“Whatever. Can I be excused? I’m full,” Hallie said.
“Sure.” I took her plate and brought it to the sink, no longer hungry either.
We’d made things clear to her. We trusted Hallie, but we didn’t trust the boy she liked. Because he was a year older, he skipped school sometimes, he’d been caught vandalizing school property, and he drank. It wasn’t happening.
Dylan was soon done too, and Ash reminded him to hand over his phone.
It was eight o’clock.
“Christ.” Dylan rolled his eyes.
Ash merely made a fork-it-over motion.
I didn’t say anything, but I wanted to. I wanted to shake Dylan and tell him to lose the attitude, I wanted to hug him and ask if this was our fault, I wanted to study him like a book and see what was wrong, I wanted to know if we were messing up with his punishments since they weren’t working well, and I wanted a goddamn parenting manual.
I’d never been this anxious when the kids were younger.
Micah announced he was gonna watch TV, and Lily skipped after him.
“Don’t forget to wash your hands and mouth, princess,” Ash called.
She made a sharp turn for the half-bath under the stairs.
A breath gusted out of me, and I realized how tired I was.
“You look like you’ve had a rough day,” Ash murmured.
I took a deep breath and tried to pull myself together. “They keep fighting.” I went over to the table again to clear it.
“They’re teenagers.”
I paused, looking at him, then slumped down in the seat closest to him. “Are we sure that’s all it is? What if it’s us? What if they’re acting out because?—”
“Nate.” He cut me off and covered my hands with his on the table. “I understand you’re worried, but please trust me. I grew up with a sibling. We were at each other’s throats the moment Theo became a teenager. At that point, I was just the annoying kid brother—and it was like that for years. And now? Come on, he’s one of my closest friends.”
I stared at our hands.
Deep breaths.
“I want to talk to them, though,” I replied, keeping my voice down. “I want us to sit down with Dylan and Hallie and tell them what’s going on—ask for their input.”
“We’ve done that before.”
Well, sure, we’d given them an update here and there on the situation, but this was it. This was the big talk. This was divorce.
“In a way, yes,” I conceded. “But what if now is a bad time? Hallie is going through a lot at school. She becomes incredibly upset if she doesn’t bring home straight As—meanwhile, she’s clearly discovering boys, and not the good kind—and Dylan is…”
“Yeah.” He furrowed his brow and withdrew his hands. “He’s somethin’, all right. Kid won’t think twice about hanging out with us for sports and exercise, but try to sit him down to talk, and he’s squirmier than a brat confessing to a prank.”
Okay, he needed to let those damn ducks go. We had an actual problem here.
“The sneaking out has to stop too,” I said. “It makes me miss the days when he talked about joining the military.”
He snorted and started to say something, but his phone rang.
“It’s James—I’ll be quick.” He didn’t leave the kitchen. He answered the call right there. “Something wrong, man? I’m talking to Nate.”
He’d really become friends with James, hadn’t he? And the guy’s husband, I supposed. Ash talked about them a lot.
