this house? Wake up, Bill! She has no friends. None. I was thrilled to send her to Wood Valley, but aren’t you worried about her? Teenagers are supposed to go out and have fun,” Rachel says.
Oh, so I’ll be the one who will end up in tears. Of course, that’s the way it goes these days. I want to yell back, right through the door. I’ve made friends! I’m doing my best. I don’t need help. It’s not my fault my mother died, that we moved here. I’ve had to start all over from scratch in every way that matters. My dad chose her, and even more inexplicable, she chose my dad, and I didn’t choose either one of them. Sure, my dad’s a nobody pharmacist from Chicago, but he’s smart, damn it. Brilliant, even. So what if he loves WWF and action movies? My mom loved poetry, and even though my dad never did, they made it work. She let him be himself.
My life is a shit sandwich, with a side of jizz veggie burger. I don’t have the strength. My eyes are blurry with tears, and I slide down the wall to the floor. Theo looks at me.
“She talks crap when she’s mad. Ignore her,” Theo whispers. “She just likes to get her way.”
“You’re one to talk about parenting.” My dad’s voice. “My kid is amazing, so don’t you dare. Have you looked at your kid lately? The way Theo gallivants all…” My dad stops, thank God. Oh, Dad, please don’t say it.
“All what?” Rachel asks. “My son is gay. So the hell what?”
Rachel is goading him now. It sounds like she wants to fight. For a moment, I think it would be preferable to listen to them have sex. This is somehow even more intimate, more raw. Even worse than witnessing her midnight tears. I don’t want to be so close to these grown-up things. It’s all so screwed up.
Suddenly, I wonder if this is what happens when people meet on the Internet. A connection without context. A good first impression so much easier to make because it can be manipulated. But they met in an online bereavement group, not a place normal people click for a hookup. It’s hard picturing someone like Rachel turning to the Internet to help with her grief. She’s always so put-together. The opposite of needy.
As much as I’m not a huge fan, I’m starting to see why my dad was attracted to her. Despite being dealt the bad hand of widowhood, Rachel’s getting an A-plus at life. She’s successful and reasonably attractive and rich. But why did she marry my dad? He’s not ugly, as far as middle-aged men go, I guess, and he’s kind—my mom used to say she was the luckiest woman in the world to have found him and to have built her life on such a stable foundation—but I’d imagine there are a million men like him in LA who come with fewer complications and more of their own cash. Why did she have to pick my dad?
When my parents used to fight, I would slip away to my room and put on headphones. I didn’t listen, especially because I knew the fight would last for days—two or three at least—when both of them would use me to talk to each other, one of the downsides of being an only child: Jessie, tell your father he needs to pick you up from school tomorrow; Jessie, tell your mother that we are out of milk. They didn’t fight often, but when they did, it was explosive and unpleasant.
Everything passes, Jessie. Remember that. What feels huge today will feel small tomorrow, she once said, right after a big fight with my dad. I don’t remember what they were arguing about—maybe money—but I do remember that it ended out of nowhere, four whole days after it started, when both of them just looked at each other and started cracking up. I think about that often—not only how that fight broke, but what she said. Because I’m pretty sure she was wrong. Not everything passes.
“Let me just make something clear here.” My dad’s voice gets low and growly. He’s calm, almost too calm, which is what he does when he’s really angry. Runs cold. “I’m not some ignorant homophobic hick, so stop talking to me that way.”
“Bill!”
“Forget it. I’m going for a walk. I need air and to get far away from you,” my dad says, so Theo and I scramble