“I haven’t talked to her any way,” I said, “I just asked what was going on and why you keep nitpicking at me.”
Sonny and Steve burst out laughing, and I gripped my fork so tight in my fist, I was worried I’d bend it. Sonny told me I was out of my mind,and Steve added, “Yeah, since you came back, you think the whole world’s against you.”
“I don’tthinkanything,” I replied, “it’s just that all of you are talking about me behind my back, and I’m over it.”
“No one’s talking about you,” my father reassured me. He was lying, I could tell. He even blushed a little before he glanced over at Mom.
“Oh yeah?” I fired back. “Then why do you two keep looking back and forth like that?”
“We’re not!” Mom shouted.
“You are!”
Steve pretended to cough, saying the wordpsychoas he and Sonny cracked up. I was furious and could feel the blood draining from my face, and that made me yell at my brothers for the first time in ages: “Can you shut up for once?”
“Jennifer!” my mother responded. “That’s enough! No one’s plotting against you! Stop being paranoid!”
“I’m not paranoid! Y’all are up to something!”
“Like what? Your brothers are laughing! What’s wrong with that?” Mom asked.
“It’s not that they’re laughing,” I told her, my voice getting louder, “it’s that they’re making fun of me! They’ve been making fun of me constantly, and you never say anything, and Dad doesn’t either!”
My brothers turned irate, but Mom talked over them: “Where is all this coming from? Why now? When we’re trying to have dinner in peace?”
I told her she’d started it, that she’d been acting weird with me ever since I’d returned home and I didn’t understand why. I asked whether she even wanted me back, or whether I was just extra now. She shouted back that I was pushing it, and I saw my father’s back straighten as he got ready to intervene.
“You’re taking it too far!” he screamed. That wasn’t like him. But Istood my ground and asked if he was really going to deny that Sonny and Steve made fun of me all the time. Sonny jumped in to tell me to stop making everyone feel bad, and to top it off, he threw a napkin in my face.
At that point, I lost control: “Can you not just leave me alone? Do you two really have nothing better to do than mess with your little sister? Shouldn’t you maybe try to drag your garage business out of debt for once? Focus on your own shit and stay out of my business!”
That was the first time in history I’d gotten them both to shut up. But Mom was fiery red, which meant I’d really gotten under her skin. She pointed at me and said, “You can’t just go through life making everyone else feel miserable, Jennifer!”
“Everyone else? What about me?! Have you ever asked yourself how I feel, or does that just not matter to you?”
“When did you decide it was OK to talk to people that way?” she screamed, and started burbling something about how I’d changed since I’d gone away to college, and I must have picked up my bad behavior from my friends there and the guy I had gone out with.
For some reason, since my return, Mom had refused to call Jack by his name. He was alwaysthat guy you were going out with, and her tone, which had once been affectionate, was now totally disrespectful.
I agreed with her, though, and I let her know it, slamming my fork down on the table: “You’re right! Jack opened my eyes to lots of things!”
“Exactly,” Mom said, and I realized that was the answer she’d been looking for. “He got into your head and turned you against us! He even got your old boyfriend thrown in jail!”
I couldn’t answer—her words had shocked me too much. Frozen, I noticed that Spencer, who hadn’t yet said a word, stood and warned her in a steely tone, “Mom, no. Don’t go there.”
She wasn’t used to people defending me, especially not against her, and she almost flinched as she said, “I’m just telling it like it is.”
“He was an asshole, and he got what he deserved,” Spencer said, and when Dad stood up and shouted at him, Spencer cut him off. “Stay out of it, Dad.”
Mom yelled that getting Monty arrested had caused all sorts of problems for them: “Do you know how the rest of the neighborhood has looked at us since then? Do you know what they say about us? It’s like we don’t even exist anymore.”
“He was hitting Jenny, Mom!” Spencer screamed.
“That’s what she says!”
That made me react. I had been miffed before the subject of Monty came up, but now I saw what was really going on, and it shocked me. Mom wasn’t mad that I was back home, she was mad because things had changed in her life. She wasn’t worried about some maniac who might come stalking me, she was worried about the inconvenience it might cause her.
Before I realized it, I heard my chair sliding backward and found myself running toward the stairs. My movements were at once robotic and enraged. Enraged at my mother, at the twins… I couldn’t believe a year had passed and people still didn’t believe me.
