Chapter 8
While Jay was folding laundry on FaceTime, I propped my phone against my MacBook screen and pulled up my so-called novel.
It had begun as a retelling of my parents’ relationship.
Always, the stories they shared about themselves were handed over lifelessly, a machine counting money and telling you the amount.
I was attempting an act of resurrection.
But what I’d written so far felt like a random person telling you how their parents met.
A notification dropped down from my phone. T*ump had said immigrants in some Ohio town were eating cats and dogs. Now people wanted to blow the town up. Jay must’ve gotten the same alert because he said, “I’m glad we get to live in the dumbest timeline together.”
“That’s actually so sweet,” I said.
My mom walked through my door in her bathrobe. “When’s the last time you changed those sheets?” She came over, flicking crumbs off my bedspread. “You’re gonna ruin your back like that.”
I was slouched against my headboard, my laptop balancing on my stomach. “I’m writing.”
She smiled with the perfect straight teeth she decided not to give me, cursing me instead with my father’s gap. “Let’s watch our show.”
“I’m busy.”
“With what?”
“Writing!” I held up my phone. “And talking to Jay.”
“I mean, we’re not really talking. Hi, Mrs. Dorinda.”
“Hi, Jay.” Looking at me, she said, “I’ll get the popcorn.”
The Bachelor was reaching new heights with one woman, but ready to take a leap of faith with another.
I thought about how the show’s drama, its stakes, were rooted in the wrenching experience of having to choose between people you cared about.
After sending several women home that night, Troy cried in the helicopter above a snowy mountain.
My dad had left the night before after another fight. I knew I’d get in trouble for it, but I asked, “Why does he always get to leave?”
My mom grabbed a fistful of popcorn. “I left once. When you were a baby.”
I’d only ever seen my dad’s car shrinking down the street, my mom tearing things apart at the kitchen table.
“Remember the garden we used to have out front? You might’ve been too young to remember. I used to keep a small garden. Sunflowers, wild indigo, goldenrods.”
This sounded like an incantation. I didn’t remember.
“You were two,” she added. “One night he had too much to drink and drove right over my flowers. I remember running out and seeing the dirt ripped up from the ground, my sunflowers in halves. We went to stay with grandma.”
“What happened after that?”
“He enrolled in a program and picked us up.”
She made it sound so easy. “Here we are twenty years later, still waiting for that nigga.”
She pinched my arm with her nails. “Don’t call your father a nigga. Only I can call him that.”
The lock to the front door unlatched. My dad wandered in looking lost. I couldn’t see his eyes beneath the lip of his cap.
His tie askew, button-down creased from the day.
He flicked his cap off and tossed it on the hallway side table.
This was the man my mom was always waiting for, I thought, this man with mustard in his eyebrow.
How did you even get mustard in your eyebrow?
He must’ve stopped at Booeymonger. Of course he didn’t ask us if we wanted anything.
At least he was working again. Last month, he got a job at the National Archives.
It seemed to be going all right, not that we talked about it, not that we talked about anything.
My mom was thrilled that he’d gotten a government job, like her.
That was the peak of success in her mind, working for the government.
She was entering her twentieth year at HUD.
I didn’t see how she stomached it, working at the same dreary place for that long.
They made her clock in and out for fifteen-minute breaks like a shitty service job.
She was proud of this—every other morning putting on patent leather pumps, a pencil skirt, pearl earrings, just to be chained to a desk.
Walking into the living room, he said, “Turn on CNN.”
Sometimes he blurted things. As a person who spent half their twenties in a pandemic, I understood having impoverished social skills.
My mom’s mouth twitched. “You come turn it on.”
When he bent over to grab the remote, she licked her thumb and swiped the mustard from his brow like he was a little boy. Erin Burnett appeared on TV with her intense blue eyes, relaying with her signature frown that over forty thousand Gazans had been slaughtered since the war began.
I left to go stand in the kitchen. Staring out into the dark yard, I was as still as a startled deer trapped in the bright flare of car headlights.
That night, Rah pulled up in his truck, the paint flaking off the door, straight from his shift.
I told him to drive around the corner in case my parents opened the curtains.
There was no way to explain to them why I was with another man.
“Nonmonogamy” was not a term in their lexicon; once, a host on The View said “throuple” and my mom thought it meant a performer who could act, sing, and dance.
Rah was filthy, reeking of dishwater. I crawled to the back seat, feral, wide awake. Facing the window, I braced my hand against the cool glass while he hungrily took me from behind.
Beneath me, my phone buzzed: an article about coping with the news cycle from Tristan.
My orgasm came as a shock, like someone bursting through a door in the basement of my body. I cried out the wrong name. It sounded like “trash can.” Feeling raw and observed, I dressed quickly.
Rah lit a cigarette and smoked out the window. “Who the fuck is trash can?”
I reached out my hand. “Give me a hit.”
“Nah.”
“Why not?”
He passed me an amused look. “You a good girl.”
I took the cigarette and stuck it in my mouth. I regretted it immediately, coughing into my elbow. My parents would have killed him, then me, then themselves, then come back to life and killed me again if they caught us.
“Leigh thinks you’re trouble,” I said.
“What you think?”
“What do I think?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know. We do this and then you’re gone.”
He got out and returned to the driver’s seat. I felt like a child alone in the back.
“You working tomorrow?”
“Yeah.”
“Bet.” He handed me the used condom. “Could you throw this out?”
I said, “Sure,” and got out of the car. I watched his truck struggle up the street, the condom dripping into my hand.