back here the instant lunch is over so that, as soon as I finish class, we can blast to the bank. Okay? Got it? This is nonnegotiable.”
“Okay! Okay! I already told you I would. What do you want? My name signed in blood? If that’s how little you trust me, why don’t you …” She pauses, then names the thing that she’s been angling for for months. “Just throw me out!” She yanks away from my grip and runs out the door like the doomed heroine of a nineteenth-century novel, like Tess of the d’Urbervilles rushing to meet Angel Clare at Stonehenge.
I yell after her, “Don’t make me have to drag you out of that …! That …! That mobile food conveyance vehicle! Because if I have to, I will!”
Aubrey’s aggrieved stomping turns into an airborne dance the moment she slips beyond my reach. She has a sanctuary and she is running to it. Wafting across what remains of the lawn I can’t afford to water, her feet don’t seem to touch the ground once. From her first baby steps, Aubrey had helium in her bones, springing through life like a gazelle. I never understood how such a light-footed creature could have issued from my leaden body. For a fraction of a second, I allow myself to enjoy the only comfort she still offers me, her beauty. I cling to it just the way I did when she was a colicky baby howling out her jerky screams as her tongue clicked spastically in her open mouth. Babies—silky, sweet-smelling babies. They must have been a cavewoman’s first luxury goods.
Tyler opens the door of his truck and gathers Aubrey into his arms, the rescuing hero. My daughter puts her arms around Tyler’s neck, hiking the Nike shorts up even farther, just in case she’s left anything at all to the neighbors’ imaginations. The sweethearts grin into each other’s faces, delirious about being the punch line of their own secret joke.
The uncontrollable “replay” button in my mind activates, and Aubrey’s entire life as it would have been with a father passes before my eyes, a father who would storm out at this very second, snatch his daughter from the clutches of this marauding male, make her “put some clothes on” and go to the bank with her mother. Right this minute. That father does not materialize and Tyler hauls Aubrey into the truck.
At graduation in May, I’d overheard a mom observing Tyler’s and Aubrey’s mutual gorgeousness whisper to her friend, “God, imagine the children they’d have.” I remember that comment and, for a fraction of a second, the regret machine stops and time freezes in the present, right now, as it actually is.
Both Tyler’s and Aubrey’s faces are framed by circles of white shoe polish drawn on the front windshield with their names and “Sexy Seniors!” written above the circles. Sitting in that truck, with shoe-polish halos encircling their heads, they look like Mary and Joseph. A jolt of panic squeezes my heart as I allow the fear I’ve been denying to surface: that the only thing missing from their Holy Family tableau is the Baby Jesus himself, standing between the haloed couple. Just an ignorant little redneck baby who would utterly destroy my daughter’s life and condemn her to live in this miserable suburban wasteland forever.
God, if I’d only been able to nip this romance in the bud. If I’d even only known when it started.
SEPTEMBER 14, 2009
I am completely and unequivocally into football territory. Paige Winslow and Madison Chaffee, sitting on the aluminum bleachers five feet away, don’t notice me.
In world history last year, we studied the rise and fall of the Soviet Union. Mr. Figge explained what de-Stalinization was, how leaders like Stalin would be expunged from the country’s history so completely that their faces were literally erased from photos. That’s what Paige and Madison have done to me: They’ve de-Stalinized me. I still remember when we all played together at the pool, diving under for plastic rings, riding together on field trips to Pioneer Farm, but they don’t. Friendship with me turned out to be the kind of embarrassing accident that happened when you were little, before everyone found their place in the social hierarchy.
They assume that I hate them. That I am deeply jealous and want to be them, but that since I never will be, I’ve channeled my envy into scorn and hatred. It is a valid assumption and generally true. But wrong in my case. I