Chapter 30
T he force of Benny staring at me woke me up. She was in my bed, propped up on her elbow like she didn’t even know the concept of boundaries existed.
“I thought you were an early bird,” she said. “It’s past nine.”
“I have a request,” Benny said.
“Wow, big surprise,” I told her, smiling. She knocked me on the shoulder.
“We’re going to do a throwback Triple Quinn Ultimate Movie Day,” she said. “Mom is in.”
My stomach dropped. Those memories of our iconic movie days spent eating junk food, ordering pizza, and watching five movies in a row had turned so bittersweet over the years. Or, maybe, to justify staying away for so long, I’d allowed them to turn sour, so I’d never miss it too much.
“Benny, I need a day off,” I said.
“Then you owe me ten grand,” she said, smile dropping from her face. “This is important, Charlie.”
“I’m not a kid anymore, Benny.”
“You know, Mom and I still have our movie days and there hasn’t been one in all these years you haven’t come home that we haven’t looked at each other with tears in our eyes and wished you were with us. Sometimes you only see what you need and not what we might need from you.”
Well, that made me feel awful.
“Okay, okay,” I said, and she brightened immediately.
“Stay in your pajamas,” she commanded. “I’m going to go get us all the junk food we can handle and be back in an hour, then we start.
” She got up off the bed and almost made it to the doorway before she doubled back.
“Remember we used to go to Blockbuster the night before and pick out all the movies we wanted to see and the next day it felt like Christmas morning, waking up to stay in all day?”
I felt my eyes prickle at the memory. When I was younger, Mom would critique the performances, dream out loud about the roles she couldn’t wait to play. All Benny and I could do was dream with her.
“I remember,” I said. “Now we have every movie at our fingertips. I kinda miss waiting for things, the anticipation of seeing if the movie you wanted to rent was available.”
“The best feeling was not seeing the movie you wanted out on the shelves and then going up to the counter to see if any copies had come in.”
“We died that one time when they told us someone had just returned Clueless .”
“Oh, my God, we need to watch that today.”
“YES,” I cried.
“Kids these days will never understand the joy of Blockbuster on a Friday night,” Benny lamented like she wasn’t twenty-five.
She then nodded, like she’d completed something she had set out to do.
What that was, I didn’t know, but then she was gone and I didn’t venture downstairs until I heard her come back in the house.
When I did, there was a full French press and a whole breakfast spread on the coffee table in the living room and Mom came out of the kitchen holding a jug of orange juice, triumphantly declaring, “I made breakfast!”
There was a big plate of eggs, bacon, and several pieces of toast. Some part of my heart seemed to thaw at the sight of it and I sat down on the couch next to my mom and said, “This looks amazing.”
“I can cook,” she said. “I just like to do it sporadically so when I do, I impress you.”
“I am impressed,” I told her, chuckling.
“And I’m starving,” Benny said, squeezing herself right into the middle of us so we both had to scoot over to make space for her. “This is going to be the best day.”
All three of us started on our plates of food, adding the exact same amount of cream and sugar to our coffees. I felt myself too easily falling back into the familiarity of belonging to these two women.
“We have so many movies to catch up on,” Mom said, between a forkful of eggs with ketchup on them (the way we all always ate our eggs).
I forgot how much I used to like being a part of Triple Quinn.
Family was so complicated, threads of good and bad and hurtful and incredible memories all tangled together.
One minute you love them, the next you can’t wait to get away.
We spent the rest of the breakfast deciding our list of movies, ranging from classics like Clueless and Grease (our personal favorite, of which we knew every word and lyric) to new releases we hadn’t seen yet.
By the time we’d cleared the dishes, it was almost eleven o’clock.
We turned on the first movie, while I threw a blanket over our three laps, then Benny’s head landed on my shoulder, and Mom’s outstretched arm held us both.
We ate pizza. We didn’t talk about anything serious. They didn’t ask me any questions and I didn’t ask any of them. We just existed in each other’s company and I remembered a time before life swooped in and it got complicated.
Somehow I was able to access the good memories of these movie days, when I didn’t want to be somewhere else, when I wasn’t trying to rebel against the Triple Quinn force and be my own person.
Like when we’d watch Grease at least once a month, and sing every song at full volume.
One year when I was fifteen, I even got us special Pink Ladies jackets to wear for Halloween.
Petra was “bad” Sandy in all black. Mom threw a Grease -themed party on October 31 and I performed a near-perfect rendition of “Summer Nights” with some aspiring actor that had a voice just like John Travolta’s.
Those were good times. Really good times. So many of them, stacked up like boxes I’d stashed in storage somewhere, gathering dust, forgotten.
The thing is, when you repeatedly deny yourself something, you can almost convince yourself you don’t miss it. But family can see through you. They know who you’ve been. They can chart the course of who you used to be and who you are now.
And sometimes, you don’t want them to see you. When you stay away, you can’t be reminded by how much you’ve changed, what you’ve given up.
If you never confront the past, never let it catch up, you can almost convince yourself you’ve outrun it entirely.
Almost.