“Go back to class,” Leigh yells after him. She pulls a twenty from her bag and tucks it under the napkin dispenser.
We walk back to campus and she doesn’t say a word about Micah, just like she doesn’t force me to talk about Wil. I’m glad. I love her for being pissed on my behalf, but I hate the little spark of defensiveness that flames when anyone rags on Micah. I know he deserves it.
We talk about nothing: how hot it is already and what we’re wearing to graduation, which Leigh already knows even though it’s still months away. Some kind of white caftan, but her mother is lobbying hard for a sundress, just this once. I can wear the sundress, she says. (I don’t even have to ask.)
I want to talk forever about white dresses and hot air—frothy, foamy things, things that tug my mind away from dead fathers and mistakes I can’t seem to undo and brothers I don’t know what to do with. I want to escape.
WIL
Spring, Junior Year
NO matter where I go, I can’t escape what my father has done. When I yank open the refrigerator door, the tired sucking sound is replaced with the crack of my dad’s hand. When I turn the hot water faucet to shave, the shriek of metal on metal is my mother’s sharp breath. Violence is coiled up tight in everything, I realize. The world is a fighting place.
My mother doesn’t leave the house for three days. She says she doesn’t want to talk about it. It! Too small a word for what’s happened here.
“It’s private, Wil,” she says one night before dinner. “A private matter between me and your dad. We don’t want you to worry.” She stares out the window and scrubs the lunch dishes for the third time today. Her hands are withered and red under the faucet.
“Seeing your mother get hit makes a person worry.” I dry the dishes as she hands them over. She’s moving too slowly. I shouldn’t be annoyed with her, but I am.
“Hit.” The word whooshes out like the last bit of air from a dead balloon. “God, Wil. You make me sound so—” Her face gets as pinched and red as her hands. “Pathetic.”
“Not you, Mom. Him,” I snap, and she winces.
I pat her back a little. It’s my fault. If I hadn’t brought up that stupid sweatshirt, Dad wouldn’t have been so angry.
“He didn’t mean it,” she says. “It was an accident.”
“Don’t make excuses for him,” I tell us both.
When she finishes the last spoon, she fills a juice glass with water and tilts it into the vase on the kitchen table. Dad’s put fresh flowers in there every morning: red roses on the first day and pink ones with those tiny white dried buds around them on the second day and today it’s flowers that have been dyed neon colors: pink and yellow and orange. She hovers over them and plucks the bad leaves.
“Get the salad out for me?” Mom says, fiddling with the stem of an electric-pink flower. “In the fridge.”
“Sure.” I tug the fridge open and lean into the cool. “Spaghetti ready?”
“Give it another minute. I set the timer.”
“Mom. Has he ever, like, has this ever . . . happened before?” I clench my jaw so tightly, my face could shatter.
“I don’t want to talk about it, Wil. I told you. Please.” When the oven timer screeches, she jumps behind me, startled.
“I got it, Mom. It’s okay,” I say. Soft, the way you talk to a scared kid.
“Let me get it.” She slides around me and grabs the pot and if I don’t ask her now, I’ll never ask her.
“Hey. Mom. Do you think I’m like him? Do you think I’ll turn out like him?”
She opens her mouth just as my dad comes through the door. He looks like a stranger who’s wandered into the wrong kitchen, searching for a family. I want to tell him to move along. We don’t need him here.
“Supper ready?” He claps me on the back. I cringe.
“Just about,” Mom says. I wait for her to answer me with her eyes, but she doesn’t. She just flips the pot into the colander in the sink. Dad slides up behind her and wraps his arms around her waist.
“Something smells good,” he says.
Screw you, I think.
Mom says, “Wilson,” like a high-school girl. She never says his name like that.
God, I think. She’s pathetic. I could just—
It happens that fast.
I could just. I could just . . . what? Hit her?
The thought blazes through my brain and then it’s gone, and God Almighty, I hope that wasn’t a Real Me thought. But it wasn’t a Generic Teenager thought, either, because Generic Teenagers think about getting laid and scoring weed and maybe the SATs.
Mom tells Dad and me to have a seat and we stare at the flowers instead of each other. I haven’t looked at the whole of him since it happened. If I look at him, he will try to have a talk, try to apologize. So I break him down into pieces, and I sneak a look now and then: his rough hands, his sunburned forehead lines. Looking at him at all makes my body ache. Three days ago, he was one person, and now he’s another. And I am half of him, but I don’t know which half.
“Here we go.” Mom serves us each plates of spaghetti.
I could just.
“Let’s say grace,” Dad says, and if I were looking at him, I’d look at him like he was crazy. We’ve never said grace in this house. Mom’s forehead wrinkles but she bows her head. This is a nightmare. We are playing at Happy Family.
Dad clears his throat. “Gracious Father, we want to thank you for this day and all its blessings. Most of all, we thank you for your grace, and for how you forgive us, even when we don’t deserve it. Amen.”
“Amen,” my mother says.
What. The hell?
“Missed you in the shop this afternoon, son,” Dad says, twirling a chunk of noodles around his fork.
“Homework,” I lie.
“Well, school comes first,” he lies back.
The food is too hot, but I force it down.
“It’s good, Henney,” Dad grunts. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, leaving a bloody stain.
“I’m glad, Wilson.” I still see Dad’s handprint on the side of her face, flashing red like a Mini Mart sign.
When the doorbell rings, I’m up. At the front door, on the other side of the decorative glass, Ana Acevedo is in abstract girl pieces: cutoffs and one hip jutted out to the side and her hair flowing over one shoulder. None of her quite fits together. I think about these Picasso paintings we had to look at on the first day of the art history elective Mom signed me up for last year.
“Hey, Wil Hines,” she says before I’ve opened the door.
“Uh, hey,” I say. I’m so glad for an interruption, any interruption, that I don’t even care what she’s doing here.
We look at each other for a while. She bounces on my front porch with this pretty scrubbed skin and hair that floats in midair and I’m not even sure her bare feet are touching the ground. There is nothing weighing this girl down. I want her lightness.
My dad calls from the table. “Wil? We’re in the middle of dinner.”