The next day I drove to the airport and picked up my mom. She was quiet on the ride home. I helped her carry her bags in and went up to my room.
A moment later she yelled up the stairs, “Gavin! Can you come back down here please!”
I came back down the stairs.
“What is this?” she said. She was standing in the middle of the living room with her arms crossed.
“What is what?”
“This,” she said, waving one hand in the air. “It reeks like cigarette smoke in here,” she said.
“Oh . . .”
She beckoned me further into the room and pointed out a tiny Mexican salsa bowl that had been pushed under the sofa. It had several of Kai’s cigarette butts in it.
“Oh, sorry about that,” I said.
“I can’t have you smoking, Gavin,” my mother said, suddenly on the verge of tears. “Do you understand that? Not now. Not with everything else that is happening.”
“I don’t smoke, Mom. Some friends came over. Kai and Antoinette.”
She shook her head. I couldn’t tell if she believed me or not. It didn’t seem to matter. She snatched up the salsa dish, marched into the kitchen, and threw it into the garbage.
I went back upstairs.
• • •
My mother worked for a small advertising agency before she met my dad. This was in San Francisco, during her first years out of college. One of our photo albums was dedicated to this period, my mother’s life in the early nineties. As a little kid I loved these pictures. Mom sitting on the fire escape of her apartment. Mom in black dresses and Doc Martens. Mom on a scooter or drinking cocktails after work at the trendy offices of the Echo Advertising Agency.
At one time she was engaged to one of the founders of Echo, Peter Frohnmeyer. He was very good-looking and fashionable. Apparently he was from a wealthy San Francisco family. There were lots of pictures of the two of them: at the beach, at a big New Year’s party, on a boat. It was quite a life, judging from the pictures. It always looked like my mother was having a great time.
But then my dad had appeared on the scene. My tough-guy, no-bullshit dad. I never learned the exact story of how he stole her away from Peter Frohnmeyer. The most Russell and I were ever told was what a great victory it was for our dad. One of his many successes.
In another photo album there were three or four pictures of my dad at around the same time. He had moved to San Francisco too. He was supposedly very poor when he was in law school and yet a year later he was somehow driving a convertible. He looked pretty good in these pictures, with all his hair and less flab in his face. But it’s obvious from the most casual photos that he was the more serious person. A certain grim determination was visible in his face, even in the old Kodak pictures. Whatever he did to get my mother away from Frohnmeyer, I’m sure that was part of it. Frohnmeyer looked like a pampered rich kid in his pictures. My dad looked like a bulldog.
So that’s what happened. My mother married the poor lawyer, had two kids, and soon found herself in Oregon. Which makes you wonder what would have happened if she’d stayed with Frohnmeyer in San Francisco. She would have gone to a lot more cocktail parties, that’s for sure. And probably had more fun. She would have had a totally different life.
• • •
Back at school, Krista remained with Tyler Young through the spring. Fortunately, she was in the freshman/sophomore wing, so I didn’t see her very often. The couple times I did, she was bouncing around like she does. I heard she’d made the girls tennis team. So that was good for her.
Claude and Petra were together now too. The rumors had been true. How exactly it went down was still a mystery. Claude wouldn’t say much, even to me.
“She just got more and more impossible,” was all he really said about Hanna. When asked about Petra, he would be vague. “We’re hanging out,” he would say. If people pressed him on it, he would admit that it was now more than friends. And then he’d shrug. And people would be satisfied. He was Claude, after all. People assumed he knew what he was doing.
There was still something he wasn’t saying. That was my impression. Something else had happened. I was sure of it. But I had my own problems: getting dumped by Krista, my dad walking out, the weirdness of my new home life. Besides that, I had to figure out college or art school or whatever I was going to do after high school. And it wasn’t like when Russell was in this position. There wasn’t the four of us sitting around the kitchen table, thinking through all his options. It was just me sitting at the kitchen table now. I was an army of one.