“I know, I know, except there’s one problem with that: mayonnaise is disgusting.” Brooklyn scrunched his nose up.
“Right. Of course.” She chuckled and leaned up on her toes to kiss his cheek.
“Nice to see you again, Natalie.” She turned to me and gave me a white-toothed smile that shone against her naturally tan skin. I felt like I was looking at Stella thirty years into the future, with her high cheekbones and lightly freckled nose.
“You too,” I replied as I slid back onto my same stool at the kitchen island.
“Anyway, I have to talk to you.” Brooklyn dropped a plate with half a sandwich on it in front of me but kept his eyes on his mother.
“If this is about that trip with Alec to Japan again, I already told you it’s not happening.” Brooklyn’s mother brushed him off as she continued putting fruit away in the fridge.
“What? No, he’s not even going anymore.” Brooklyn crossed his arms over his chest. “Earlier today, I tried to buy a stupid DVD at the movie store, and Dad apparently locked my damn credit card.”
“You meanhiscredit card,” she corrected him.
“That’s not the point,” Brooklyn continued. “Can you just tell him to lay off? I don’t know what he thinks I’m getting myself into, especially considering he’s not evenhereto see what I’m not getting myself into. It’s like he’s out to get me or something.”
“He’s not out to get you. He’s only trying to prevent you from doing unnecessary things with your money. But you can tell him all that yourself when he calls later.” Even her words seemed to tiptoe. While her voice was nothing short of soothing, it was almost as if she was afraid to say the obvious. Meanwhile, Brooklyn looked more uncharacteristically unsteady by the moment.
“Mom, drug dealers don’t take credit cards.” He groaned.
On the other side of the kitchen, a snort escaped Stella’s lips before she clapped her hand over her mouth.
“Brooklyn, maybe we should go start the movies,” I interjected. “Before it gets too late.”
Thunder rumbled outside, and that seemed to be the end of this tense but clearly familiar conversation. Finally, Brooklyn let out a resigned sigh and nodded. “Yeah, let’s go.”
I briefly made eye contact with Stella before leaving the kitchen, and a flicker of relief flashed over her before she turned away and continued unpacking groceries.
I followed Brooklyn down the front hall to the staircase, where photos lined the walls leading up to the second floor. I brushed my hand over the silver frames of Brooklyn’s and Stella’s senior high-school photos, all airbrushed with their white-toothed smiles and sun-kissed summer skin.
“I had baseball pants on in that picture,” Brooklyn told me with a gentle grin, as if the last five minutes hadn’t happened at all.
“Really?”
“They scheduled all the pictures during fall practice, but we only needed to be dressed from the waist up. So I kept my baseball pants on, threw a suit jacket on, took the picture, and went back to practice.”
His smile made me smile. It was that simple.
“Cute,” I said.
“I know.” His grin widened.
As we walked farther up the stairs, the photos became older and faded, and Brooklyn and Stella got younger and younger as I passed each one. One trip to Disney. Junior travel baseball and cheerleading. A few Christmas dinners. They were so painfully normal, they even had one of those awkwardly staged family photos in white turtlenecks and jeans. Looking at them all in one place made my chest tighten. I didn’t know how much I’d missed not having these kinds of family photos—picturesque and socomplete—until I saw someone else’s. It was a weird, hollow feeling.
“Is that your dad?” I pointed at one of the photos at the top of the steps, where Brooklyn, who couldn’t have been older than seven or eight, was sitting on the shoulder of a muscular man, tall and wide and built like a tree. Brooklyn clutched a shining trophy in one hand, and they were both sporting big smiles.
“Yep.” Brooklyn nodded, admiring the photo. “He looks pretty much the same now, except he’s mostly gray.”
“Your dad looks kind of intimidating.”
“He wrestled in college,” Brooklyn offered with a shrug as I followed him down the upstairs hallway to a room at the end. “But actually soft spoken, and he’s a smart guy. I obviously completely take after him.”
We shared another laugh before Brooklyn led me to his room. The way a man kept his bedroom said a lot about him. I didn’t know what I expected Brooklyn’s to look like, but it definitely wasn’t what I walked into.
A queen-sized bed with gray sheets was pushed against the right-side wall, and a black comforter was kicked to the edge of the bed. A few Nike shoeboxes were neatly stacked next to the door, and a small, four-drawer dresser sat against the wall next to the boxes, the paint chipping at the edges. A TV hung on the wall across from the bed with a few wires and cords hanging down from it, but any other wall space was empty. The air felt thin, like there was too much empty space for it to fill. Everything looked shrunken and tiny, and the big windows that overlooked the ocean only added to the openness of the space.
“You can sit on my bed,” Brooklyn said as he kicked off his sneakers and placed them on top of one of the shoeboxes. “Sorry I don’t have a chair for you or anything. I got rid of most of my stuff moving from Clayton back home.”
