“Not exactly.” Brooklyn grimaced. “More like a family thing. My dad will be home this weekend, and . . . it would be nice to have you there.”
He fiddled with the radio again. I tried to read the expression on his face, strained somewhere between unease and uncertainty. I delicately pulled his hand away from the knobs on the radio and laced my fingers between his.
“I’d love to,” I told him. “Remember what you told me the other day?”
Relief washed over him. “I meant everything I said before. Idomean everything I say to you, always. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
“You’d have nobody to yap with about obscure indie movies from 1992, obviously.”
“Obviously.” Brooklyn smiled at me again, and leaned over to kiss me the way he had so many times already, and the way I hoped he’d continue to do for a long time.
Twenty-one
Brooklyn’s father, Charlie, was nothing like I anticipated. He was mild-mannered for a man of his size, and far softer around the edges than Brooklyn had made him out to be. When he found out I’d been writing (which Brooklyn had to proudly state), he recommended a few nonfiction books on creative philosophy.
It was also Charlie’s family lasagna recipe that was made for dinner, and Stella eagerly played sous chef, yapping his ear off about junior league and some inconsequential drama in her friend group. But Charlie listened attentively.
“Don’t let the tough-girl act fool you, she’s a daddy’s girl.” Brooklyn nudged me and smirked.
“Does that make you a mama’s boy?” I asked. We’d taken on the task of setting the dining room table after Brooklyn had so graciously volunteered.
“No way,” Brooklyn replied. “At least, not in the negative connotation of the word. But god forbid men are nice to their mothers.”
“Don’t be so smarmy.” Annie had appeared beside us to hand Brooklyn a stack of napkins. “You know you’re my favorite son.”
Brooklyn blinked. “I’m your only son.”
“Exactly.”
I snickered behind my hand, and Brooklyn playfully jabbed me in the side, causing me to squeal and capture everyone’s attention.
“Nothing to see here.” Brooklyn came to my rescue. “Maybe a casual kidnapping.”
We sat down for dinner, and they carried on as if Charlie had only been gone two days instead of almost two months.
“On the rig, sometimes it’s hard to pass the time,” Charlie was saying. “A bunch of us take turns doing the questionnaire from theColbertshow. Have you ever done it?”
“No, but I like personality quizzes.”
Charlie nodded. “You’ll like this, then. So the first question is what’s the best sandwich.”
Definitelynotwhat I had expected, and I was sorely unprepared for an answer—which I guess was the whole point. “Wow, that’s actually kind of hard, because I don’t think I’ve ever thought about that in my life.”
Brooklyn lurched forward in his chair. “Grilled cheese, obviously.”
“For you maybe,” Stella scoffed with a flick of her wrist. “You have the eating habits of an eight-year-old.”
Stella’s comment lit up places in my memory, and the answer surfaced. “Okay, I’ve got mine. When I was younger, my mom used to make me turkey and lettuce with mustard on really good sourdough that she’d get from the farmer’s market in downtown Arcadia. I know that’s not thebest, but I ate that for lunch every day from fourth grade to seventh grade, and back then I thought it was pretty great. With some classic Lay’s, of course.”
“Best toyou, though,” Charlie said. “That’s the point.”
Brooklyn casually draped his arm over the back of my chair, and his father continued the questionnaire. Despite knowing there was some kind of tension between Brooklyn and his father, they kept it away from the dinner table, and we all laughed and ate lasagna and debated if apples or oranges were the better fruit.
When I thought about what family normalcy looked like, this was it. As well adjusted as Nikki, Mom, and I were with our situation, that didn’t stop me from occasionally wondering about what our whole family would have looked like having dinner on a Sunday summer night. I wondered if my dad would have still been a history teacher, and if my mom would have kept collecting those little ceramic animals that had been all over our kitchen.
And suddenly, it sank in, deep into my bloodstream, as to Brooklyn’s desperation to fit in and be normal. It was for them. People like Brooklyn (and by extension my sister) might have been victims of their illness, but their families were victims of everything else that came with it.
The realization of that stung—that meantIwas a victim, instead of someone who was handling things because it’s your family and you care and you want things to be okay. I didn’t like to be thought of as a victim, because it didn’t feel right to identify as something people who had serious trauma identified as, but maybe Nikki was right about something—I didn’t know nearly as much as I thought I did.
