“Sounds fun. What did they make? Turkey? Stuffing? Yams with little marshmallows? Those baby onion things?”
“Pearl onions? Yeah, we had all the usual, typical stuff.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing, except why do people get so worked up over turkey when the best thing you can say about it is that it’s moist? Who wants to eat moist meat?”
“I’ll get a list to you.”
I think that might be a sex joke but I’m not sure, so I just say, “You weren’t here.”
“I will be. Soon as the season’s over, you’re gonna get so sick of me.”
“So the season’s not over yet.”
“Not quite.”
That’s when I know the Pirates won and are going to be in the state quarterfinals. Then, like he always does when football comes up, Tyler immediately changes the subject and asks, “Did you go to sleepaway camp when you were little?”
“Wow, that was a random segue.”
“These guys on the drive home were talking about sleepaway camp. Made me wonder if you’d ever gone.”
“Yeah, this one summer when I was ten I went to, like, YMCA camp, because it’s supercheap. I was the only girl who gained weight. I actually liked the food, since it was so much better than my mom’s.”
“So did your mom write your name in all your clothes?”
“Obsessively.”
From there, he gets me to talking about how I gashed my head open in third grade on the jungle gym and how no one would hold my hand for Red Rover in first grade when I had a wart on my thumb and about the Christmas that I got BeeBee Pretty Hair Purple Puffalump.
“Is that the Christmas your dad left?”
“How did you remember that?”
Then, the way he always does, he asks me all about myself, my childhood, what I remember about my father.
“To me,” I say, “he was like a rocket-ship ride to the moon. I can’t say if this is a true memory, since I was two, but I remember how, when he’d pick me up, it was different from when my mom would. Everything would turn streaky with speed blurs as he lifted me up to him and his face would get bigger and bigger. There always seemed to be a light behind his head, which is what made it like a rocket-ship ride to the moon. But seriously, Tyler, tell me about you.”
“I know about me. I want to know about you.”
“Tyler! You always do this. You always make me talk about myself. I feel like some giant egomaniac. Tell me about when you were little.”
He considers for a long time. “Different kind of deal.”
“Tell me anyway. I want to know all about you. God, I bet you were such a cute little boy. Those big ears.”
“Big ears?!”
“Oh, yeah, big ol’ cute Furby ears. So tell me.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Everything. Something. If you don’t tell me something about when you were little, I’m going to hang up.”
“Well, you know …” There is a silence that gets longer and longer. He is sad when he finally says, “Not a rocket-ship ride to the moon.” He hears himself sounding sad and this makes him mad. “OK?”
I’d never heard him even close to mad before and it makes me wish I hadn’t forced him to talk about something he didn’t want to talk about. I am scared he’ll hang up and never talk to me again. I am scared my life will go back to exactly the way it was before him. So I tell him, “I had a dream about you.”
“You did? What kind of dream?”
“One of those kinds of dreams.”
“Tell me.”
“No!”
“A.J., you cannot say that, then not tell me.”
“You have your secrets, I have mine,” I say, making both our secrets equal. Nothing to get mad about.
Finally, he gives up trying to make me tell him my dream, holds up his iPod to the phone, and plays a song he says reminds him of me. I think it’s a Rascal Flatts song or something even more mainstream and uncool.
I am just glad that he’s changed the subject, because I never would have told him that I dreamed about us sleeping in the same bed and waking up together. And then sleeping and waking up together again the next night. And the night after that. And that sex, with badger costumes or spanking or whatever, sex of any kind, wasn’t even the biggest part.
And I never, ever, ever would have told him that I wasn’t asleep when I dreamed it.