loan. My mother said “thank you,” ignored the advice, cashed the paycheck, and moved into an apartment with Bowzer.
She called me from her new phone, excited, but she did not invite me to spend winter break with her. I hoped this was because she wanted her own space for a while. I worried that she couldn’t afford the groceries.
“You’ll be more comfortable at your father’s,” she said. “You know you will. For one, I’m sure he has furniture.”
It was true. My father’s rented condo had come furnished, complete with paintings on the walls in neutral colors that matched the carpet and the curtains and the throw pillows on the leather couch. Because he spent so little time at home, everything was clean and new-looking. The glass table in the dining room was smudge-free. He’d lived there for almost a year, and he’d used the oven exactly twice. The guest room had its own television and a double bed, which I would be sharing with Elise when she arrived on Christmas Eve.
Elise had already called to break the news that she could only stay for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Work was insane, she said. Charlie, who did tax law for an even bigger firm, couldn’t take any time off at all. My mother wondered about her new son-in-law spending the holidays by himself.
“He’ll be fine,” Elise told my mother and, later, me. When she called me, she was on a headset, buying groceries at midnight, Pacific time. “You all don’t understand the kind of time we put in. You can’t imagine it. The work just doesn’t stop.”
By “you all,” she of course meant my mother and me. My father needed no instruction on the kind of hours a law firm might require of a new associate. He was still working all the time himself. The whole week before Christmas, he left for his office before I woke up, and he usually got home after I ate dinner. But he seemed happy that I was there. Every night, he stayed up late, long after he was yawning and blinking, to tell me stories about his day—a judge falling asleep, a juror surreptitiously picking his nose.
“You’re not laughing,” he said.
I tried to laugh.
He looked at me over his bifocals. “You okay? You seem kind of down.”
I shrugged. If I only told him that Tim had broken up with me, he would automatically take my side and call Tim names. On the other hand, if I gave him the particulars—namely, that it was all my fault—he might ask me, just what had I expected, acting like that? He would have to take Tim’s side, given the parallels between Third Floor Clyde and the Roofer. I didn’t see them as parallels, but he might see them that way.
“You’re bored, right?” He put a frozen burrito in the microwave, setting the timer and turning it on without taking his eyes off me. “I mean not right now, while I’m here. I mean during the day. I feel bad, you’re here by yourself.”
I shrugged again. It was true that my options were limited. My father’s car was with him all day, and it was too cold to walk anywhere. But I’d actually gotten used to my holiday schedule, which involved reading the last four hundred pages of Middlemarch and regularly looking up and out the window to watch rain or snow fall into the tiny, man-made lake for which my father’s entire neighborhood was named. I made myself grilled cheese sandwiches. I watched the news and infomercials. Even with all this, I had several hours a day to spend on my default activity—lying on the guest room floor and feeling bad about Tim.
My father offered to pick up a study guide for the MCAT. “You’ve got all this downtime,” he said. “You might as well put it to use.”
I told him I needed a break from studying. I left it at that. I didn’t want to talk to him about my chemistry grade, either, though report cards would be mailed out in less than a week.
But I liked the idea of a distraction, of somehow putting my time to good use. I’d told my mother that if she wanted to come pick me up, we could go to a movie, or I could help her get set up in her apartment. But she was back to work at the mall, going in for long shifts to make up for the time she’d lost. And anyway, she