CHAPTER SEVENTEEN #4
“Yes,” Doug said. “I believe she went to speak with God.”
“Oh, is he there today?” Chip said.
Doug sighed. “Let’s go in the living room.”
They went as he ushered them, but Chip said, “Is she planning to be here for this at all?”
Carver found his mother’s absence sort of ludicrous, but he wasn’t surprised by it. He even understood her motives for hiding.
“This isn’t supposed to be a big deal,” Doug said. “This is a chance for us to make sure we’re all on the same page and iron out any immediate concerns. I’m sure she’ll be happy to speak with you all when she gets home. For now I’m fine speaking on her behalf.”
The three kids sat on the couch while Doug stood across from them, placing his hands on his hips. Carver marveled at how different this room looked in the clear light of day — it seemed smaller and far less ominous than it had twelve hours ago.
“But do you see how this is the exact type of bullshit I’ve been talking about,” Chip said to Doug, surprising Carver. “Do you see how you’re stuck doing her dirty work?”
“Chip,” Doug said in his this-ends-now voice.
“I thought we were ironing out immediate concerns,” Chip said. “You know what my concerns are! I’ve made them very clear.”
“Chip, it’s more complicated than that,” Conway said in a quiet voice.
Chip put a hand up to her. “Connie, you know I respect your opinions on shit, but the fact is, you’ve never been married, okay? And if you were, you’d immediately see what I’m talking about. If you let your husband pull this shit on you I’d be furious.”
Doug snapped his fingers at Chip, who went silent. “I know she hurt your feelings with what she said to you this morning, but this is not a venue for freely disrespecting your mother.”
“Then she should have been here to defend herself!”
“Enough!”
“Hi,” Carver said, and everyone looked at him. “I feel like I’m out of the loop.”
“Yeah, ‘cause you were out of the loop for five years,” Chip snapped.
“Okay, sorry you guys kept a secret from me for five years and my entire life.”
“You want to know something?” Chip said, leaning forward to meet Carver’s eyes and pointing at Doug. “He wanted to tell you after I found out. Did they tell you that? Mom’s the one who put her foot down.”
“What?” Carver said, looking with surprise at Doug, who sighed.
“Hey,” Conway said, “can we not? You’re kind of being a child, Chip.”
“What?” he exclaimed, laughing. “I’m being a child? I’m the only one who wants to talk straight! It’s not my fault Mom’s losing the locker room, it’s her own fucked-up decisions.”
“A family isn’t a football team!” Conway snapped. “You can’t fire your mom, okay? We love each other unconditionally through each other’s mistakes and wrongdoing, that’s the point!”
“I do love Mom, but I’m gonna criticize her,” Chip said. “I’m not gonna be told I can’t criticize her. I’m forty fucking years old.”
“Well, I think you’re being a little bit of a misogynist and a hypocrite,” Conway said, “because what about those women you cheated on Maggie with? What if you’d gotten one of them pregnant?”
“Whoa,” Carver exclaimed, astonished, as Chip got up and stormed out of the room. “Whoa! Connie!”
Conway shrugged and flopped back against the couch with her arms folded. “I’m sorry, but he’s been so aggravating all day, and I feel like I’m the only person he’s even pretending to actually listen to, so.”
Doug had closed his eyes and was now just standing there, waiting.
“Can I just, uh,” Carver said, raising his hand. “He has a point about Mom being here. It doesn’t make sense for her to not be here.”
Doug opened his eyes and glanced over at him. “There were some sentiments she wanted me to express on her behalf.”
“Well, like what? Why can’t she express them?”
“She feels fairly humiliated right now.”
“But that’s normal!” Conway exploded. “It’s normal and human to feel humiliated! Sometimes you have to feel that way!”
“Try to see it from her perspective, sweetheart,” Doug said.
“I want her to see it from my perspective! I’m not going to shame her or attack her, I just want to talk to my mom! I’ve been holding this inside for five years, I’ve gone to therapy about this!”
“You have?” Carver said to her, concerned.
Conway rubbed her eyes. “I couldn’t tell you because you didn’t know.”
“Right.”
“Plus we barely see you, which I frankly don’t blame you for!”
“Please stop with the shouting and truculence,” Doug said. “Please. This little drama isn’t an excuse for us to act like a bunch of Italians.”
Chip appeared in the doorway with an open can of Diet Coke in his hand. “You know something about Italians?” he said. “They’re actually pretty happy people. They might sound like they’re yelling at you, but they’re smiling. Maybe that’s more psychologically healthy.”
“I don’t care,” Doug snapped. “You know what makes me happy? Decorum. Sit down.”
His voice was so commanding that Chip immediately went over and sat down. The golden retriever, who’d been dozing in a bed near the fireplace until the yelling woke him, got up and jingled out of the room as if leaving them to their dysfunction.
Carver leaned over and whispered in Conway’s ear. “What’s that dog’s name?”
She looked at him in befuddlement. “Ralph!”
“Ralph, right. Thanks.”
Doug took a piece of paper and his reading glasses from his pocket. “I have some notes from Nora.”
“Maybe he killed her,” Carver stage-whispered. To his delight, his siblings laughed hard at this while Doug actually cracked a smile.
“I did not kill your mother,” he said, perching his glasses on his nose and unfolding the paper. “Okay. First, she would like to acknowledge that mistakes were made, for which we are sincerely and profoundly apologetic.”
He paused to let this rest, but shouldn’t have.
“Mistakes were made,” Chip repeated. “Who is she, Richard Nixon?”
“That kind of works,” Carver said, “because Dad looks like Gerald Ford.”
“Oh my God, he does,” Conway said.
“Kids,” Doug interrupted.
“Who made the mistakes?” Chip said.
“Both of us,” Doug said. “And we’re not going to sit here and weigh them out. As our resident marriage expert, you must know that keeping score isn’t actually useful.”
Chip looked a little stung by this, but said nothing.
“Okay,” Doug said. “Moving on. We know we’ve been old-fashioned in the way we communicate with you.
We’ve never wanted you to think of us as your friends or peers, we’ve always wanted you to be certain of our authority and feel like you could rely on us.
But we understand now that we made a very large error which has undermined our authority, and our failure to communicate honestly with you about this has compounded the error. ”
The three of them nodded in agreement.
“So going forward we’re going to try to respect all three of you more, as adults and people, by giving you more privacy and being less private about ourselves,” Doug said, his eyes moving down the page.
“How?” Chip said.
Doug glanced up at him. “Excuse me?”
“How are you going to respect our privacy and be less private?”
“Well, we agreed we should ask you fewer questions about your, uh, plans regarding children, for instance.”
“Dad, not to throw you under the bus, but you were asking me some pretty personal questions earlier,” Carver said.
Doug looked caught. “I was worried about you.”
“Yeah, don’t muddy the waters, here, Carver,” Chip said. “We’re all worried about you, that’s different.”
“Worried about what?”
“I don’t know,” Chip said, throwing his hands in the air. “How many fucking pills you take?”
“Okay, well, Dad was asking me about my affair with Scott,” Carver snapped.
Chip reacted with a comical, almost cartoonish look of astonishment. “Your what?”
Conway looked over at him. “Did I not tell you about this?”
Doug snapped his fingers again, and they turned back to him.
“I’m not finished,” he said. “We want you to know we recognize you as the adults you are and we cherish you as individuals. We don’t take any of you for granted.
We acknowledge that, while it’s unlikely that you would, you could decide one day to never see us again.
And we already see Carver very little, which we take considerable responsibility for and hope might change. ”
A silence followed. Doug folded the paper in half and put it back in his pocket.
“Is that it?” Chip said.
“As far as this piece of paper goes, yes,” Doug said.
“Okay,” Chip said. “Well, thanks. I appreciate the sentiments. Is there anything else?”
“No,” Doug said. “Unless you have any questions.”
“Nope, I asked all my questions,” Chip said, getting up. “I’ll be out in the backyard with the kids. They have school tomorrow, so we can’t hang around here all day, so if Mom could hurry home sooner rather than later…”
“She’ll probably be home in forty-five minutes,” Doug said, sounding exasperated. “Can you hang on ‘til then?”
“Yup,” Chip said, and strolled out of the room again.
Conway cleared her throat. “They were good sentiments, Dad. I appreciate you guys saying that stuff.”
“Me too,” Carver said.
Doug smiled at them. “Thank you both. You know how dear you are to us.”
“Yeah,” Conway sighed. “We know.”
Their father left the room without saying anything else, then walked upstairs. Carver knew where he was going — up to the study so he could read obscure Internet forums in peace.
Conway shook her head and turned to him. Carver noticed she had a few small fake gemstones near the corners of her wide blue eyes. “This has all been so crazy.”
“What are those things near your eyes?” he said, squinting at them.
Conway reached up to touch her face. “Oh, stick-on gems. They were a party favor at the wedding last night.”
“There were party favors?”
“Yeah, I got a sheet of these and a bubble wand.”
“Man. I did not actually enjoy that wedding at all.”
“You kind of ruined the end of it for me, too,” Conway said. “No offense.”
“No, it’s fair to say,” Carver said. “How are you, by the way? I wanted to ask yesterday, but I thought you wouldn’t tell me.”