There are a lot of possible explanations,I would always answer.And one of those explanations is aliens.They never knew what to say to that.
Violet showed us the wooden horse and the bag of marbles, and the first thing I thought of was the balsam wood airplane that Ben had never been able to assemble. I thought of his disinterest in race cars and toy trucks. It was because those things meant nothing to him. Nothing at all.
There’s an explanation.Yes, there is. There are many possible explanations, in fact. Flip a card and pick one. You might not like it.
When I broke up with the tarot girlfriend, I was mean to her. I was mean to every woman I broke up with, because when I was cruel, they backed away and left me alone forever. They didn’t understand that it wasn’t about them, about what they had done or hadn’t done, how they looked or didn’t look, what they said or didn’t say. It wasalways about the fact that without Ben, I was a shell of a person, and the only thing I truly wanted was to be left alone.
So when I broke up with the tarot girlfriend, I said,Did you seethiscoming? If your cards are so accurate, did you predict this?
She’d looked me in the eyes and said,Vail, I predicted this from the beginning.
I owed that woman an apology, but she would never get one. Just like all the others.
Sorry, but that’s the way it goes.
28
Violet
Even though it was late, I called Lisette. Clay answered the phone and argued with me for twenty minutes before he finally put her on. When she picked up the phone extension in her bedroom, her voice was surly and resentful. “Yeah? What?”
My mind was spinning, my eyes were dry as sandpaper, and my stomach was trying to flip upside down. For once, anger had no hold on me. I couldn’t even feel an echo of it inside my skull. I could only feel a rush of relief and happiness at the sound of my daughter’s pissed-off voice.
I wasn’t thinking about the attic or the bag of marbles in that moment. I was thinking about Martin Peabody, the look in his eyes, the brush of his fingertip on the back of my neck, filling me with cold despair.
“Are you all right?” I asked Lisette.
“Yeah.”
“Is everything going okay there?”
“Yeah.”
She wasn’t going to give me anything. When was the last time mydaughter had given me even the tiniest piece of herself? It had been years.
I was trying, for once. It had been years since I had done that, either.
We did a dance of strike and parry.Is school okay? Yeah. Did you do your homework? Mostly. What homework was it? English.She didn’t ask anything about me. She never did.
“What’s going on there?” I asked, still trying.
A brief pause. “Dad’s watchingThe Love Boatwith Katie.”
Clay must have a girlfriend, then. Had this been kept from me like some careful secret? Had they thought I would explode at the news? I truly did not care that Clay had a girlfriend. I assumed he’d had more than one over the years. I did care that this woman was spending more time with Lisette than I could.
I wasn’t going to explode, though. I wasn’t going to be the Crazy Ex-Wife, just this once. I would glide past this news with dignity, like a ship in the night. “You like that show,” I said.
“It’s a stupid show.” She shot the words back at me like a slingshot. I wasn’t even sure she meant them.
“You always said you liked it.”
“It’s stupid,” she proclaimed. “Dad says I have to go to bed now. I have to get up for school tomorrow.”
“You’re a night owl.”
“I need tosleep.”
Annoyance crept up the back of my neck and pinched my skull. This was Violet the Bad Mother, always annoyed and out of patience. My daughter knew I had a short fuse, and in the last few years, her favorite hobby was testing it, then blasting it to pieces.
