Liars and Fools (4 page)

“I know how important sailing was to you,” Joni said softly.

Everyone did that: changed the subject whenever I tried to talk about Mom. “You all want to forget about Mom, don't you? That's why Dad's selling the boat.”

“Fiona! How can you say that? Of course we don't.” Her voice cracked, and she started coughing and coughing. “Listen,” she said after she caught her breath. “No one wants to forget your mother.”

I didn't say anything. That sure wasn't how it seemed to me.

four

Dad looked up as I entered the living room. “Um, Dad?”

“Fiona. Good. I was about to come and find you.” He cleared his throat. “There's something I want to talk to you about.”

Was he going to tell me about selling
Eliza J
? I held my breath and waited.

Dad sat down in his armchair and ran his hands through his hair. He didn't have a lot of it, and he combed it over the bald spot on top of his head. Mom always used to say he should shave his head, and I had to agree. Half the time, his hair was hanging the wrong way, and it didn't cover the bald patch anyway.

He gestured for me to sit, and I perched on one arm of the couch. I wondered if he was feeling bad robin stevenson about putting the boat up for sale without even talking to me about it. “What is it?” I asked him.

He cleared his throat again and looked so miserable that I was almost tempted to tell him that I already knew. Almost. “The thing is…Well, I've been meaning to say something about this for a while. I suppose I should have brought it up sooner.” He looked at me a little desperately.

“So why didn't you?” I had to concentrate on keeping my voice steady.

“I guess I've been worried about how you'd react.” Dad leaned toward me. “Honey…”

“I already know.”

He looked relieved. “You do? You guessed?”

I opened my mouth to explain, but Dad kept talking, his words coming out in a rush. “We've been seeing each other for a couple of months, but I wasn't ready for anything too serious. I wasn't planning to get involved with anyone, but she's a wonderful woman, and I know you'll like her.”

I stared at him. “
What?
”

“I want you to meet her.” His neck was getting red and blotchy.

“You…you're saying you have a…you're dating someone?”

He nodded and frowned. “I thought you said you already knew.”

I pushed my fists against my stomach, hard, as if this would stop everything from spilling out. “No. I was thinking of something else. Not that.”

“Well.” There was a pause. “I thought we could all have dinner together one night. With her daughter. She's about your age.”

“Dinner?”

“So you can get to know her. Them. Both of them.”

There was a lump in my throat.
What about Mom
? “I don't want to get to know them,” I said out loud.

“Don't be like that, Fi.”

“Like what? I'm not being like anything.” I stood up. “I'm just not interested in meeting this…this…your…”

“Her name's Katherine.”

Katherine. I hated her already. Trying to shove her way into our lives. Trying to make Dad forget all about Mom. Images flickered through my mind. Snapshots. Mom sitting on the couch, doing a crossword puzzle and laughing at a story I was telling her. Mom standing tall at the helm of our boat, the wind whipping her long hair back. Mom's hand gripping mine as we peered over the edge of the dock, looking at—what? A fish, maybe? A sea star? I couldn't remember. “I don't want to meet her,” I said again.

Dad cleared his throat. He took off his glasses and wiped them on his shirt. “Well…I'll give you some time to get used to the idea.”

I just stared at him. Then I turned around and ran up the stairs to my bedroom.

The next morning, Dad said Joni was feeling better and I could go to her place after school as usual.

I nodded. “I have to leave early,” I told him. “I have a group project meeting before class.” It wasn't true, but I didn't even feel a twinge of guilt about lying to him.

I waved as I walked out the door, got on my bike and headed straight to the marina.

I stepped aboard
Eliza J
and walked up to the bow. When Mom and I were sailing, I liked to sit up here if I wasn't at the helm. Sometimes, when I was younger, I used to bring along a coloring book and a pack of markers, or a book to read, but most of the time I just dangled my feet over the side of the boat and listened to the sounds of the wind in the rigging and the water rushing past the hull.

I held onto the forestay and looked around the marina and out toward the sea. A small red-hulled liars and fools sailboat was making its way into the marina. Maybe a twenty-one or twenty-three footer, with a single mast, cluttered deck and an outboard engine. Lucky people, to be out sailing instead of spending the day in school.

A few months ago, I'd asked Dad if I could crew on one of the racing boats that sailed out of here every Wednesday night, all year round. But Dad had practically choked on his breakfast cereal. I didn't want to bring it up again. Joni said he couldn't stand to think about anything happening to me, but that was stupid. Sailing wasn't that dangerous, especially around here. What happened to Mom was just bad luck. Besides, if Mom had been on
Eliza J
instead of her friend's lightweight fin-keeled boat, I bet she'd have been okay. She'd always said
Eliza J
was a boat she'd trust with her life.

I still hadn't told Dad I knew about our boat being for sale. I didn't want to talk to him. I didn't even want to be around him. Or his—what? Girlfriend? He was too old for a girlfriend. I didn't know what to call her.

I was almost late again. I walked into the classroom at
8
:
45
and slipped into the seat beside Abby.

She turned to me. “You're late again.”

I looked up at the clock just as the second bell rang. “No, I'm not.”

She rolled her eyes. “Uh-huh.”

“Okay, okay. Almost late. But listen, I have to talk to you.”

Mrs. Moskin walked in, and the room fell silent.

“After class,” I mouthed.

The teacher caught my eye, cleared her throat meaningfully and launched us right into geometry. Ugh.

I flipped open my book and did my best to concentrate. I couldn't afford not to. Mrs. Moskin and I don't see eye to eye. Abby says that she and I have opposite personality types. She says I'm an ISTJ— introverted, sensing, thinking, judging—and Mrs. Moskin is an ENFP—extroverted, intuiting, feeling, perceiving. Abby wants to be a psychologist, so she's forever analyzing everyone and trying to make them take tests or fill out questionnaires. She tried to get Joni and Tom to do them once, but they just laughed, and Tom said he was RFCB: Ready For a Cold Beer.

I stared at the page and blew out a sigh. Even if I could convince Dad to keep
Eliza J
, he'd never let me sail her. When I was old enough to do what I wanted, I'd get my own boat, maybe like the little red one I saw that morning. I wouldn't mind having a boat like that. Not too big, easy to sail single-handed. liars and fools Even with the clutter on the deck, you could see that the boat had nice lines.

I doodled a picture of
Eliza J
on the inside cover of my binder.
Eliza J,
I wrote, curling the end of the
J
into a little circle like a neatly coiled dock line. No boat could ever replace
Eliza J.

At lunch, I finally got a chance to tell Abby what had happened. “Sit down,” I told her.

Abby obediently slid down to the floor, her back against her locker.

I squatted in front of her. “You're not going to believe this.”

Abby raised her eyebrows and waited.

“It's Dad,” I said. “He's seeing someone. A woman.” I waited to see how she'd respond.

She opened her eyes so wide I could see white all around her brown irises. “Really? You're not joking?”

I shook my head. “I wish.”

There was a long pause.

Abby rested her elbows on her knees and balanced her chin on her hands. “Wow. Tedium.”

“Yeah. It sucks. I can't believe it.”

She hesitated. “Though…well, maybe it'll be all right, you know? Maybe you'll like her.”

I stared at her. “I'm not going to like her, okay?”

“Aw, come on, Fi. You don't want your dad to be single forever, do you?”

I thought about that for about three seconds. “Yeah, actually, I'd be okay with that.”

She gave a half-laugh, but she was still frowning. “My dad's seeing someone. Well, you met his girlfriend, remember?”

“That's different,” I said. “Your mother isn't dead.”

Most people changed the subject when I used the D word, but Abby didn't even flinch. “Why's it different?”

“Because. It just is.”

“Fi? Are you…okay?” Abby put her hand on my arm.

“He's selling the boat,” I whispered. “Mom's boat.”

“Oh.” She winced. “That sucks. I mean, really sucks. Beyond tedium.”

I nodded and said nothing.

“I guess it sort of makes sense though. No one was using it anymore.”

“I was.”

“Yeah. Sort of. But…” Abby broke off. “Does your dad even know you still go down there? You're not allowed to, right?”

I shook my head. “No. He says it's not good for me. He says it's”—I tried to remember his word—“morbid. It's so stupid. Like he thinks I sit on the boat, getting depressed and thinking about Mom being dead.”

Abby said nothing for a moment, and I wondered if that was what she thought too. “I guess he's trying to do what he thinks is best,” she said.

I didn't know what Abby's problem was. Lately she seemed to be on everyone's side but mine.

five

After school I rode over to Joni's. Her house is on a quiet little dead-end street, halfway between my house and the marina. I locked my bike to her fence and let myself in.

Joni was in the kitchen, perched on a stool, with a mug of tea in one hand. The kitchen was the main living area in her house: a big, sunny room with pine cupboards and bookshelves, terracotta floor, shiny pots and pans hanging from big hooks on the ceiling, and a wild jungle of plants tumbling leafy green limbs across the cluttered countertops.

Joni is my mom's older sister. Fifteen years older, actually—people sometimes think she's my grandmother. She isn't one of those people who try to look young. She let her hair go gray years ago, and it's long liars and fools and curly and kind of wild. And she's quite fat. She doesn't believe in diets. She says that they make people obsess about food and get even fatter.

She looked up as I walked in. “Look at this,” she said. Her voice was low and scratchy from being sick. “I was thinking about taking a course up at the university.” She held up a glossy catalogue.

I made a face. “No way would I do school if I didn't have to.”

She ignored me. “Pottery classes,” she said, flipping pages. “And look at this—Southeast Asian literature! And here, there are courses on astronomy! Listen to this: ‘An introduction to astronomy, covering constellations, planetary motion, recent discoveries about planets, pulsars, black holes, galaxies and cosmology. The evening labs will allow students to use telescopes and to analyze data.' Now doesn't that sound fascinating?”

“I guess.”

Joni put down the catalogue and took off her reading glasses. Hot pink cat's-eye glasses. “Want to talk about it?”

I pulled a stool up to the counter beside her. “It's Dad,” I said. “He's seeing someone.”

“I know. He called me last night and told me about Katherine. He said you were upset.”

I nodded. “Understatement.”

“Is it really so bad?”

I looked away from her sympathetic half smile, glared down at the green swirls of the countertop and concentrated on not crying. “It's like he's forgetting about Mom.”

“Like I told you last night, no one's going to be forgetting your mom. Not ever.” Joni put a soft arm around my shoulders. “Do you need a snack? I made some great peanut-butter cookies.”

Joni's cookies are incredible. And I'm kind of a peanut-butter addict. “Okay.”

She winked at me, slipped off her stool and padded barefoot over to the fridge. Standing on her tiptoes, she grabbed a tin from the top of the fridge and plunked it down in front of me. She poured me a tall glass of milk and sat back down.

“Things are okay otherwise?” she asked.

I thought about
Eliza J
, and about Abby and her hesitation about being my partner for the science project. And that math test. I'd have to tell Dad
.
“Not great,” I said out loud. “Total tedium, actually.”

Joni waited. I didn't say anything. We sat in silence for a moment, munching.

After a minute, Joni opened her mouth and closed it again.

“What?” I asked.

She hesitated. “Do you want to know what I think?”

I nodded.

“I think your dad is someone who isn't good at being alone. I think he's been very lonely without Jennifer.” Joni took a second cookie out of the tin, looked at it thoughtfully and put it back again. “I have to stop eating these.”

“So maybe he should learn to be alone.”

“Maybe.” She blew her nose on a big pink handkerchief and tucked it back in her pocket. “Peter doesn't find it easy to meet people. He's not the type to go out a lot. He's not good at small talk. How did he meet this Katherine, by the way?”

“I don't know.” It hadn't occurred to me to wonder, but it was a good question. “Did you talk to him about the boat?”

I shook my head.

“You should.” Joni picked up another cookie. “Maybe just one more.”