WHILE THE cousins had been working on the bunkhouse, the aunts and uncles had been cleaning out more of their stuff. Uncle Mike had on a Van Halen concert T-shirt from 1985 that stretched tight across his chest. Kyle’s dad had a Sunday school participation ribbon pinned to his collar. During dinner, Aunt Jenny and Uncle Dale sat at the corner of the smaller table, like they were already tired of their Baker in-laws.
Kyle’s mom sat with them. She looked pretty. And sad, even when she was talking or smiling. Kyle was so mad at her, but also, like, part of him got it. How you could want and intend to be a certain kind of person but also keep getting deeper and deeper into the hole you had dug for yourself. It was hard to climb out. At least when he’d messed up with Nadia, she’d eventually drawn the line, and in a weird way, that had helped him start to get unstuck. Whereas with his mom, it seemed like they were all letting her just stay down there.
But whose job, exactly, was it to get her out?
The cousins and Great-Aunt Gina were all around the big table. Kyle sat with them and listened to Alex tearfully try to talk Gina into taking Larry the horse back to the convent with her.
“We don’t have a fenced area, honey. Or anyone who knows one thing about horses.”
Kyle tuned out, imagined Megan pulling up in a cloud of dust and stomping out of her car straight to Mom and being like, “What’s this shit about you using farm week as an opportunity to do some more cheating?” Flipping tables, some big scene.
When his mom stood up, he tuned back in.
“I didn’t bring my migraine medication with me,” she said, “and I feel a bad one coming. I’m going to run into town and get my prescription transferred to the pharmacy here.” She smiled a tense, fake smile, which did sort of look like the smile of someone who was about to get a migraine.
“I’ll go with you,” Taylor said. “You shouldn’t drive if you’re about to get one of your bad ones.”
Maybe Taylor really was worried about her driving, or maybe she wanted to be the one to give Mom the assist and tell her to stop. Maybe Kyle should say he’d go to the store with them and they could do an intervention. Maybe his dad should wake the hell up and act instead of stuffing tortilla chips in his face.
“Get ice,” Aunt Brenda said.
“We just got ice,” Grandma said.
Uncle Dale laughed. “Two words, Helen: margarita machine.”
Meanwhile, Kyle’s mom stood there, her smile frozen. “I’m fine on my own, and I really . . . I need to make just the one stop and get the meds so I can knock this thing out.”
Kyle’s dad reached for more chips and guac.
“Okay then,” their mom said. “Be back shortly.”
In the kitchen, Taylor made massive amounts of noise rattling plates and cups and silverware while she rinsed.
“You’re going to break something,” Kyle said.
“I want to break something.”
“What did you think was gonna happen if you went with Mom? It’s not like you need to catch her in a lie to know the truth.”
Taylor handed him a couple of glasses. “For one thing, I thought she might really be getting a migraine and might need me to drive. For another, what she’s doing is wrong and it makes me crazy how she can be so wrong and not care, and I care and I thought maybe I could say something and stop it.”
“I know,” Kyle said. “I felt exactly like that when I first found out.”
“Kyle, don’t do that. Don’t be all, ‘When I was your age,’ especially when I’m older, okay? You’re the baby.”
He put a row of plates in the dishwasher. “I’m trying to help you because I know it sucks.”
“Sorry,” she said quietly. “Now we’re going to look back on our final farm week and it’s going to have this extra garbage on top.”
“You told Megan about the texts, didn’t you.”
“Of course I told her. I told her the guy was here and Mom is seeing him and we needed her. Anyway, I thought you wanted us all here? Nothing motivates Megan like anger.”
“Yeah,” he said, “but I didn’t want angry Megan here. I just wanted Megan. Our sister Megan.”
He could picture Megan at ten, eleven, her two dark braids and how she wasn’t afraid of anything and would step on the spiders in the attic with her bare feet. How she’d turn off the flashlight when they were walking around the farm at night and let everything be pitch-black until Taylor or Kyle or Emily begged her to turn the light back on.
“Ugh, I’m so mad. Migraine medication. Using a real thing she has that way. It’s trash.”
“I guess I think it’s probably kind of complicated,” he said, then hated himself for using that cop-out word. “Anyway, what about Dad? Why isn’t he doing anything? Maybe there’s a reason Mom went looking.”
“Are you seriously defending her?”
“No. I’m just saying.”
There was a tap on the sliding door; Martie stood outside with her arms full of dishes. Kyle opened the door. “I think this is everything,” she said, and put them on the counter. “I decided I do want to sleep out with you guys tonight,” she told Kyle.
“Me and Emily thought we should sleep in the bunkhouse tonight,” Kyle explained to Taylor. “Before it’s gone.”
“There’s no roof.”
“So?”
“I like being indoors. Anyway, I want to wait here for Megan.”
“I’ll go get Alex to help me dig out the camping mattresses and stuff,” Martie said.
Kyle and Taylor finished with the dishes, and Kyle went out onto the patio while Taylor snuck another look at her phone. Emily and Great-Aunt Gina were walking up from the lake, Pico trailing behind them.
When he saw Emily, he felt both better and worse than he had in the previous moment of not seeing her. Better because she kept saying amazing things to him and he felt so understood. Worse because in a few days he would go back to hardly seeing her at all, and then what?
The aunts and uncles were hanging out around the big patio table, playing poker. They’d lit citronella candles, and the table was covered with beer bottles and a bottle of tequila and a bag of quartered limes.
Emily came over to Kyle and draped her arm around his neck. “I guess they don’t need the margarita machine if they’re just drinking straight tequila.”
“Saves on ice.”
“Em!” Aunt Brenda called out. “Come over here, I’ve barely seen you all day, I miss you.”
Emily dropped her arm and went over to the table and perched on the edge of her mom’s chair. “Are you winning?”
“Not yet.”
Kyle stood behind his dad, who had pocket tens. Uncle Mike was dealing, and a ten came on the flop. Finally, some tiny amount of good luck for his dad.
Aunt Brenda touched the back of Emily’s neck. “I wish you hadn’t cut your hair.”
“So you’ve mentioned.”
“I wish you’d done, like, an intermediate step. Long to bob before pixie.”
Emily leaned away from her mom’s grip. “My body, my choice. Like with your tattoo.”
Kyle’s dad looked up from his cards. “Uh, what?”
“Her tattoo,” Emily said. “Didn’t you show them?”
Aunt Brenda folded her cards. “Wow, Emily. Way to throw me under the bus.”
“Mom!” Kyle’s dad called, meaning Grandma, who sat in a patio recliner with a book. Great-Aunt Gina sat in the chair next to her, her face lit by the glow of her e-reader.
“Jeff!” Aunt Brenda reached across the table to hit his shoulder. Aunt Jenny and Uncle Mike looked like they were going to burst out laughing.
Grandma set her book down. “It’s getting loud, kids.”
“There’s no one around here for ten miles, Mom,” Mike said.
“There’s your father, who’s resting, and I’m sure he’d like to be able to hear himself think.”
“One of your kids got a tattoo,” Dad said. “Guess which one?”
Grandma’s eyes immediately went to Aunt Brenda. “You didn’t.” After a pause, she asked, “Where?”
“A place near campus,” she answered.
Aunt Jenny and Uncle Mike lost it. “She means where on your body, Bren,” Jenny said, and then everyone else laughed too. Everyone but Grandma.
Emily took her mom’s arm, about to help her roll up her sleeve, but her mom grabbed it away and stood. “Now I’m not showing it. It’s personal.”
“Oh, come on,” Dad said, holding out his hands and accidentally showing his cards. “You have to!”
“Nope, I actually don’t. Trip tens, Jeff? Nice.”
Kyle’s dad threw his cards in. “You’re going to wear long sleeves all week? In this weather?”
Emily’s mom shoved Emily off the chair—kind of joking but kind of not. Kyle watched Emily’s face. She retained her usual chill except for one twitch of her eyebrow that told Kyle she didn’t like being shoved by her mother.
“We’re sleeping in the bunkhouse,” Kyle announced.
“Oh, I don’t know, honey,” Grandma said.
Great-Aunt Gina set down her book. “They’ll be fine, Helen.”
“You’ll have to round up all the gear yourselves. Oh, there’s Karen. . . . I hope she was able to get her pills.”
Kyle’s mom’s car crunched on the gravel drive. She’d been pretty fast. Maybe she’d gone to town just to tell Troy goodbye forever, or maybe she really was getting pills. Maybe she’d only wanted to be alone, away from this chaos of all the Bakers all at once.
He wondered if he’d ever be able to trust a simple explanation again.
“This was a dumb idea.” Martie sat on a top bunk, swinging her legs.
“This was a great idea,” Emily said.
They’d inflated mattresses, laid out sleeping bags and pillows, put up a few battery-operated lights. Emily was already in one of the bottom bunks with a book. Kyle was amazed at how she could do that—serenely read with people moving and talking around her. No wonder she got such good grades.
“We need snacks,” Alex said. She slapped at her thigh. “And bug spray.”
“Yeah, why don’t you guys go get some food and stuff?”
“By ‘you guys’ you mean me and Alex because you think you can boss us around? Just because you’re oldest?” Martie said, lightly kicking Kyle’s shoulder.
“I don’t mind!” Alex headed to the door.
“You don’t know enough about life yet to mind,” Martie said to Alex.
“You do?” Kyle asked, laughing.
“Don’t treat me like a baby.”
“Don’t act like one.”
Emily put her book down. “Kyle.”
“Sorry,” he said.
“It’s fine. Hey, get the Mexican to do it.” Martie climbed down the ladder from the top bunk. “That is the whole history of this bunkhouse, after all.
“Sorry,” she continued, “but I found out that when Grandma and Grandpa Baker sent out an email to your parents and Kyle’s parents about selling the farm, my mom and grandpa weren’t on it.”
“That’s messed up,” Emily said.
“My dad was on it, and Grandma is trying to play it off like she just assumed he’d tell my mom, but literally everyone but the kids got the email.”
“I’m sorry, dude.” Kyle tried to remember if Grandpa Navarro had participated in any of the family email chains Kyle had been on. “Is your grandpa even on email?”
“Yes, Kyle, he’s on email! He’s not some ancient Mexican riding around on a burro, wondering how email works! How do you think he runs this whole farm? Oh my god.”
Alex was by the door, listening, eyes big.
“Yeah that was a stupid question,” Kyle said. “I’m sorry.”
“Super dumb.” Martie looked around the bunkhouse. “You know what, I don’t want to sleep out here. It’s a fun yay cousin camp thing for you, but . . . I think I don’t ever want to come out here again.”
“Staayyy, Martie,” Kyle said, jostling her shoulders.
She shook her head. “I don’t want to.” Her face crumpled, like the adrenaline of her anger had morphed into something more sad, and she turned and left. Alex watched her go, looked at Kyle and Emily, then ran after her.
“Wow, I really said all the right things.” He imitated himself in a dumb-guy voice: “‘Is your grandpa even on email?’ Idiot.”
“She’ll forgive you,” Emily said. “Really she’s mad at Grandma and Grandpa.”
“She should be.” Kyle sat on the bunk opposite Emily. “When I went to see Megan that time, and told her about my parents, she said all this stuff about our family I’ve never thought about. Our house and cars and the fact that we could be buying like a herd of goats for a whole village instead.”
Emily laughed gently. “What are you talking about?”
“I don’t even know. I’m talking about our family, I guess.” He lay back so he could look up into the trees. A robin seemed to stare down at him and then fly away. “My mom’s affair isn’t, like, the one thing that’s messed up. I mean, I know we have our issues, but when I brought Nadia here for Thanksgiving, I felt like we were a pretty good family to meet.”
“We are. ‘Pretty good’ is . . . pretty accurate.”
“But I thought we were better.”
She was quiet, then said, “It’s hard to let go of the idea of something. Especially when the idea is important to you. But if you don’t let go of the idea, you can’t actually live in reality.”
He propped himself on his elbow so he could watch her face. “How are you so smart at this stuff, while I’m so far behind?”
“My dad being a psychologist helps.” She kept staring into the sky, which was getting more and more darkly blue, more and more quiet. “But also, like, I grew up the way we all do, with people talking all the time about crushes and romance and who you like, and you’re supposed to want that. To be part of some romantic couple or whatever. Every song and every movie and TV show and book . . . every old musical that me and you love watching.” She turned her head to him. “I had this idea that I should want that too. And I know I seem like a confident, badass aro ace now—and I am—but it was hard to let go of the idea of what I was supposed to be. So that I could just be who I am.”
Kyle kept his mouth shut, in hopes she’d keep talking and talking. She didn’t, so he said what he felt. “Who you are is awesome, Emily.”
She smiled, then propped herself up on her elbow too, a mirror image of him.
“And maybe you need to do that with your mom, your dad, the whole family,” she said. “Let go. Let go of what you thought it should be. And see what it is.”
“What is it?” he asked, only half joking.
“A bunch of flawed people trying to love each other?”
“A bunch of flawed people trying to love each other and also just survive life,” he said.
“A bunch of flawed people trying to love each other, survive life, and maybe be happy sometimes.” Emily continued, “Anyway, I think letting go of what you thought things should be happens whether you want it to or not.”
Like it had with Nadia, how avoiding her when he didn’t know the right thing to say didn’t make anything better. At all. How skipping baseball when he could have been relying on a group of friends only left him lonely. How wishing as hard as he could that his mom wouldn’t do what she was doing hadn’t made her stop. Him or his mom or anyone else trying to make a perfect last farm week wasn’t going to change the fact they were losing that too.
All this loss, all this change. Hiding and avoiding and resisting it had been like twisting against a knife that was going to cut him no matter what.
And face-to-face in real time with Emily like this, he felt he was actually seeing her. Seeing her. And he understood he’d had an idea of Emily, too, that he needed to let go of so that he could keep seeing her like he was right now. He wanted to be in reality with her, not in a fantasy in his head of her always being there for him the second he needed her and never being mad and never disagreeing, him wanting her to swear to be best friends forever no matter what and trying to get her to promise nothing would ever change.
He knew, in that moment, he could survive the reality of being flawed people trying to love each other. With Emily, with his parents, with himself.
“Emily,” he said, “I’m glad you’re my cousin. I’m glad you’re my friend. I think you’re smart and nice and interesting and a good person.”
She reached her hand across the gap between their bunks; he grasped her fingers.
When she let go, she turned over on her back again. “I kind of like having no roof.”
“Me too.” The light above them had turned deepest blue. Once in a while there was a final goodnight song from a robin. The chirp of crickets. And the hum of a mosquito nearby. “We actually are going to need bug spray.”
“I know.” She cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted, “Alex!”
He laughed. “I . . . don’t think she’ll be back. Are we still going to sleep out here?”
“Yes!” She sang a line from West Side Story. “Tonight, tonight, the world is full of light, with suns and moons all over the place!”
He continued it in his head: Tonight, tonight, the world is wild and bright . . .
“I might actually be drowsy,” she said.
“Not me.”
“You can keep talking if you want. I’m going to close my eyes.”
He kept his open until the crickets and the sound of Emily finally soothed him to sleep.