Twenty minutes and one bus ride later I was back in my neighborhood but not ready to go home. My plan was to grab my bike and get rid of some nervous energy, but before I’d quite reached the house a car stopped at the bottom of my driveway and Owen emerged. His stepmom was at the wheel, and she gave me a quick wave before pulling away.
Owen was just finishing a granola bar and, judging by the way he scowled at the empty wrapper, it hadn’t quite done the job.
“This is Dee-Ann’s idea of a snack,” he said, waving the empty foil pouch. Owen doesn’t waste his time on small talk.
“I think we can find you something else,” I told him. “Can’t have you passing out in our driveway.”
“It could happen,” he said.
He beat me to the back door, hurried into the kitchen, and started scavenging like a feral cat.
“Is your mom cooking today?” he asked from the inside of the fridge where he’d shoved almost his whole upper body.
“Doesn’t look like it,” I said. “But stay anyway. She’s probably ordering in.”
“I’ll check to see what’s going on at home,” he said.
Translation: he was going to find out if his mom’s partner, Phil, was going to be home in time for dinner. That probably gives you the impression there are problems at Owen’s house. There are, but Phil isn’t one of them. Phil is the one who often keeps things from getting too far out of hand.
Owen’s mom, who’s a genuinely nice person, is also an alcoholic. It’s not unusual for her to be a bit blurred by dinnertime, in which case there’s no telling what version of her you’re going to get. There could be hugs and hilarity, but just as often it’ll be hassles and hostility. Sometimes it’s a combination — you never know what you’re walking into there. I’ve seen it plenty of times and believe me, it doesn’t make mealtime exactly relaxing. Owen avoids eating with her when Phil isn’t home.
“Hey, guess what? I was thinking about going back to the gym,” Owen told me, emerging from the fridge with a tub of cream cheese dip. “You guys have any chips?”
For the record, Owen has been to the gym exactly twice in the three years I’ve known him, so he wasn’t talking about resuming an inspiring fitness routine. While asking for chips.
I checked the snack cupboard.
“No chips,” I said, passing him a box of some kind of snack cracker. “These should work though. So, what made you decide to start hitting the gym again?”
He shrugged. Just as well since he’d already swiped a couple of crackers through the dip and crammed them into his mouth.
I didn’t press him, and in any case, it wasn’t hard to guess what the answer might be. Most likely, he was interested in someone. About time too. He’d been a mess when his girlfriend of a couple of years moved out west last November. Their plan to stay together long distance hadn’t lasted much more than a couple of months and I’d witnessed the misery of him trying to hold onto her while she slowly but surely pulled away. I hoped he was finally ready to put that behind him.
As he munched away on his crackers and dip, my thoughts shifted back to the situation with my dad. I knew I could trust Owen, but just as I was about to fill him in on the strange happenings of the past couple of days, I heard the garage door open.
Dad was home.
I tried to remember if he’d told me how long he’d be “out of town” this time. Sometimes he does but just as often he says it will depend on how long it takes to wrap things up. Whatever that means. More vague and indecipherable talk to go along with the explanations of what it is he actually does.
I’ve felt a little dim on occasion, when I couldn’t follow what he was talking about. Now I suspected that was deliberate. Which made me wonder how much, if any, of the stuff he’s told me over the years is even true. Heck, maybe it sounded hard to understand because none of it made sense.
Maybe my father was having a secret laugh at me, like he does when he tells clients how he built his business with nothing but hard work and ingenuity and forgets to mention my mother’s inheritance.
And then there he was, sauntering into the kitchen, back from his last fictitious business trip.
I watched him as he crossed the room. There was nothing about him, not in his face or movements or the casual way he greeted me and Owen, that seemed off. And yet I knew he’d been lying about where he’d been the past few days, and who knows how many other times. For all I knew, he’d never made a single one of those trips.
It was a strange feeling, looking at my father and knowing he was living some kind of lie. A lie that had infiltrated his own home and family. That thought made me realize something important. I needed to be every bit as smooth as he was. If he thought I suspected anything, it was a sure bet he’d step up whatever precautions he was taking to keep from being found out.
I’d need to be as good at deception as he was. Which was a pretty tall order.
“Sorry I didn’t get back to you the other day, Ethan,” he said, popping a pod into the coffee maker. “We went straight into meetings, and then it slipped my mind.”
“No problem,” I said. “I barely remember what I was texting you about.”
I almost laughed and added that it couldn’t have been too important. But I stopped myself in time because I realized it would sound forced.
It was a weird feeling, as if I was an actor in a play but no one had given me a script.
“Any idea where your mom is?” he asked.
“Not really. She might have mentioned her plans but if she did, I don’t remember.”
He chuckled at that. Little did he know the reason I’d been so preoccupied all day.
“I’ll send her a text,” Dad said. “See if she wants me to make reservations for dinner.” Then he added, without looking up, “You’ll join us, won’t you, Owen?”
“I’m not sure — my mom might have cooked,” Owen said.
Owen has had plenty of meals at our house, but he doesn’t like eating out if it involves any kind of formal dining. I thought I’d better bail him out before anything else was said.
“We’ll take a walk to Owen’s place and see what’s up,” I said. “If his mom made dinner I might eat there. Otherwise, maybe we’ll just order a pizza or something.”
“Whatever you like,” Dad said. His voice was casual, but he glanced at me and there was something about his eyes, something penetrating, that sent a weird feeling crawling up my neck.
More paranoia? Probably.
All I knew was that I suddenly wanted to be anywhere other than in a room with my father. I grabbed my phone, made sure there was no mess in the kitchen from our snack, and followed Owen out the door.
“Thanks, man,” he said.
“Actually, I didn’t want to go either,” I said.
Owen gave me a curious look. He knows I like eating out, trying new things.
We sure wouldn’t be trying anything new at his place, but it was nice to find his mom sober and in the kitchen cooking. Spaghetti sauce, which she makes a lot. It’s really good too.
“Hey guys, are ya hungry?”
“Starving,” Owen said. The same Owen who’d just eaten half a box of snack crackers and a whole container of dip.
“Honestly. I don’t know what that woman has against feeding you properly,” she said. “Every time you go to your dad’s you come home half malnourished.”
“Is Phil here?” Owen asked. He’s pretty good at sidestepping criticisms of “that woman,” who, of course, is his stepmom, Dee-Ann.
“He’s on his way. Have something light if you want — we’ll be eating in an hour or so.”
“I guess I can wait,” Owen said. “We’ll be out back.”
That sounds like we were heading outside. We weren’t. The Cass house has a big sunroom on that end, and it’s Owen’s favorite place in the house. Over the last couple of years, with his mom’s drinking getting worse, it’s become a sort of haven to him. He even got interested in the plants out there and spends time fussing over them.
I’m neither here nor there about plants, but I’ve noticed there’s something about that room that makes it a great place for talking. Owen will be going around checking soil and pinching off dead leaves and doing a dozen other plant-tending things, but somehow, he’s more able to focus on a conversation there than anywhere else.
So, while he went around doing his thing, I sat in one of the hammock chairs and got started.
“You noticed my dad was just on a business trip, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, actually, he wasn’t. He was right here the whole time.”
“What do you mean?” Owen looked puzzled. “He just got home when we were at your place a few minutes ago.”
“That’s what we’re supposed to think. He hasn’t been at home — but he wasn’t out of town on business either. It was a lie.”
“But then, where was he?”
“That’s the thing. I have no idea.”
The plants were left to fend for themselves as I filled him in on the rest of the details. He interrupted with questions quite a few times — who could blame him, hearing such a bizarre story?
“And you actually hired a spy!” Owen said when I’d finished.
“She’s a private investigator,” I corrected.
“This is like something in a movie!”
“It kind of is. Doesn’t feel real just yet — which is why I’d like to avoid Dad as much as I can for a few days. I’m worried I’ll slip up and give something away.”
“Right,” Owen said. “I’ll have to be careful too.”
“You’ll be fine,” I said. More accurately, Dad always finds Owen a little quirky, so not much he did was likely to get Dad’s attention.
Owen isn’t quirky, by the way. Maybe a bit socially awkward sometimes but that’s true of lots of people.
And as for me, I figured I could carry it off. All I had to do was be careful not to do anything to raise his suspicions.
Little did I know I already had.