Evan lets out a genuine laugh that shakes something loose deep inside of me. I like genuine laughter in the same way I like the warm sun on my face, but I haven’t heard or felt either of those things in a long time.
“Well, good night, then,” my mom says as she slips all the way inside. “You’ll have to swing by for pizza some other time. Right, Morgan?” It’s not a question. It’s an expectation. It’s a request to hurry up and have a life again.
“Um, right,” I say, rolling the knotted string of my daytime pajama pants between my fingertips. I stand at the door staring at Evan. “Sorry. My mom’s kind of embarrassing.”
“Not really. She just tells it like it is. It’s not like we don’t know where we are. It’s not like we don’t know we’re living the lyrics to a bad country song.” He fakes strumming a guitar.
Something about Evan makes me want to be brave, so I fasten a fake guitar strap across my own shoulder and strum the strings at my waist.
“She lives in a rundowwwwwn building on the outskirts of towwwwwwn,” I croon in an over-the-top country twang.
“Not bad,” he says as he backs away from the door, nodding. “Not bad at all. I’m gonna have to write some music to go along with that. Right after I learn to play the guitar.”
The idea of us making music together is so ludicrous that it makes me laugh.
Evan grins at me. “You have a good laugh. Like when you hand one out, you mean it. My cousin was like that.”
The compliment throws me off-kilter, and I play it back in my head to be sure I heard him right. “Well, your cousin must’ve been one cool dude.”
He smiles halfheartedly. “Yeah. I think you would’ve liked him.” He shrugs his shoulders. “Well, I hope you feel better. My mom swears by soup. Do you have any?”
That makes me laugh again.
“What?”
“That was just really funny in a way you don’t even know.”
“Oh, well, then I’m glad I could make you laugh. Again.”
“Me too.”
I’m still laughing as I say goodbye and shut the door behind me. It’s a sound that echoes inside and outside of me, and it stops my mom in her tracks when I turn to face her. She stands dead still in the center of the kitchen and looks at me, a smile creeping across her face. It’s quick. There and gone. And then she pulls a slice of pizza from the box and slaps it down on my brother’s plate.
“You eating?” she asks me.
I nod and pull myself onto my stool at the kitchen counter. The stool where my mom and Ben are to the left of me because they know the drill.
“Evan seems nice. Did you talk for long?” my mom asks. She’s fishing.
“Long enough.”
“I’m not sure it was long enough for him. He wanted to stay for dinner.”
“He shoulda stayed,” Ben says. “He’s cool.”
“Yep, too cool for me, I think.” I grab a slice of pizza and turn to my brother. “So who’d you play with at school? I want to hear all about it.”
Ben launches into a story about recess. He tells me about how they played Farm and all the kids were different animals and he got to be the farmer.
“That’s the best part because then you get to pretend to feed all the people.” He laughs, then shakes his head trying to knock his mistake loose. “I mean, the animals.”
He keeps talking, animated and stuttering with excitement. I listen to the sound of his voice. And even though the sides of his mouth are covered in tomato sauce and he smells like kickball sweat and playground dirt, I pull him into me and kiss the top of his messy head of hair.
“I love you,” I tell him. “You know that, right?”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he says through a mouthful of pizza. “I love you, too.”
chapter two
My emergency pills are in an amber prescription bottle on the second shelf of the medicine cabinet. I look at them every morning and hope today isn’t a day when I’ll need to take one. But knowing they are there makes me feel better. I haven’t needed an emergency pill for almost two months. Since Valentine’s Day. That was a bad day because my dad called. I refused to get on the phone even though he asked to talk to me. That was the last time he tried. But he did talk to my mom, which made her angry. And he talked to Ben, which made him confused. Ben asked my dad when he was coming home, because by then it had been over a year since Ben had seen him. Over a year since he’d returned from his last tour, his fifth one, in Afghanistan. Over a year since my mom had filed for divorce and full custody. Once Ben had gone into another room where he couldn’t hear her, my mom told my dad he’d better not even think about showing up at Paradise Manor.
So he didn’t.
And he probably never will.
*
After my mom and Ben have left for work and school, I hold the amber prescription bottle in my hand. I run my thumb over the label that tells Morgan Grant to take one pill as needed.
Not today.
I put it back.
I shut the door.