decorating around the house with Pops, and I’m pretty sure if I’m not home soon, he’ll send out a search party.”
I see the disappointment on his face because of my response and feel horrible about it. His light hazel eyes seem to lose a little of their luster, and I want to just give him a hug, but I don’t want to send any mixed signals.
“I guess I’ll see you tomorrow?” he asks.
“Yeah, definitely. I’ll be dressed as Little Red, in case you were wondering.”
“Classic. I like it.”
As I drive away, I see him in the rearview mirror watching me leave. The sight of him kicking around some dirt makes me feel worse about how I handled our little chat. It sucks when somebody likes you and you can’t like them back in that way. That’s probably why we haven’t been hanging out as much as we used to. And things change when you go to high school…people change.
To take my mind off Kevin, I roll down all the windows and turn up the radio while letting the cool fall air flow through the car. I love fall in the Northeast, especially while driving through the neighborhoods. People really go all out for Halloween. Our house, on the other hand, is the only one on our street not decorated yet. Halloween is only a week from tomorrow. To say the least, I feel ashamed.
When I pull up to the house, my dad’s car isn’t in the driveway. He’s probably buried himself in work again at the station for the nth time this month. I bet he’s left me a note on the fridge and twenty bucks for a pizza. My father’s a creature of habit, which makes him easy to predict. I guess in some ways, that’s a good thing.
I was right. I find twenty bucks and a piece of paper stuck to the fridge with a cute little happy face magnet. The note reads:
Had to go back into work. Will explain later. Sorry about the decorations. Pizza is on me.
I notice several open boxes of Halloween decorations sitting on top of the kitchen table. I guess he made an attempt to decorate the house before he went back into work. I have this gut feeling that thoughts of Mom combined with those decorations were too much for him to handle.
I begin to dig through the boxes, removing all the little knickknacks my mom collected over the years. As I start to place them around the house, I feel strange doing this all by myself. It just doesn’t feel right. A sense of apathy toward the whole thing suddenly hits me.
“I think I need music,” I say.
I remember that Dad connected our surround sound system to Pandora radio a couple of weeks ago, and decide to switch on the Halloween station. One of my favorite songs, Michael Jackson’s Thriller, comes through the speakers.
“Ah, just what I needed.”
I’ll be honest…decorating while trying not to break out into the zombie dance is kind of killing me.
I barely hear my phone ring over the music and rush to the kitchen counter where I left it. Just before I answer, the caller hangs up. The number comes up as unknown. They don’t leave a voicemail, so I assume it’s a wrong number. I set the phone down and head back into the living room to finish putting up the remainder of the decor.
When I feel like I’m at a good stopping point, I take a little break. Collecting the twenty dollars from the fridge, I grab my phone and dial for pizza. I figure I’ve got at least twenty-five minutes to kill before the food arrives, so I decide to sort through the box of my old stuff upstairs. I know if I don’t go through it soon, Dad will keep pestering me about it until I do.
There’s an old framed family photo on the wall right in front of me as I reach the top of the stairs. For the past year, every time I reach the second floor, I stop right in this spot and just stare at it for a moment. It’s a reflection of what I believed was a happier time for our family, but now I’m pretty sure it’s just a constant reminder to my dad of Mom’s cheating. He claims he likes to keep it up because I look nice in the picture. Personally, I think he’s still in denial about the whole thing.
Flopping down on my bed,