Chapter 1 #2
“Let’s not exaggerate about your housing situation,” she says. “You can always stay with me until you find a new place. Or why don’t you just ask Jackson if you can stay in her old condo until you find a new place? Her renters just moved out, right?”
I didn’t realize the couple who were renting her Park City condo had moved out, and it irks me a tiny bit that Petra knew this, but I didn’t. It’s another reminder of how hard it is to have your lifelong best friend up and move across the country.
We both worked for the National Ski Team in Park City and for years I lived in Jackson’s condo with her.
When I got engaged a year and a half ago, I moved into Peter’s place.
Then a year ago Jackson reunited with her boyfriend from high school and together they moved to my hometown of Blackstone, NH—where I first met Jackson skiing, and where she, her fiancé Nate, and I all raced when we were in high school.
Now they own the mountain and are ridiculously busy managing its growth.
She’s walking down the aisle in two days, and it feels like she lives a whole lot more than 2,000 miles away.
“Hmm,” I say to Petra, “that idea has merit. I wouldn’t want to take advantage, though. I’m sure they could rent that condo out weekly and make a killing, like Nate does with all his other properties.”
“The last thing they need is another rental property. I’m sure she’d be happy to have you there.”
One of Petra’s special talents is expecting that the world will just bow to her, which it always does.
She’d never think twice about something like this, never stop to consider if it might be an imposition.
She’s so upfront about everything, and I think sometimes she assumes everyone else is too.
Like if Jackson and Nate didn’t want to rent me their condo, they’d say so.
But the truth is, Jackson would do anything to help me—just like I would for her—so she wouldn’t say no if I asked.
And I never want to take advantage of her like that.
“Maybe I’ll float the idea when we see her at that cocktail reception thing tonight.”
“I can’t wait to see this place!” she says.
Nate and Jackson have built a new hotel at the base of the backside of Blackstone Mountain, and everyone attending their wedding is staying there.
The hotel doesn’t open for another three weeks, so this wedding is a trial run of sorts for them.
Jackson has sent us pictures, but I have a feeling it’ll be even more beautiful in person.
“Me too.” With this early flight followed by the two hour drive from Boston’s Logan Airport north to Blackstone, I’m sure all I’ll want to do once we get there is crawl into my comfy hotel room bed and take a nap before tonight’s event.
Unfortunately, instead I’ll be dropping Petra off at the hotel and then heading to my mom’s place because she insisted on seeing me when I’m in town, and I refuse to give her any of my time tomorrow or the following day, which are all booked up with wedding plans.
I’m in Blackstone for Jackson, not for my mom’s drama.
“You haven’t even taken a sip yet,” Petra says, eyeing the glass still sitting in front of me. Then she raises her own glass and says, “To being young and single and free!”
I raise my plastic cup and clink it with hers, even though thirty doesn’t feel young and I don’t want to be single or free.
I take a sip as Petra says, “We’re going to find you the hottest guy at this wedding and you’re going to have some no-strings-attached sex.”
I almost choke on my drink, because everything Petra just said is consistently how she operates, but the complete opposite of my personality.
“I don’t go for hot guys who want one-night stands,” I say once I’ve successfully swallowed my drink. “I go for steady, stable guys who are looking for long-term commitments.”
“Yeah, and that got you, Peter,” she says, glancing out the window of the plane. “So maybe for once you can just let your hair down and have some fun.”
“Is there any problem you don’t think can be solved with sex?”
“Not that I’ve ever encountered.”
“I don’t know what you want from me, I really don’t,” I say to my mother.
My back is to her as I stand at her small kitchen sink washing the takeout containers from the late lunch I picked up on my way here, but I can see her in the plastic-framed mirror hung above the faucet.
She’s sitting at the square kitchen table that takes up most of the floor space in her kitchen, chain-smoking cigarettes as she berates me for my life choices.
“Just want you to stop acting like you’re so high and mighty. You’re the queen of nothing”—she practically spits out the word—“and your gravy train just left the station with a new conductor.”
I’m not sure that mixed metaphor works quite as well as she wants it to, but it stings just as she’d intended.
“Peter wasn’t my gravy train, Ma, he was my fiancé. My partner. The person I was building a life with.”
“Only reason a man goes looking elsewhere is if he ain’t gettin’ what he needs at home. Like your dad. Once you were born, I couldn’t pay as much attention to him as he needed, so he went looking elsewhere.” She inhales her cigarette so hard it’s like she’s trying to drink it.
I close my eyes so she can’t see them roll back in my head, and I take a deep breath.
I was raised on this story, this line of thinking.
And when I was younger, I actually believed it.
I spent the first decade of my life certain that I was the cause of my dad leaving.
It wasn’t until I saw other mothers in healthy relationships with their spouses, raising children they loved, that I understood the problem was actually my mother.
“The twins’ dad too,” she says, referring to the man who lived with us long enough to knock my mom up with my younger sisters and be gone before they turned one. “You think servicing your man is hard when it’s just the two of you? Try it with a whiny-ass toddler and two babies.”
I don’t know which fallacy to address first. I wasn’t a toddler when my sisters were born, I was six years old.
Old enough to know the best places to hide when he started smacking my mom around, and too smart to attract attention to myself by whining.
But there’s no point in reminding her of this.
Ma remembers things how she remembers them, and only a fool tries to convince her that she’s wrong.
I turn and rest my lower back against the Formica countertop, locking eyes with her.
“The only problem with our sex life was how infrequently he was home.” That, and the man had zero sense of how the female body worked.
I literally had to teach him how to give me an orgasm, a skill he never quite mastered.
“He worked long hours and had to travel a lot for work,” I add, because apparently I feel the need to justify why I didn’t know he was cheating.
I really did think he was working all the time.
I believed him when he said he was doing it for us, so we could have a comfortable life, buy a nice house, settle down, and have kids.
Looking back, I was so naive not to suspect his lies.
“Yeah, well,” she says, stubbing the end of her cigarette into the ashtray, “I think now we know that ‘work’ was really an excuse for fucking someone else.” A look comes over her face, it’s something like empathy which would make sense if my mom wasn’t a sociopath.
Okay, maybe that’s not a clinical diagnosis.
But I can still remember sitting in Psychology 101 my freshman year of college and learning about antisocial personality disorder, or ASP, and feeling like everything finally made sense.
My mom checked all the characteristics of a sociopath: her inability to think of anyone other than herself, the way she twists and manipulates people and situations, her complete lack of empathy, how often she lies to get her own way, and how she’s never had a healthy relationship in her life—not with her friends, boyfriends, or even her children.
“Well,” I say, crossing my arms across my chest. “At least I found out before we were married.”
“You were never going to marry him,” she says, then laughs like it is the most ludicrous suggestion in the world.
Cue my internal groan, because here we go with her batshit crazy theories of curses and conspiracies.
“The Lemieux women do . . . not . . . marry. As far back as our family tree goes, there’s not a single marriage. ”