HE WENT back to the shopping center, thinking he should pick up some job applications. Start making his own gas money. And also maybe get out of this coaching-kids thing. If he said his family needed the money, Ito couldn’t do anything about that.
He sat in his car to fill them out but couldn’t concentrate.
That look on Nadia’s face. And now I don’t trust you.
Coop flipping him off the other day, telling him he was shit.
Ito being all “You know you can’t play in the games.”
Text me when you’re done with school, he wrote to Emily.
He waited for her reply. Filled out the easy parts of the applications. Walked around the perimeter of the parking lot. When he’d killed as much time as he possibly could and texted Emily twice more, he went home, where the house had that empty, depressing, four-thirty feeling.
Where did his mom go after she left the guy’s house? To the Baker & Najarian offices like everything was normal?
Back when Taylor and Megan still lived at home, his parents had kept this calendar in the kitchen and a magnetic notepad on the fridge. Everyone wrote in their plans and left notes about where they were. That had all stopped. Maybe they thought Kyle didn’t mind, that he could just take care of himself.
He looked through the refrigerator, hungry again after the small street tacos, but there wasn’t anything to eat unless you counted condiments. Hey, Mom, maybe pick up some food for us while you’re buying groceries for your boyfriend? In the pantry, he found a few bags of pasta with a handful left in each. There was also a jar of nacho cheese sauce. He put a pot of water on the stove and cranked up the heat on the big stainless gas range. Kyle and his dad had done this whole kitchen together last summer, to his mom’s exact specs. White granite on the island and countertops, travertine tile, new appliances, including the massive stainless-and-glass range hood that loomed over him now.
What was the point? Why did his mom ask for this specific kitchen if she didn’t want to be in it with them?
Still no replies from Megan or Emily. He put his phone on the counter and tried not to look at it. He got a bowl and a spoon and stuck the jar of cheese into the microwave, and then dumped his random assortment of penne, linguine, and shells into the boiling water. He heard the garage door. That meant his mom, because his dad parked his truck on the street. Kyle’s heart sped up.
You already knew, he reminded himself. What you saw today, you already knew.
She came in through the door that led from the mudroom to the kitchen. Her hair was damp, and she had on leggings and a long T-shirt.
“Hey, sweetie.” She kissed him on the cheek. He pulled back. “I was just at the gym.”
Go visit the boyfriend for a quickie, then head to the gym to clean up and change out of the adultery clothes. Maybe somewhere in there go to the office. She had a whole system.
“Are you not talking to me?” she asked, leaning against the granite he’d helped install just for her.
“Not really. What am I supposed to say?”
“Say whatever you want. I’m still your mom. I still love you.”
“Well I don’t love you,” he said, stirring the pasta.
He scooped out a piece of penne: undercooked. Then a strand of linguine: perfect, and about to be overcooked. He didn’t want to look at her and see that what he said had hurt. Kind of couldn’t believe he’d said it.
“I understand that you feel, right now, that you don’t love me.” She didn’t sound hurt at all. She sounded calm and reasonable. Like his mom. “I would still rather you talk to me than not talk to me.” She paused. “What are you making?”
“A big ball of gluten and dairy. You wouldn’t like it.”
“I eat the way I eat because it makes me feel better, not because I don’t like gluten and dairy.”
“I’m only having this because there’s nothing else.”
She walked behind him and opened the fridge with the obvious intent of proving him wrong. “Oh,” she said.
“Yep.”
He drained his pasta before it all turned to mush, stirred in the nacho sauce, and scraped it into his bowl.
“I’m making a grocery list,” she said, typing into her phone. “Any special requests?”
He imagined her asking the guy the same thing before she went to the store earlier. Any special requests? Maybe she had two lists on her phone. One for him, one for home.
“No.”
“Kyle, come on.”
“Just whatever,” he said, and sat at the island. “I don’t care.”
“Okay, then. Bon appétit,” she said, before heading down the hall toward Megan’s old room. What was she going to do when Taylor was home from finals in a few weeks?
The kitchen seemed to throb with loneliness. Kyle’s dinner now struck him as disgusting enough to take a picture of and send to Emily.
#masterchef
That got her to reply at last.
WHAT IS THAT
He hovered his thumbs, wanting to ask, Where were you? Are you sick of me and my problems? Instead, he went with: dinner obvi
BTW, she wrote. Sorry about earlier. I was in class, then study group and then we did a practice SAT and I wanted to wait until I could pay full attention bc . . . YOU SAW YOUR MOM’S BOYFRIEND. are you ok?
Kyle exhaled. The lonely and forgotten feeling he’d had all day started to dissipate.
I don’t know. I think I’m starting to get in touch with my anger.
Nice, she replied, with a devil emoji.
Not sure I like it, he said.
Yet again, Emily’s eternal pause.
His shoveled in a few spoonfuls of the mass of orange undercooked-overcooked pasta. Then felt a jolt of pain again when he thought about Nadia saying “Now I don’t trust you.” Is this how it would be? Her words coming out of nowhere? And now, also visions of her body the first time he’d seen her all the way naked on a green comforter in her room, soft and rounded and golden.
He punched himself lightly on the thigh. Stop. Then harder. You asshole.
“Okay,” he said aloud. “Okay.”
He ate more of his neon dinner. Jiggled his leg fast. Scarfed down the pasta and pulled up a video of the barn-raising dance scene from Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and propped his phone against the empty fruit bowl on the counter. He needed every available trick for escaping the accusing voice in his head.
The part where the brothers stole the girls away from the uptight dudes in suits used to make him laugh. The dancing style was kind of dumb and there was all this big exaggerated winking, and the whole thing had struck him as funny. Then one time Emily pointed out that the guys were treating the women like property or something and the scene didn’t really get good until the women starting getting to choose who they danced with, and the guys were showing off for them and trying to get them to choose rather than just yanking them around the dance floor. “Rape Culture: The Musical,” Emily called it once.
He liked was how strong those dancing dudes were, though. The girls, too. Doing cartwheels and jumping on and off tables and hopping around on what was basically a balance beam, all while holding axes. It was pretty badass, and the ridiculous and acrobatic musical number was just what he needed. The sounds and images on his phone pushed the ones in his head out until they seemed far away, something seen through the small end of a telescope.
When it was over, he rinsed out his bowl and the pot and put them in the dishwasher. His phone chimed again. He dove for it.
Did you see the wife and kid? Emily asked.
It took him a second to understand. The wife and kid of his mother’s boyfriend. No, he hadn’t seen them, and he hadn’t even thought about them. Wow, he really was an asshole. Now he wondered what their names were, and if the husband and wife got along and thought everything was fine, or if they’d found out in the time since Kyle’s dad had told him what was happening and now they were living like Kyle’s family was. Or if it was something in between, if the wife or the kid or both had a sense that something was wrong but didn’t know for sure that their lives were in the process of shattering.
Just the guy and the house.
Also I talked to Nadia today. it’s definitely over.
He read over his own text, feeling the defeat.
This one time during his sophomore year, when Ito was trying him out on varsity, a game near the end of the season had gone into an eleventh inning. Coach Ito had stuck Kyle out in right field for most of the game, and then they were at bat in the bottom half of the inning and Kyle was at the plate with two outs, their last chance to score with the opposing team one up. He had a headache from being hungry and thirsty and having been outside for four hours in the ninety-degree afternoon. As he stood at the plate, he decided, just decided, he was going to strike out so the eternal, frustrating, hot game could come to an end and he could get into his mom’s air-conditioned car and get shakes at the drive-through like they always did after a game.
He’d swung at three terrible pitches in a row, and it was over and his team lost and all he felt was relief.
“You didn’t even fight for it, Baker,” Ito had said, shaking his head as Kyle made the walk from home plate to the dugout. “You just gave up.”
That was exactly what he’d done with Nadia.
He heard the front door open and close, and a few seconds later his dad was in the kitchen and Kyle looked at him and knew the truth. He and his dad, they were both quitters. Cowards. They could do hard things, to a point. Demo and rebuild a kitchen: sure. Load a quarter ton of rocks, one at a time, onto a trailer and unload them, one at a time, at a customer’s house for a custom landscape job: no problem.
But when it came to stuff like . . . those moments you really really needed to be understood but were also afraid of it, or you wanted to say what you actually meant without getting laughed at, or you felt like if you didn’t grab onto someone, you might fall off the planet and go spinning into space all alone . . . that kind of hard stuff—well, they sucked at it.
“Hey,” his dad asked, then did a double take. “You’re looking at me funny. Any chance that has something to do with the call I got from school about that note you forged? I said that I signed it to avoid a hassle, but don’t do that again.”
Avoiding a hassle was his dad’s entire approach to life in a nutshell. “You’re not even fighting for it.”
“What?”
Kyle’s frustration surged. “You’re giving up. With Mom. You’re going to let it all fall apart.”
“Kyle.” His dad held up his hand, daring him to say one more word. “You’re way too young to have the remotest idea how complicated this is.”
“Complicated” was a cop-out word Kyle noticed adults using whenever they couldn’t rationally explain their dumb opinions or actions.
“Me and Nadia broke up. I let it fall apart. And now—”
“Don’t compare a thirty-year marriage to a high school crush.” His dad opened the fridge and, guess what, still no food. He closed it again. “It’s been a bad day, and I’m not in a frame of mind to talk about this or be accused of giving up. I’m not the one out there screwing around.”
“But what are you doing about it?” Kyle knew he was pushing.
“I’m trying to keep the goddamn bills paid here, is what. That’s all I have to give at the moment, and if you want something more out of this conversation, too damn bad.” He rubbed his face. He turned in a circle in the kitchen. “I’m starving.”
Kyle could have said he’d seen a can of tuna in the back of the pantry. That there were crackers on the high shelf. But why couldn’t his dad even face a little obstacle like what to eat without literally spinning in circles?
“I made a contact at Coldwell Banker today,” Kyle said. He put Dawn’s business card on the counter. His dad stopped looking so lost for a second and picked it up. “You should email her a brochure and stuff. She said she’s always looking.”
“You cut school to do Baker and Najarian business? I know you’re worried, but school is your number-one priority.”
“That’s not why I cut.”
His dad was still looking at Dawn’s card with this puzzled and tired expression. “Thanks for this,” he said. “Good looking out.”
“Yeah, well.” Kyle stopped himself from saying “Someone has to.” Instead, he got the tuna and crackers out and set them on the counter for his dad.