WHEN PUP GOT HOME, his father was still fast asleep on the couch, while Luke, he assumed, was curled up on the roof ledge sleeping off his hangover. His mother sat at her usual place at the kitchen table, drinking her coffee and penciling carefully in one of her adult coloring books.
“Hi, honey,” she said, glancing up at him in surprise as he walked through the back door. “You’re up early.”
“Hey, Mom.” Pup drifted over to the fridge. He found some orange juice and poured himself a glass. “I had a school thing. Photography club.”
“How wonderful! I didn’t know you liked photography.”
Pup sipped his juice. There was no point in telling his mom about his failing art grade. Why add to her stress? Besides, one of the perks of having aging parents was that they didn’t annoy him about school. It wasn’t that Ted and Judy Flanagan didn’t care about their youngest son’s grades or his future. It was that neither one of them owned a smartphone. They had one joint email account—set up for them by Annemarie—that could go months without being checked. While his friends’ parents got text and email updates for every tardy or detention or plummeting chemistry grade, Pup enjoyed almost complete immunity. If everybody else’s parents were helicopter parents, hovering around their children and managing their every activity, Pup’s parents were more like space-shuttle parents: watching over him, sure, but from a very far distance, and living, for the most part, on a different planet.
“Do you want some breakfast?” His mom closed her coloring book. “I was just about to make some scrambled eggs.”
“Sure, Mom. Thanks.”
She got up and began rummaging around the cabinets looking for a skillet, while Pup handed her the carton of eggs from the fridge.
“Hey, Mom,” he said. “Have you talked to Luke lately?”
“Luke? Of course I have. He’s my son, isn’t he?” She cracked an egg into a bowl and tossed the shell in the trash.
“Well, does he seem . . . okay to you?”
“Does he seem okay?” She cracked another egg. “Well, he’s Luke. So, has he been a little Lukier than normal lately? Well, now that you mention it, I suppose maybe he has.” She whirled around suddenly, the shell crushed into her palm. “Why? Is something wrong?”
“No!” Pup handed her the butter. Okay, so she definitely didn’t know that Luke and Carrie had broken up. Which meant that none of his oldest sisters knew, either, because Jeanine and Mary and Elizabeth and Noreen were basically a single entity of prying older sisterhood, and anything they knew, Pup’s mother would soon know too. “He’s totally fine.”
“Well, then, why did you ask?”
“I was just making conversation, Mom. Calm down.”
“Fine,” she said, whisking the eggs with a vigorous arm. “So, how was the party last night?”
“What party?”
“Noreen told me you were going to a party.” She dropped a pat of butter into the hot pan and began swirling it around with the edge of her knife. “With that girl Izzy you’ve been seeing.”
“I’m not ‘seeing’ her,” Pup said, slumping down into the nearest kitchen chair. “And she didn’t have a party. She just had people over.”
“Isn’t that what a party is? When you have people over?”
“Not really.” Pup sighed. “Can you maybe make me some bacon, too?”
“We’re out of bacon. I’ll make you pork sausages instead.” She poured the eggs into the pan. “So you’re not seeing this Izzy person? Does that mean you two broke up?”
“We did not break up.” Pup put his head in his hands. If it weren’t for the promise of pork sausages, he’d be halfway up the stairs by now. “We were never together. We’re just friends. Why does Noreen act like she knows my life?”
“Well, maybe I’ve gotten my facts wrong. It’s possible, at my age.” She pointed at him with her spatula. “But honey, if something’s on your mind, you should tell me. You can always tell me if something is bothering you. You know that, right?”
“Yes, I know that,” Pup said, even though of course this was not even remotely true. Pup’s mom moved very carefully through life these days. She avoided anything that could disrupt the delicate balance of her emotions—she didn’t follow politics, didn’t go to parties or public events, had abandoned her beloved true-crime shows, didn’t drive during rush hour, quit her bowling league because it was too “competitive.” When the Cubs had won the World Series, while the rest of the family had gathered inches from the big-screen television in their matching blue T-shirts, Pup’s mom went and hid in the bathroom during the late innings, unable to bear the thought of possibly having to watch them lose. And she most certainly did not want to know if her children were suffering from anything worse than a mildly rumbling stomach, a problem she could instantly fix with a large plate of scrambled eggs and pork sausages. He could not talk to his mother about his pathetic relationship with Izzy. He could not talk to her about his crappy grades. And most of all, he could not talk to her about Patrick, about how much he missed him, and how bad it got sometimes. Even if he wanted to tell her about these things, it wouldn’t matter because she wouldn’t want to hear them. She just couldn’t handle it.
At that moment, Luke himself, glassy eyed and greasy haired, appeared in the doorway with his laptop bag slung over his shoulder.
“Morning,” he growled, without meeting Pup’s eyes.
“You’re just in time for breakfast,” said his mom.
“No thanks,” Luke said. “I’m running late for study group.”
He grabbed a bottle of red Gatorade from the fridge, stuck it in his bag, gave a general wave, and went out the back door.
“Poor boy,” Pup’s mom said thoughtfully, watching through the screened window as Luke hurried across the backyard and disappeared through the back gate. “He does look stressed. It’s probably all this business with the bar exam. You know how hard he works.”
She picked up a pencil then, and continued to work on a half-finished mandala in her coloring book, swirling with blues and greens and pinks, while Pup ate his breakfast in silence. He already knew what he would find when he went upstairs to put his camera away: the laptop Luke had bought for himself when he’d started law school three years earlier, forgotten, as usual, on the nightstand. And he already knew what he would do when he found it: he would pick up a magazine from the floor and toss it casually over the forgotten computer, so that if their mother happened to go upstairs she wouldn’t see it and grow suspicious. Pup had his own suspicions, of course, about Luke’s weekend study groups; about his shaking hands and bloodshot eyes and untouched notebooks stacked on the floor next to his bed. He would never ask his brother about it directly, though. He couldn’t. That just wasn’t the way their family worked.