We watched a truck zoom across Mom’s window and then off into the distance, beyond the Arby’s, beyond the intersection way, way ahead. With Mom’s story, my perception of my parents underwent a series of rapid changes, the way letters on an eye exam do when the doctor flips the lenses—clear, then blurred, sharp, then back to incomprehensible fuzz.
“I get it: he sucks. Fifty percent of me is composed of the worst person ever. Is that what you want me to say?”
“Don’t be so immature. I don’t want you to say anything. I just want you to know that this, what he’s doing, he was always like that. Just, cold. Weird. He always had that in him. The next morning he acted like nothing happened but he didn’t try to make it up to me or anything, and I swear, I felt this little door open up in my head, a little door to a room full of all the shitty shit I didn’t want to face about him, and it was like, oh, divorce, it was just there, as an option.” She shifted in my direction and reached out for me. I shrank toward the passenger-side door. “Hey. It was worth it, though. Definitely. You, your brother, you guys are so, so worth it.” I could hardly stand her. “I just don’t want you to expect anything from him, that’s the point I’m trying to make.”
A line from my book swirled through my head. I was in the peril of my life, and I did not know it. A very early memory, so wavery I’d often brushed it off as a dream; me, five, half asleep in the backseat of his car, parked in the driveway of a house I didn’t recognize, as Dad sat on the porch talking to a woman with a thick blue streak in her hair. For a single summer when I was eight or nine, Dad moved into an apartment near the strip mall. When I visited, he’d offer me weird gifts—a troll doll, though I hated dolls to the point of nightmares, a stuffed dog that smelled like a secondhand store. I have few memories of him from those long weekends. Instead, my imagination unwinds footage of me wandering his neighborhood on cloudy days, burying the troll facedown in a pile of wood chips in someone’s flower bed, no one looking for me, no one caring what might happen.
Mom unrolled her window halfway and then cranked it back up until it was open just a finger’s width, letting in a wheeze of mulch and spring-damp air. “What are you? Sixteen?”
“I’m fifteen.”
“You know what I mean. You can handle this stuff. You can face the truth.”
We were just about to leave, when, at 1:03, he pulled into a spot a little ways down from us, as if to say I’m here, but don’t get used to it. He was driving an unfamiliar car, a maroon five-seater thing with a deep dent in the driver’s-side door. Scattered snow flurries would probably put it out of commission. Becky was in the passenger seat. I’d known, of course, that she would be—we only have a week off, after all:)—but seeing her still twisted my insides.
We all met up on the walkway and exchanged weird greetings, Mom and Dad first, one of those fake hugs where your chests are far enough apart to fit a true hugging couple in between, while Becky tapped me on the head faux-affectionately. Then she and Mom ignored each other as Dad—instead of doing his usual super-charming swoop and spin, picking me up and generally pretending like seeing me was the greatest thing he could imagine—acted shy and saddish and told me I looked lovely and kind of hooked an arm around me and clasped me to his side. Mom said she’d wait in the car while we ate.
“You sure?” asked Becky, all kiss-assy.
“I’m sure,” said Mom, already halfway there.
“Went a little crazy with the makeup, didn’t you,” said Dad, and my body temperature rose a thousand degrees.
Inside, Culver’s was hospital bright and smelled like fryer oil and Windex, your standard fast-food place, with a menu pretty much identical to Dairy Queen’s. “Welcome to Culver’s!” screamed a cheerful overweight girl behind the register, who wore a terrible white nurse uniform splattered with ketchup and grease. I beelined for the bathroom and spent a few minutes rubbing at my face with a folded-up paper towel. The restaurant was empty except for one other table where a woman sat with two little kids. One of them had stuffed a French fry between the gap in his two front teeth and was shaking his head like crazy at the other, who ignored him.
Here he was, Dad, finally. Dad, taking up too much space, distributing slimy menus, brushing crumbs off the booth. Dad. He was in better shape or something—the muscles on his arms had that overexercised clench that make older men look tired and a little pathetic. He drummed his fingertips on the tabletop as he read over his choices. His nose was sunburned and he kept sweeping his newly long hair back from his forehead. Becky sat so close she was nearly on his lap, and as Dad surveyed the menu she stared at her open cell phone, tapping at it with two metallic thumbnails.
“I could destroy a burger,” Dad said. I’d never seen these wrinkles on his face before. “What about you babes? You hungry?”
“Sure,” I said. I felt willing to do anything that would make this end faster and with fewer casualties.
“Chicken tenders for me,” said Becky, without looking up from her cell. “And no fries.”
“And extra barbecue sauce,” Dad said to her in a deranged baby-voice, turning his Rs into Ws. He stood up to go place our order.
“I’ll come with you,” I said.
“No, stay, stay. You two can catch up on girl talk.” It took me a second to realize that the thing he was doing with his fingers was air quotes.
“Okay,” I said. “That’s fine.”
Becky kept texting. She was more ordinary-looking than I remembered, and that made it even sadder that my dad had left my mom, who was—objectively, I thought—a million times more attractive. As soon as Becky sensed my dad coming back with the food she placed her phone facedown on the table and gave me a whoopsie grin.
“What’d I miss?”
“It wouldn’t be girl talk if we told you.” I smiled tightly. Becky picked up her phone with one hand and used the other to propel a chicken tender into her mouth.
“So,” Dad said, after we’d silently eaten everything on the table but a half-moon of burger bun. “You going to talk to me about what’s been going on at school or am I going to have to beat it out of you?”
“Dad,” I said, playing a girl I wasn’t anymore. “I’m fine! It’s fine. I didn’t want to go at first, but I’m okay now, I’ve made some friends, it was just a thing, you know? I even like it.”
“I told your mom it was nothing,” he said.