Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self - By Danielle Evans Page 0,58
his landlord, as if Phil would hold it against him if he moved out of a building that Phil himself had left years ago. But she never pressed, because under the flimsy excuses she guessed her father’s reasoning was something along the lines of Why bother? He saw most of the people he wanted to see at work, had built a network of friends who spent more time at the office than at their own homes anyway. The only person who came to see him on a semi-regular basis was Eva, and although there were only thirty blocks between them—eight subway stops, counting the back-tracking, but walkable, if you were in the mood for walking—it had been over a month since she’d last been to visit, and she almost never invited him to visit her.
When Maya floated in from work, click-clicking against the floors, smelling vaguely honeyed from her shampoo and mildly sweaty from her bike ride home from the after-school center where she was a social worker, Eva had already been shopping, planned a menu, bought decent wine instead of the cheap stuff she and Maya usually drank, and was a minute away from inviting her father over for dinner the next night, giving him time to get home before she called.
“What’s the occasion?” Maya asked. She dropped her shoulder bag on the kitchen counter and held Eva around the waist, planting a soft kiss on the side of her neck.
“I’m inviting my dad over for dinner tomorrow,” said Eva. She could feel Maya’s arms stiffen, then drop from around her.
“Great,” said Maya. Her shoes clicked backward, away from Eva. Eva turned to face her, watched her arms fold across her body. “Does that mean I have to make plans elsewhere?”
“Who said that?”
“Your father hates me.”
“He doesn’t. He just doesn’t understand—us.”
“Maybe he’d understand better if you stopped introducing me as your roommate. He knows you’re bullshitting him.”
“Maya—I’m trying. Everybody’s parents aren’t so awful that they can tell them to go fuck themselves and move on with their lives, and everybody doesn’t have a foster mom who owns a berry farm upstate and makes her own tie-dye skirts and is thrilled to meet her daughter’s girlfriend. He’s lonely, and he’s my father, and he’s never done anything bad to you. To me, either, for that matter.”
“Is that the standard for parenting these days?”
“Maya, don’t. I don’t need you to fix this. I’m not one of your kids at the center.”
“No, you’re not. For one thing, my kids at the center can admit to themselves that it doesn’t matter what they do, their parents will never love them the way they are. But you sit there and make garlic bread like a moron if you want to—he’s still going to look at you like the last time you did anything right, you were eleven years old. You will never be what he wants.”
It didn’t matter how many times Maya apologized, or how much she’d cried when Eva came with Cheese to move the handful of things in the apartment that actually belonged to her. It didn’t matter that Eva admitted, when pressed, that she’d been out of line bringing Maya’s parents into it. There were moments when you knew things about what was inside of people you didn’t want to, knew how deeply they could disappoint you. There was love, and then there was suicide—and then there was whatever it was she had with Cheese. A place to go whenever she needed it, but where she’d never feel good about being. They’d spent the night she left Maya, and most of the following morning, in bed together, until there was the sound of the phone ringing, and with a glance at the caller ID, Cheese took the call and headed into the living room with the phone. Eva had been ignoring the new girlfriend all morning, but the bedroom suddenly seemed full of things that belonged to her: a woman’s belt, a paint-splattered T-shirt, a bottle of orange nail polish on the dresser. She turned the sound up on the television. On CNN, green bombs were falling somewhere, and Eva felt more chastened by the blurred night vision carnage than she had by the token reminders that another woman lived here now.
Cheese came back into the room a few minutes later. “Kate,” he said. “She’s upset about something. She was visiting her parents for the weekend, and I guess they had a fight. Eva—”
Eva exhaled. “If you’re going to console distraught