“Your mother and I thought it would be a good idea to talk about this a little more.”
It was two weeks since the Thomas bomb had been dropped, and the day after my parents had gone out for a big dinner to celebrate their wedding anniversary—which I suppose qualifies as a fine example of irony.
If you had come over to our house during that two-week stretch, you wouldn’t have noticed anything different from the way things had always been. My dad went off to work selling houses, my mom continued doing her layouts part-time for the magazine and chauffeuring Julie around to the various singing and dancing classes that consumed her life. Dinner was on the table each night. Everything looked the same, yet nothing was.
I had been trying to keep my head down and basically just avoid everyone, but then my father gathered us all in the living room. I couldn’t remember the last time I had actually sat in that room. Everyone always passed through it on the way from the stairs to the kitchen. My dad was on the big couch next to my mother, a cup of tea in his hand. Julie and I were in the two overstuffed chairs across from them. The sun streamed in through the window over my dad’s shoulder, and dust motes floated in the shaft of light. I kept my eyes on them throughout most of the talk.
“The first thing I want to say is that I love you two very, very much,” my dad said. “And I love your mother very much.”
My mom reached over and took his hand.
If this was the way this talk was going to go, then I was gonna puke.
“When you kids were much younger, your mother and I went to a party at a friend’s home.”
So this was it. He was going to tell us all the dirty details. I wondered which friends had the party. I didn’t ask.
Apparently my father met a woman at said party and shortly thereafter they had a onetime fling. That was the word he used, fling. Seriously?
It was just the one time—or so he insisted.
He was leaning forward, his elbows resting on his knees, the mug of tea clutched in both hands. “I didn’t know there was going to be a child until months later, when I saw the woman at the train station and she was very pregnant.”
“When’s his birthday?” I asked. I didn’t even know I was going to ask that. I had never wondered before.
“It’s in September,” my father said. “September 24.”
“And what’s his name?”
“His name is Thomas,” he said calmly.
“Yeah, I know that. What’s his last name?”
My parents looked at each other for a second.
“Eaves,” my father said. “His name is Thomas Eaves.”
The talk went on from there. At one point I looked over at my sister. I knew she was sitting beside me, but somehow I couldn’t feel her there so I had to look over and make sure. She seemed very small, buried deep in the cushions of the puffy chair. She’s very fair skinned, but she seemed even paler than normal. She was staring at something above my father’s head. I had no idea what. A little later I thought I could just barely hear her humming “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning,” or another one of those super old show tunes she’s been singing forever. She didn’t say a word the entire time.
The talk was meant to clear the air, but frankly, it was too much information and not a lot of answering the important questions, like how the hell could he do that to my mom, especially when she was at home dealing with the kids and keeping his house running? Why didn’t she just take her hand out of his and punch him in the face?
I remembered once seeing a TV show about a Hollywood couple who had newborn twins. The guy had been caught cheating, and this was their first public appearance to say how their love and family was so important, and they were putting the incident behind them.
“With a new child everyone is so overtired,” the starlet wife was saying, but she didn’t look overtired. She looked like a movie star with perfect hair. She was sitting on the couch next to her movie star husband, just like my mom was now sitting next to my father. She went on to say that between their stellar film careers and now parenting, they just hadn’t had any time for each other or for romance and that it happens more often than you’d think. It didn’t mean they didn’t love each other. “And from now on,” she said, “we’re going to have a date night every week just to keep things percolating.” Then she turned her glimmering teeth on her A-list husband and he smiled back devilishly.
“It’s just something that can happen in a long relationship,” the wife concluded as the husband nodded his head.
I suppose it makes sense, but it also sounded like a bunch of excuses to me. He looked like a smug jerk, and she seemed like a total wimp.
I realized I wasn’t even listening to my father anymore, and at some point I had shifted my focus from the floating dust to the oversized palm tree mug he was holding in his hand.
When I was little, about seven or eight—the same age as that kid who lives across town—my dad used to take me to this pottery place not far from his office. It was our place, the thing that just we did together. You could make your own cups and bowls and various other things, or you could pick from the stuff that had been premade. Neither my dad nor I was very good at throwing pottery, but we both loved painting it.
“What are you going to do today, Dad?” I’d always ask as we walked through the glass front door.
“I think maybe today it’s gonna be a mug,” my dad said that particular morning he decided to paint the palm tree. He had a sly grin on his face, I remember.
We set about filling our trays with the colors we’d need. The trays held eight colors each, but that day he only squeezed out four. Usually we chatted away while we painted, and sometimes we even changed our minds about what we were painting halfway through, but that day my dad was quiet. He was really concentrating. He knew just what he wanted to do.
“Whoa! Awesome, Dad,” I said when he finally let me see it. Even before it was fired it looked pretty great. “I want to go to that beach.”
“Me, too,” he said with a big sigh.
It took about a week after we painted the stuff for it to go through the kiln and be ready for us to pick up. As much as we loved the painting part, what I think we both liked best, but also couldn’t stand, was the anticipation of the final product.
My dad actually got pulled over once for going through a red light just trying to get there faster. He didn’t get a ticket because he had sold the policeman his house two years earlier and the cop remembered him.
“Good thing he likes his house,” I said after the officer let us go. I have to admit that my dad is very good at his job.
“Sure is.” My dad laughed. The truth is that the stuff we made at that shop was usually a little disappointing. Nothing ever turned out as good as I thought it was going to—except for that palm tree mug. It’s not that the palm tree or the ocean was so perfect; it’s just that you sort of felt like you were at the beach when you looked at it—which doesn’t make much sense, but is really the best way I can describe it. It just exceeded all expectations, even my mom’s.
“Look at that!” she said when she saw it. “Did you really do that, sweetheart?”
“Shocking, isn’t it?” my dad said.
My mom laughed. “It is.”
She usually tried to make a show of being impressed by my stuff, even when it wasn’t all that stellar, but this one thing of my dad’s caught her genuinely off guard. It was spectacular.
And he gave it to me. Naturally, being the bighearted person that I am, I gave him carte blanche to use it whenever he wanted. Now that I thought about it, he probably made it right around the time of the incident with the woman from the party. Disgusting. It was pretty insensitive of him to be drinking from that particular mug at that exact moment in the living room.
My mother didn’t really say two words during the talk, and nothing my father said was of much interest to me. Eventually the big meeting just fizzled out.
After that, whenever I was in a room with my dad, I left as soon as I could. At first I tried to do it so he didn’t notice that it was because of him.
“I’ve got a lot of homework,” became my standard thing to say so I could leave right after dinner. Or I’d say, “Oh, I gotta find my phone,” if he came into the kitchen while I was having something to drink. Not very original lines, but I didn’t care.
After a little while, I stopped trying and simply walked out whenever he walked in. The sight of my dad had started to make my stomach sick.
One afternoon he caught me off guard when he came back between house showings. I hadn’t expected him until dinner. I was at the kitchen table reading the newspaper. Though I generally have no interest in reading the paper, for some reason I take great pleasure in spreading it out on the kitchen table and perusing it when no one else is around.
When I started to gather it up, he stopped me.
“Lucy.” He said my name with great seriousness. He was getting set to have a little heart-to-heart. You certainly had to admire his perseverance, if nothing else. He gazed down at his shoes and then looked up at me. His already big blue eyes got even bigger, and bluer, if such a thing was possible. In the past I would have said that my dad had very sincere eyes, but of course I couldn’t say that anymore.
“We’re going to have to talk again sooner or later,” he said.
“We’re not not talking. I’ve just got a term paper due.” I left the room.
I didn’t have any interest in anything he had to say on the subject, or any subject for that matter, even though I did actually have a lot of questions. Questions that didn’t get addressed during the big talk.
Did this Thomas person have a father who was his everyday father, like a stepfather? Would it even really be a stepfather since my dad and this woman were never married or a couple? Was she married now? Was she pretty? And what was her name? Where exactly did they live? Did the woman really want no involvement between my dad and their child, as he had said? Would she change her mind? And what about his involvement with her? Was it really just that one time? Did he still like her, did he love her, or think about her? How often did he run into her at the supermarket? Was my dad ever going to go and live with them? There seemed a lot of loose strings to this situation, and it wasn’t likely that I was going to get any answers, especially since I wasn’t talking to the main person who would have been able to tell me everything.
And I certainly wasn’t going to ask my mother. Frankly, I couldn’t really deal with her either. How could she have stayed with him after what he did to her? We should have moved out when it happened, and then we’d be all set up in our new life by this point. We might not have our family, but I’d at least still have some respect for her.
Around the same time I began ducking my parents as much as possible, I wandered into Mr. Burke’s office at school.
“Hey, Mr. Burke,” I said from the doorway.
“Lucy, hi. I’m just running over to the yearbook meeting. We’re setting the layout. Come on, we’ll walk over.”
“Actually, I need to talk to you about that.”
“How are the interviews coming?” He was gathering a big pile of papers, not really listening.
“Yeah, you know, I actually don’t think it’s such a good idea anymore. I think people will think it’s stupid.”
He stopped sorting papers and looked at me. “What?”
“Maybe you can get someone else to do it.”
“Sit down, Lucy.”
I walked into his small office and he lifted a stack of papers off the chair next to his desk.
“It’s a fresh and original idea, Lucy.”
“Okay, but I just don’t think so.”
“Where’s this coming from? When you came to me and presented the idea, you were so excited. It was your enthusiasm that sold us all. And now everyone is counting on you.”
I stared at my hands. “I’m sorry. I just can’t do it anymore.” I couldn’t tell him that I had only spoken to nine people. There was no way I was going to get the other fifteen interviews done in time. He was a sweet man; he didn’t deserve to get ditched.