fluke and now I pause, face screwed up as I hear her ask, “Why haven’t you been answering? Is everything okay? How’s school?”
Funny how she’s so worried about me all of a sudden. “School is… fine,” I reply haltingly. “I’ve just been really busy.”
She knows this is bullshit. She’s fully aware I’ve been ducking her. But if there’s one thing my mom excels at, it’s the art of ignoring a problem. She slips easily into the conversation she’s probably pretending we’re having. Cordial. Normal. “Are you homesick yet?”
I swallow down a mean laugh. Yeah, right. “There’s not a lot of time here to worry about things,” I answer diplomatically.
“That’s good, I suppose.” I hear water from the sink run and check my watch. Ah, yes. It’s five. Doug likes to eat at 5:45, sharp. The thought makes me shudder, just knowing that there’s this sudden connection to him, over the phone, through my mom. As if just talking to someone in the same house could make him manifest. She goes on, “I wanted to let you know that I scheduled the ceremony for the twenty-third of February.”
It takes me a long, confused moment to even understand what the fuck she’s talking about. We haven’t even spoken since the day after I arrived at Preston, but she’s acting like she’s picking up a conversation we had yesterday. Then it clicks.
Ah, right. The ceremony. Every year my mother likes to go to the cemetery and lay flowers at my dad’s headstone to commemorate his death. It’s depressing and fucking tedious, like reliving his funeral over and over again. Just thinking about it brings the hot prick of tears to my eyes. I’d actually forgotten all about it.
I clear my throat. “What day is that?” I ask, seeing the cats creep out from the woods. They’re a little more used to me now and know I bring food. I sit on the tree stump and tear off the top of the bag.
“Um.” She rummages around. “A Thursday?”
I exhale in relief. “It may be a little hard for me to get away that day. You know with classes. Plus, they like to give tests on Fridays.”
“Well if it’s a problem I’ll talk to the dean. It’s important that you be there.” She pauses. “Your father would have wanted it.”
Now I really do laugh. My father would have wanted a lot. He probably would have wanted my mom to marry someone who didn’t beat the shit out of me, for starters. Just, like, baseline standards here. He would have wanted me to live in a house where I felt safe. Mostly, my father would have wanted to still be here. He wouldn’t have wanted to have been killed in action during his tour in Afghanistan.
And I like to think that he would have wanted me happy, not dwelling over his death nine years later. But this isn’t about what my father would have wanted. Not really. This is about her.
The fucked-up thing is that I don’t hate my mom. Even after all the years of Doug, her watching him hurt me and doing nothing to stop it, I mostly just feel sad for her. When she’d cry with me after a beating, petting my hair, icing my bruises, cleaning up the blood, she’d just beg me to stop goading him so much. Even then, the only emotion I could muster toward her was a bland kind of apathy. Doug had eaten up all my resentment. I didn’t have any left for her.
This memorial is the same as it’s been since she married him. She probably doesn’t realize that I know. The ceremony is a flimsy veneer of unity between mother and daughter, as if we still share something pure and sacred—something Doug can never touch.
It’s a lie.
“No,” I decide, feeling exhausted down to my marrow. “Don’t call. I’ll work it out.”
I have Preston. I have a new life with new people, something with promise at the end of this dark, shitty tunnel known as my life. My mom has Doug and nothing else. I’ll give her this.
But I won’t give her anything else.
I hang up without saying goodbye.
Numbly, I take out a handful of treats and toss them a few feet away, waiting for the cats to come forward. They still won’t let me touch them. They allow Sebastian to touch them, but not me. It doesn’t seem fair.
Fuck.
Nothing seems fair.
Lucy comes first, nibbling on a treat, even getting close enough to sniff at my