“Ava, hon,” my mom says in a honey-sweet voice reserved only for her daughter. “I think Max doesn’t want to discuss that right now.”
I flip the food onto my plate and turn off the burner. I might just make it down the hall before another line of questioning.
“Max,” my mom calls. I sink, wishing I could catch a break.
“Yeah?”
My parents whisper about something, so I set my plate down on the counter and prepare for complaints and nitpicking. Maybe they’ll admonish me for using the wrong detergent or leaving the bathroom light on overnight.
“I’m heading into the office,” my dad mutters, grabbing his leather briefcase and exiting through the garage.
“I, uh…” My mom clears her throat, unable to meet my eyes. “We—I owe you an apology. I was so impressed with your show,” my mom says. She really loves that word. “We—well, I didn’t quite know what to expect, but you did such a good job.”
“Oh.” I don’t know how to accept praise from her. I send a quick look to Ava since I suspect she put them up to this, but she shrugs. “Okay. Thanks, I guess.”
“Your father and I have been hard on you. The life of an artist, it’s…difficult. Money doesn’t come easily.”
I stab at the tasteless scrambled eggs on my plate. “Good thing life doesn’t revolve around money,” I say, bitter. “People can do things because they enjoy them. Art brings me joy. It always has.”
“I understand that,” my mother says.
“Do you?” I turn to the fridge for the creamer and am reminded that Daisy takes her coffee black, so I slam the door shut. “You two’ve treated art like an obnoxious hobby. I got a job right out of school, but you never cared. You were just…disappointed.”
“It might not have been our first choice of career for you.”
“I could tell.”
She shifts her weight in her seat, and I’ve never seen her so restless. Then again, I’ve never pushed back. But I need to understand why they treated me the way they did for so long.
“You didn’t attend a single showcase when I was a kid, and you never traveled out to see anything I ever did. Why the sudden change of heart?”
“It’s hard to watch your own child choose a career path that has such a meager success rate,” my mom starts slowly, “but we figured you needed to get it out of your system. That you would do art in high school but you’d select something more practicalfor college. But you didn’t. You traveled around doing little museums, and then—”
“They weren’t ‘little museums.’” I should have expected this apology to be a double-edged sword. “Those pop-ups were my job. Legitimate work with people who’ve won awards.”
“Then you moved back here, and we thoughtthistime you’d go a more practical route. Then you didn’t, and I saw…I realized that even on your own, you are very good at what you do. Passionate.”
“It’s more than the other night.” I shake my head, not ready to accept her apologies—not after a lifetime of wanting to please them and always failing. “You two’ve never really been there for me. Ever.”
“We had an idea in our heads, I think, of what we could accomplish as parents and what we dreamed of for our children.” My mother wears a pained expression and sets her elbows on the table. “Especially as a woman in law, I felt this immense pressure to be great at everything—to have the high-powered job and the perfect family. And no matter what sports teams or clubs we put you in, all you wanted to do was run off and do your own thing, nose in a sketch pad. I kept…” She exhales, deep and heavy. “I kept getting it wrong with you. And then Ava came along, and she—” She appears to search for a word. “She was needier.”
“Hey.” Ava pouts.
“Well, you were, honey. And by the time she was headed to kindergarten, you were a teenager.”
“So, because I was independent and had different interests than you expected, you stayed hands-off?”
“I didn’t mean for it to happen, and I’m not saying we were right.” My mom struggles to keep her chin high. “But once we realized it, the damage had been done. I’m sorry.”
As much as I want to hear these words from her, I can’t bring myself to celebrate. I’d love to know what Daisy would think of all of this. I wish I could walk over to the casita and tell her.
Taking my time with a bite of breakfast, I consider whether I could eventually forgive them. Or at least one of them.
“What about him?” I ask, my chin tilting to the door my dad left through.
She sighs. “He’s not there yet. Our mode of tough love turned out too tough, I guess, and somehow he became his own father. He hates himself for it, but…he needs time.”
I never understood my parents, and it turns out they never understood me, either. How they raised me affected my life, my everything—including the way I felt in this very town. If things with Daze hadn’t imploded on Thursday, maybe I could handle this, but now I can only rub my eyes in frustration.
