Sex & Violence (28 page)

I mean, I know I did at the brunch and everything, but not really
in a way that was nice. I mean, I really liked hanging out with you.

All summer. It was cool and you were cool and I didn’t mean to just
leave as if we weren’t friends. That day in the bathroom was weird.

But good. Just bad timing, maybe? You’re a great person. I know
things haven’t been great for you in the past. My mom told me some
stuff that your dad told her, and I feel shitty now, about how I acted.

Probably you don’t want the whole world knowing about what happened to you last year. I’d be pissed at my mom if she told anyone stuff
like that, and with your economical tendencies, I’m sure it’s making
you feel worse. But don’t, okay? There’s always someone who will be
understanding, especially when it comes to bad shit. Really, ask my
roommate. I’ve unloaded a ton of shit on her already and she with me
too and it all just makes us stronger, right? Makes us better friends.

Better people. I hope you won’t feel weird next time I see you because
I said all this. Because I’ll be back next summer on the lake, and you
better not try your Evan Carter avoidance bullshit. My mom and I
are going to England in June for this research thing of hers, but we’ll
be back mid-July so I expect you to get drunk with me and tell me all
about your views on my shitty lame high school …

The letter went on to tell me about her joining all these clubs and crap at college and there was also some weird story about camping and meeting these wilderness people who lived in a cave and built all their own tools out of mud and sticks and then she told me to write back and included some books I should “totally” read, as she thought they’d be “right up your alley” and it was nice, but too much like having Baker here, being bossy and parental and made me miss her. I was sick of missing people.

***

My dad and I were like two grizzly bears on the same mountain. Circling, snarling, trying to stay out of each other’s way.

He acted like he was this new dad, a tough guy, someone with expectations and plans. He wanted to know where I was going, who I was going with, what we were doing, when I’d be home.

I told him mostly the truth, but I doubted he’d know what to do with the data I gave him. It was like he was just doing drills, practicing being a father.

Mostly I was with Jordan. Sometimes Jesse, when he gave me shit for being a pussy-whipped douche, but mostly Jordan. I went to her house after school; we ate lunch together; we hung out on weekends. For taking crazy pills and being in therapy, Jordan was fairly normal, though she didn’t play sports or do much beyond reading. For entertainment, she liked to go for long drives where she blasted music and drove really fast. After school, we’d get in her VW and drive out into the country. Past farm stands selling pumpkins and apples. It reminded me of hanging out with Tom—so wholesome. We’d sit under trees until the sun went down, doing homework or playing Frisbee—

she was unnaturally good at Frisbee—and sometimes making out a little, though always at a PG-13, sea turtle pace.

“We’re worse than senior citizens,” I told her one afternoon, when the weather turned and we ran to her car to get warm.

“Too cold to be outside. We might as well sit in wheelchairs and bird-watch from the sunroom.”

“Don’t criticize me; I flunked my French quiz today.” She started her car. “So, I’m
practicing self-care
,” she added, all sar-castic. Her shrink used the same kind of dorky phrases as Dr.

Penny, and so it was a little joke between us.

“Evan, please
validate and affirm my feelings
.” She peeled out of the gravel turnout and floored it. “Evan?”

“Sorry, I’m just busy
inhabiting the fear
,” I said back.

Fridays, Jordan’s mother would come home from the hospital and pour a glass of wine and make really complicated foods from scratch, like apple pies with lattice crusts or vegetable curry. She said cooking relaxed her. Jordan thought this was ridiculous, but I liked coming around on Fridays to see what Jordan’s mom would make. Sometimes I’d even help her out.

One night, after Jordan’s mom made homemade pizza in the hearth on their deck, Jordan and I sat out there on a lounge chair under a big blanket. Stuffed full, I couldn’t stop blabber-ing about how good the pizza was. Finally, Jordan just put her hand over my mouth.

“I get it, already, Evan!” she said. “You liked it.”

“I know, but that cornmeal on the crust …”

“My mother can’t hear you, you know, in case you’re trying to get in her pants with all your compliments.”

I told her to shut up.

“I mean, you probably could,” Jordan continued. “She loves you, Evan. She thinks you’re the best thing ever.”

Compared to Jake, of course, was what went unsaid. Of course I was better than Jake, the Almost-Rapey Ex-Boyfriend.

Who I didn’t enjoy discussing, though Jordan brought him up occasionally. Because she wasn’t supposed to
stuff her feelings
; she needed to
let her trauma work its way out.

“My luck with older women isn’t too bad, actually,” I said.

Jordan sat up, her face bright and shocked. “Really?” she asked, as if I’d just confessed to a murder. “How old was she?”

“I was fifteen; she was nineteen or twenty, maybe?”

Jordan was like a little kid, all excited.

“Oh my god! You’ve got to tell me everything!”

I sighed. But if I felt so unsure, why did I fucking bring it up?

“Wait, no. I’m sorry—you don’t have to tell,” she said.

“Yeah, I’d appreciate it if you’d
respect my boundaries
, Jordan.”

“I don’t know what I was thinking,” she said. “
Sexuality is a
personal matter for every individual.
”

“Thanks for
honoring my method of processing
.”

“It’s important to have
a foundation of trust when sharing
vulnerabilities
.”

For a while, we were like a machine that made psychological bullshit. Then the subject changed, and I forgot about the Cupcake Lady. Looked up at the stars and thought of how much brighter they were out on the lake. Concentrated on Jordan and her unidentifiable-but-good girl smell and how lazy and comfortable it was to sit under a blanket with a full stomach and nothing to do, nowhere to go.

But I wanted to tell her. There was something nice about telling a girl shitty things about yourself and having her laugh and ask you little questions, instead of being quiet, like I usually was. It made me feel like things in my life weren’t just shitty.

They were just stories, things that had happened. A woman in a cupcake shop. Mandy and the movie theater. Stacy and the rash cream. Collette during chapel. Lana and the Dumpster. Baker and the chicken stir-fry. Just stories.

I never really thought about holidays before. Thanksgiving was hit or miss. Christmas we had presents, of course. Both times, though, for food, my father would hit up an upscale grocery store and pay for turkey or spiral-cut ham and all the sides. Cub Foods even offered meals like this, and the people who ordered that shit were usually about ninety-nine years old and one minute from death. The whole concept depressed me so I decided to cook for Thanksgiving.

Our kitchen was nowhere as nice as Jordan’s mom’s, but it was big enough. I thought I’d make turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, and some pie. Fridays at Jordan’s had busted my conception of pie making as being difficult. I decided to do a pecan pie, since the gooshiness of fruit seemed too messy.

Thanksgiving week, I was looking online through a million recipes and turkey-roasting methods when Tom messaged me.

Kelly = my Everything Girl.

I messaged him back:

Nice.

To which he replied:

I know, it’s good. But she thinks she’s going to hell. And take my
advice. Don’t go to the same college as your girlfriend. Baker had it
right with the non-monogramy thing. There’s a million hot chicks
here, and they all offer Everything right away. I’m dying here.

On Thanksgiving, I made two boxes of instant mashed potatoes (give me a break; I made pie crust) and we didn’t have a serving bowl that fit all of it. I was considering other uses for mashed potatoes—could we spackle the walls? brick up a chimney?—when my dad came downstairs and told me that my Uncle Soren was on his way.

“What? Now? How do you know?”

“Because he just called me from the road,” he said, looking somewhat happy but also nervous. “He’s coming for Thanksgiving.”

I nodded. My father nodded back. We were hell on the nonverbal communication, he and I.

“Looks like you’ve made enough food,” he said, trying to sound jolly. “When’s the turkey going to be done?”

“In a couple hours.”

“I’m running to the liquor store for beer,” he said. “If I can find one that’s open. You need anything?”

“No,” I said. He got his keys and left. I stood in the kitchen without moving for a minute. Soren? Here? Was this first Thanksgiving going to be a drunken throw-down, where my uncle would finally ream out my dad for being a wife-stealing bastard? Maybe I could convince everyone to get along, Pil-grims and Indians-style, just until we could choke down all this food I’d been freaking about making all day.

The nice thing about cooking is that you’ve got to keep moving. Stuff’s heating up and other stuff needs to be started and you’ve got to set the table and make sure the pie won’t come out burnt—Jordan’s mom had coached me well on pie crust—

and so I just kept working through my list of recipes like a ro-bot. Hoping my uncle wouldn’t think I was a pantywaist for fussing over it all. Maybe he’d just ignore me while he and my dad would have their big brother-to-brother moment.

I was half done with the stuffing when there was a knock on the door. I went to get it, flour all over my T-shirt, still in my bare feet—I’d been cooking since I’d woken up—and there was a man who looked just like me, so it had to be Soren. My uncle. Standing in the doorframe with a giant duffle on his shoulder, looking totally normal.

Looking just like me. With shorter hair, though, like he buzzed it every morning. I was sort of surprised. I’d imagined him some wilderness guy, bearded and scraggly. But then he was a marine, so I supposed he’d been trained to be tidy. Soren was as tall as me, and I could see under his jacket that he wasn’t unsubstantial in the muscles department. Nothing like my dad, who was shorter than me and had a round little belly going.

“Evan,” he said. “You’ve grown a bit.”

“My dad’s at the liquor store,” I said. Like he was some door-to-door salesman, and I’d been given strict instructions not to let anyone in.

“Good, I hope he finds one that’s open,” he said. “I could use a drink.”

Soren kind of shoved his way in and set his duffle on the floor and I just stood there, until he said he needed to use the bathroom. I went back into the kitchen and privately freaked out. Wished I could call Jordan. I’d told her about my Uncle Soren, but she was at her grandmother’s.

“Adrian said you’re quite the cook,” Soren said, startling me. He nodded toward the disaster of food.

“You want a glass of water?”

“I can get it,” he said.

“You know, your grandma was a cook too,” he said, digging in the cupboard for a glass while I just kept standing there. He probably thought I’d been dropped on the head as a child.

“Yeah, I heard that.”

“Well, it smells great,” he said. “Been on the road for a while, and nothing but greasy gas station food. Awful stuff. It’s been a while since I had a real meal.”

“I didn’t know you were coming to see us.”

Soren shook his head and drank his water. It was the most manly method of drinking water I’d ever seen. I could even see the muscles in his neck working.

“Typical Adrian,” he said. “Avoiding anything upsetting. I hope you’ve not inherited that from him.”

My face felt hot, because, of course I had. I wondered now if my dad’s trip to the liquor store was like those stories of fathers going out for a loaf of bread and never coming back. And I would have to live with Soren, the Scary Former Marine.

Soren sat at the counter across from the mess of food prep.

Slowly, I went back to work, and he started talking. He’d been in Montana, with a buddy of his from the marines, helping build a house. Had meant to go back to California, where he lived, but thought some time at the lake was in order.

My hands busy, I relaxed a little, and Soren asked me a bunch of questions. Did I like Pearl Lake? Did I fish? Did I like the little balcony on the second floor? He and my dad sneaked out of there sometimes, down the trellis. The trellis was gone now, he said, like he was sad about it.

“No, but I found enough trouble without it,” I said. “It was kind of a crazy summer.”

“Life on the lake is different, no doubt about it,” he said.

***

My dad came back and he and Soren shook hands and I panicked, but then the worries of setting the table and getting all the food set out took over and there was no time for confronta-tion, for plates smashing or angry words. The three of us sat down and just shoveled it in. I realized I was starving. Hadn’t even had breakfast in my quest to get everything made. My dad talked about his work a little, kept shuffling beers from the fridge to all three of us. I tried not to guzzle mine, but when I saw how quick Soren and my dad knocked theirs back, I figured what the hell. Kept up with them, then. We ate almost every bit of the mashed potatoes and all of the stuffing. The turkey sat in the middle of the table, and we just picked off it like vultures.

Soren belched. My dad stretched.

“Good food, Evan,” Dad said. “I’m impressed.”

I ducked my head. “Better than takeout, I guess.”

“Much better,” Soren agreed.

We slumped the dirty dishes in the sink. My dad made coffee and Soren asked him if he had any whiskey and they both kind of smiled at each other and I watched them dose their mugs with it. I hadn’t had whiskey in coffee since The Cupcake Lady of Tacoma, and the idea made my stomach turn.