Casebook (3 page)

One Sunday, I saw my dad pacing on the porch and climbed up to the roof. “I could get away for a long weekend maybe,” I heard him say. There was no one else there. He was on the telephone. “Not a month. She wouldn’t want to either. The last thing she’d want is a beach with me! When I get a night off, she doesn’t elect to go out. She has me take the kids so she can work. And I get that. I really do.”

A sweet dark twirl of air floated up to me. Thinking he was alone, my father had lit a cigar. He didn’t suspect I was above him. We weren’t supposed to know that he smoked. My mother had found some statistic that children of parents who smoked were more likely to smoke themselves. The Mims loved a good statistic.

That night, I stood outside their door. They were talking about the new chairman of the math department, who’d come from MIT after her husband died. “I worry about her,” my father said. “She’s just not attractive enough.” Then he burped. “Great meal.”

I burst in and said I needed a tuck. She followed me to my room and put her hand on my forehead. I loved that. Her hand was always cool. It erased my thoughts and let me fall asleep.

Then, it happened: the permanent thing.

When they told me, my lungs went out of sync. I lost the rhythm of breathing. I had to remember,
Suck in, exhale
, the hunger for oxygen no longer automatic.

My father went to the sink to get me a glass of water.

My mother told me to breathe.

“Drink,” my father said.

“I never thought you two” was all I could whisper, my face in his shoulder.

5 • Guessing Who Left

My father moved out a month after 9/11. Even that didn’t keep him home.

In school, we drew pictures of the Twin Towers to send to faraway New York City firemen, and during Life Skills, when the rock came to me in the circle, I said my parents were separating and that made me sad.

My mom got up early now. She fixed our lunches, the same as before, but she moved stiff and fast, like a general, dragging us up.

I taught the Boops to say
Jawohl
. And
Heil Hitler
.

“Who do you think left?” Hector asked.

I really didn’t know. “They said they decided together.”

It was the worst thing that ever happened to me, after the Boops
being born. Even with all my sleuthing, I’d never suspected this. A day in October my mother sat at the kitchen table staring at an index card where she’d penciled the numbers of our friends’ moms. I watched her make herself dial. I learned from the conversation she had with Sare later that Simon’s mom had asked,
Did you guys ever think of doing some counseling?

“Yeah, right,” Sare said. “You ever think of that?”

They laughed frighteningly. So my parents had gone to counseling. I hadn’t known.

But Hector’s mom, Kat, had said, “I’m about six weeks behind you.”

I counted. Six weeks passed, then seven, then eight. Nothing happened. Hector didn’t know his luck. I felt bad, but I wanted it to happen to him, too. I thought it would make us better friends.

6 • How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?

My father told me we were going to see
The Sound of Music
as a family.

We’d never done anything
as a family
before. “Do I have to?” I said.

They made me. Hector went, too, with the aunt who paid his school fees.

“My family,” I said to him at Intermission.

He shrugged. “My mom says your parents get along because it
wasn’t
about sex. No one had an affair.” Meaning, I supposed, that sex was the dangerous element. I acted as if I’d already known that. “Simon’s mom says you have the best divorce.”

“We’re not actually divorced. We’re here
as a family
, remember? My dad’s gunning for an A in Separation.”

When he picked us up Saturday mornings, he called ahead from the car to say,
Put Emma in the black headband
. He still cared about our hair. He usually ran late so we had to wait on the porch
with our hair combed and then run down to his car. My mom came out in socks. He’d open the passenger window and hand her something—a cup with a straw, takeout containers, crumpled napkins—and say,
Could you throw this out?

She took it. And we beheld our handsome dad, the distant ocean unrolling behind his profile, framed by the window of his new, heavy car.

“Your dad moved out,” Hector said. “Maybe
he’s
the culprit.”

My dad
would
be the one to fall in love. He walked into walls, pratfalling. He said himself he was the stupider of the two. He didn’t say he was also the better-looking one. Neither of my parents was especially romantic. I remembered the way they said
in love
, with spin, as if it were pathetic or a joke. My mom saw love as a trap to catch females. “You don’t really believe in that romance stuff, do you?” I’d asked her once, after a Disney princess movie with the Boops.

“I think it’s more or less stuff and nonsense,” she’d admitted.

Maybe my dad had left her for the Dutch.

Hector looked at me with pity.

You don’t even know how close you came
, I thought.

His aunt walked over, balancing two supersize Cokes and a popcorn. His aunt was the age of our moms, but she wore boots and scarves because her boyfriend was married and she didn’t have kids to spend money on.

Boop One had moved three rows down to sit with girls she knew from school.

“I want to go home,” Boop Two whispered. “I’m homely.”

“Lonely, you mean. You’re lonely. Not homely.”

“I just want to go home.”

“Me, too. But we can’t.”

My mom waved to the Bennetts on the other side of the aisle. Sare had draped her leg over the movie-chair arm, onto Dale, as if to prove separation wasn’t contagious.

Out on the sidewalk, we met Holland for the first time, straining
at the leash of an enormous poodle. She was tall and Brentwood-looking.

I asked her if she was Dutch.

She said, “No, just American,” and looked as if she had no idea why I’d asked.

I couldn’t have been the first person to ask that. More like the eighty-third.

7 • A Kind of Suspense

For a long time I woke up abruptly. At attention. I lived in a kind of suspense. We come into the world whole, all of us, but we don’t know that, don’t know that life will be taking large chunks out of us, forever.

Over a year after she said she would, Hector’s mom moved out of their house, to a cottage in Topanga. A week later their dog ran away. Hector and I stapled up signs with Rebel’s picture and the offer of a fifty-dollar reward.

I told Hector, “The worst part is finding out. After that, they buy you things. I have to say, this year hasn’t been as bad as I thought.” Mondays and Tuesdays Malc, my dad’s assistant, picked us up after school, Green Day blasting in his Honda. We stopped for takeout from Jerry’s Deli. My dad ordered us the same thing every night: chicken, broccoli, and baked fries. He made it home in time to eat with us, something my mom had tried to get him to do, but she never succeeded. A sense of tragedy flitted over his face as he surveyed the takeout boxes and plastic forks, as if we were enduring hardship together. But we
preferred
this food. Every Monday and Tuesday, we ate layer cake. When we used to have Sunday-night dinners in our house, our mom had said,
Napkins on laps
, and he’d put his on top of his head to make us laugh. But now he remembered each of the dishes she cooked and spoke of them solemnly. When he called us there to say good night, he asked
what we’d had for dinner.
With the shrimp?
he’d say, or
That’s the salad with the beans in it?

Before, my parents had fought about which one of them would
have to
go to the class picnic, who’d show up for the teacher conference, back-to-school night, blah blah blah. Now they still fought, but over who would
get to
. Had to or get to, the Mims always did. Since the separation, she seemed in constant motion. Like Avis, the second-biggest car-rental company, she tried harder.

Sometimes, I woke up at night and heard her crying.

“The worst is when they tell you,” I said again to Hector. I didn’t like remembering that. Everything had gone granular. Then, for months after, I kept wondering when the real horror would begin. In the middle of the night, I’d jolt and think, Here it is. But most days, it was as if we’d gotten another life but an okay one.

I guess I’d been waiting to tell somebody all this.

“But it’s not like my parents are separating or anything,” Hector said. “She just found a house in Topanga for the summer.”

8 • We Try Harder

Hector and Jules never knew where they’d sleep. Often, they ended up one place and a book or a sweater, in the case of Jules, who lived for her clothes, would be in the other. We were separated, but at least we had a schedule. The Audreys decided day-by-day. Hector’s dad, Philip, stayed in the bungalow where they all used to live, with the one bathroom that now never seemed clean. Hector slept over at my house most Friday nights. We never went there because he shared a room with his sister.

The Mims bought a pizza stone. As soon as she walked in the door those June Fridays, she changed into sweats, made a fire, mixed dough, and set it to rise. I liked seeing fire while it was still light out. Hector and I sluffed to my room, hauling backpacks.

This was all part of the Mims’s We Try Harder campaign. She
made us regular pizzas, but for herself and Boop Two, she sliced pears and spooned on wet cheese and finished with a kind of bitter lettuce. Marge Cottle, the math department chair, brought over poisonous-looking mushrooms.

“Malted barley in the crust,” the Mims said, biting down. She loved her own cooking.

“Your house smells like excitement,” Hector said to us.

9 • How We Felt

“So I’m dating someone,” she said, in the car. “How do you feel about that?”

Sare must’ve told her to ask that. The Mims looked at me and swerved. She was never a great driver.

“Watch the road, please.”

The year before, Sare had made her assistant a partner in her real estate business, and now she drove twice a week to classes for her MSW. Since she’d started, there’d been lots of asking how we felt. Not that how we felt made any difference.

“Seriously? I guess I’m kind of relieved.”

My dad had had Holland awhile already. I was okay with her. I just didn’t want her snively runt moving into my room. I liked my room at my dad’s. It felt like a tree house, with a glass wall and a loft bed built in by a famous architect in 1967. So the Mims had met someone now. Her hands stayed on the steering wheel; she faced forward. I hadn’t noticed when she’d stopped crying at night. I’d thought maybe I’d just stopped waking up.

“Who is he?”

“Eli Lee,” she said, as if that were a name I was supposed to know. And I did, kind of. Someone named Eli called. Was he the dork guy? I wondered but couldn’t ask because I’d never called him that to her face.

“Eli. Yeah,” I said. “So, is he going to start coming over and stuff?”

“Well, yes,” she said. “But he lives in Washington, D.C.”

I remembered Sare asking once,
What happened to that guy you run with?
, and the Mims saying they didn’t live here. I pictured a wife with her hair parted in the center and braids on each side, carrying a potato baby. What did he do with her?

The Mims seemed about a hundred percent looser. She was probably dying to call Sare to tell her I felt relieved. But even so, we didn’t see the guy for months. Still, he called, and I liked yelling through the house, It’s
hi-im
!
Eli!

I really was relieved. The nights we went to our dad’s in the canyon, I thought, she had someone to talk to.

10 • Behind a Door

Eli Lee finally walked up our steps on an October night, and he
was
the dork guy! I’d thought he was, but his really being who I’d guessed still shocked me. I was used to being told I had a big imagination. Not in a nice way. He stood no taller than my dad and he had weird hair that stuck up on top like an artichoke gone to flower. Boop One asked to touch it. “Was it always like that?” she asked. “When you were little?”

“It used to be just awful,” he said. “It grew out like a mushroom. A stylist in DC developed this cut.” His head was shaved on the sides. He wore a white button-down shirt, khakis, Converse low-tops, and no socks, even though it was winter cold. He had ears I kind of wanted to pull.

Walking to the restaurant, he put his hand on my mom’s back. That seemed wrong. She’s ours not yours, I thought.

Then, in the restaurant, my mom ordered a glass of wine, and he ordered a Coke. When my mom and dad ordered wine, they both did.

He turned to me. “So who do you think …” He motioned with his hands; he seemed to have trouble getting the question out. He stammered, “What, what bands do you listen to?”

“Green Day,” I said. “Coldplay.” I hadn’t meant to rhyme. I blamed his stammer. I hated speech impediments. Twice a week, Boop Two got driven to speech therapy, and I had to go along and sit for an hour in a room full of dirty toys.

Eli signaled the waiter. “Could we please have red pepper flakes?”

My mom liked hot pepper on pizza. But before, she’d always asked for it herself. An old couple stopped at our booth then, and my mom introduced us. “We’ve noticed them,” she said, after they left.
We’ve?

“Why don’t I know them?” I asked, thinking, If
he
does.

“See the way she’s looking at him, folding her hands?”

“Yeah,” I said. “So?”

“They seem eager to talk to each other. As if they’re expecting … fun.”

“They have a nice …” Eli flailed, his hand flapping. “A nice …” He never finished that sentence. He seemed to have trouble with sentences.

Watching old people: I didn’t like that. And I hoped she didn’t get all
we
-ish with Eli.
Ask for your own pepper flakes
, I felt like saying.