Chapter 3
3
Tatum
The older my parents get, the earlier they wake up. They’ve been telling me this for a while, and it’s not that I didn’t believe them, it’s just that I never expected to run into their kitchen at 4:16 in the morning and find my mom midway through a crossword puzzle while my dad cleans up the breakfast they’ve already finished eating together.
I live in their guest house. Guest cottage as we call it, because it’s two stories tall, made of dark stone and covered in ivy, surrounded by flowers in every shade imaginable. It’s “positively darling,” as my sister, Laney, once put it, using a British accent, because the cottage looks like it should exist in the English countryside, not the oversized backyard of a small-town Illinois bungalow.
It’s lovely and idyllic and far enough behind the main house to give me a sense of independence, but close enough that when I hear a loud bang in the middle of the night, I can sprint over to my parents’ place in less than a minute. I imagined having to dramatically shake the two of them awake. Instead my mom is already dressed in her daytime attire trying to remember how to spell ostentatious while my dad tells me he wishes he knew I was coming, because he would’ve made more eggs.
“I don’t think I can do eggs this early in the morning,” I say, still panting from the run down the garden path that connects our houses, hands shaking as I inserted my key into their back door’s lock.
Dad looks at the clock. “I like to think they taste the same as they do when the sun is up. What’s going on?”
Explaining the noise feels silly considering how relaxed they are in comparison to my frantic, half-awake hysteria. The words hardly leave my mouth before my dad laughs.
“That was just me,” he says jovially. “I was getting my bags boards out of the garage, and I knocked over some boxes.”
“We wake up very early,” my mom says in her usual even-keeled voice, the exact same way she’s told me this a hundred times before. Now I know how much she means it. She peers up through her readers to gaze at my dad, letting the look linger long enough for my dad to feel the intensity of it. “?‘Ostentatious’ is about five letters too long, Andy.”
There is no use in complaining about my dad choosing to get out his bags game in what I still firmly believe qualifies as the middle of the night, because my parents let me live in their cottage rent-free. Ninety-nine percent of the time, it’s a perfectly good situation.
The cottage itself is a sticking point between them. Me living in it works out for all involved. It was built to be an oasis for my mom after my dad “let her down,” as the story goes. When we were kids, that’s what she told us, never saying any more on the subject. “Your dad really let me down.”
What she meant is my dad cheated on her, and she didn’t find out until years after it happened. They chose to work through it instead of splitting up, but that severance of trust between them has never totally healed right. The lingering hurt has manifested in countless strange ways, one of which is over-the-top gestures like having an entire second house built in our huge backyard. Mom’s never used the cottage, even though it’s the charming, cozy escape she said she always wanted. So I use it, because that’s what I’m best at—finding solutions to other people’s pain.
Plus the cottage gets great light. I can sit on the couch and read an entire book in one afternoon, and it feels purposeful and right. It’s the kind of place where life is meant to be gentle. Slow.
Except now there’s a situation even I can’t make better. Dad recently informed my siblings and me he has another child from that long-ago affair—a son in his thirties whom Dad only recently learned about. It’s the kind of thing I cannot fix. No well-worded note or carefully considered gesture can undo the existence of a secret child . I don’t even know what to do with myself about it. No matter how many catnaps I take in the cottage living room, or puzzles I solve at the dining room table, nothing tricks my brain into believing this isn’t a massive, life-altering deal.
If there’s any positive, it’s that it only serves to prove that my longest-held belief is still as true as ever—love causes too much hurt to ever be worthwhile. It’s best to avoid it at all costs.
“Sorry for waking you up,” Dad says as he comes around the kitchen island to give me a hug.
“Go ahead and ask him why he didn’t get the boards out yesterday,” Mom prompts.
This is one of her favorite tactics, telling me to ask a question that’s actually a lead-up to some dig she wants to take at Dad. Maybe she feels better about it because she’s doing it indirectly? It’s not for me to understand.
In my younger years, I took the bait every time, believing I could mediate the situation and bring some sort of genuine resolution to them both. But the problem is never about the bags boards, the misplaced keys, or whatever other minor inconvenience that gets mentioned. The problem is actually so deep they’ll do anything not to discuss it, fussing over countless tiny annoyances to make sure we stay as far away as possible from the real thing.
“Are you sure you don’t want to give early-morning eggs a shot?” Dad asks, giving me a graceful out this time. “I promise to add extra cheddar cheese to them for you. And then maybe you can show me how to link my phone up to my car again? I can’t get it to work anymore.”
My dad is such a sincere guy. Sometimes painfully so. That’s what makes it hard to understand the mess he made. His entire brand is adoring his family with his whole heart. I’ve already spent a lot of my life trying to reconcile that with why he cheated in the first place. Now there is a living, breathing person born from that situation, and it all makes even less sense than it did at the start.
“It should’ve just stayed paired through your Bluetooth,” I say. “We can look at it later and see what happened, though. I’m sure it’ll be very simple to fix.”
“Thanks, sweetheart,” he says. “I’m not sure what I did.”
“You did something ,” Mom says.
My mom holds herself the same way during a fight as she does during a celebration—eerily composed, with scrutinizing eyes that call you on all your bullshit the way her words never will. She forgave Dad on paper years ago, but it’s never felt like she forgave him in her heart, especially now that all of us know the full truth about the child. When she tells him the crossword puzzle word doesn’t fit, there’s an air of distrust to it. Why would you ever think that word would be a good idea?
It’s the kind of subtext that takes years to notice. I’ve had almost an entire lifetime of practice, so well-versed in their passive fights that I worry I don’t know how to speak any other language myself.
“Okay, I’ll have some eggs,” I say to my dad, hoping to move all of us in a different direction for the time being.
Mom starts sniffing the air. “Something smells strange,” she announces, looking right at me.
Her scrutiny prompts me to realize I am, in fact, the source. “I put some perfume on before I went to bed. I was trying to get myself to like it.”
“I wasn’t gonna mention it, but you do smell a bit like my car did after I left the windows down during a rainstorm a few years ago,” Dad tells me.
I wave them both off, settling into my seat at the table. “That’s enough. It’s not that bad. And it was a gift from June, one of our regulars at the diner. I didn’t want to be rude and not use it.”
Dad glances back from the stove as Mom peers at him over her readers. “Oh, we know June,” she says.
The exchange they share is one of their rare moments of complete unity, a wordless conversation occurring solely through their eyes.
“How’s she doing?” Mom asks me now, a notable lightness added to her tone.
“She’s great.”
My defensiveness will only make this situation worse, but I can’t seem to shake it. To my knowledge, I have never mentioned June in their company. Not in a way that would warrant this kind of energy from them. I’m always telling stories about the regulars. Obviously June is my favorite, but I’ve been very careful to make that sound like a title she’d win with any waitress, not just me. My parents would know Mr. Tompkins too, and his habit of stealing our sugar packets. Or the sweet young family that travels twenty miles just to see me on Sunday nights, because they know I’ll always give them an extra scoop of ice cream on their sundaes.
Dad cracks an egg on the counter. “We were just wondering.”
Again, the unity. The second use of we . How beautiful that their fractured love for each other can only be overcome when meddling in my personal life. It must be so exciting to have found this shared path.
“Carson told you about her,” I say. This reeks of my older sibling’s handywork.
“They mentioned she’d asked you out—” Mom says.
“ Months ago,” I say.
“And you said no…” Mom continues, ignoring my interjection. She makes sure to let every sentence linger, for reasons she wants me to figure out on my own. “But now you’re wearing a perfume she made you…”
This feels like a setup, even though I’m the one who put myself here. They couldn’t have known the perfume was made by June, or that I’d be here this early in the morning. Still, they’ve clearly been waiting for this opportunity, and here I am, caught in their mysterious parental bait trap.
“I thought I’d aged out of these kinds of inquiries into my personal life,” I say. “Or will that happen next year, when I turn thirty?”
“You never age out of that,” Dad informs me. “It only gets worse. Sorry, kid.”
“We’re just wondering why you’ve turned her down,” Mom explains. “Carson showed us a picture of her. She’s lovely.”
I didn’t know it was possible to be this mortified before sunrise, but my parents are making an honest go at it. “She has a girlfriend.”
“Has she made her a perfume?” Mom asks.
“She’s made her several,” I say. Sensing my lie has no grit to it, I search for the upper hand. “And they all smell better than mine.” This is not the most compelling argument for me to make, but I’m doing my best on four hours of sleep.
Dad finishes whisking the eggs and pours them into his pan. “So she made you a bad perfume on purpose to prove she likes you less than she likes her girlfriend?” He’s not asking to be malicious. That’s not his style. He’s genuinely curious. But it’s all so embarrassing. I’m backed into a corner.
“Can we please discuss something else?” I plead.
“Of course,” he says. “We just want to see you happy.”
“I am happy,” I say, managing to find the exact voice of a person who is definitely not happy. Which isn’t true. It’s just an unfortunate side effect of my frustration. “I really am,” I add, doubling down to prove the point to my parents and myself.
When I look at my life, I do like it. There is nothing hard about it, or complicated. At least not beyond the complication at the core of it all—the conflicts I didn’t cause, like the affair. The things I can’t fix.
There is a lot of good. I get to write for other people. I get to make them smile. At night, there are books to greet me and a big comfy couch for me to lounge on. In the end, I am my own best company. No one else can hurt me when I don’t let them get close enough to try.
“If you say so…” Mom uses her lingering effect as a final blow. “We’ve just noticed that lately you seem a little…”
“Disconnected,” my dad offers.
Now my hackles are really raised. What do they want me to say? Yeah, I am a little disconnected. My parents have been slightly unhappy my entire life, and now there’s a whole secret child I’ve just learned about, and it’s a permanent reminder of the unspoken tension that’s existed in our family for years—a tension that’s permeated every area of my life.
I swallow back my urge to push this. No good will come from challenging them. They’ve stuck together despite it all. They would never understand why I’d object to that, because they think if they’re okay with their decisions, then everyone else should be too. They wouldn’t want to know that how they’ve chosen to love each other has affected the way I move through the world. That their inability to ever really talk about what happened has made me fear conflict in such a deep, all-consuming way, I’ll do absolutely anything to avoid it.
All we’d do is politely argue about why I’m wrong for feeling that way until I give up on trying to explain myself at all.
“I feel completely connected,” I say instead. “Very, very Zen.”
Dad chuckles. Mom just stares.
I move the conversation to our safe topics—reality TV and the weather. All the while my thoughts hover over their curiosity, picking at the edges of it. What does it matter to them if I date June or not? I’m the one holding all of our lives together by being exactly who I am.
They are the last people in the world who should want that to change.