my dad getting in touch with me are these random adrenaline spikes in the endless boredom.
So I come home and, as usual since Mom’s business has gotten so busy, there is nothing decent to eat. She calls, but I don’t answer, and she leaves a voice mail saying there is some kind of population explosion and she will have to stay late at the hospital. Which is fine except for the lack of edibles and me being starved, since I was too nervous at lunch to eat.
I make some cinnamon toast and watch while the butter melts and the cinnamon sugar turns all bubbly under the broiler. I take it out, put both pieces on a plate, pour a glass of milk. Consume. Suck butter-sugar from my fingers. Repeat.
Then, without any planning at all, I get the laptop out, go to Facebook, and, like pulling a Band-Aid off with one fast rip, I confirm my father’s friend request.
I have barely begun to believe that I’ve actually done it when Facebook makes the bloopy sound it does to alert you that someone wants to chat.
Chat?
I hadn’t considered the possibility of chat. Since I’ve already jumped off the cliff, though, I click on his message, and keep on falling while the first real words my father has communicated to me in sixteen years appear on the screen.
4:34 P.M. AUGUST 26, 2009
=Aubrey, hello. Thank you for confirming me.
I come so close to slamming the laptop shut and calling Mom and telling her everything. About Dad. About Tyler. Everything. But I know that if I hesitate for one second I will freeze up and this will turn into an impossibly big deal, and I’ll never do it, so I just dive in and start writing whatever pops into my head.
=How could I not after I went to your page and saw that, essentially, you’d set it up just to be friends with me?
=God bless Facebook! Because of my situation here, it’s the only way I could contact you without being monitored.
=Monitored?
=Long story. Not what I want to talk to you about. What I want to talk to you about is YOU!
=OK …
=Seriously, I want to know everything about you. What music, books, movies you like. Which ones you hate. What your favorite subject is in school. Everything. Aubrey, I’ve missed so much. We have so much to catch up on.
=Oops. I hear the garage door going up. Mom’s home. We share this laptop, so I have to shut this down and log out. Sorry. GTG.
I quickly sign out, because I don’t actually Got To Go. I actually have GTB, Got To Breathe. Breathing. Something that pretty much stopped the instant that chat box blooped open.
I don’t know how long I spend reading and rereading what he wrote and what I wrote back, but it startles me when Mom pounds on my door, yelling, “Hey, punkalunk! There’s groceries in the car. Can you at least get the ice cream and milk in? I’ve got to pee like a racehorse.”
Thanks for the image.
I open my door. As she sprints to the bathroom, she yells back at me, “How was your day?”
“Fine.”
She stops dead in her tracks and studies me. One word. One single word and she knows. I am certain that she knows about me chatting with Dad. “What happened?”
“Nothing! God! I’m sorry my life is so boring.”
She laser-scans me, gathering clues.
“Groceries,” I say, and rush out to the garage, to the safety beyond her force field.
FRIDAY, AUGUST 13, 2010
I’m asleep on the couch when Pretzels, whimpering patiently by the patio door, wakes me. My first thought is, It’s Aubrey’s birthday. When I hear the sound of water rushing through the pipes in the slab beneath my feet I almost burst into tears of joy: Aubrey is home.
I help Pretzels out the patio door, then rush to the kitchen to make a Happy Birthday breakfast of Miggy Moo. While butter bubbles in the frying pan, I press a Mickey Mouse cookie cutter into a piece of bread to make a big-eared bread cutout that I slide into the pan and break an egg into. This breakfast will make up for last year, when I was gone too much and not paying enough attention. It will atone for all the dry Cheerios eaten from a Tupperware container as she was strapped into a car seat driving to day care. It will redeem all the salt and grease abominations picked up from McDonald’s on the way to drop