And it doesn’t happen like that at all.
I elect to finish off the last of my water because I’m eternally dehydrated and why not make a small life change at this very moment while I’m making abiglife change? In upstate New York, I’ll be properly moisturized. Borderline dewy. I’ll never get another headache.
I’m chugging my Smartwater in an extremely ladylike fashion when I see something out of the corner of my eye. There’s a split second where it occurs to me that it should happen this way. Because I first saw Nick out of the corner of my eye, and even though he was a ringmaster at the time, this feels like the most perfect bookend to the initial chapter of our story.
Instead, I do a spit take, which sprays all over the person whohas come up on my left, who is not Nick. I wasn’t wrong to clock them as someone familiar, because they’re probably the most familiar person to me in terms of hours spent in their presence: it’s my dad!
No. Sorry, that was a joke. Absent-father-related gallows humor.
“Sam!” Perry shouts. “I found this under the daybed.”
They hold out the package in bright green tissue paper. In my tornado of showy, angry packing, I hadn’t realized I left it behind.
“You came all the way to the airport for this?” I ask. “You’re amazing.”
“Aren’t you going to open it?”
I suspect I left it in the office subconsciously. It seemed too sad to open it. Too final. Too enmeshed with a conversation I’d like to stop reliving.
But with Perry standing here, having gone to the trouble of parking at the airport, I don’t feel I have a choice.
I tear into the paper, revealing a set of six multicolored King’s Island–branded erasers—the kind that go on top of pencils like little hats.
“I’ll wait with you in line for a few minutes. I don’t like the idea of you not getting a send-off.”
I look at the erasers and will myself not to cry. “Thank you.”
Perry stands next to me, both of us searching for something to say. At least, I am. Sometimes it’s still awkward when it’s just Perry and me, without the connecting fulcrum of my mom. I find myself scanning for conversation topics, answering questions politely rather than honestly. Maybe it’s weird when two adults are thrown together into artificial closeness. A mother-in-law you “really like,” but you know you need to keep your guard up around her.
But in this moment, I’m surprisingly grateful not to be alone.
I even start feeling genuinely comfortable in the silence between us, until Perry clears their throat.
“It’s hard for me, you know?” They turn to me. “I’m there, but I don’t have a role to play. I love your mom so much, but I’m not sure if I’m supposed to be validating her perspective or playing devil’s advocate because I’m the ‘objective’ party. I want you to trust me and feel like you can talk to me, but I know you’re an adult. I’m not your parent. So, I try not to get involved—”
“You can get involved, you know. It’s your family, too,” I say definitively. People with tote bags piled on top of giant wheeled suitcases swerve around us. “If anything, I’m the interloper.”
“That’s exactly what I didn’t want you to feel,” Perry says.
The people in front of me shuffle forward. I’m almost to the first checkpoint. Perry grabs my suitcase and wheels it out of the line, motioning for me to follow them over to the vending machines.
“Can I confess something?” they ask when I drop my backpack on the floor in front of a nonfunctioning coffee vending machine. “I’ve been coming back to this online forum for stepparents. I used to read it when I was with my ex. Specifically the posts about adult stepkids. It’s mostly venting. People asking for advice, but really they just want validation for resenting their partners’ kids. I think I looked at it mostly out of morbid curiosity. Kind of a ‘there but for the grace of God go I’ thing.
“But one time, I saw this post that just said, ‘If they have a child who failed to launch, that’s a parenting problem. Back away, run.’ People were leaving comments about a boomerang stepchild being their worst nightmare and how they’re ‘terrified.’ ”
I blink at Perry. We’ve been in separate rooms, reading the same alarming Reddit page. “Did it freak you out?”
“No! Reading all those comments had kind of the opposite impact on me. I wanted to be more understanding. I tried to beanyway. And patient. Especially when your mom couldn’t be. Parents have a lot of their own issues wrapped up in their kids, you know? It’s so personal. I might have been in a better position to be a sounding board for you. But I stepped back, tried to give you space. Maybe I’ve erred on the side of caution and you probably followed my lead.”
“I wish you’d told me about the scary forum,” I say. “We could’ve bonded over our mutual fears.”
“At the time, I didn’t realize we had that in common,” they reply. “I know it’s not the same situation. But I’m here. If you ever feel the desire to post a complaint about a stepkid, I could be a sounding board.”
“I don’t think that’ll be an issue anymore,” I say. “But thanks.”
“There are always going to be times where I’m standing on the outside,” they say. “That’s the nature of being a stepparent. But is there anything wrong with a child having more than two people who love them and look out for them, no matter what?”
I look down at the green tissue paper and try to cast myself as a positive addition to Kira’s life rather than an interloper. It doesn’t work; I still feel like I wreaked havoc on their first summer in a new home.
