by Jenny Han
He’d arrive at dinnertime on Friday night, and we’d wait for him. Susannah would fix his favorite drink and have it ready, ginger and Maker’s Mark. My mother teased her for waiting on him, but Susannah didn’t mind. My mother teased Mr. Fisher, too, in fact. He teased her right back. Maybe teasing isn’t the right word. It was more like bickering. They bickered a lot, but they smiled, too. It was funny: My mother and father had rarely argued, but they hadn’t smiled that much either.
I guess Mr. Fisher was good-looking, for a dad. He was better-looking than my father anyway, but he was also vainer than him. I don’t know that he was as good-looking as Susannah was beautiful, but that might’ve just been because I loved Susannah more than almost anyone, and who could ever measure up to a person like that? Sometimes it’s like people are a million times more beautiful to you in your mind. It’s like you see them through a special lens—but maybe if it’s how you see them, that’s how they really are. It’s like the whole tree falling in the forest thing.
Mr. Fisher gave us kids a twenty anytime we went anywhere. Conrad was always in charge of it. “For ice cream,” he’d say. “Buy yourselves something sweet.” Something sweet. It was always something sweet. Conrad worshipped him. His dad was his hero. For a long time, anyway. Longer than most people. I think my dad stopped being my hero when I saw him with one of his PhD students after he and my mother separated. She wasn’t even pretty.
It would be easy to blame my dad for the whole thing—the divorce, the new apartment. But if I blamed anyone, it was my mother. Why did she have to be so calm, so placid? At least my father cried. At least he was in pain. My mother said nothing, revealed nothing. Our family broke up, and she just went on. It wasn’t right.
When we got home from the beach that summer, my dad had already moved out—his first-edition Hemingways, his chess set, his Billy Joel CDs, Claude. Claude was his cat, and he belonged to my dad in a way that he didn’t to anyone else. It was only right that he took Claude. Still, I was sad. In a way, Claude being gone was almost worse than my dad, because Claude was so permanent in the way he lived in our house, the way he inhabited every single space. It was like he owned the place.
My dad took me out for lunch to Applebee’s, and he said, apologetically, “I’m sorry I took Claude. Do you miss him?” He had Russian dressing on his beard, newly grown out, for most of the lunch. It was annoying. The beard was annoying; the lunch was annoying.
“No,” I said. I couldn’t look up from my French onion soup. “He’s yours anyway.”
So my father got Claude, and my mother got Steven and me. It worked out for everyone. We saw my father most weekends. We’d stay at his new apartment that smelled like mildew, no matter how much incense he lit.
I hated incense, and so did my mother. It made me sneeze. I think it made my father feel independent and exotic to light all the incense he wanted, in his new pad, as he called it. As soon as I walked into the apartment, I said accusingly, “Have you been lighting incense in here?” Had he forgotten about my allergy already?
Guiltily, my father admitted that yes, he had lit some incense, but he wouldn’t do it anymore. He still did, though. He did it when I wasn’t there, out the window, but I could still smell the stuff.
It was a two-bedroom apartment; he slept in the master bedroom, and I slept in the other one in a little twin bed with pink sheets. My brother slept on the pullout couch. Which, I was actually jealous of, because he got to stay up watching TV. All my room had was a bed and a white dresser set that I barely even used. Only one drawer had clothes in it. The rest were empty. There was a bookshelf too, with books my father had bought for me. My father was always buying me books. He kept hoping I’d turn out smart like him, someone who loved words, loved to read. I did like to read, but not the way he wanted me to. Not in the way of being, like, a scholar. I liked novels, not nonfiction. And I hated those scratchy pink sheets. If he had asked me, I would have told him yellow, not pink.
He did try, though. In his own way, he tried. He bought a secondhand piano and crammed it into the dining room, just for me. So I could still practice even when I stayed over there, he said. I hardly did, though—the piano was out of tune, and I never had the heart to tell him.
It’s part of why I longed for summer. It meant I didn’t have to stay at my father’s sad little apartment. It wasn’t that I didn’t like seeing him: I did. I missed him so much. But that apartment, it was depressing. I wished I could see him at our house. Our real house. I wished it could be like it used to be. And since my mother had us most of the summer, he took Steven and me on a trip when we got back. Usually it was to Florida to see our grandmother. We called her Granna. It was a depressing trip too—Granna spent the whole time trying to convince him to get back together with my mother, whom she adored. “Have you talked with Laurel lately?” she’d ask, even way long after the divorce.
I hated hearing her nag him about it; it wasn’t like it was in his control anyway. It was humiliating, because it was my mother who had split up with him. It was she who had precipitated the divorce, had pushed the whole thing, I knew that much for sure. My father would have been perfectly content carrying on, living in our blue two-story with Claude and all his books.
My dad once told me that Winston Churchill said that Russia was a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. According to my dad, Churchill had been talking about my mother. This was before the divorce, and he said it half-bitterly, half-respectfully. Because even when he hated her, he admired her.
I think he would have stayed with her forever, trying to figure out the mystery. He was a puzzle solver, the kind of person who likes theorems, theories. X always had to equal something. It couldn’t just be X.
To me, my mother wasn’t that mysterious. She was my mother. Always reasonable, always sure of herself. To me, she was about as mysterious as a glass of water. She knew what she wanted; she knew what she didn’t want. And that was to be married to my father. I wasn’t sure if it was that she fell out of love or if it was that she just never was. In love, I mean.
When we were at Granna’s, my mother took off on one of her trips. She’d go to far-off places like Hungary or Alaska. She always went alone. She took pictures, but I never asked to look at them, and she never asked if I wanted to.
chapter thirteen
I was sitting in an Adirondack chair eating toast and reading a magazine when my mother came out and joined me. She had that serious look on her face, her look of purpose, the one she got when she wanted to have one of her mother-daughter talks. I dreaded those talks the same way I dreaded my period.
“What are you doing today?” she asked me casually.
I stuffed the rest of my toast into my mouth. “This?”
“Maybe you could get started on your summer reading for AP English,” she said, reaching over and brushing some crumbs off my chin.
“Yeah, I was planning on it,” I said, even though I hadn’t been.
My mother cleared her throat. “Is Conrad doing drugs?” she asked me.
“What?”
“Is Conrad doing drugs?”
I almost choked. “No! Why are you asking me anyway? Conrad doesn’t talk to me. Ask Steven.”
“I already did. He doesn’t know. He wouldn’t lie,” she said, peering at me.
“Well, I wouldn’t either!”
My mother sighed. “I know. Beck’s worried. He’s been acting differently. He quit football …”
“I quit dance,” I said, rolling my eyes. “And you don’t see me running around with a crack pipe.”
She pursed her lips. “Will you promise to tell me if you hear something?”
“I don’t know …,” I said t
easingly. I didn’t need to promise her. I knew Conrad wasn’t doing drugs. A beer was one thing, but he would never do drugs. I would bet my life on it.
“Belly, this is serious.”
“Mom, chill. He’s not doing drugs. When’d you turn into such a narc, anyway? You’re one to talk.” I elbowed her playfully.
She bit back a smile and shook her head. “Don’t start.”
chapter fourteen
AGE 13
The first time they did it, they thought we didn’t know. It was actually pretty stupid of them, because it was one of those rare nights when we were all at home. We were in the living room. Conrad was listening to music with his headphones on, and Jeremiah and Steven were playing a video game. I was sitting on the La-Z-Boy reading Emma—mostly because I thought it made me look smart, not really because I enjoyed it. If I was reading for real, I would be locked in my room with Flowers in the Attic or something and not Jane Austen.
I think Steven smelled it first. He looked around, sniffed like a dog, and then said, “Do you guys smell that?”
“I told you not to eat all those baked beans, Steven,” Jeremiah said, his eyes focused on the TV screen.
I snickered. But it wasn’t gas; I smelled it too. It was pot. “It’s pot,” I said, loudly. I wanted to be the one who said it first, to prove how sophisticated and knowledgeable I was.
“No way,” said Jeremiah.
Conrad took off his headphones and said, “Belly’s right. It’s pot.”
Steven paused the game and turned to look at me. “How do you know what pot smells like, Belly?” he asked me suspiciously.
“Because, Steven, I get high all the time. I’m a burnout. You didn’t know?” I hated it when Steven pulled the big brother routine, especially in front of Conrad and Jeremiah. It was like he was trying to make me feel small on purpose.
He ignored me. “Is that coming from upstairs?”
“It’s my mom’s,” Conrad said, putting his headphones back on again. “For her chemo.”
Jeremiah didn’t know, I could tell. He didn’t say anything, but he looked confused and even hurt, the way he scratched the back of his neck and looked off into space for a minute. Steven and I exchanged a look. It was awkward, whenever Susannah’s cancer came up, the two of us being outsiders and all. We never knew what to say, so we didn’t say anything. We mostly pretended it wasn’t happening, the way Jeremiah did.
My mother didn’t, though. She was matter-of-fact, calm, the way she is about everything. Susannah said my mother made her feel normal. My mother was good at that, making people feel normal. Safe. Like as long as she was there, nothing truly bad could happen.
When they came downstairs a little while later, they were giggling like two teenagers who had snuck into their parents’ liquor cabinet. Clearly my mother had partaken in Susannah’s stash as well.
Steven and I exchanged another look, this time a horrified one. My mother was probably the last person on earth who would smoke pot, with the exception of our grandmother Gran, her mother.
“Did you kids eat all the Cheetos?” my mother asked, rummaging through a cabinet. “I’m starving.”
“Yes,” Steven said. He couldn’t even look at her.
“What about that bag of Fritos? Get those,” Susannah ordered, coming up behind my La-Z-Boy. She touched my hair lightly, which I loved. Susannah was much more affectionate than my mother in those kinds of ways, and she was always calling me the daughter she never had. She loved sharing me with my mother, and my mother didn’t mind. Neither did I.
“How are you liking Emma so far?” she asked me. Susannah had a way of focusing on you that made you feel like the most interesting person in the room.
I opened my mouth to lie and tell her how great I thought it was, but before I could, Conrad said very loudly, “She hasn’t turned a page in over an hour.” He was still wearing his headphones.
I glared at him, but inside I was thrilled that he had noticed. For once, he had been watching me. But of course he’d noticed—Conrad noticed everything. Conrad would notice if the neighbor’s dog had more crust in its right eye than its left, or if the pizza delivery guy was driving a different car. It wasn’t really a compliment to be noticed by Conrad. It was a matter of fact.
“You’ll love it once it gets going,” Susannah assured me, sweeping my bangs across my forehead.
“It always takes me a while to get into a book,” I said, in a way that sounded like I was saying sorry. I didn’t want her to feel bad, seeing as how she was the one who’d recommended it to me.
Then my mother came into the room with a bag of Twizzlers and the half-eaten bag of Fritos. She tossed a Twizzler at Susannah and said, belatedly, “Catch!”
Susannah reached for it, but it fell on the floor, and she giggled as she picked it up. “Clumsy me,” she said, chewing on one end like it was straw and she was a hick. “Whatever has gotten into me?”
“Mom, everyone knows you guys were smoking pot upstairs,” Conrad said, just barely bobbing his head to the music that only he could hear.
Susannah covered her mouth with her hand. She didn’t say anything, but she looked genuinely upset.
“Whoops,” my mother said. “I guess the cat’s out of the bag, Beck. Boys, your mother’s been taking medicinal marijuana to help with the nausea from her chemo.”
Steven didn’t look away from the TV when he said, “What about you, Mom? Are you toking up because of your chemo too?”
I knew he was trying to lighten the mood, and it worked. Steven was good at that.
Susannah choked out a laugh, and my mother threw a Twizzler at the back of Steven’s head. “Smart-ass. I’m offering up moral support to my best friend in the world. There are worse things.”
Steven picked the Twizzler up and dusted it off before popping it into his mouth. “So I guess it’s okay with you if I smoke up too?”
“When you get breast cancer,” my mother told him, exchanging a smile with Susannah, her best friend in the world.
“Or when your best friend does,” Susannah said.
Throughout all of this, Jeremiah wasn’t saying anything. He just kept looking at Susannah and then back at the TV, like he was worried she would vanish into thin air while his back was turned.
Our mothers thought we were all at the beach that afternoon. They didn’t know that Jeremiah and I had gotten bored and decided to come back to the house for a snack. As we walked up the porch steps, we heard them talking through the window screen.
Jeremiah stopped when he heard Susannah say, “Laur, I hate myself for even thinking this, but I almost think I’d rather die than lose my breast.” Jeremiah stopped breathing as he stood there, listening. Then he sat down, and I did too.
My mother said, “I know you don’t mean that.”
I hated it when my mother said that, and I guessed Susannah did too because she said, “Don’t tell me what I mean,” and I’d never heard her voice like that before—harsh, angry.
“Okay. Okay. I won’t.”
Susannah started to cry then. And even though we couldn’t see them, I knew that my mother was rubbing Susannah’s back in wide circles, the same way she did mine when I was upset.
I wished I could do that for Jeremiah. I knew it would make him feel better, but I couldn’t. Instead, I reached over and grabbed his hand and squeezed it tight. He didn’t look at me, but he didn’t let go either. This was the moment when we became true, real friends.
Then my mother said in her most serious, most deadpan voice, “Your boobs really are pretty goddamn amazing.”
Susannah burst out into laughter that sounded like a seal barking, and then she was laughing and crying at the s
ame time. Everything was going to be okay. If my mother was cussing, if Susannah was laughing, it would all be fine.
I let go of Jeremiah’s hand and stood up. He did too. We walked back to the beach, neither of us saying anything. What was there to say? “Sorry your mom has cancer”? “I hope she doesn’t lose a boob”?
When we got back to our stretch of beach, Conrad and Steven had just come out of the water with their boogie boards. We still weren’t saying anything, and Steven noticed. I guessed Conrad did too, but he didn’t say anything. It was Steven who said, “What’s with you guys?”
“Nothing,” I said, pulling my knees to my chest.
“Did you guys just have your first kiss or something?” he said, shaking water off his trunks and onto my knees.
“Shut up,” I told him. I was tempted to pants him just to change the subject. The summer before, the boys had gone through an obsession with pantsing one another in public. I had never participated, but at that moment I really wanted to.
“Aww, I knew it!” he said, jabbing me in the shoulder. I shrugged him off and told him to shut up again. He started to sing, “Summer lovin’, had me a blast, summer lovin’, happened so fast …”
“Steven, quit being dumb,” I said, turning to shake my head and roll my eyes with Jeremiah.
But then Jeremiah stood up, brushed sand off his shorts, and started walking toward the water and away from us, away from the house.
“Jeremiah, are you on your period or something? I was just kidding, man!” Steven called to him. Jeremiah didn’t turn around; he just kept walking down the shore. “Come on!”
“Just leave him alone,” Conrad said. The two of them never seemed particularly close, but there were times when I saw how well they understood each other, and this was one of them. Seeing Conrad protective of Jeremiah made me feel this huge surge of love for him—it felt like a wave in my chest washing over me. Which then made me feel guilty, because why should I be feeding into a crush when Susannah had cancer?