Every Other Weekend

by Abigail Johnson

  Jolene:

  This ought to be good.

  Adam:

  I’d get it if you were upset about losing in a cool sport, like basketball, but soccer is the most tedious sport ever. Like, there are entire games where no one scores. I mean I guess it could be worse, like lacrosse or something. So there’s that.

  Jolene:

  That is not bad. I mean, soccer is everything awesome, but I shouldn’t expect much from the guy who thought FIFA had something to do with French poodles.

  Adam:

  You win. At insults at least.

  Jolene:

  Now that was a solid burn.

  Adam:

  I feel like a jerk.

  Jolene:

  And yet somehow you made me smile.

  Adam:

  Yeah?

  Jolene:

  Yeah. Want to feel like a bigger jerk?

  Adam:

  Not really, no.

  Jolene:

  I play lacrosse in the spring.

  FIFTH WEEKEND

  November 20–22

  ADAM

  “You’re not doing it right.” I stood on the side of the road, shivering as the moon started its slow ascent.

  “What do you know?” Jeremy said. “And will you please stop shaking the flashlight all over the place?”

  “I know it shouldn’t take half an hour to change a flat tire.” But I added another hand to steady my grip.

  “Adam?”

  “What?”

  “Could you shut up for a minute so I can finish?”

  I clenched my jaw at the gust of wind that cut right through the coat I wore. It was Friday night, and we were heading to Dad’s. Even though my teeth were beginning to chatter, signaling my impending hypothermia, I was grateful for the delay in seeing him. Our last weekend had been... I’d acted like things might be okay, or at least like we more moving in that direction. Helping him with the lights, talking a little, letting him choke up in front of me and never once reminding him that his actions meant Mom was grieving all alone at that exact moment.

  When the tire on Jeremy’s car blew, I’d half convinced myself it was wish fulfillment. Thirty freezing minutes later, I was rethinking that conclusion. Jeremy clearly had no idea how to change a tire, and I wasn’t much help. It was a skill I’d planned on learning, but hadn’t gotten around to. Jeremy obviously had a similar plan.

  “Dammit, Adam! If you don’t stop moving that light around, I swear—”

  “You’ll what? Move slower?”

  Jeremy lunged to his feet. “You want me to knock you out right now?”

  “I want you to fix the tire so we can go. Where was I not clear about that?”

  The socket wrench—I think it was a socket wrench, it was pathetic that I wasn’t sure—clanked against the asphalt as Jeremy threw it down. “Do it yourself then.”

  However little Jeremy knew about changing a flat tire—and it was a very little—it was still light-years beyond what I knew. I stared at the socket wrench. Then I stared at my brother. I repeated this process several times before he made a sound of disgust and squatted down in front of the tire again.

  “You’re worthless, you know that?”

  I did kind of know that. I didn’t bother with a response. Instead I watched my brother struggle to change a tire for probably the first time in his life. There was nothing especially heartwarming about the sight. Squatted down, his jeans dipped low in the back, revealing plenty of butt crack. He was also grunting and swearing under his breath as he wrestled with one of the lug nuts—a term I was mostly confident I had right. But I felt angry heat sear through me.

  “Why didn’t Dad teach us this? Why didn’t he make sure you knew something this basic before you got your license?”

  Jeremy shook his head and forced a laugh. “You don’t know when to quit, do you?” He looked up at me, and the pissed-off smile left his lips. I wasn’t ragging on him that time, and he knew it. “I don’t know. Maybe he forgot. Or maybe he didn’t have time. It’s not like we were having a party when I turned sixteen.”

  All our holidays and birthdays since Greg died had been somber affairs. Without him, celebrating was the last thing any of us had felt like doing.

  “Did you see Mom before we left?” I asked.

  Jeremy’s hands stilled on the lug nut he’d gone back to loosening. He said nothing.

  “Did you?”

  “Yeah, I saw her.” He made a grunting noise as he continued forcing the bolts free.

  “And?”

  “And what?” Jeremy got to his feet and kicked the tire. “Damn thing’s rusted tight.”

  I lowered the flashlight to my side. “Did you say anything to her?”

  “Of course I did.”

  “What did you say?”

  Jeremy turned, first his head and then the rest of him, to face me. “What was I supposed to say? ‘Hey, Mom, please don’t spend the weekend wrapping Christmas presents for your dead son like you did last year’?”

  I swung the flashlight beam up to his face and then dropped it when he didn’t bother to shield his eyes.

  Jeremy finished changing the tire. Not once did he have to remind me about the light.

  Without asking, Jeremy blasted the heater when we got back in the car. Stopping at the next light, Jeremy flexed his hands on the steering wheel, the red glow of the traffic light illuminating a streak of grease running across his knuckles. When a cursory search for something to wipe them with turned up nothing, he dragged the back of his hand on his jeans.

  “We should be with Mom.”

  “We were,” Jeremy said. “And now we’ll be with Dad tonight.”

  I shook my head. “That’s wrong and you know it.”

  “What’s wrong is the way you’re treating Dad. When are you going to grow up?”

  “The way I’m treating Dad? Me? What the hell is wrong with you? Mom is in that house all alone right now, and Dad—”

  “And Dad is alone all the time. Why don’t you care about that?”

  I forced my head to turn to the window before I did something stupid like punch my brother while we were going fifty miles per hour. Maybe when we slowed down.

  “You need to ease up on Dad. He’s not doing real well. You’d know that if you spent any time with him.”

  “Who do you think helped him with the lights, huh?”

  “Yeah, and then you didn’t say a word to him all Sunday.”

  “If he hadn’t left, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation.”

  Jeremy shook his head. “You keep doing that. Think about what it’s like for him. What it’s been like since Greg died. She can’t let go.”

  “She’s supposed to let go when we keep leaving her alone like this?”

  “I don’t know. But it wasn’t Dad’s idea to leave.”

  “It wasn’t Mom’s.”

  “No, it was both of them. They decided together. However mad you are at him for leaving, you better be just as mad at her.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut. None of it made sense to me, but Dad leaving, even if he was agreeing with Mom, was wrong. It was so obvious after these past few months that she wasn’t coping with Dad being gone. She was crumbling before our eyes each time Jeremy and I left. If Dad was any kind of man, he’d have seen that. Jeremy knew it as well as I did.

  “Dad’s alone because he’s a coward. Mom’s alone because she married one.”

  I wanted to feel satisfied when Jeremy didn’t have a response, but I wasn’t.

  Jolene

  I couldn’t tell you how long I spent waiting for Adam in the lobby, but it was full dark outside—and not from the weather—when I finally saw his brother’s car. I was aware of how pathetic I looked, waiting there for him, but I didn’t care eno
ugh to pretend that I’d been doing anything besides waiting. For him.

  I had cause to rethink my so-called indifference when Jeremy entered the lobby first. He took one look at me, scowled while muttering something under his breath, and stormed toward the stairs. The two-second encounter made my skin feel like it didn’t fit. But then Adam was there.

  He wore a scowl identical to his brother’s until he saw me. He stopped halfway inside the building and took a deep breath without taking his eyes from me. Then he dropped his bag to the floor and crossed the lobby in three long strides, sending my heart pounding.

  His arms went around me, and my feet were lifted from the ground as his face was buried in my shoulder. If he noticed how I stiffened when he embraced me, he didn’t show it. “I really needed you to be here, right here. I wouldn’t have made it another step. How’d you know that?”

  Adam was still wrapped around me, almost too tightly. He smelled really good, like spicy apples, and my whole body finally sighed into him. “I was actually just down here getting the mail.”

  He laughed into my shoulder, and his breath stirred the baby hairs at the nape of my neck, making me tingle. With one last squeeze, Adam released me.

  “Easy, Adam. You know, I think you cracked my rib just now,” I said, lightly running my fingers along my side.

  “Nah, you’re just not used to it.”

  Something prickled behind my eyes, but I ignored it and went to retrieve Adam’s bag. I felt his gaze on me the entire time.

  “Sorry, that was a stupid thing to say.”

  “Trouble in paradise, I take it?” I nodded in the direction Jeremy had gone. We could still hear him stomping up the stairs. “And call me nutty, but I think your brother is falling in love with me.”

  “It’s not you,” Adam said, dodging the lighthearted life preserver I’d thrown him and focusing on the empty staircase. “He thinks I should be spending time with our dad.”

  “I already knew you were Team Mom in the split.”

  “There shouldn’t have been a split.” One of his eyelids started to twitch. “If Dad had stayed instead of leaving when Mom needed him, we wouldn’t be here. We’d be home together, missing him together.”

  Oh.

  I mean, not oh, I totally get what’s going on, but one big piece just got added to the mix. No wonder Adam had gotten so upset when I’d implied one or both of his parents had cheated. They’d lost someone.

  “Who?”

  “My older brother. Greg.”

  He did that guy thing where he locked his jaw tight enough to crack and tried to keep his eyes from doing more than looking extra shiny. I should have touched him or said something—that was what people did when someone revealed something like that, right? But patting his back or saying I was sorry felt woefully inadequate.

  “Recently?”

  Adam hunched, and his hand moved from his jacket pocket toward the phone I could see in his jeans. “Yeah. I mean no.” His fingers flexed like he was forcing himself not to touch his phone. He shoved his hand back in his jacket. “It was a couple years ago, but I don’t really want to—”

  “You don’t have to. I’m just—I’m sorry. That sucks.”

  “Yeah, it does.”

  His gaze grew distant—more distant—and I could tell he didn’t like any of the places his thoughts were taking him, so I changed the subject.

  Gazing outside, I said, “Do you ever feel like the earth hates us? I mean, look at that.” That was the snowstorm currently obliterating the view, such as it was. It was gray and screaming and completely impenetrable. “How do you interpret that as anything other than deeply held hatred?”

  “I am feeling strongly disliked at the moment,” he told me. “But that might have more to do with the hour I just spent with Jeremy.” He looked at me. “Shelly pick you up today?”

  I made a face. “Yes. She didn’t get out of the car, and I ran out the second she pulled up. It wasn’t too bad.” Though that was largely due to the fact that I’d hidden Mom’s watch and phone and changed all the clocks in the house back an hour before she had gotten up, so she’d been caught unaware when I ran out.

  “She try to talk to you the whole drive over?”

  “Hmm? Oh no.” I grinned at him. “I pretended to be on the phone with you.”

  He half smiled. “You know, you could have actually been on the phone with me.”

  I shrugged. It always took me a little while to recover when I left my mom’s on these weekends, and I wasn’t sure I wanted Adam to see—or hear—me while I was still frayed.

  Another howling gust rattled the glass of the doors, and we both eyed the seemingly thin panes.

  “That’ll hold, right?” Adam asked.

  “It held last year.”

  “Okay, that’s good.”

  “But maybe it was weakened enough that it’ll shatter apart any second and impale us with large shards of glass.”

  Adam looked at me. “Why do you say things like that?”

  I shrugged again. “I don’t know. I should probably watch fewer movies.”

  “Yeah, I don’t think that’s what’s wrong with you.”

  If he only knew. “So where do you want to go?”

  “Away from the potentially homicidal glass doors for a start. I’m assuming Shelly is in your apartment?”

  “And your dad and brother are in yours?”

  “Yep.” Adam went quiet for a moment, the kind of quiet that seemed to scrape my skin. “Hey, how come I never see your dad?”

  I’d been walking along a lifting seam in the carpet like it was a tightrope. I paused for a beat, then resumed walking. “What do you want to hear?” When he didn’t answer, I hopped off the line and spun to face him. “It wasn’t a trick question.”

  “Yeah, I’m not so sure about that.”

  “Aren’t you the clever boy?” My chin lowered slightly along with my shoulders. “You don’t see him because I barely see him. I could tell you about his demanding job, the one that helps him afford his ridiculously expensive lawyers who fought my mom with unprecedented savagery in order to get me here two weekends a month, but that’s the pile of horse crap that horses crap on. It’s not about the money—it’s about me. I don’t even think he’d keep Shelly around if he wasn’t legally required to have someone with me. He couldn’t care less about me. I mean, obviously.” I kicked at a freshly painted baseboard.

  “You said I was petty the first day you met me.” I shook my head with a small smile. “I’ve got nothing on my dad. Somehow my mom managed to convince him that she wants me more than anything else, so of course he’s determined to take me away from her. If he thought killing me would make her suffer, I’d have a dozen hit men after me.”

  “Geez, Jolene.”

  “Too morbid for you? Sorry and whatever, but you did ask.”

  “You just talked about your father plotting to murder you out of spite.”

  “I believe the word I used was petty.” One foot in front of the other, I walked my makeshift tightrope again until Adam pulled my arm.

  “Would you stop for a minute? Don’t you see how messed up that is? Tell your mom or her lawyer or someone.”

  I laughed. “My mom would try to use it as leverage to get more alimony, and my dad would likely retaliate by having me committed—there, is that better than murder?”

  “No,” he said, his face frozen in an expression that made me scowl.

  “Get over yourself.”

  “I’m trying to get over you.” My gaze shot to his, wide and unblinking, and he reddened, adding, “I didn’t mean it like that. I meant—I don’t know what I meant.”

  “Let’s forget it, okay? I don’t want us to waste our time fighting about something that doesn’t matter. I’m here, you’re here. You obviously missed me.” I rubbed my side again, hoping
for a smile or something besides that half grimace he still wore. “And I’m not in a rush to hang out with Shelly, so...” Come on, Adam. Come on...

  “No,” he said after a pause. “No, it does matter.”

  I groaned. “Fine, it matters, but...” I groaned again. “You’re such an idiot, you’re gonna make me say it.”

  “I’m the idiot?”

  “You, stupid. It doesn’t matter because of you. Two weekends a month. It’s not a bad trade-off.”

  My stomach seemed to twist in two different directions as I waited for his response. The days with him were worth enduring the ones with my parents—the presence of one and the absence of the other. He was a jerk for making me spell it out. The prickle was back behind my eyes, and he needed to say something. Fast.

  I was still holding Adam’s bag, and his fingers glided across mine, warm and smooth, as he transferred the weight to his.

  “Me, too.”

  “What?” My gaze snapped away from our hands to his face.

  “It’s not a picnic with my family right now either—for different reasons, but still. Two weekends a month. It’s not a bad trade-off.”

  And then he smiled at me like a dope.

  And I smiled back.

  ADAM

  “What made you think of ice-skating?” Jolene asked on Sunday afternoon as I opened the door to the rink for her.

  “Winter. Snow. Ice. The thought of potentially watching you fall on your face before we go back to our respective homes tonight.” And, I mentally reminded myself as my face warmed, the excuse to hold on to you if you need help balancing.

  She grinned. “What makes you think I’m not an Olympic-level figure skater?”

  “Are you?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never tried.”

  “What, like, never?”

  Jolene shook her head at me. “You couldn’t be pretty and smart, could you? Yes, never means never. I take it you were born on the ice?”

  “Not born exactly. My dad used to play amateur ice hockey, so he wanted his sons to learn. We used to skate all the time.”

  “Oh, are we going to sad skate?”

  “What?”