“KYLE? KYLE. What happened? Did someone die?”
He’d called Megan. Megan, not Emily, because one, he’d laid enough shit on Emily that wasn’t her problem, and two, he remembered Emily’s text from when he’d almost told Megan the first time, telling him he should. She’s your sister!!
As soon as he heard Megan’s voice, he started to lose it.
“How come every time I call you, you think someone died? Can’t I just call you?”
“Well, you call me and I can tell you’re crying, I mean.” She paused. “I’m sorry I didn’t text you back the other day?”
He managed to say no, no one had died, but he needed to talk to her and he didn’t want to go home. “And I’m not fucking crying because you didn’t text me back.”
“I know, I know. Sorry. Are you okay to drive? Breathe, Kyle.”
He did. It helped. “Okay. I’m okay.”
“Meet me at my apartment. I’ll text you the address so you can GPS it. It might take like forty-five minutes or more at this time of day. Are you okay to do that?”
“Yeah. Sorry.” He breathed again.
“Kyle, whatever it is, it’ll be all right. Text me when you get here. The doorbell is broken.”
He headed toward the 101 with just enough gas in the tank to make it.
The road kept blurring
Why, dude. What’s the matter with you.
He kept, like, crying. He’d stop, calm down, then think about some moment. Like his dad and his four dumb words. Nadia saying, “And now I don’t trust you.” His mom laughing and so happy with the guy. Emily, when she called him out for acting like her hair belonged to him. Yeah, they ended that conversation okay, but when he relived it and thought about how ever since he’d been trying harder than she knew not to seem needy, keeping it light and tight when in fact he felt like this bottomless pit of need, all he could feel was shame.
He wasn’t going to dump more of his garbage on her.
That’s what sisters were for.
By the time he got to Megan’s, he’d thought through the entire situation a hundred times—what Kyle knew that he shouldn’t know but other people should know, and how he’d let it all take so much away from him. No matter how he sliced it, it came to shit.
Her building, which he’d never seen before, was one of those old California stucco apartment complexes with just two floors, maybe eight or ten units, a courtyard, a gate.
I’m here.
A few seconds later, the gate buzzed and unlatched. The door to unit five opened on the ground floor and Megan, wearing a tank top and pajama bottoms, let him in. “You cried the whole way here, didn’t you.”
“No.”
“You need a hug,” she said.
“You hate hugs.”
“I know.” She put her arms around him, and it felt simultaneously unnatural and necessary. She was shorter than him, but more substantial. She let go and pulled him to a ratty brown couch. “My roommate, Julie, is here, but she said she’d stay in her room awhile. And you can stay over. if you want. Sleep here.” She patted the threadbare couch cushion.
“I have school tomorrow.”
“Skip. Or get up super early and go.” She stood. “I’m going to have some wine. I know you probably only drink beer at your jock parties or whatever, but you can have some if you want.”
“My jock parties? Are you a hundred years old? And do you know me?”
“Whatever! I was never invited to those things, so I only know what I see in movies I can stream for free. I assume you wear letterman jackets and chant ‘Keg! Keg! Keg!’ while bikini babes ride around on inflatable dragons in the pool.”
He laughed, which he knew was her goal. “Yeah, I’ll have some wine.”
When she came back, she had a big glass with red wine nearly to the rim for her, and a teacup about one-third full for him. “Just enough to chill you out.” She settled into the corner of the couch with her feet up, staring at him.
“You didn’t have to work one of your jobs tonight?” he asked.
“I called in.”
“Don’t you need the money, though? I didn’t mean—”
“Don’t worry about it, Kyle, okay? You didn’t ask to come here. I invited you. Have a sip of your wine and tell me what’s going on.”
He took a sip, made a face. But liked the way the burn slipped over his tongue, down his throat, and landed in his stomach like an ember. It was actually his first drink since the night his dad had caught him after the party and put it in the vault.
He stared into the teacup and told Megan everything.
She didn’t interrupt or ask any questions. She sat still, one elbow on the back of the couch. When he was done, she grabbed her phone off the upside-down laundry basket she was using as a coffee table.
“What are you doing?” he asked. “Don’t tell anyone, don’t—”
She held up a finger for him to stop talking. Waited a few seconds. “Dad?”
“Shit, Megan!” he hissed.
She made the zip-your-mouth sign. Kyle could hear his dad’s voice. “Mm-hmm,” Megan said. “I’m fine. Yeah, I know, whatever, but listen. I wanted to let you know Kyle’s with me, he’s staying over at my apartment tonight, and don’t worry about it.” She tapped the phone screen and put it back down.
“What did he say?”
“I don’t know. I hung up.” She curled her legs underneath her. “Okay. Kyle. So, you never noticed any problems with Mom and Dad before? Before all this?”
He shrugged. “I mean, you know how they are.”
“Yeah, I know how they are. But do you? That push-pull game they play?”
“What do you mean?”
“Like . . . one pushes the other away when they feel ignored, by working too much or being really fake and surface-y. Then the other pulls them back, like, to prove they really belong together. You know how I first noticed that? By watching high school couples when I was a sophomore.” She pinched her fingers together and punctuated each word with them. “High school couples, Kyle. Games.”
He took the last couple sips of his wine. “I don’t see any pull happening. Only push.”
“And then there’s the money thing. What they told you about how Mom is still at home because they can’t afford for her to have her own place? I’m sorry, but that’s bullshit. Mom and Dad are not poor. The have a huge house and two cars and a business and probably too much life insurance. And you have a car. And Taylor has a car. And they’re not making her work while she’s at school, like not even to pay her own phone bill. And I know you don’t pay yours.”
“We’re on a family plan.”
“So not the point, Kyle.” She leaned forward. “Yeah, they’re broke, or having a tough time at the moment or whatever. But they’re not poor. There’s a difference. They could sell it all and pay off their debts, live more simply, tell Taylor to get a job. . . .”
A headache started to tap tap tap under Kyle’s left temple. “Maybe, but you don’t know how it’s been lately,” he said. “You’re not there. I think it really is bad, like they might lose the business?”
“Worst case scenario, the Najarians buy them out.” She got up to grab the bottle of wine off the counter that divided the kitchenette from the living room. “Do know how Aunt Gina sends us that goat card every year?” she asked.
“Yeah?” It started a long time ago. Every Christmas, Great-Aunt Gina sent a card saying she’d donated a goat to a family in Zanzibar in their names. They always laughed at it. Making fun of Great-Aunt Gina was kind of a tradition. She was a nun, first of all, in a mostly non-Catholic family. Her order or whatever didn’t wear robes and stuff, they just clomped around in sandals with socks and wore no makeup.
“I know we all thought it was a big joke.” Megan fell back into her spot on the couch. “One year I looked up the website on the back of the goat card. I clicked through the explanations of how a goat or a few chickens or rabbits or even a llama could make a big difference for some people in the world. There were other parts of the site showing how you could give people and villages irrigation pumps. Stoves. Farm equipment. Kyle, for the price of the phone I was holding in my hand to look up the site, we could have sent a girl to school for a year.”
Megan was officially on a Megan rant now. Kyle rubbed his temple and closed his eyes. He saw Jacob in the passenger seat, explaining how busy his own father was.
“Then there are the constant upgrades to the house, to the cars, to the gadgets,” she continued. “Everything is being replaced all the time whether it needs to be or not, they’re just on automatic. They can never just let an appliance or a piece of furniture or a counter surface or a paint color be fine. It can always be better. They run a whole company based on the concept that what you have isn’t good enough. Think about it. Then there are the extras. Kyle, so many extras!”
He opened his eyes to hear about the extras as Megan ticked them off on her fingers until she ran out of fingers. “Mani-pedis and hair color and blowouts. Baseball camp. Horse camp, surf camp, music camp. All the camps, Kyle, we went to all of them. Gym memberships and golf memberships and eating out and vacations and wine collecting. Our family could have educated, fed, and clothed several villages’ worth of people by now.”
“Okay, yeah, when you list it out it’s a lot. But I’m not—”
“No no, my point here is if Mom wanted to move out or Dad wanted her gone, she’d be gone. This is their game. Only now they’ve dragged you into it.”
“And Jacob and his mom,” Kyle said.
“Who?”
God, she hadn’t even been listening. “The kid, Megan, the whole reason I’m here right now. The kid of the lady who is the wife of the husband who Mom is seeing.” He wanted to close his eyes again. His brain had no juice for processing the money stuff Megan was obsessed with. “Do you have any food? I didn’t eat dinner.”
“Oh, shit, yeah. Let’s forage.” She got up and went to the fridge; he followed. “Leftover Thai—it’s really good and Julie’s parents own the place, so I can always get more. Two pieces of pizza of indeterminate age. Cheddar. We always have cheddar. Um, PB and J.” Megan pulled everything she’d listed out of the fridge and put it on the small counter in a pile. “Okay, so the kid, Jacob. He’s on your Little League team or something? I was listening.”
“No. It’s just an after-school fun thing for fifth graders. Coach Ito asked me to when I went to talk to him because you told me I should.”
She dumped pad thai and curry beef and rice into a bowl and put it all in the microwave. “That’s for you. I’m volunteering as tribute to eat the old pizza.” She handed him a glass of water. “Chug this.”
“Thanks.” He looked at her over the rim of the glass while he drank.
“So the goat thing?” she said.
Still on the goat thing. Kyle gave up. “Yeah?”
“I talked to Mom about it back then,” Megan said. “And she was all, ‘We don’t pick where we’re born. The way we live is normal for here. The way they live is normal for there.’ And I asked why, why is it normal to have so much more than we need? And she said I could feel guilty about it if I wanted, but she wasn’t going to, guilt doesn’t help anything. So that’s Mom. And I bet she doesn’t even feel guilty about this kid or the wife.” She took the Thai food out of the microwave, stirred it, put it back in. “This is why I cut it all off, Kyle.”
“Okay.”
“I suggested a completely rational plan to do my basics at community college and save that money, and she freaked out like, ‘Oh, Megan, you have not worked this hard on your GPA so that you could go to community college!’ and I was like, “Why not? Who cares? You could have three entire schools built in Bolivia for the cost of one year of bonehead gen-ed requirements that I could do online or whatever!’” She took the food out. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
“Because . . . I feel like you’re making this all about you and your issues with Mom?”
“And Dad.” She took a bite of pizza, cold.
“So, should we tell Taylor? Even though Dad said it’s in the vault?”
Megan rolled her eyes. “The vault. I thought Dad only used that with me after he narced on Adam to the police.”
“No. I’ve got like two things in there plus now this, and I’ve known for over a month and been the only one besides them who does, and I’m telling you it messed up my relationship with Nadia, and baseball, and my grades, and now I’m like . . . part of it!” He pointed at himself, stabbed at his own chest. “I’m part of their stupid fucking affair because I know the other people and I know they don’t know and now it’s like I’m cheating on them too.”
They stood there staring at each other.
“Well, shit,” Megan said.
“Oh my god,” Kyle said. “I think I just realized that’s what I’m feeling.”
She nodded. “Contrary to how we were brought up, talking about things and allowing yourself to be upset actually does help. And you know what I’m going to say.”
“Something about goats?”
She laughed. “Noooo.”
“That I’m not actually cheating on Jacob and his mom?”
“Right. This is not on you, Kyle. Here.”
She handed him his bowl of food. The noodles and rice and meat and sauce were all so good, even though they weren’t meant to be all mixed up. Kyle ate faster, suddenly starving after weeks of living on protein bars and crackers and cafeteria burritos and cheap fast food.
“The tricky thing is,” Megan said, “it’s not your secret to keep, but it’s also not your secret to tell. Mom and Dad have put you in a super-shitty place.”
“Thank you.” He glanced at her. “I told Emily.”
“Who?” She started laughing almost immediately. “Kidding. Wow, you guys really are close.”
“I trust her.”
“Taylor is going to figure it out when she comes home,” Megan said.
“Do you think I should warn her ahead of time? Just tell her, like, right now?” He finished his food and literally licked the bowl.
“I don’t know. She just had a big drama with one of her friends, who treated her really bad, if you believe Taylor’s side of it, and I mostly do. . . .”
“Okay, well, no one asked me if I could handle it when they dumped this shit on me, so maybe Taylor will just have to eat it.”
“Damn, Kyle.”
“I’m a little tired of being the water boy for this family’s garbage, is all.”
She tossed her pizza crusts in the trash and said, “Mixed metaphor.”
While he rinsed his dish in the sink, his eyes fell on a picture of him and Megan and Taylor when they were little, at the farm. The farm.
“Did Taylor tell you about the farm?” he asked.
“No?”
“Have some more wine.”
They went back to the couch and he told her about the farm being sold, what all he knew, what their parents had said about it. She didn’t cry, but she did finally stop talking about goats.
“What I want,” Kyle said, “is for all of us to be at the farm this summer. You. You have to go.” Yeah, it was what his parents wanted, but he wasn’t asking her for them. He was asking for himself. “It’s the last summer. Forget Mom and Dad. When was the last time me and you and Taylor were all together, with all the cousins?” The fact that she hadn’t interrupted him yet meant he was getting to her. “You used to love it as much as everyone else. Come on. Picking pears? Swimming in the pond and trying to convince me it was full of poisonous snakes? Sleeping in the bunkhouse and Uncle Mike scaring us in the middle of the night, pretending to be a ghost from the Gold Rush?”
Her shoulders slumped and she let out a whimper, like she was a kid realizing she was going to have to do something she didn’t want to.
“Megan, remember how even when we were little we barely saw any parents the whole week? You can avoid them. It’s a big place. Pretend they aren’t there. Do it because it’s our place. All the cousins’.”
They had a staring contest while she sipped her wine. Kyle didn’t flinch, and finally Megan said, “I’ll see if I can get time off work.”
Not even being exhausted and full of noodles and wine helped Kyle get to sleep on the world’s lumpiest couch. After trying and failing to find a comfortable position, he moved onto the floor and decided now that he was past his big emotional crisis, it was okay to text Emily.
I think I talked Megan into coming back to the farm this summer.
It was late and he shouldn’t have expected a reply, but that didn’t keep him from waiting, adding more.
I’m staying at her apartment right now. It’s a dump compared to our house. I guess the independence from my mom and dad is worth it to her. He snapped a picture of the laundry basket/coffee table. This is her living room furniture.
Honestly though, he could kind of understand what Megan saw in her situation. The couch was janky and the coffee table doubled as a receptacle for dirty clothes and he could tell that leftovers from her roommate were her main food. Still, she didn’t owe anything to anyone. She didn’t have to pretend or hide or keep up any illusion of being something she wasn’t.
Her life is real, tho, he sent to Emily, wishing she were there with him. It would be like when they were kids, sleeping in the bunkhouse on old metal springs at least as uncomfortable as this couch. They’d talk into the dark and play twenty questions until Alex and Martie were asleep and Taylor and Megan were telling them to shut up. They always outlasted Taylor and Megan, though. The last ones standing.
“Are you still awake?” Kyle would whisper.
“Are you?” Emily would reply.
“Yeah.”
Then they’d let themselves drift off, too.