like his clothes are making him itch. His hair, dark like his dad’s, flops over his light blue eyes, a combination that really should send the girls swooning. Maybe in a couple of years when his skin evens out and his voice smooths over again. “I don’t . . . know.” I note the pause. When he feels the stammer coming, he takes extra time to pronounce the word.
“You don’t know?” Michael interjects.
“I haven’t heard you practice in a long time,” I say quickly, interrupting his dad. Dylan used to enjoy the company when he played his sax. We didn’t talk, in fact most of the time I’d just work on my laptop, on the floor, propped up against his bedroom wall. He said it made him play better knowing there were “other ears in the room.”
“It’s okay,” he says. “You don’t have to.”
The teen kiss-off. “You don’t have to” equals “Please don’t.”
Jewel pushes her pink glasses up the bridge of her nose and announces to the table in general: “Did you know that humans have 206 bones in the body? And we’re born with more. Some of them fuse together, though.”
I’m so grateful to her for cutting the tension with her factoid, I want to sweep her up in a hug. I cross my arms instead and smile. “Yeah?”
She’s wearing a French braid today, which she must have conned Angel into doing. Apparently their mother was a whiz at complicated hairdos. I’ve never been good at that, and the first time Jewel asked me to fix her hair it took twenty minutes, and she cried all the way out the door with uneven pigtails.
“Yeah,” she replies, and I’m hoping she’ll continue her lecture but she refocuses on her cereal. She doesn’t have to be up as early as her big siblings, but she likes to be, she says. She likes to watch everybody head off for the day. Plus, she gets the television to herself after they leave until it’s her turn for the bus at eight thirty.
Dylan picks up his phone and reads a message, seeming to flinch. But then says casually, “Hey, Dad, Robert is sick today. Can you drive me?”
Robert is Dylan’s ride to Excalibur Charter Academy. EXA, the kids call it, like ecks-uh. Angel takes the bus to the magnet school in town, having won entrance with good grades. Dylan’s grades aren’t bad, nor are they exceptional. He went to the regular public high school until that gun incident in the courtyard there, and then Michael’s father arranged for him to attend his friend’s charter school. In the tradition of communicative teenage boys everywhere, Dylan says EXA is “fine.”
“Yeah, sure,” Michael says, roused from his work trance where he was mentally rehearsing his day. “Angel, I’ll take you, too, as long as I’m driving.” With a nod but no words, Dylan trots up the stairs, probably to fetch his saxophone.
Angel hops up from her chair. “Thanks, Daddy.”
In the bustle of bags and coats, I retreat to the corner of the kitchen. It’s too small for all of us in here.
Michael sweeps by me and tries to land a kiss on my cheek. He misses, and is propelled out the door by the momentum of his kids coming up behind him. Dylan says nothing on his way by.
Angel says, “Bye, Casey. I hope you enjoy this nice quiet house today, all by yourself.”
She’s turned away from me as she says that, so I can’t see her face.
How much did she read?
“Casey? Can I go watch cartoons now?”
“Sure, J. Go ahead.”
I pick up her bowl and Dylan’s Pop-Tart plate. Jewel wraps her arms around my waist, her nose buried in my belly. By the time I put the dishes back down to return the hug, she has fled to the living room to turn on SpongeBob SquarePants.
In the emptiness of the kitchen throbs the jagged emptiness in my chest, steadily growing in recent months, which I’ve tried to ignore but no longer can. It’s where hope briefly flickered, in the days when Michael still kissed me before he left, without fail, busy morning be damned.
I take a two-minute shower because all the hot water is gone, and when I go back downstairs, Jewel’s face is in a book called A Kid’s Guide to Positive Thinking. She has pulled her glasses down to the tip of her nose to read, stretched out flat on the couch, the book propped on her chest. The TV still blares, but she