Page 24

Not hi, hey, what’s up. She says hello. And she says my name, to me, which is something people don’t usually do in conversation. It feels so intimate I nearly blush.

Her mom goes into motion, like a robot that just now went into start-up. “Yes, hello. Are you going to introduce us, Alex?”

“Mom, this is my friend Jack Fisher.” Alex says it automatically, as prompted. The word friend comes out awkwardly, one her tongue and lips haven’t practiced enough.

I’m thinking about her tongue and lips when I should be shaking the hand her mom is holding out, waiting patiently for me to divert my attention from Alex’s mouth. Her hand limp in mine, a greeting as warm as the wind biting my back.

“I got your car out of the ditch,” I say, eyes back on Alex so quickly it’s like she’s a magnet. Her glance goes over my shoulder to the driveway where my dad sits in the truck, lights dim, engine idling.

“I was going to call, but I don’t have your number,” I add, hoping the hint is enough.

Her mom has faded away, a pale figure receding back into the house.

“I don’t have a phone,” Alex says.

“Maybe you should get one.”

Her eyes are on mine, and it’s like there’s no such thing as casual flirting with this girl. Every word she speaks is intense as hell and thoroughly investigated before she lets it out of her mouth.

“Maybe I should,” she says.

And I kinda feel like I just won the world.

21. ALEX

You learn how to pretend when you live in this house.

We’re both so good at it now we don’t know how to do anything else. Pretend that I’m okay. Pretend the scotch bottle is as full as it was yesterday. Pretend that Anna’s permanently closed door might open again. Pretend that mine doesn’t exist. Pretend other families live like this.

It’s the only thing we do well together.

It wasn’t always this way. I remember my father. I remember marking the calendar, putting smiley-face stickers on the day when he would get home from his run. I remember Mom’s mood changing as we got closer to it, her face reflecting the sticker.

Dad would come home. The rumble of a semi in the night and the flash of lights trailing across my bedroom walls, slipping downstairs in my footed pajamas, unable to mask the swish-swish noise of them as I came down the stairs, Anna behind me. We never got in trouble, no matter how late it was. He’d scoop us up and hug us, toss us in the air so high Mom would squeal a bit. The house would smell like gas and takeout and nobody cared.

Then things changed. Mom seemed to prefer the days in between the smiley faces on the calendar, her face stretching into a tight mask as we got closer to the next one, the muscles creating the best parody of it that they were able. We were bigger and harder to toss in the air, and Dad just kind of looked at us when we ran to him, unsure what to do with something not shaped like a steering wheel.

So we stopped running to him.

And then a sticker day came and he didn’t. It faded, the color creeping back from the edges until only the teeth were yellowed. Mom never took the calendar down. It hung on the refrigerator, a silent testament to his failure, a constant reminder whenever we wanted a drink.

It was her litany when Anna was still alive, her echoed refrain any time my sister pointed out tangles in my hair or toenails grown too long.

“At least I’m here,” she would say, stomping away from the argument so that her footfalls shook the house, asserting the simple fact of her presence.

Every day that passed brought my real face out from under the baby fat, the elongating cheekbones too much like his, the eyes reminding her of another pair that couldn’t bear to look at her anymore.

Dad’s things are still here; his clothes hang limply in his closet, his tools unused in the garage. The only thing of his not covered with dust is a punching bag, because I’ve kept it in perpetual motion since he left, the rage my small fists vented growing into an actual threat now that I’m older.

When I’m throwing punches is the only time I remember him clearly, all the hours I stood nearby, my own face crunched in fierceness like his, my feet mimicking his movements. I went out there alone only once, after Mom had tossed something I was reading into the garbage disposal after I ignored her instructions to clean my room. Pages had flown in the air, shredded words floated between us, and I wanted to cross the distance with my knuckles, wipe the smirk off my mother’s face.

But I knew better, and I ran to the garage to do all the things I wanted to do to her to the punching bag instead, screaming, punching, slapping, kicking, sweating, crying, heaving. I was red-faced and out of air when Dad found me resting on the tailgate of his truck, one sleeve of my shirt dried stiff from wiping tears. He sat next to me, his weight pushing the truck bed down, my little feet that much closer to the ground. He rested his hand on my head and sighed, and I saw that he was crying too.

I didn’t understand then, but I do now. Anna never forgave him for leaving, for the absence that the checks—bigger every month once he owned his company—didn’t fill. But I know it was the better alternative, just like I know why he cried that day he found me in the garage.

There are parts of yourself that you hate; parts that you know other people wouldn’t understand. And he knew his own worst elements had been passed on to me, this unwieldy wrath that burns through my brain, turning reason into ash. So I can’t be angry with him for leaving when I understand too well the reason. If he’d stayed, he would’ve killed our mother, eventually. Maybe when we were kids, maybe when we were older, maybe once we had left. But either way, it was a foregone conclusion. We could either have a mother and money coming in, or we could have a cold grave and a father in jail.

And while I know he made the right decision for Anna, I don’t know about me. I want to tell him all these things that I have done. Whether he would be disgusted or proud, I do not know. But at least I would have someone to tell, someone who knows me.