He waits for me to answer a question he did not ask. It frustrates me when people will not just spit it out, and it makes me petulant.
‘What happened to your brother?’ he eventually says.
‘He met some consequences for once in his life,’ I reply.
‘Oh, right. Consequences dished out by you, then?’
‘Something like that.’
He takes a few deep breaths, eyes out over the garden, and then turns back to me.
‘I understand Luke isn’t so easy to be around at the moment; he’s going through a lot. And you are too. It can be easier to focus our energy on finding others’ faults, and much harder to face our own.’
‘That’s very wise. I assume you are planning to give him this same speech?’
Dad looks taken aback by my response, and does not have anything more to add.
‘I thought as much.’
I shut the door in his face. Coward. Little does he know how much time and energy I devote to my own shortcomings. It is just that they can’t be the only things I focus on, and sometimes other people need a bit of help finding theirs. This family especially. A mosquito buzzes past my ear and my focus switches to squishing it before it bites me. By the time I accomplish this, I have no remaining feelings about Luke and his lights, other than a vague sense that I may have overreacted.
Upstairs, Olivia and Maeve are in the living room – Maeve spread out on the floor lining up her plastic animals, and Olivia on the couch, wine and phone in hand.
‘There you are,’ she says, looking up, her eyes soft and relaxed.
‘Here I am.’
‘Luke lost his mind, by the way.’
‘A long time ago, I reckon. If he ever had it to begin with.’
‘Very funny.’
‘I’m being serious.’
‘I get he was being a dick, but maybe you shouldn’t have wrecked his window. It was a bit immature.’
‘And “does that even classify as a window?” wasn’t immature?’
Olivia shrugs and makes a face, like ‘you got me there’, then turns to focus her attention on Maeve.
‘She always does this,’ she says, pointing to the line of toys. ‘She never wants to actually play with them.’
‘I used to do that too. I loved putting them in order of tallest to smallest, or just seeing how many I had in my collection,’ I reply.
‘What is that supposed to mean?’
‘What?’
Olivia has stiffened, her face vacant of expression.
‘Just because you have a new diagnosis or two doesn’t mean you’re the spectrum expert all of a sudden,’ she says.
‘I’m not trying to be, I was just saying –’
‘Well, don’t. Maeve is different, she’s very advanced for her age, and she loves people. She’s really social, she doesn’t have any problems there. I didn’t ask for your opinion anyway, and actually you know nothing about raising a kid.’
‘Right.’
