you know, it’s paid, not like an internship internship. I’ll be doing the same thing I did back in Chicago while I get certified.”
My dad stutters a nervous laugh and wears that half smile. He’s babbling.
“You got a job at the supermarket near my school?” Theo yells.
“At the pharmacy counter. I’m a pharmacist. You know this, right? He knows this?” my dad asks Rachel, now completely bewildered. “I’m not bagging groceries.”
“You. Have. Got. To. Be. Kidding. Me. Mom: Are you serious?”
“Theo, slow your roll,” Rachel says, and puts her hand out. Who are these people? I think, not for the first time. Slow your roll?
“As if I’m not humiliated enough. Now my friends are going to see him working at the supermarket with one of those lame little plastic name tags?” Theo throws his fork across the room and stands up. I can’t help but notice the splash of soy sauce on the white dining room chair, and resist the urge to find some Shout. Or is that Gloria’s job? “Give me a break. It’s hard enough without this shit.”
Theo storms off, all ridiculous stomp and huff, like a four-year-old. It’s so overblown that I’m tempted to laugh. Did he learn to throw fits like that in theater class? Then I see my dad’s face. His eyes are sad and hollow. Humiliated.
“Language!” Rachel says, even though Theo is long gone now, and also sixteen.
When I was little, I used to love to play pharmacist. I’d dress up in one of my mom’s aprons and use the empty bottles my dad brought home to dispense Cheerios to my stuffed animals. Until my mother died, it never occurred to me to be anything but proud of my dad, and even then, my doubts were only about his survival skills, not his professional ones. I actually like the idea of him behind the counter at Ralph’s, just down the road from school. I miss him. This house gives us too many rooms to hide in.
Screw Theo and his rich friends; we didn’t have dental in Chicago.
My father is an optimist. I doubt he realized it would be this hard, or maybe, when it was just the two of us flattened in our wrestler’s house, he thought: There’s no way California could be any harder than this.
“I can’t not take the job because he’s embarrassed?” My dad says it like he’s asking Rachel a question, and again I find I have to look away. But this time it’s not to spare me, but to spare him. “I need to work.”
—
Later, I sit outside on one of Rachel’s many decks. Stare at the hills, which cocoon the house with their fairy lights. Imagine the other families out there, finishing up their dinners or soaking their dishes. If they’re fighting, their fights are likely familiar, old habits rubbing each other raw in spots already grooved. In this house, we are strangers. Nothing like a family at all.
Weird too to think about how things used to be here, before my dad and I arrived, before Theo’s dad died. Did they all sit down to dinner together, like my family did?
I have my phone with me, but I’m too tired to text Scarlett. Too tired even to see if I have another email from SN. Who cares? He’s probably just another entitled little shit, like everyone else at Wood Valley. He’s already admitted as much.
The screen door opens and closes behind me, but I don’t turn to look. Theo plops down into the lounge chair next to mine and takes out a set of rolling papers and a bag of weed.
“I’m not an asshole, you know,” Theo says, and begins to roll his joint with tender precision. Fat and straight. Elegant work.
“Honestly? You have given me no evidence to the contrary,” I say, and then regret it immediately. Couldn’t I have just said Yes, yes you are. Or Leave me alone. Why do I sometimes talk like a sixty-year-old? “Won’t your mom see you?”
“One hundred percent sanctioned, legal, and medicinal. Got a prescription from my shrink.”
“Seriously?” I ask.
“No joke. It’s for my anxiety.” I can hear the smile in his voice, and I find myself smiling back. Only in California, I think. He holds the joint out toward me, but I shake my head. My dad has had enough trauma for one day. He doesn’t need to see his Goody Two-shoes daughter smoking up with his new stepson. For a pharmacist, he’s surprisingly conservative about pharmaceuticals. “Anyhow, I