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“Sissy, you’re doing it again. I can hear you mumbling,” my dad stated.
I’d been picturing a call between me and Ward. At a safe distance, I could have told him that it hurt my feelings that he didn’t care enough to talk to me before a game, and that no, I wasn’t coming over to his condo on Saturday afternoon to help him clean up after his Friday night poker session with his friends, because I would be tired. In my mind, I’d told him a lot of things that I never would have dared to say to his face.
“Was I mumbling again? I’m sorry,” I apologized to my dad. “It’s a bad habit.”
“You’ve done it since you were a little girl. I would see your lips moving and you concentrating so hard and when I asked what you were thinking about, you would have some crazy answer. ‘I was imagining that there were white ladybugs in clouds with see-through spots so they can hide.’ That was one I remember. ‘I was pretending that I have a best friend named Juniper and she lives in the hole in the porch roof.’”
“If I remember right, it was actually a squirrel living up there.”
“A whole damn family of them,” he said, and sighed. “They left, eventually.”
“By the way, a friend of mine is going to come over and work on the house,” I mentioned casually. “I think he is, if he has time.”
“Free labor? I’ll take it. It’s not Ward, is it? I just had to see him at the wedding.”
I’d had to beg Aubin to invite him and I’d told my dad that I wouldn’t attend if my boyfriend wasn’t going to be there, too. I would have gone to the wedding anyway, of course, but then I would have had a huge issue with Ward about it, so I’d considered myself lucky that my sister had given in. “We’ll put him at the table with Bill’s bitchy aunt and the cousins who only speak Greek,” she’d decided, smirking. “That will mean he’s bored and pissed off.” She’d been right about his mood, and in the end, it hadn’t been lucky for me at all.
Aubin had always disliked him and my dad hated him even more because of some incident a million years in the past, when Ward had laughed about how crappy our old car was and made some jokes about poverty. No one had found his remarks very funny but I remembered trying to explain them away at the time.
“No, it’s not Ward coming to help,” I answered. “It’s Bowie. Garrett Bowman.”
“That big guy?” he asked next, and I nodded. “He looks like he could put his back into it,” he told me approvingly. “Good choice.”
“You and I could do some work, too. Maybe on Sunday, we could trim and mow the front yard. I have the day off and you don’t need to go in until the afternoon. It’s looking abandoned again.”
“I’m working the game tomorrow, too,” he said, and scowled as he thought about it. Most people in our area would have killed for a job with the Woodsmen since they paid so well and had great benefits, as well as offering the possibility of a brush with the football players. Not my dad. “After that, I’ll need to take a break. The house doesn’t look that bad.”
It didn’t look that good, either. “Ok,” I said, and tried not to sigh or start mumbling again. I could do the work myself.
It had been totally silent for a few miles when he asked me, “What am I doing wrong?”
There were a lot of ways that question might have been answered. “Can you be more specific?” I hazarded.
“With you sister, with Aubin. Why is she still so pissed off at me? Aren’t I doing better?”
“You are,” I agreed. It had been a few months since the accident and he hadn’t had any more trouble on the roads; I hadn’t had to go pick him up anywhere; he’d even handled the wedding better than I’d expected. I lit on that. “She let you walk her down the aisle,” I reminded him. “That was a special moment.”
“It was all for show,” he told me. “All those pictures we took, too, the three of us smiling. She even had the photographer splice together a picture of her and Kimmy, some kind of dream sequence thing.”
Kimberly was our mother, and I’d seen that image posted, too. “You follow Aubin’s social media?” I asked him. She’d put up the shot of herself in her white gown looking off into the distance at a fogged-up, blurred figure of our mom. It had gotten a lot of positive responses and sympathy from her followers and friends. I’d thought it was a little weird, maybe, but I also thought it was beautiful and I wished our mom could have been at the wedding with us.
“It’s all public,” he told me, but I hadn’t known that he’d been looking at it. “Your sister is more pissed off at Kimmy than she is at me. Walking down the aisle with me, posting a picture of her mother, that stuff was for show. It didn’t mean anything.”
I knew that he was correct, but I felt like I needed to defend Aubin. After all, my dad had his own part in this. “She feels like she has to promote an image, partially for her business—”
“Her whole life has been that way. I remember showing up to some teacher meeting and seeing pictures that Aubin had drawn of our family, her mom standing there smiling and me holding a briefcase. She was a little girl already promoting a bullshit lie. I was stunned.”
“The part that stuns me is that you bothered to attend a school conference,” I snapped. There was another short silence before I apologized. “I’m sorry,” I told him. “I’m sorry I said that, because I know you were alone and you tried. And you’re right about Aubin. A lot of her time is spent preparing for and then putting on a show.”
“You don’t do that. You don’t pretend like that,” he said.
I nodded. I didn’t pretend in the same way that Aubin did, painting a picture of her life as perfect, easy, happy, and wonderful. It had to be stressful for her to keep up the façade, and I hoped that things really were happy and wonderful now that she had Bill. Maybe she could be more honest with everything since she had a secure and loving marriage to fall back on.
My dad’s mind must have been running along the same lines. “Seems like she might love her husband. That’s good.”
“I think she does.” I considered it. “I wonder how it feels for her to have stability for the first time.” I glanced over quickly to see if he was offended, because I’d pretty much just accused my dad of never providing any stability to Aubin before.
If he was insulted, he didn’t show it. “Should I get ready for another damn wedding? Are you going to marry that guy of yours next?”
