1

IT WAS mid-March, and like Martie had promised, Nadia had been invited to her quinceañera. But it overlapped with the start of spring break, which turned out to be a bad time for everyone. Nadia’s family had a trip to Chicago planned, and anyway, her parents had other ideas about how much time she should be spending on overnights with Kyle. Taylor was too stressed out by school to go, and Megan was still boycotting the family. Kyle’s mom had planned to come, but then she felt like she was getting the flu and didn’t want to spread it around. So she said.

She’d been out of it lately—hardly home, working a lot and forgetting about Kyle’s games and other stuff. Not the predictable and reliable Mom she usually was. Pretty much as soon as he got back from the party, Kyle would be taking off for a spring break varsity baseball tournament in Arizona, and he hoped his mom would have his stuff ready.

Anyway, if Nadia was going to be gone, there was no reason to stay home for the weekend when he could be hanging out with Emily and everyone else at the farm. So it was Kyle and his dad alone for the long drive up the coast, his dad listening to a cooking thing on NPR and Kyle texting Nadia.

He took a picture of his dad.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

His dad patted the hair around his bald spot and glanced at Kyle. “Are you posting that?”

“Just to Nadia.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m bored. And I want her and me to be bored together.” He sent off the text.

#dadvibes

She replied with a smile.

“You could ask people’s permission before taking pictures of them and sharing it around,” his dad said.

“It’s just Nadia.”

now he’s mad. I think he thinks I’m making fun of him

“Maybe I don’t want you to send Nadia a picture of me.”

well now you are!! Nadia wrote. btw the hotel we’re gonna stay at in Chicago is supposedly haunted.

“She knows what you look like, Dad.”

“Not the point.”

he feels violated I guess? u believe in ghosts?

“What is the point?”

“Maybe put the phone away for a minute, Kyle. I want to talk to you.”

in trouble now haha.

Nadia sent him a string of emojis that Kyle didn’t have time to interpret before his dad grabbed his phone and dropped it into the driver’s-door cup holder. Kyle stared at his dad and laughed, playful. “I’m sorry, Dad, I’m sorry!”

Kyle wanted his dad to laugh too. He wanted them to crack each other up and find the humor in their own dumb reactions to stuff that wasn’t that serious. A quick look at his dad was enough to see that wasn’t happening. “I wasn’t dunking on you, I swear. I was sending her pictures of the road, other cars, freeway signs, whatever. It wasn’t anything.”

The muscles in his dad’s jaw flexed, like he was clenching his teeth. It didn’t look like he’d be giving Kyle’s phone back anytime soon. Kyle thought they’d been in a good mood. He blew air from between his lips and shook his head. Whatever. He’d just stare out his own window, then. Kyle’s mom always said he and his dad were alike that way. Too sensitive, too fast to “go dark,” as she put it. “As fast as switching off a light.”

“You don’t need copper pans, it’s the aluminum that actually holds in the heat,” the woman on the radio was saying.

“You don’t even cook, Dad,” Kyle muttered.

They listened to the rest of the tips on buying a sauté pan. The handle should be comfortable. It should be ovenproof. It should have a little hole so you could hang it from a rack. Then his dad turned off the radio and said, “I want to tell you something. That’s going on.”

Kyle’s first thought was: money. A couple times every year, there was some big speech about money, the business being unpredictable, them all needing to tighten the belt and be more conscious of the inflows and outflows. His dad would be super serious like this for about ten minutes, and then literally nothing changed and they went on spending exactly as much as always.

“Go ahead,” Kyle said, impatient.

“Don’t sigh like that. Don’t give me attitude.”

“I’m not!”

Silence. They went a few more miles. A tumbleweed skipped across the road, but his dad didn’t drive through it. Instead, he slowed down and let it blow past.

Was Kyle supposed to apologize now or something? His dad was being all sensitive and cranky. Maybe they should talk about baseball. Kyle had been moved from outfield to second base and had been playing pretty well there this season. Coach Ito had told him the other day he showed good leadership, but the idea of saying that to his dad right now, like some kind of brag, felt awkward.

He reached for the radio to turn it on again; his dad stopped him, and their hands touched for a second before they both pulled back.

“Mom is seeing someone,” his dad said.

“Huh?” Kyle wanted his phone back.

“Mom is seeing someone.”

Kyle had no idea what he was talking about. “You mean like a shrink or something?” It wasn’t that big a deal. Half the people they knew were in therapy. Mom probably should be in therapy, and work out this shit with Megan or whatever else she was going through so she could be more like she used to be. But then his dad’s silence worried him. “Or some other kind of doctor?” Kyle asked. “Is she sick? Dad?”

“No,” he said quietly.

Then Kyle got it.

Seeing someone. His brain processed the phrase, one you normally didn’t hear about married people. A parent. Your parent.

Then his body caught up with his mind, and he felt it in his gut.

“I haven’t told your sisters yet. I . . . we . . . haven’t told anyone, actually, and I don’t even know why I’m telling you now. I didn’t plan this.”

We haven’t told anyone.

“Wait, so . . . Mom knows you know?”

“Yes. But she doesn’t know you know.” He lifted his hands off the wheel and let them fall again. “She’s been seeing someone for a couple months. She says.”

The world outside the windshield flew by and Kyle wanted to stop it, rewind, make his dad unsay the words.

His brain sorted the pieces of information and tried to make sense of them.

His mother was having an affair. And his father knew and they were still married and living in the same house like everything was fine? And they weren’t planning to say anything to anybody. Was he missing something? In what world did any of this make sense?

Not in Kyle’s world. Not the one he thought he was living in.

Every muscle in his body wanted to reach over and grab his phone from the driver’s-side door and tell Nadia, tell Emily, tell Taylor, tell Megan. WTF??? he would ask on a group text.

“I don’t know what to do, Kyle,” his dad went on. “I really don’t. We were waiting it out, you know?”

Um, no, I don’t know, I have no idea whatsoever.

“We’re still waiting it out, I guess, and I guess we should separate, but to be honest we can’t afford it. I mean, a place for her and a place for me? Rent prices in California, with business how it is? It’s such a goddamn expensive industry, Kyle. I always imagined you and the girls taking it over, but I don’t want you to. There’s so much overhead, and if people don’t pay on time or a project goes wrong, you’re screwed. Not to mention all the competition now and all the people who watch an hour of HGTV and think they can do everything themselves for five grand.”

He’d gone from dropping the bomb of his mom’s affair to lecturing Kyle on the cost of running a contracting business?

“We were waiting it out,” his dad repeated, sounding bewildered. “And frankly, neither of us thought this would still be going on at this point.”

Kyle made his right hand into a fist and gnawed on his knuckle. A thing he used to do when he was stressed out as a kid. But he didn’t want to look like a baby right now, so he shoved his hand under his leg and asked, “You’re ‘waiting out’ Mom sleeping with someone else? Like, you discussed it and decided to ‘wait it out’? You’re just gonna, like, wait? For it to not be happening?”

They passed three freeway exits.

“I shouldn’t have told you,” his dad said at last.

Yeah, no shit. “You did, though.”

“I know, I know. Kyle, I’m sorry.” His dad reached over and touched Kyle’s arm in a way that seemed to try to express some kind of father-son-ness, as if it would make this any better. Kyle recoiled toward the passenger door and brought his hand back to his mouth.

His dad kept talking.

“I don’t have answers that are going to make any sense to you. All I can say is life isn’t as all-or-nothing as you think. Not after twenty-six years of marriage and fifteen years of our business, and three kids, and two house remodels and one medical scare and”—he gestured to the road they were on, taking them to the big family event—“your aunts and uncles and cousins. A history. A life. You don’t just . . .”

His dad was losing it. Kyle had seen his dad angry, seen him depressed, seen him goofy, seen him sad, seen him quiet, seen his eyes go damp, seen him go somewhere deep into himself. But he had never seen him actually truly cry. He didn’t even know if he could tell Taylor or Megan this part. Kyle listened to his dad’s choppy breathing, pulled at the hair of his knuckles with his teeth.

“Okay.” His dad said, exhaling sharply. “Okay. Sorry. Okay.”

“It’s fine,” Kyle said.

Totally fine.

Fine that it turned out his whole world was a tumbleweed, just a mass of dried-up bits that used to be rooted in something but now was fragile, not attached to anything, on the verge of being annihilated if the wind blew it one inch the wrong way.

“Look, we’re going to figure this out. Forget I said anything.”

“Sure, Dad.” Like he could forget. Delete. Backspace.

They drove past more strip malls, gas stations, billboards.

“Seriously, though. This weekend, Martie’s birthday. You know, don’t say anything. Don’t let on.”

Kyle nodded. Got it. His dad had pushed past the emotion to some worse place that was all about being practical. Be around the whole family and act like everything is fine. Hang out with his cousins without letting on what was falling apart. Look his grandmother in the eye and be cool.

“The thing is . . . ,” his dad continued, “the thing is that the, um, the guy. The other guy? His wife doesn’t know. His kid. There’s another family on the other side of this, and every town is a small town when it comes to this stuff. Especially considering the business and all, our names out there on the trucks and everything. Anyway, I feel like it’s not my place or our place to make that choice for him. The other guy.” He glanced at Kyle. “About whether or not to tell.”

What was even happening? Was his dad’s truck some kind of portal to a parallel universe, where everyone’s parents—who previously had been annoying, at most—were actually the worst people on the planet?

“But you’re okay making that choice for me.”

“Well. You’re not directly involved.”

Kyle wiped the back of his hand on his jeans. “Oh, okay.”

“I didn’t mean . . . Sorry. That sounded bad. Obviously you’re involved now, thanks to me. I . . .” He trailed off. “Christ. Just please don’t tell your sisters. Don’t tell Nadia.”

Nadia. At Thanksgiving, on this road, they had been joking about getting married. At Thanksgiving, on the farm, he’d imaged him and Nadia in a wedding picture like the one of his parents. He’d been so into his big messy-happy family, so into showing it off, like “Someday this could be us.”

He had to tell her, right? His dad couldn’t control whether or not he said something to his own girlfriend.

“Kyle?”

“I heard you.”

“I mean it,” his dad said. “This needs to be in the vault.”

The vault.

There were a couple things between him and his dad in there. Like when Kyle drove home from Mateo’s after drinking and his dad was waiting up and immediately knew and talked to him for over an hour about “Do you want to kill a kid? Is that what you want to do? You want to hit a car and send a baby into the street?” Or “You want a record? You want to not drive again until you’re twenty-five? Or never? You want all your college applications rejected?” Then he said he believed in Kyle, believed he was smart and wouldn’t make that mistake again. “I’m putting this one in the vault. If you let me down, I can’t help you. You’ll die alone in prison.”

Another thing in there was when Kyle was on a job site with his dad and they found a mistake in how the scaffolding had been set up, the kind of mistake that could have led to the whole thing coming down and injuring or killing workers or people on the street. His dad shut down the site, fired the foreman, and oversaw the fix himself. But before that, he sat in the Baker & Najarian truck with Kyle and said, “That’s our name. Ours and Al’s. On the trucks. On the site. On the contract. And we could have just lost everything. Don’t forget this happened, but never talk about it, Kyle. Put it in the vault.”

And Kyle had all kinds of stuff between him and his sisters, pacts they’d made to keep each other out of trouble with their parents. There was also something that had to do with Megan’s shitty high school boyfriend, Adam, but Kyle didn’t know details and no one ever said his name anymore.

Now this.

Kyle leaned over again to turn the radio back up. The cooking show was over, and now it was a news quiz, with joking and laughing. They listened without cracking a smile. Eventually Kyle’s dad said, “Oh,” and retrieved Kyle’s phone. “Here.”

Nadia’s texts were there when he unlocked it.

I mean I guess ghosts COULD be a thing, who am I to say?

Hello?

The playful conversation with Nadia was from a different life. He scrolled through it. His cracks, her smileys. His photos, her replies. He had to say something, even though the Kyle in those texts had been left somewhere back behind them on the highway, tumbling into the horizon.

sorry—we’re driving into a signal dead zone now

He hit send and turned off the phone.

Then he turned it on again.

Nadia had sent a heart and a waving hand.

See ya, boyfriend who used to tell me everything!

Goodbye, boyfriend’s nice family!

He shut it off once and for all and shoved it way down to the bottom of his duffel.

“So,” his dad said as they made the turn toward the farm. “Like I said, Mom and I don’t know how this is going to play out. It could all be sort of a blip, you know, in the grand scheme of things.”

Sure. A blip.

“And if it is that, I don’t want everyone to hold it against her down the line. She already feels kind of like an outsider with my family. Anyway, this weekend is about Martie. A celebration. No need to get into anything complicated. Kyle? Hello? Can you acknowledge that you’re hearing me?”

“Dad. You’ve basically said the same thing like a hundred different ways, and I heard all of them. It’s in the vault. You don’t ever have to say anything about it again.”

“I’m sorry,” his dad said. “Sorry.”

They rounded the turn, and Kyle saw Emily on the swing set at the top of the drive. His throat closed up. How was he going to hang out with her and not tell her what he’d just found out?

“Keep driving,” he told his dad.

“You don’t want to hop out here and say hi to Em?”

Emily waved at Kyle and slid off the swing.

“Just park first.” He waved at her through the window and gestured: Sorry, no idea what my dad is doing. She held up her arms: WTF?

They kept going, all the way to the big circle of gravel and weeds behind the house that functioned as a parking lot when a bunch of people were there. Grandpa Baker was waiting under the pear tree, his cane in one hand and his big coffee cup in the other, like always, like nothing at all had changed.