The Art of Adapting (16 page)

“Eats? You think I starve them?” Up on his toes, back on his heels, up on his toes, back on his heels. He was making Lana seasick.

“She seems too distracted to sit down and eat a proper meal these days,” Lana said. “She looks thin to me.”

Right on cue Abby came trotting down the stairs, light as a butterfly, and into her father's arms.

“She's fine. More grown-up each time I see her,” Graham said. Abby smiled, gave Lana a halfhearted wave, and practically skipped toward his car. Byron came tromping toward the door with much more vigor.

“History,” Lana reminded him.

“Sucks,” he finished.

“Enjoy the rave,” Graham said, heading out.

Moments later Mitch's white SUV pulled up, surfboard still strapped to the roof rack. “Are you waiting for me at the door?” Mitch asked, grinning as he stepped out of his car, unfolding his lanky body like a model in a photo shoot.

“Just said goodbye to my kids, off to their dad's house for the night.” She stepped aside and Mitch came in, taking a quick glance around the half-empty living room. She needed to rearrange the furniture to cover for the pieces Graham had taken: his recliner,
one end table, the coffee table. There was a Graham-void in the room.

“How old are they?” Mitch asked. Lana wasn't sure he knew how much older she was. But he would when he heard she had teenagers.

“Fourteen and fifteen. God help me,” she said with a laugh.

Mitch looked her over, dashing as ever in dark jeans and thin blue V-neck sweater, black shoes so shiny Lana wondered if they were new.

“Oh,” Mitch said. “So you were a child bride.” He shook his head. “No wonder it didn't work out.”

Lana laughed and some of her nervous energy dissipated. Matt peeked out at them. Lana introduced Mitch to Matt, and they shared a stilted greeting before Matt retreated. As she climbed into Mitch's SUV, something crunched under her feet. She hoped it was papers and not discarded food. The SUV was pretty messy inside, the backseat full of gear and clothes for Mitch's various hobbies. There was sand everywhere, and the smell of the ocean filled the car. Lana struggled between the desire to clean it up and envy for all the freedom the mess represented.

Mitch's restaurant choice was a noisy, artsy place in the Gaslamp Quarter, brimming with business types and dressed-up twenty-somethings gearing up for a night on the town. Lana wondered if he'd chosen the trendy, upscale place to impress her, but as they made their way to the table, it seemed half the young people at the bar knew Mitch. He briefly greeted them, but didn't introduce Lana.

“Are you a regular?” Lana asked as he pulled out her seat for her, curious to see this little glimpse into Mitch's life outside of school.

“No,” Mitch said. “Not really.” Lana waited for him to explain. He offered nothing else but his winning smile. They ordered and launched into work talk: school policy changes, the two teachers quitting, test scores, and funding shifts. It felt like any Monday meeting at the school.

“Where did we leave off the other day?” Lana asked, hoping for more meaningful conversation.

“Childhood?” Mitch asked. “Happy or not?”

“Mostly happy. Dad was a lawyer and Mom was head of the PTA. I had three siblings, so it was a lively house. My brother Matt came along and sort of tipped the balance. You know, having a sibling with Asperger's is a unique challenge. And then my brother Stephen was diagnosed with leukemia and everything changed. He went through several rounds of treatment, but it was no use. I was eleven when he died. Stephen was only sixteen. It was like we weren't really a family anymore after that. It became each of us for ourselves.” Lana set her wineglass down and picked up her water. She'd overshot her mark on the deep stuff. “Sorry. Two glasses of wine and I lose my filter.”

Mitch smiled. “No worries. I'm not much for small talk. Sounds like a lot to handle. Is that when your caretaker streak kicked in?”

“Am I a caretaker?” Lana asked. She wanted to disagree, but he was probably right.

“Two kids and an autistic brother? You have your hands full.”

“Full in a good way,” she said. “Matt's got his quirks, but he's also brilliant, gentle, funny. It can be hard to get close to someone with Asperger's. We're getting a second chance to bridge that gap.”

Mitch smiled, held up his hands. “I like how protective you are of him.”

“I've always been protective of him,” she said. “Someone had to be. My family was gutted by losing Stephen. Mom went from Mary Poppins to a robot overnight. Dad lost his humor, threw himself into work. My older sister kept busy chasing boys and emulating the popular girls at school. Matt and I were the two left behind. Matt was brilliant, but awkward. He was teased and bullied.”

“And who did you become?”

“The good girl. Perfect to a fault. A sealed-up box of tightly contained emotion. Unless someone hurt Matt. Matt had this one tormentor, Tommy. He was big, older. Relentless. I hit him in the face with a metal can of paste and nearly broke his nose. He never teased Matt again.”

“I'll be sure not to piss you off,” Mitch joked.

“A good plan,” Lana said, smiling. What had happened to that fighter in her? Was she gone forever, or just dormant, resting, waiting? “What about your childhood?” she asked.

Mitch took a sip of wine and smiled at her. “Good enough. Loving mother. Nice sister. My parents divorced when I was ten, and I didn't see my father for fifteen years. We're back in touch now, but it's not really a father-son relationship.” He shrugged, resumed eating. Lana waited for more, but he seemed to be done sharing. “So are you and your ex on fairly good terms?” Mitch asked.

“We're . . . friendly, but not friends.” She wasn't sure if that was true, but it sounded good.

“You think you might get back together?” Mitch asked. Lana was surprised by the directness of the question. It wasn't a typical date question. But maybe it wasn't a date.

“No, I don't think so,” she told Mitch.

Mitch was watching her closely. “But you haven't filed for divorce.”

“No, we haven't. We hand kids back and forth, he gives me some money every month, but aside from that we hardly even talk anymore. He's dating someone, busy enjoying his new quieter, responsibility-free life, and I'm holding the rest of the family together. I guess we just haven't gotten around to it yet.”

“But you think you will? Divorce?”

“Definitely,” she said. She switched back to drinking her wine. Mitch ate a few more bites. Lana's plate was empty, though she had no memory of consuming her food.

“What was the biggest issue?” he asked.

She shrugged. “It starts with money battles and next thing you know you're fighting for ground on every front. He's a CPA, so he insisted on being in charge of our finances. I've been self-supporting since I was seventeen and I'm used to living on a tight budget, saving as much as I can for those unexpected bills. Every suggestion I gave on how to cut back expenses was like an insult to him. Every dollar he wasted was like an insult to me. Extrapolate that out to raising kids, home repairs, family vacations, family crises, the finer
things he needed as rewards, my fear of being broke, saving for college . . .”

“So he's the controlling type,” Mitch said.

It wasn't a word Lana would've used back when they were together, but now that she was the one in control of everything, she realized how rarely she'd been allowed to be the authority on anything. “Maybe,” she said. “Maybe we're just both too stubborn. Too much will and too little compromise.”

“You're hardly what I'd call stubborn,” Mitch said. Lana smiled, not sure if it was a compliment or criticism.

After dinner they strolled around downtown. The dry Santa Ana winds kicked up, gusting dust, debris, and static electricity. The abrasive breeze drove them back indoors. They chose a café where a young couple with long hair, hippie-throwback clothes, and wooden bead jewelry had set up a makeshift stage in the corner. The young man played guitar and the girl played a clawhammer banjo and they sang sweet mountain songs about lost love. The music took Lana back to her childhood, when her southern-born grandfather would play similar music, but one glance and she could see it did nothing for Mitch.

“Not your style of music?” she asked.

He shook his head. “The songs are fine. But there's something about these young wannabe hippies, in their hemp clothing and Birkenstocks, singing sad songs while Mom and Dad pay their way through college. It's like a façade they wear, not who they are. Ask them about politics and they know nothing. Ask what they're doing for the environment and they'll say they recycle. I'd rather they skip the dress-up and find some meaning in their lives.”

“Wow,” Lana said. “You'd probably think my kids are the most self-centered people on the planet.”

Mitch looked up in surprise. “I'm sure your kids are great. How can they not be? They're your kids.”

Lana smiled and accepted the compliment, but felt less attracted to him now that she'd seen beneath the cool, gorgeous surface. He wasn't lacking in depth, but maybe in experience. Lofty idealism was great for an early-thirties bachelor, but for a mother
in her forties it just seemed like a way of making the world harder to accept than it had to be.

Mitch sipped his loose-leaf tea, set his white porcelain cup down, and sighed. “She also looks a bit”—he held up his index finger and thumb about an inch apart—“like my ex-girlfriend. Maybe that's what I'm annoyed about.”

Lana looked over at the girl, lanky and thin with long light hair and dark almond-shaped eyes, her narrow face almost gaunt. She could not have been more opposite from Lana.

“I'll loathe her with you, then,” Lana said. She held up her mug, and after a brief moment of narrowing his eyes at the singer, Mitch smiled and clinked his cup to hers. It was the most interesting part of the evening, this glimpse into Mitch's private life, the hint of untidy emotions.

Matt emerged from his room and into the blinding morning light as soon as the garage door's squeaking, grinding, and whole-house vibrating had ceased, signaling the house was now empty. Lana had the loudest garage door he'd ever heard. There must be something loose in it, he decided, because there was no way it was that loud on purpose. After breakfast he'd look it up online, find her garage door opener brand, and figure out how to fix it himself. Matt liked repairing things, especially when taking them apart and putting them back together meant they'd be quieter.

The whole house was quiet, which was exactly what Matt wanted. Except that when he was alone in the house all day, that's when he missed the drinking and the pills most. He needed to keep his mind busy all day and at night to stop thinking about it. He had programming to do for Bill, but he needed more. He needed to think about something even while he was coding. Because Matt's mind was fast-processing. That's what his doctor had told him, and he liked that phrase, because that's exactly how it felt in Matt's mind. Fast. Too fast, sometimes. He needed layers of thoughts to be going at all times. Or one really good topic to focus on, to keep all other thoughts away.

He'd promised both Lana and Nick Parker that he'd never see
Spike again. He wanted to keep that promise, not so much because Nick had been so angry, but because Lana had been so sad. She'd cried when she told him how worried she'd been. He felt her sadness in his chest. It had filled Matt's whole body until he almost cried, too. Matt hated crying. His tears or anyone else's. It was too much for him. It made him want to act out and drive the feeling away with something bigger and more physical. So he needed to never make Lana cry again.

He didn't care so much about how Nick felt. He didn't like to make people angry, but he heard Lana telling Nick to let it go, that it was a family issue and he wasn't family. That made Matt feel better. Lana had sounded mad at Nick as she said it. Matt didn't like to be too close to angry people, because anger got into his chest just like sadness did, but it was easier to drive the anger back out again. The sadness took hold much longer and stronger.

Matt had met Lana's friend Mitch, too. They'd gone out on a date. Mitch hadn't said much to Matt, and Matt liked that about him. He liked Mitch better than Nick, so if Lana was interviewing potential boyfriends, Matt wanted to vote for the nicer one. He told Lana that he liked Mitch better than Nick. He didn't really care about learning to hit a baseball that much. He liked Mitch's quiet over Nick's anger.

Lana had laughed and said, “At this point, I'm not sure what the hell I'm doing. They're both too perfect and too flawed all rolled into one.”

Matt had no idea what that meant, but he knew people made contradictory statements on purpose to show when they were conflicted. And he knew how it felt to be conflicted. Matt was conflicted most of the time.

Matt kept his curtains closed and his room dark, but the rest of Lana's house was startlingly sunny. And dusty. It seemed like Lana was cleaning all the time, but mostly it was just messes the kids left everywhere: trails of clothes and papers and packages for things and empty plates and cups. She swept and vacuumed every weekend, but she didn't dust surfaces or scrub hidden corners very often.

Matt kept his room organized, but he wasn't much better about the cleaning. He hadn't dusted or vacuumed in there since moving in, and his dirty clothes and trash kept getting mixed up in piles on the floor and under the bed and desk. But his desk and shelves were neat. Everything on his desk and shelves was there for a reason, and the order mattered. Matt couldn't explain it to anyone else, why the hardback and paperback books had to be on separate shelves, why the hardbacks were sorted by size, from biggest to smallest, while the paperbacks were in alphabetical order by author. Why his journals had to be either blue or green. Why they had to be stacked on the right rear corner of his desk and nowhere else, blue journals on top and green ones on the bottom of the stack. But these organizational details gave Matt a sense of calm that other people's systems just didn't. He was glad that Lana let him set up his room the way he needed, and that she never came in and cleaned it. But he really did need to dust in there at some point. Now that he was out in the sun, he could see how dusty the whole house was. It made his lungs itch just thinking about it. Matt paused to watch a smattering of dust dance through a stream of light. He swept his hand through the beam and watched the dust scatter like silt in a stirred pond.