Last night was my first solo night with Dad at his new house, and this morning will be our first solo breakfast. I guess most families get together for dinner, but with Mom’scrazy client schedule, our thing was always breakfast. So rolling out of this bed knowing that only Dad will be waiting at the kitchen table makes Monday morning feel even moreMondaythan it already does.
I reach into my closet and pull out my own personal uniform—jean shorts, black high-top sneakers, and a black-and-white-striped T-shirt. Dad wears the same coveralls to work every day. When I was a kid I asked him why he never wore different colors, and he said that geniuses wear the same thing every day so they can save their brain power for more important decisions. I don’t know if I’m a genius, but I like the idea of saving brain power. So for me, it’s usually dark shorts, pants, or even a skirt and a black-and-white-striped shirt. Sometimes a headband if I’m feeling sassy. Miss Flora Mae says I always look like I’ve just robbed a bank, but that she can appreciate my consistency—whatever that means. My closet might be a little boring, but at least it makes it a smidge easier to deal with the limited clothing options out there for a thirteen-year-old girl who’s nearly sized out of the juniors’ department.
After getting dressed in a striped T-shirt, black denim shorts, and a yellow headband, I shut the door to my new bedroom behind me and stand there for a minute in the dark hallway. Dad’s bedroom, with the door wide open, sits at the end of the hallway, but just past my room is something Mom’s house never had—a third bedroom. Ithink Dad’s third bedroom probably just has a bunch of his old stuff in it. But I feel a little funny going in it since the door is closed.
Most houses on our street have only two bedrooms. They’re all the same style—except, of course, Miss Flora Mae’s, which has a style all its own. I call Mom’s house Sweet Pea Headquarters 1.0. We used to live in an apartment above Mom’s practice downtown, but when Nana died when I was in kindergarten, she left us her house, and it’s been home ever since. Dad’s house—or Sweet Pea Headquarters 2.0—is the bigger version, with a third bedroom and a wider garage.
Dad tried buying furniture that looks like all the stuff in SPHQ 1.0, but there’s no good way to copy Nana’s kitchen table, complete with scratches on the legs from when Cheese was a kitten. The whole place kind of reminds me of the Halloween costume I bought at Green’s Grocers last year. From far away, I looked exactly like the zombie prom queen I’d envisioned in my head, but the longer I looked, the easier it was to see that nothing about my costume was close enough to the real deal to actually be scary. Honestly, the scariest part about it was the tag on the inside that saidKEEP AWAY FROM OPEN FLAME! HIGHLY FLAMMABLE MATERIAL!
In the kitchen Dad is half-dressed in his usual gray coveralls with the top hanging around his waist and witha fresh undershirt up top. Mom never let him wear his coveralls in the house before, but now I guess Dad can make his own rules.
My dad is a painter. Not some fancy-schmancy art-school painter. He paints houses and buildings and rooms and basically anything that could need painting. Sometimes, though, businesses ask him to come paint designs in their windows, like for holidays or big sales. He’s never said so, but part of me has always wondered if he secretly likes those special jobs best.
“How’s the bacon?” Dad asks through a mouthful of hash browns.
I brush my toes against the leg of the kitchen table, just to be sure there are no claw scratches from Cheese. “Very dead,” I tell him.
He kisses his fingers like a chef. “Maybe we could make some baked ziti tonight?” he asks. “Then catch up onJeopardy!?”
“I think Mom has Mondays,” I remind him. I moved in on a Sunday, and the plan is that Dad gets Friday, Saturday, and Sunday while Mom gets Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and each of them takes every other Thursday. If that sounds confusing to you, join the club. When Dad was still at the El Cosmico, we didn’t have much of a schedule, but I guess him moving into an actual house made things feel more real.
He nods. “Right, right.”
The thought of my dad, sitting here just two houses over eating dinner and watchingJeopardy!by himself while Mom and I are together is the kind of thing that stings. It reminds me that, despite my two matching bedrooms and the short walk between my parents’ houses, they are divorced. D-I-V-O-R-C-E-D. No matter how pretty or normal they try to make it feel.
I still can’t help but think they could have stuck it out. There had to be a better way.
Dad shakes out the paper and clears his throat. “‘Dear Miss Flora Mae, my son is getting married to a big-city girl who’s a little full of herself. She’s a lawyer in Dallas and has got it in her head that no one will come out to her wedding if she has it out here in Valentine. How do I convince them that the West Texas landscape is the perfect backdrop for their dream wedding instead of that godforsaken concrete jungle known as Dallas? Yours truly, Mom on a Mission.’”
I squint, wiggling in my chair as I concentrate. Of all our family traditions, this is one of my favorites. Dad would read us Miss Flora Mae’s advice column over breakfast while me and Mom took turns answering the letter aloud. Sometimes our answers were spot-on with Miss Flora Mae’s, and other times, we were just as stumped as the person who’d written in. Mom’s advice was always a little too perfect. The kind of stuff that sounds easy but is hardto actually do. My style was a little more down-to-earth. Nobody’s perfect. What’s the use in pretending?
“Sounds like this girl’s a little bit of a bridezilla,” says Dad.
“A what?” I can’t help but picture a half lizard, half human in a puffy white wedding gown and glittering veil, slithering down the aisle, claws full of a bouquet of flowers and a tail dragging behind her.
Dad chuckles. “A monster bride,” he says. “Someone who’s hard to work with. Not all that flexible.”
“Well, mayyyyyyybe this mom should just let her son’s fiancée plan the wedding she wants?”
“Dear Mom on a Mission,” Dad says in an official-sounding voice, “perhaps a parent’s most noble mission is to do whatever will make their child happiest, and in this case that includes your future daughter-in-law’s plans for her concrete-jungle wedding. This is one safari you won’t want to miss.”
“Clever,” I say through a bite of cheesy eggs.
I finish my breakfast and fill up my water bottle before grabbing my backpack and lunch. I give Dad a quick hug goodbye and sprint to the bus stop at the end of the street before it leaves me behind. On the bus Oscar is waiting for me with a saved seat in the second row.
He lets out a yawn so big I can see his tonsils. “How was night one?”
I pause and think about telling him that I felt my whole body hiccup every time the house creaked in the middle of the night or that it was weird to see Dad’s family pictures piled up in a box instead of hanging on the wall or that I couldn’t find the hand soap when I went to the bathroom.
Instead, I shrug. “It was fine.” I shake my head. Oh heck, who am I kidding? “It was weird,” I blurt. “It was like waking up from a dream but then just finding out you’re still dreaming. Like, it was my room, but it wasn’t. Everything was just a little bit off.”
“I don’t know why your parents don’t just do like what my tía and tío did. Tía Lisa kept the house and Tío Rudy got a tiny little one-room apartment at the edge of town before moving to Odessa after he met his new girlfriend in the Classifieds section of the newspaper.”
Oscar comes from a large Mexican family and sometimes just listening to his mom talk on the phone to her sisters is more interesting than most TV shows, but his tía Lisa and tío Rudy were the first divorce in the family ever, making them the big family gossip for a long time now. “Aren’t the Classifieds for, like, used furniture and odd jobs?”
His whole body flops dramatically when he shrugs. “Maybe people try to trade their boyfriends for recliners?”
“A recliner sounds way better than a boyfriend,” I say, trying my best to hide the way the thought alone of aboyfriend makes my mouth go dry. “Well, I don’t want my dad to move-move. You don’t think he’d actuallydothat, do you? But maybe he doesn’t have to live one house down from my mom, and maybe his place could look totally different. Like it’s just his instead oftheirs.”
