By the time I get home, my disgust has whittled itself down to tiredness. I hike up to the porch and yank open the door, letting a crack of afternoon light into our musty living room. The air smells like salt and boiling water, and Russell sleeps on the couch, his dark hair curling at the tips like mine used to when I was little, and I ruffle his hair before heading down the hall.
“Mateo, ven aquí,” comes my mother’s voice from the kitchen. Weird. She rarely speaks in Spanish unless she wants to hide something from Russ. Weirder is the fact that she’s in the kitchen at all. When I walk in, the lights are clouded with steam, and I dump my backpack on the faded rug, sit at the table, and say, “What’s up? Why are you—” and she says, “Wash some plates, will you? I’m cooking dinner,” like it’s obvious, like we don’t eat out of the microwave seven nights a week, and I’m like, “Uh, okay, but why—” and then I break off, because her hands are shaking, and I’m embarrassed I didn’t notice from the careful control in her expression that something’s wrong.
“?Qué pasó?” I ask, standing, and she looks up at me and says, “Nothing,” still in that light, careless voice, and I say, “Mom, seriously,” and she says, “I asked you in here to help with the cleanup,” taking on a warning tone, and I say, “But tell me what—”
She slams the wooden spoon onto the stove and says, “Mateo, do what I told you, and stop asking questions!” and in the reverberating wake of the cold, empty clang, I turn, trancelike, to clear off the table with clumsy hands, and there they are, the divorce papers, lying on top of the newspaper like any other printout. When I turn back to look at my mother, she’s half facing away, her body held slouched like a sagging tent, and I can’t do a thing but stare as she hunches over the counter. Her back gives one huge shudder. A tear drips down her baggy cheek. Her knuckles fly up to her mouth, and she bites on one hard, and then she starts shaking and trembling like water under thunder, and I think she might just dissolve.
I’m silent.
Sometimes you go a long time having fooled yourself into thinking that you’re as grown-up as you’ll ever be, or that you’re more mature than the rest of the world thinks you are, and you live in this state of constant self-assurance, and for a while nothing can upset you from this pedestal you’ve built for yourself, because you imagine yourself to be so capable. And then somebody does something that takes a golf club to your ego, and suddenly you’re nine years old again, pieced together from humiliation and gawky youthfulness and childlike ideas like, Somebody please tell me what to do, nobody taught me how to handle this, God, just look at all the things I still don’t understand, and you can’t muster up the presence of mind to do anything but stand there, stare, silent, sorry.
Or maybe this doesn’t happen to everyone. Maybe it’s only me waiting to learn all this, waiting to find a place where I’ll understand everyone and everything and how it all works and why I’m fumbling through life’s pages with too-thick fingers, and maybe it’s only me who’s stuck in this emotional paralysis because I’m so busy trying to seem grown-up and feel grown-up I haven’t done any growing up, and maybe it’s only me standing in a small, dimly lit room, watching someone I love break down in front of me and not knowing what to do or where to turn or who I’m supposed to be.
7:15 COMES AND GOES, AND DAD DOESN’T WALK through the door. I don’t ask where he is. Something’s wrong with my throat.
Russ, swinging his legs at the dinner table, says, “Mommy. Where is Daddy?” and I say, “Come on, Russ, eat your dinner,” and Russ turns his big, round eyes on me—Dad’s eyes—and says, “Where is Daddy?” and I swallow and prod his little fork toward his hand, like, “Hush, just—here.” Mom’s jaw moves mechanically as she chews, her eyes trained on the saltshaker as if she’s trying to count every grain inside.
I watch Russ eat, my head filling up with worries. Maybe it’s stupid to worry about my brother when a million kids get brought up between two houses and turn out fine, but it’s still weird to think about how different his upbringing is going to be than mine was, how maybe Mom or Dad will remarry and Russ will call somebody else his parent, or he’ll be my age and look back and never remember living in the same house with the three of us. And maybe it’ll fade from my memories when I’m older, too, and from Mom’s and Dad’s, if they can ever forget, and once we all forget what this place felt like, it’ll be like this family never happened at all. We’ll be a new, different set of people, only me and Russell binding us together.
After dinner, I walk Russ up to his room. We hop up the steep steps in rhythm. “One, two, sound off,” I say, a little marching tune, and his hands spread out, bouncing by his cargo shorts.
A tiny bathroom, an angular closet more than anything, sticks off to the side of Russ’s room. As we hunker down in it, brushing our teeth, I look down at the top of his head and get this rush of light-headedness, like vertigo, and I remember my dad standing beside me, brushing his teeth, back when I was a kid. He never missed a night, not for years.