look at me. Instead, he looks angrily at my dad. “I told you guys I should tell her.” Then he looks down at his plate. “I didn’t want to keep this from you, AB.”
I feel as though my world is spinning, the breakfast table tipping upside down, like I am falling down a rabbit hole. I put my hands over my eyes to steady myself. I don’t understand how this is happening. This is our family. This is our home. This is how it works.
“I am sure you are very upset, but I promise you once you go off to Columbia, your life is going to change so much, you’ll hardly even be here,” my dad explains, as if I need reminding that soon I will be moving across the entire country for college, away from everything and everyone I know.
“The point is that my life will change so much, and I will need this to come home to,” I say, my voice cracking as I struggle to hold back tears. I do not like this at all. I do not like being displaced. I do not like a disruption in the way things are.
“Well, unfortunately, honey, you don’t get to decide,” my mother says. I hate when she uses that tone with me. Like she empathizes, when really she doesn’t. I hate it especially because she always uses it when she’s actually right. “This is for your father and I to decide, and believe me, it has been devastating. But this is what needs to happen. And you’re just going to have to try to understand.”
I want to argue with her. To make some kind of threat, some ultimatum. But the scariest part is, I can’t. I don’t get to decide if they’re married or living together or whatever. There is nothing to say. And then my mother sniffs, and I realize she doesn’t want to fight about this any more than I do.
“Um, hey,” a voice says quietly, and Elliot is there in the doorway. Why is he forever showing up when I don’t want him to? He gives a swift knock against the wall. “Sorry to interrupt. . . .”