swollen eyes and salt-abraded cheeks—“this is sanity. It’s acknowledging that it hurts and that none of it makes sense. And once this passes, once you get your car back and Shayla starts to do better, once you master a few more easy meals to make and get a few more German phrases under your belt, it’ll start to feel better. Just don’t expect it to happen overnight.”
She patted my hand. “What feels overwhelming now won’t be quite so confusing in a month and even less in a year. Every challenge is part of the process. Give the changes the time to become familiar, and give yourself permission to be scared or frustrated or confused. Just like you give permission to Shayla.”
“Hans and Regina went to the pool,” I said in German.
“Come again?”
“That’s the one German sentence I know really well, and I’ll probably never get to say it.” The last words turned into a wail, and I launched into chapter two of Shelby’s Epic Meltdown.
“Hey, consider yourself lucky,” Bev said. “The only sentence I know in French is Voulez-vous coucher avec moi, ce soir?”
I put my wailing on pause long enough to give her a Huh? look.
“From ‘Lady Marmalade,’” she explained. “You know what it means?”
I shook my head. I had heard the song all my life without ever wondering about the French.
“Well, it’s a surefire way of meeting the natives,” Bev said. “It means, ‘Do you want to sleep with me tonight?’”
I laughed so hard I snorted.
“Your nose is red,” I said to Trey. He was lying on the floor next to the couch, his bag of frozen peas still pressed against the livid traces of my father’s shame around his neck.
“I’ve been sneaking out and doing a clown act after dark every night,” he croaked, his eyes closed. “Can’t seem to get all the makeup off, though.”
“Oh, good,” I said, “’cause I thought maybe you’d been crying or something.”
He opened an eye and glared at me. We’d never been very good at crying together.
Mom and Dad were in the kitchen. They’d been in there forever. After I’d come to on the couch, Dad had sat there for a while in the pretty flowered chair. Then, while I went to the bathroom to throw up, he’d gone into the kitchen with Mom. It hadn’t been his idea. Mom had approached him, trying to keep her voice low so we wouldn’t hear what she said. But she was so angry that it was like her words had ultrasound. They weren’t loud, but we felt them vibrate in our bones.
“Go to the kitchen,” she’d hissed, the words sharp and brittle in the silence of the living room. It was the kind of tone we’d used on the dog we had when we were really little. We’d sent him to the kitchen too when he’d peed on the rug or chewed on the furniture. But I never, not in my most psychedelic nightmares, ever thought I’d hear Mom speak to my dad that way.
They’d been in the kitchen for several minutes now, and all we could hear was the occasional word.
“You want me to go put my ear to the door?” I asked Trey.
“Only if you want to.”
“My wrist hurts too much.”
“Okay.”
That’s when Mom yelled. She yelled so loudly that both Trey and I sat up like someone had set firecrackers off under our backs.
“Get out!” she yelled. “Get out of the house and don’t come back!”
I had never heard Mom yell that way before. Never. Not even when her brakes had given out when she was biking down a hill during a camping trip. Even then, she’d just kinda kept quiet and aimed her bike at the pond off to the right instead of at the trees to the left. She hadn’t even screamed when the bike had gone off the road, across a bumpy patch of grass, then right into the water. She’d just put her feet down when the bike sank in the silt and walked out of the knee-deep water, leaving the blue Schwinn standing there in the pond all by itself.
We heard Dad go upstairs and rummage around for a while. Then he came through the living room on his way to the door, a garbage bag full of stuff slung over his shoulder, left the house, started up his Chevy, and just kinda poofed out of our lives.
Mom told us over lasagna that night that Dad was going to be staying at his other house for