EIGHT

“Can I come in?”

Mom knocked on my door and then opened it.

“You’re already in,” I said, yawning. At some point, I had fallen asleep, record sleeves and books all around me.

“In bed already?”

“Incarceration is exhausting,” I said, popping my arms out of the covers. “What did you bring me?”

“Chocolate chocolate chip or toffee swirl?” she said, taking ice cream out of a bag. Anytime she punished me, which wasn’t often, she always showed up a few hours later with ice cream. Two pints, one conscience, cleared.

“Chocolate,” I said. “I think I’m supposed to be giving you the silent treatment, though.”

“And you will,” she said, handing me a pint. “It’s hard to talk with ice cream in your mouth. Scoot over.”

Mom climbed into bed with me like she had for the first few weeks after Dad left. I’m sure it was supposed to be the other way around—me coming to her—but she always beat me to it, curling up behind me. Jeans brushing pajama legs. Her sobs never as soft as she thought they were.

“You told the principal you were a sleepwalker?”

We sat side by side, legs out, backs propped on pillows.

“It seemed brilliant at the time,” I said. “I didn’t think about having to get a doctor’s note. Or the fact they would eventually figure out your work number.”

Mom scooted closer so that her leg touched mine.

“Quite the elaborate plan,” she said. “You must really like it here.”

“I do,” I said. And then I looked at her, really looked at her, for the first time all night. “Don’t you?”

She licked ice cream off her spoon. “I like that you have a friend.”

“So we’ll figure it out?”

“For now,” she said, her words like storm clouds, gathering. “There’s one condition, though,” she said. “Lie for your safety, if you have to, but don’t lie to me.”

She had no idea those were one and the same. One mention of my shaman panda and the car would have been packed by morning, the three of us hundreds of miles away by noon.

“Okay,” I said. “But I have a condition, too. I need you to tell me what was wrong with Dad.”

“Nothing was wrong,” she said. “He had an overactive imagination, just like you do. The facts haven’t changed.”

“But I’ve changed,” I said. “I’m older. Maybe I’ll hear things differently.”

“Not tonight,” Mom said. “I can’t take any more pain right now.”

Neither could I, I thought. Pain was having a crush that would never happen. Pain was being broken and not knowing how to fix it.

“So tell me something else,” I said. And even though I knew the story, I asked for it, anyway. “Tell me how you and Dad met.”

Mom put the lid on her ice cream and set it, along with the spoon, on my nightstand. I was eating mine slowly, letting the chocolate chips melt on my tongue before spooning more in.

“We met at NYU,” Mom said. She was using her dreamy voice. “Your dad was studying physics, I was studying modern dance, and he showed up at my class every day for a month, trying to join the troupe. Just to be close to me.”

“But he didn’t dance,” I said, which I knew. He had like a hundred left feet.

“But he kept showing up,” Mom said. “After a while, the teacher was so enamored with him, she made him an understudy. He never performed, not once, but he didn’t care.”

“Because you were there,” I said, thinking about Drew. Wondering if he’d text before Monday, even if I couldn’t read it.

“Yes, but I ignored him,” Mom said. “The difference was, your father never gave up. And after a few months of strawberry-ginseng-banana smoothies, I fell in love.”

“That smoothie sounds like the opposite of love to me.”

“It was the eighties,” Mom said, laughing. “We all drank that stuff. Besides, things like that don’t matter when you’re in love. You’ll see.”

I wondered if I was going to be seeing anytime soon. I handed her my ice cream and sank deeper into the bed, pulling the covers up to my chin.

“Most of the time I hate him,” I said, thinking about Dad. But I couldn’t help thinking about other things, like Sunday mornings and the crossword puzzle, the way I hung on to their banter like air, words flying back and forth, kisses in between. I ate cereal until I popped, just so I could stay in the room with them.

“But sometimes you miss him.” Mom smoothed the hair off my face. “That’s okay,” she said, voice shaking. “Sometimes I miss him, too.”

She leaned in, kissed my forehead, and a tear dropped onto my face. I told myself it wasn’t my fault she was sad, that she got there on her own, but I knew it wasn’t true. Dad put both of us there, whether he meant to or not.