“I really want to but it’s full. Maybe I can take it next fall!”
She pressed my hand between hers like a waffle maker. They were cold, lotion-soft. “I’m sorry, dear. I’m retiring after the spring.”
She let go, passed me the book, then offered a smile to the person behind me.
Chapter 8
While Jay was folding laundry on FaceTime, I propped my phone against my MacBook screen and pulled up my so-called novel. It had begun as a retelling of my parents’ relationship. Always, the stories they shared about themselves were handed over lifelessly, a machine counting money and telling you the amount. I was attempting an act of resurrection. But what I’d written so far felt like a random person telling you how their parents met.
A notification dropped down from my phone. T*ump had said immigrants in some Ohio town were eating cats and dogs. Now people wanted to blow the town up. Jay must’ve gotten the same alert because he said, “I’m glad we get to live in the dumbest timeline together.”
“That’s actually so sweet,” I said.
My mom walked through my door in her bathrobe. “When’s the last time you changed those sheets?” She came over, flicking crumbs off my bedspread. “You’re gonna ruin your back like that.”
I was slouched against my headboard, my laptop balancing on my stomach. “I’m writing.”
She smiled with the perfect straight teeth she decided not to give me, cursing me instead with my father’s gap. “Let’s watch our show.”
“I’m busy.”
“With what?”
“Writing!” I held up my phone. “And talking to Jay.”
“I mean, we’re not really talking. Hi, Mrs. Dorinda.”
“Hi, Jay.” Looking at me, she said, “I’ll get the popcorn.”
The Bachelor was reaching new heights with one woman, but ready to take a leap of faith with another. I thought about how the show’s drama, its stakes, were rooted in the wrenching experience of having to choose between people you cared about. After sending several women home that night, Troy cried in the helicopter above a snowy mountain.
My dad had left the night before after another fight. I knew I’d get in trouble for it, but I asked, “Why does he always get to leave?”
My mom grabbed a fistful of popcorn. “I left once. When you were a baby.”
I’d only ever seen my dad’s car shrinking down the street, my mom tearing things apart at the kitchen table.
“Remember the garden we used to have out front? You might’ve been too young to remember. I used to keep a small garden. Sunflowers, wild indigo, goldenrods.”
This sounded like an incantation. I didn’t remember.
“You were two,” she added. “One night he had too much to drink and drove right over my flowers. I remember running out and seeing the dirt ripped up from the ground, my sunflowers in halves. We went to stay with grandma.”
“What happened after that?”
“He enrolled in a program and picked us up.”
She made it sound so easy. “Here we are twenty years later, still waiting for that nigga.”
She pinched my arm with her nails. “Don’t call your father a nigga. Only I can call him that.”
The lock to the front door unlatched. My dad wandered in looking lost. I couldn’t see his eyes beneath the lip of his cap. His tie askew, button-down creased from the day. He flicked his cap off and tossed it on the hallway side table. This was the man my mom was always waiting for, I thought, this man with mustard in his eyebrow. How did you even get mustard in your eyebrow? He must’ve stopped at Booeymonger. Of course he didn’t ask us if we wanted anything. At least he was workingagain. Last month, he got a job at the National Archives. It seemed to be going all right, not that we talked about it, not that we talked about anything. My mom was thrilled that he’d gotten a government job, like her. That was the peak of success in her mind, working for the government. She was entering her twentieth year at HUD. I didn’t see how she stomached it, working at the same dreary place for that long. They made her clock in and out for fifteen-minute breaks like a shitty service job. She was proud of this—every other morning putting on patent leather pumps, a pencil skirt, pearl earrings, just to be chained to a desk.
Walking into the living room, he said, “Turn on CNN.”
Sometimes he blurted things. As a person who spent half their twenties in a pandemic, I understood having impoverished social skills.
My mom’s mouth twitched. “You come turn it on.”
