“You seemed to sleep well,” her mother said, which was her mother’s way of telling her that she’d come to look in on her in the night. How many times? Meredith wondered. Three? Thirty?
“I did,” she said. “Really well.” She took a bite of the pancake, which was undercooked, even on the edges, promising a goopy middle. Her mother had no patience when it came to pancakes, yet continued to make them, and they never got any better, and she always wound up throwing half of them away before they even made it to the table. These were worse than usual.
“Meredith,” her mother said.
She studied her pancake. “Yeah?”
Of course Meredith knew exactly what was coming. She and Evan had overheard the end of their parents’ conversation with the psychiatrist, Dr. Moon. She knew all about the Lines of Communication and how important they were. She’d gotten away with silence yesterday, but she knew it wouldn’t last.
“What happened to you,” her mother said. “I can’t even. I don’t even. I can’t even.”
A for effort, Meredith thought, then immediately felt guilty for being so mean. Her mother was trying. Everyone was trying.
“It’s okay,” she said. “I’m all right.”
“What your mother’s saying,” her father said, “is that we are here. For you. We are here.”
Like this was always a good thing. Like all anybody ever wanted was their parents here, two feet away and ready to pounce.
“I know,” she said. “Thanks.”
“If you want to talk,” her mother said. “If you want to tell us. Something. Anything. Feelings. Things. Emotions. Tricky emotions. Anytime. If you want to say something. You can say anything.”
Meredith made herself look up from her pancake. Her mother was smiling, but her eyes were drowning eyes, pleading eyes. Meredith could have swum in her mother’s failure. She could have launched a boat into it, a battleship, an aircraft carrier. When Evan got hurt she’d felt sorry for her mother. The night after Evan’s second surgery, which had been endless and especially frightening, Meredith had gotten up to go to the bathroom and heard the kettle on downstairs and come down to the kitchen and her mother was sitting at the kitchen table and there were tears just rolling down her face onto the table. It was the weirdest crying Meredith had ever seen, soundless and motionless but for the tears themselves, spilling onto the table.
“It’s all right,” Meredith said. “Okay? Really.”
She knew she had to throw them a bone, so she looked back and forth between them, made actual eye contact, and added, “I mean it’s really weird and probably it hasn’t quite hit me yet, you know? And so maybe a little later I’ll want to talk about it—but for right now I just kind of want things to go back to normal as much as possible.”
“Normal?” her mother said, like she didn’t quite believe in the word, but she wanted to grab onto it like a life preserver—Meredith congratulated herself for rescuing both her mother and herself simultaneously.
Her father put both hands palms down on the table, to indicate the conversation had reached a satisfactory conclusion. “Who would like some Tater Tots?” he asked.
“It’s breakfast,” Meredith said, looking down at her inedible pancake.
“Who says Tater Tots are not for breakfast? I went out first thing this morning and got those teeny-tiny ones. They’re like breakfast potatoes. They don’t call them breakfast potatoes but that’s exactly what they are. They are exactly, precisely, a hundred percent breakfast potatoes.”
“Okay,” she said.
Her mother had layers; she had always known this, known it well before the silent crying over Evan’s eye, known it well before she, Meredith, had reached the age to be embarrassed or even annoyed by her mother. Her mother had layers and secrets and dark spaces where she kept god knows what. Her father had no such dark spaces. Her father was transparent, which is not to say he was shallow or stupid or even uninteresting. He just was what he was. Sad things made him sad and happy things made him happy. His emotions were fine-tuned. And he was almost never angry at people. He got angry at things, particularly things that didn’t work—she had once seen him punch a closet door that he was trying to repair, strike it with such fury, such personal hostility, that she’d backed out of the room and later, when she’d seen a bandage on his hand, hadn’t asked about it.
Evan shuffled into the kitchen.
“Nobody ever made me Tater Tots for breakfast,” he said. He sat down at the table and looked at Meredith’s plate. “How’re the pancakes?” he asked.
Or Lisa could be dead, Meredith thought.
But no, it wasn’t even a thought. It was more like a near miss. She heard the sound of the thought missing her, heard it whistle by like a foul ball, like the ball that struck Evan would have sounded to him if he’d been standing six inches closer to the dugout. Yet somehow she knew what the thought was—strangers talking, a snippet of conversation, a voice overheard, an adjoining room—without it having actually made an appearance in her brain. Then, over the blank space in her brain where the thought did not appear,
“I need some new shoes,” she said.
She didn’t know where it came from, but she knew once she’d said it that it was 100 percent true, that she needed new shoes, that new shoes were precisely what she was lacking. It was the first thing she’d asked for in three days, and the pleasure it brought to her parents was obvious and immense. Maybe that was partly why she had said it, to give a gift to her struggling parents.
“My shoes are too small,” she clarified. “I need some new ones.”
“There’s a plan,” her father said. “The shoe plan. The plan of shoes. Why don’t we hit the mall after breakfast?”
“What kind of shoes, sister?” Evan asked mock suspiciously.
“Clown shoes,” she said. “Red ones.”
“With tufts?”
“Yes. Yellow tufts,” she said.
“I see,” he said. He pretended to write on his paper napkin. “Yellow tufts. Yes. Yes, interesting, I see where this is going.”
“Evan can take me,” she said. “He knows what I’m looking for.”
“We’ll all go,” her mother said cheerfully. “There’s something I need from there, too.”
“Yeah,” Evan said. “She needs, um, what was it, let me see, oh yeah, a baby monkey. With a, uh, golden rattle. A baby monkey with a golden rattle. It’s the baby monkey with a golden rattle plan.”
“The plan of the baby monkey with the golden rattle,” Meredith said.
“They just keep on dishin’ it out and I just keep on takin’ it,” her father said, popping a Tater Tot into his mouth. He couldn’t have been happier, she knew, his children smiling, his family brought together, safe in their home with their jokes, with a plan.