The Summer We Fell Apart

by Robin Antalek

  “This,” Finn said as he pointed, “looks exactly how I feel right before I have my first drink of the day.”

  Kate bit the inside of her mouth. It was all she could do to not reprimand him, especially as he moved on to the red-blob painting.

  Shelley laughed just as Kate was trying to figure out how the hell she was going to get Finn to sit down. “This is a lot quieter,” Finn said, pointing to the fiery hellish smear before he sat down across from Kate.

  Shelley looked at him admiringly. “Would you like some tea?”

  “Sure.”

  Kate hoped the tea was out of the room so she could fix Finn with a death stare and instead was disappointed to see that Shelley had it set up on top of a white piano that looked like it would be more suitable in Elton John’s living room. Shelley served Finn first and then Kate. Before she poured herself a glass and sat down, she looked at Kate and the box and said, “Well?”

  “I’m sorry,” Kate offered. “There’s nothing there that can help your case.” She watched as Shelley opened the lid and lifted out the envelopes Kate had labeled, one by one.

  As she did, Kate caught the anticipation on Finn’s face while he studied Shelley. It was the same look she’d seen on his face a thousand Christmas mornings ago, when he had asked for a puppy and got a G.I. Joe instead. And it wasn’t even the real G.I. Joe. It was actually a Ken doll dressed in a soldier’s outfit, and her father had laughed nastily when Finn had held it up at his urging so he could call it a sissy toy. Then their father had said it was really meant for George. None of them had even known what he meant, but Kate had gleaned enough to know it wasn’t a compliment.

  Kate swallowed some tea and squirmed in her seat. She wanted to get the hell out of Shelley’s house. The migraine that had been lurking for hours had finally arrived. Between the sunshine streaming in the windows and the smoking incense, she felt like she was going to be sick to her stomach. She was just about to excuse herself when Shelley began to cackle.

  Finn looked at Kate and for the first time since she’d picked him up they seemed to share a moment of sibling telepathy: Shelley was nuts.

  Shelley was bent over the box, reading labels on the envelopes and tossing them onto the floor all the while laughing so hard she was crying. When she tried to straighten up, she held her side as if a stitch prevented her from doing so.

  “Are you all right?” Kate asked, halfway out of the chair. Was Shelley having an attack? Through the haze of migraine, Kate felt helpless as to what to do next, but then Shelley seemed to calm down long enough to motion for her to sit, before she erupted in another uncontrollable fit.

  “I just never imagined such attention to detail…” she stammered on her way out of the room.

  “Shelley,” Kate said more loudly than she had intended as she watched the woman retreat. She got up and started to follow Shelley out of the room. She didn’t have time for games today. She had to go back to the office after she dropped Finn off at the house. If she left now, she knew Ben would probably kill her. But when Shelley spun around and shooed her back into the living room, Kate complied and flopped back onto the chair across from her brother.

  “Patience, Grasshopper,” Finn murmured, his lips against the rim of his sun tea glass. “You’ve been played.”

  Kate did her best to ignore Finn and looked past him out the sliding-glass doors to the artist’s studio. The guard was sitting in a chair tipped back against the door, reading a book. Kate squinted and tried to make out the title but she couldn’t see it. She was humiliated. Was Finn right? Had even Ben known the boxes were some sort of test?

  Shelley returned, carrying a hardcover black sketchbook the size of a legal pad. Her face and cheeks were streaked with red and her neck and chest were flushed, but she was composed. She handed the notebook to Kate.

  Kate hesitated a moment before accepting the notebook from Shelley. Was this yet another joke? As soon as she had it in her hands, she opened the front cover. It appeared to be a diary. Kate looked up at Shelley and tried to raise a questioning eyebrow, but even that slight motion hurt because of the migraine.

  Shelley shrugged in response to Kate’s facial spasm but didn’t seem alarmed. “We lived off the grid our entire lives. We didn’t come back here until he was so sick we had no choice. Did you really think I was going to take a chance giving his life’s work to someone I knew nothing about?” She paused. “Anyone who could do that,” she pointed to the boxes, “could take the care with this.” She gestured to the notebook in Kate’s hands. “Everything my husband wanted is in there.”

  “If that’s true, why not just show it to your stepson’s attorney?” Kate asked, not even trying to hide her skepticism, all the while wishing, for a moment, that everything in life was that uncomplicated. “This would be over.”

  “I don’t trust him,” Shelley said simply. “Why should I?”

  While they were talking, Finn had risen and gone back over to the red-blob painting. Kate just hoped he wasn’t going to open his mouth and offer another critique before they got out of here. She stood and tucked the book under her arm. “We should go,” she said to Shelley but looked at Finn, who took her cue and sauntered toward the door.

  In the car, Finn smiled and waved at Shelley through the windshield. Through gritted teeth, Kate hissed, “Stop that.”

  “Huh?” Finn turned to face her as she drove. “What? So she tricked you. Can you blame her, Kate?”

  “Finn, please. You don’t know anything.”

  To Kate’s surprise, Finn laughed and turned his attention back to the windshield.

  “What’s so funny?” Kate asked as they turned off Shelley’s street.

  His face remained impassive as he shrugged.

  “Knock it off,” Kate snapped. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”

  “Just don’t get your hopes up. I mean, seriously, you think the old guy wrote everything down nice and neat in here?” He had reached into the backseat and retrieved the notebook and was thumbing through it.

  She glanced sideways at him. “Be careful with that,” she admonished, then added, more for her own benefit than Finn’s, “she wouldn’t do that to me twice.”

  “Why?” he asked. “What does she owe you?”

  The pain behind Kate’s eyes thrummed so badly streaks of white crackled at the edges. “Shut up, you don’t know anything.”

  Much to Kate’s chagrin, Finn laughed again and said, “So I’ve been told.”

  After they toured the main house, the first thing Finn said when he walked into the pool house and saw the mattress on the floor in the living room was “Reminds me of when Dad moved into the barn.” He paused and looked around, “You need a love shack, Katie?”

  “You’re just saying that to get back at me.”

  Finn looked genuinely confused. “Why would I need to do that?”

  “Because of what I said in the car.”

  “Why would I expect anything else from you?” He didn’t look sad or angry, just like a guy making a statement.

  Kate was taken aback. So much so that she couldn’t speak. She moved into the kitchen, unaware that Finn hadn’t followed, and turned the faucet on and then off and then on again. The water started with a thread of bloody rust before it ran clear. She fumbled around in her bag for the bottle of migraine meds, flipped off the lid, and popped two pills onto her tongue. Then she cupped her hands beneath the faucet and swallowed the pills with the aid of the tinny-tasting water. As they went down, she squeezed her eyes shut tight and gripped the edge of the sink to stop her hands from shaking. When she opened her eyes, her vision was so blurry it took several seconds for them to focus on the lemon tree outside the window again.

  When she walked back into the room, she said to Finn, “I have to go to the office.” She paused and glanced around the room. “I had the electricity turned on and the water. But I don’t know that there’s anything you can plug in.”

  Finn watched her without comment.

>   Kate stepped over his duffel bag on the way out the door. She couldn’t even tell him to call her because the phone line hadn’t been hooked up. That was next week: phone, computer, wireless. She left him with a backward wave of her hand. She didn’t even know if he was hungry or thirsty. There was hardly a place near the house he could walk to even if he wanted. But Kate didn’t think of any of these things until she was well on her way back to Los Angeles and it was too late to turn around and do anything about it.

  Their father had moved into the barn little by little the fall Kate turned seventeen. It had started off with him needing a place to write away from the house. At least that was the bored announcement their mother had made over a rare appearance at dinner one evening as they watched their father carry a desk chair, a small table, a lamp, several boxes, and the card table from the den, where the same jigsaw puzzle had sat unfinished for the last two years, through the dining room, into the kitchen, and out the back door.

  “I don’t get it,” Amy said as she twirled a massive amount of noodles, too big for the opening of her mouth, around her fork. “He already has a whole room just for writing. What’s he need the barn for? Where are we supposed to keep the bikes and stuff?” She shoved the noodles into her mouth and chewed with her mouth half-open. When she was done, there was sauce all over her chin.

  “Can’t you even try?” Kate tossed Amy a napkin. “You are so disgusting.”

  “Kids are supposed to be disgusting your hiney-ness.” Amy grinned at her own joke before she wiped her mouth with the sleeve of one of Finn’s old sweaters. It was way too big for her but she insisted on wearing it. No one but Kate seemed to think that Amy dressed like a homeless person. Certainly the clothes and feral manners had to be the reason the only person who could stand her was George. Ten was too old to act like this, wasn’t it?

  While Kate was the de-facto parent for her siblings—forging signatures on permission slips and report cards, writing excuses, making dinner, and procuring groceries and laundry detergent—she knew barely anything about their personal lives. And she didn’t care to. What was it to her that Amy had no friends? That George was weirdly attached to his baby sister and that Finn was drunk or worse more than half the time he was awake. Really, what was she supposed to do about them all?

  “Maybe if you and George weren’t constantly making noise Dad would be able to work in the house,” Kate said.

  “How did it get to be our fault, Kate?” George asked.

  Kate stood up and then sat back down. “None of you understand how difficult it is to be an artist.”

  Finn snorted and Kate shot him a dirty look. It was obvious to Kate that their father was trying to make a statement, since it would have been easier for him to just go out the wide front door. The kitchen was an odd, narrow configuration, an afterthought to the house, and the outside doorway was blocked by a collection of abandoned sporting goods and a broken old washing machine on the fragile back porch.

  But Kate and her siblings weren’t gathered in the front rooms—they were in the kitchen. And Kate supposed this was his way of letting them know what he was doing. Although he made a point of not looking directly at any of them as he made his pilgrimage back and forth through the room. Kate caught her mother’s eye as she exhaled out of the side of her mouth, surprised by her presence. They behaved as though she was invisible because, frequently, she was. As they ruminated on their father’s exit, she had remained characteristically silent. Kate watched her grind out a cigarette, smoked all the way to its filter, in her plate of uneaten spaghetti, and then pour herself another tumbler of wine before she floated away up the back staircase to her room with a vague commandment to “Clean everything up.”

  Amy and George had been kicking each other under the table the entire dinner and now, after they dropped their plates in the sink, tumbled from the kitchen toward the den. After a few minutes, Kate heard the television. It was Thursday night and that meant The Cosby Show, Family Ties, Cheers, and Night Court. They’d be absorbed for the evening in an alternate universe where both parents were present and the problems were solved in less than twenty minutes. She already knew asking them to help her clean was more trouble than it was worth.

  She looked at Finn but he pushed back away from the table and said, “I cooked.”

  Kate nodded. It was true. Finn had dumped the jar of sauce into the pan and boiled the pasta. It had been ready when she returned from cross-country practice. Ordinarily, Finn would have been at practice as well and Kate would have thrown together some sandwiches when she got home, but Finn had been kicked off the team because he’d been caught, after multiple warnings, with another flask of booze in his locker.

  As Kate plunged her hands into the hot, soapy water and washed the dishes, her father made several more silent trips through the room. On his last run through, he paused before the stove and thrust a hand into the pot of leftover pasta. Kate tried not to stare as he brought a handful of bloody noodles to his mouth and slurped them up. This was his caveman persona, the one he used on odd occasions when they were little, to make them laugh. She hadn’t seen it surface in many, many years. Now, it just made her uncomfortable.

  Wordlessly, she handed him the kitchen towel and a fork. He took the towel and swiped at his mouth and then forked the remaining pasta with gusto. When he was done, the fork clattered into the empty pan and he squeezed Kate’s shoulder briefly before he disappeared outside. She was the only one who understood him.

  That night, when Kate brought the trash to the can out back, a glow from the lamp her father had carried from the house lit up the three small diamond-shaped windows along the side of the barn. Kate knew her father was in there, but without an invitation, she didn’t dare go over and see what he was doing. She hopped up and down on the back steps to keep warm, breathing the first puffs of frosty air, hoping for him to turn off the lights and come inside. While she waited, she caught sight of the orange end of a cigarette, and then Finn stepped out into the clearing around the back of the barn. He blew smoke rings that Kate watched drift off. But after a while, she couldn’t feel her arms and legs in her T-shirt and shorts, she had physics homework, and she simply grew tired of waiting for something to happen, so she turned and went back into the kitchen without saying anything to Finn.

  Over the next few weeks, things disappeared slowly from the house. First, it was the blankets they kept on the couch in the den, then the cushions from the couch, and, eventually, the couch.

  Amy mentioned it over breakfast one morning right before Halloween. With her mouth full of Cheerios and a dribble of milk poised on her chin, she said, “I asked Mom why Dad stole the couch, and she said he must have needed a place to sit.”

  Kate looked at Finn for confirmation but he dismissed them all by walking out the door, so Kate went into the den to see for herself. In the rectangular space where the couch had been was now a shiny swatch of wood—shinier, at least, in comparison to the rest of the scuffed floor. There were clots of dust and hair as if they had a dog (they didn’t), a few plastic toy soldiers, a pack of Big Red gum, a lollipop stick, several of the jigsaw pieces from the old puzzle, the requisite spare sock, and lost pencils. He had also, she noticed, taken the coffee table, but nobody seemed to care about that.

  Kate wondered how their father had managed to get the couch out of the house all by himself. Surely he had help? But it wasn’t like they had another couch to put into the den, so she closed the door and did her best to forget about it. When George and Amy complained they had no place to sit and watch television, Kate had suggested they bring down sleeping bags from the attic. That started the long campout of George and Amy on the floor in the den while their father slept on the couch in the unheated barn. The television was on twenty-four hours a day and Kate struggled every morning to get the two of them awake and out the door for school. Some days she just gave up, and then she would come home in the afternoon to find Amy and George still in whatever clothes they’d slept in, Gener
al Hospital on the television in the background while they huddled over the old jigsaw puzzle. They’d started working on the puzzle again, since no one had ever picked the pieces up off the floor when their father had taken the card table. It was of the ocean and every single piece was blue.

  Kate only knew for sure that she slept in her own bed at night. Finn had always suffered from insomnia; he was lucky if he slept four hours and there was no telling where he would eventually end up. More often than not it had been the couch in the den, but now that wasn’t even a possibility. And their mother? Their mother had been more absent than usual, shuttered behind her bedroom door when she wasn’t out of the house for hours on end with mumblings of rehearsals or meetings tossed out as afterthoughts if anyone asked. Although, even if she were around, their father’s living in the barn with half of the furniture from the house would hardly have been a topic of conversation.

  While she waited for her father’s invitation, Kate had taken to hiding on the back porch and watching the barn at night to see what was going on. The closest she allowed herself to this new sanctuary was when she left bags of his favorite chocolate chip cookies in front of the door. Surely that would get her inside? But it hadn’t, not so far. Yet the cookies disappeared, so she knew he was getting them. Kate deduced that he really must be working on something big, and when he was ready to share, he would come and get her. She was the early reader of all her father’s work, from way back, even when she had struggled to comprehend the meaning of the words on the page. When she was four, she had sounded out the sentence “I am fucked” across the top of one of his pages, and he had been so pleased that he allowed her to read them ever since.