by Deanna Chase
So much for principled refusals.
5
BAND SHOW
“What is with the two of you? Seriously?”
My mother, Mia Taylor, looked between her two kids––that is, me and Jon––her dark eyes sharper than I’d seen them in months. No trace of the alcoholic sheen I’d gotten used to being there flickered back at me when I returned her stare.
Seeing a glimpse of the mother I remembered...meaning the one I thought of as my real mother, the person who’d been there when my father was alive...took me aback. Then, just like it had when she used that tone on me in high school, it immediately made me defensive. It was like the past six years had just been wiped away with a magic sponge.
Folding my arms, I looked at her, then at Jon, who was scowling, his muscular arms also crossed in front of his chest.
Noting his expression, I looked back at Mom with a shrug.
“He hates my new boyfriend,” I told her. Hating how teenaged I suddenly sounded, I chose to ignore that, too, spearing a piece of lettuce with my fork and stuffing it in my mouth. “...And he’s being a dick about it,” I added.
Next to me, Jon grunted.
The sound didn’t have a lot of humor in it, though.
We were doing our off and on Sunday dinner thing, like we did most weeks when all of us were around and could make it. It was the first one since the Halloween party where I met Jaden. It was also the first one since my last birthday, where I turned twenty-two.
Of course, my mother missed that last part due to one of her unscheduled, balls-out benders that wiped her out for about three days.
I spent the day after my birthday cleaning up after that little mess. I still couldn’t quite stomach thinking about some of the crap I saw in her bedroom when I got here, after trying to call her for twenty-four hours and getting nada back from her headset.
In particular, I wanted to know less than nothing about the two used condoms I found in her bathroom trash can. In fact, I wished I could scrub the memory from my mind altogether with Comet and steel wool.
Luckily, whoever the loser of the week had been, he’d cleared out before I got there. If he hadn’t, I might be facing assault charges right now, instead of just the prospect of spending my thirties in massive amounts of therapy.
My mom hadn’t said a word about any of that, of course, since we were still playing our own version of the denial game, with me as head enabler.
She did greet me at the door with a present when I showed up that Sunday, and had the grace to look embarrassed as she handed it to me. She didn’t thank me or even acknowledge the fact that I’d been the one to clean her up after her bender, though. Or apologize for the fact that, on the actual day of my birthday, I’d spent over five hours looking for her in the bars around her neighborhood and along Divisadero, freaking out because she wasn’t answering her headset.
Then again, maybe she didn’t know about that part.
I hadn’t told her, so unless Jon had, which I seriously doubted, she probably didn’t.
So I did what I always did and acted oblivious.
Well, at least when I wasn’t blowing up and screaming at her to check herself into rehab...or crying when I found her passed out on the bathroom floor, yet again.
I noticed I tended to have only two speeds with the mom thing these days: “on” and “off.” “On” generally meant I was trying to threaten or guilt her into quitting and getting help. “Off” was oblivion, avoidance, silence...and pretending I didn’t see the shit she lied about and tried to hide from me, even when the evidence stared me right in the face.
I think mostly I just felt powerless, though. The extremes were just two different ways that powerlessness manifested. The feeling itself never changed. Ultimately, there wasn’t a damned thing I could do about anything Mom did...and believe me, I knew it.
Jon was a lot more zen about the whole thing.
Well, on the outside, anyway.
I knew he tried to talk to her periodically. I knew he did it a lot more gently than I ever had. He’d try to reason with her, even coaxed her to go to meditation classes and yoga with him, knowing she had some predilections in those areas already, at least back when she was younger. I’d heard him rant and yell at her, too, of course...and he was a lot better at playing the guilt card than I was. I’d also seen him avoid the whole thing, mainly by only coming over here about half as often as I did, maybe less.
Definitely less, come to think of it.
I, on the other hand, idiot that I am, elected myself “get Mom’s ass out of bed every day” butt monkey. Which usually involved me waking her up semi-gently with coffee and breakfast...and trying to get her to leave the house for at least part of the day, usually to walk with me in the park or to go visit friends.
Sometimes it involved air horns...or pots being banged together, or forced cold showers. At least once, it also involved me dragging her bodily off the couch, naked, while yelling at some bar loser she picked up to find his pants and get the fuck out of there before I hurt him.
Door A, Door B, Door C...the view behind each of them was depressingly similar, and no matter how I handled it, it never seemed to change.
I don’t think I realized how used to drunk mom I’d gotten, though, until I found myself staring my old mom in the face. Not only that, I was almost unsure what to say to this sharper, more alert, and heart-achingly more familiar version of my mother who sat across the table from me now.
“What’s wrong with him?” Mom asked, looking at me, then just as sharply at Jon. “This boyfriend. What’s the problem?”
Neither of us answered, but Mom wasn’t willing to drop it.
“Jon?” she prompted.
Jon gave me a dirty look. Then, thinking about Mom’s question, he shook his head. I watched what might have been a blush turn into anger a moment later.
“He’s a perv,” Jon said finally.
I stared at him. “What?”
“Guy’s a perv, Al. He treats you like a prostitute.”
I smacked Jon’s arm. Hard. “Jesus, Jon. Really? And how would you know that, exactly?”
Jon gave me a death stare. “You really want me to answer that, Al? Here? In front of Mom?”
“No,” Mom cut in, holding up a hand. “Please don’t.”
Sighing, as if we’d already managed to exhaust her mothering abilities with our one back and forth, she looked at me, as if unsure what to say to me next. Stalling, she used her fingers to tuck her curly dark hair behind one ear. I watched her do it, seeing the threads of gray now woven in with the darker brunette I’d always loved.
I’d always thought my mother was beautiful.
Something about that thought closed my throat. It also reminded me of Dad, sharply enough that I looked away, feeling that pain in my chest worsen.
“...Allie-bird,” she said, sighing again. “Are you sure Jon’s not right? Your brother usually has good instincts about people.”
“Fuck. Not you, too,” I burst out, before I could stop it. “You haven’t even met him, Mom.”
“Still. Your brother––”
“Doesn’t know as much as he thinks he does,” I said, glaring at Jon. “Jaden is not a perv. We like each other. He’s a musician...and he has a good job. Which is more than I can say for anyone in this fucking family...”
Mom winced at my language, which only made me feel worse. It also managed to push me further into my angry, defensive place.
“A job?” Jon countered. “Doing what?”
“He works for MediaTek, designing video games,” I snapped, facing him. “He’s working on the sequel to that one they just featured on the Texxi feed last Friday...and he probably makes more in a month than you do in a year.”
Jon snorted, clearly unimpressed.
“Look,” I said. “What is your problem?”
“You, Al,” he said, glaring at me. “You’re my problem.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means you
’ve been acting weird for weeks now!” Jon said, throwing up his hands and sitting up taller in his chair. “What the hell has gotten into you lately? You totally blew me off the other day...when we were supposed to go to that gallery thing. So I go looking for you, thinking you got called into work and didn’t have time to warn me, and I find out from Cass that you and your new guy just...I don’t know...took off. She said she hadn’t seen you at the apartment for something like three days. That you’d been calling in sick...”
“Jon. Again,” I said, biting back my anger with an effort. “I’m twenty-two. You get that, right? I’m twenty-frickin’-two!”
“So you can just blow people off? You can pull a disappearing act and not let me know you’re all right...Miss ‘I’m twenty-frickin’-two? Because I thought that was common courtesy. I thought that was what adults do, versus kids who can get away with acting like irresponsible, narcissistic assholes...”
I stared at him, half in disbelief.
Even so, I fought to remain silent...mostly to avoid saying something as harsh as what I wanted to say. Things about his own romantic past that I highly doubted Mom knew. Things Jon would be mortified to hear me say out loud, even if we were alone.
But I didn’t say those things.
Maybe the sibling bond is stronger than I thought.
Or maybe it was because I could definitely tell that whatever was bugging him, it wasn’t exactly what he was saying. Well, it wasn’t only those things, anyway. More lived behind Jon’s hazel eyes than he was willing to express right then, maybe because Mom was there, or maybe he just didn’t want to say it aloud to me.
I knew Jon didn’t like Jaden. He made zero secret of that.
I pushed them into meeting finally, and Jaden hadn’t exactly taken to Jon, either, so I knew the dislike was mutual...presumably in part because Jaden overheard Jon calling him a stalker the night Jon stopped by unannounced to give me my birthday present.
And as much as I liked playing dumb, I knew part of Jon’s problem was the perv thing, as he called it. Knowing him, with his big-brother crap, he thought Jaden was taking advantage of me.
And okay, something weird was going on with me and Jaden in that department, I knew that...but Jon assuming it was all Jaden really pissed me off.
So maybe I was different with Jaden than I had been with other guys. So what? How was that a bad thing? They all gave me shit when I didn’t want to date guys, so I really didn’t get why they were freaking out now that I’d more or less been open about seeing someone in particular. Jon should be happy for me. Both Cass and him should be happy for me. It was the first time I’d had any kind of anything really...with anyone. Compared to Cass and most of my friends from school, that practically made me the Virgin Mary.
Well, not the sex part, but the boyfriend part, anyway.
Moreover, I happened to know for a fact that Jon had already had more than a few pretty full-on sexual relationships of his own. That had been true all the way back in high school, when he started sleeping with his first kung fu instructor, a Chinese guy named Liko.
More than any of that, though, I knew Jon was remembering my high school years, not the fact that I’d grown up a lot since.
There were definitely times when I wished Jon didn’t know so much about my life.
Parts of it, at least.
As if he heard me, Jon looked up, glaring at me again.
“Your track record sucks, Al,” he reminded me.
So he was thinking about high school. Great.
“Yeah, and you always manage to make me feel like that’s my fault,” I shot back.
“I’m not entirely convinced it isn’t at this point,” Jon muttered, folding his arms tighter across his chest. I must have had a look on my face, because when Jon glanced over that time, he flinched. I saw guilt there, too, but only for as long as it took him to look away.
Then Jon got to his feet.
I followed him with my eyes as he headed for the entryway and the front door of the purple Victorian where we’d both grown up. I bit my lip to keep from yelling after him, not to stop him that time, but to tell him off.
I didn’t, though. I just sat there, borderline stunned.
Jon had been my best friend for most of my life. I thought of Cass as my best friend, too, but the truth was, Jon was the person I went to for anything big, and anything real. Cass was my friend, but Jon was more than that. More than my brother even.
Jon was like my conscience or something.
He and I had never had a major rift about anything important to one of us.
So yeah, as much as I tried to blow it off that Jon hated the whole me and Jaden thing, I knew I wasn’t blowing it off...that I couldn’t, really. And as much as I pretended that I thought Jon was overreacting, or that he was full of shit, or that he was reading things into things that weren’t there...I couldn’t make myself believe that, either.
At the same time, I knew I wouldn’t stop seeing Jaden.
I knew it, without even knowing why exactly.
I walked into the club feeling more self-conscious than usual.
The clothes were a lot of it. I wasn’t normally the mini-dress type, and the one I wore now was only a few millimeters longer than what I’d worn for that Halloween party.
I hate to admit it, but having a boyfriend––or realistically, someone I was sleeping with on a pretty regular basis, since me and Jaden still hadn’t talked at all about what we were beyond that––had vastly improved my grooming habits. Especially my wardrobe. And whether and how much makeup I wore. And yeah, my wardrobe. I even wore heels.
They weren’t crazy high or anything, but yeah…heels.
And, okay, they were pretty high. High enough that I had to practice walking in them.
Not like I was a total slob before or anything, but my clothes had tended towards retro-artist-punk since I got out of school…not hottie club chick, which was closer to how I’d dressed lately, meaning since I’d met Jaden.
Truthfully, I was a little relieved Jon hadn’t taken me up on the invite. He’d give me shit about the clothes, if nothing else.
We’d made up from the Sunday dinner thing. More or less.
Jon apologized for walking out...and for what he’d said in front of Mom. I told him it was okay. So more of a truce than any real resolution of our mutual shit. We’d stopped talking about Jaden in the days since, but some perverse part of me kept trying to get Jon to come out with me and Jaden anyway, maybe to try and force him to get over it. I knew I really wanted Jon to like Jaden...for both of them to like one another, really, instead of just humoring me...but I was beginning to think I was dreaming.
I didn’t know Jaden that well yet, given our “thing” had only been going on for a few weeks, but I knew Jon. I knew when he was keeping the peace versus real peace between us.
Despite his zen exterior, he was stubborn as hell.
He was also tactical. He apologized solely as a diplomatic and strategic move and I knew it. He’d probably done it so I wouldn’t shut him out, and would still come to him if something went wrong, particularly with me and Jaden.
Which he definitely seemed to think would happen.
I also knew he intensely disliked Jaden, and not just in a “I don’t trust this guy” kind of way, like he’d claimed at the dinner table with Mom. No, Jon actively disliked him. It baffled me, really, given how little contact they’d had. It wasn’t just some prejudice against Jaden’s type. Jaden was basically a tech hipster…Jon had friends exactly like him.
Hell, most of the under-thirty-fives of San Francisco were like that.
Moreover, Jon didn’t seem interested in learning anything more about Jaden, either.
His dislike was almost visceral, animal to animal, so maybe it was some guy-testosterone thing that vibrated at a frequency only males could hear.
I got the protective part of that...I really did. I used to joke that Jon had PTSD from trying to protect me from stalkers over the yea
rs. I’d had problems with that pretty much since I’d been old enough to walk. My parents worried about it. Jon worried about it. Even a few of my teachers worried about it...although none of them could really explain it.
Jon jokingly called it my “full moon mojo.”
But yeah, it really wasn’t all that funny.
The bottom line was, I picked up stalkers. Some of them had actually abducted me for short periods of time when I was a kid. Religious nuts, mostly. But also guys, of course, given that I was a female under forty who had mostly working parts...and occasionally, I would get harder-to-explain things, like the woman who was convinced that I was her long lost daughter who’d been abducted as a kid.
But even with all of that, Jon’s reaction to Jaden was weird.
He’d never taken such an instant dislike to anyone interested in me before.
Jon wasn’t the jealous friend/sibling type, either. I don’t mean that in a gross way...we might not be blood related, but Jon was 100% gay, even apart from the sheer weirdness of that.
I more meant, he wasn’t the type of friend to resent if I focused on someone else. Cass was a lot more like that than Jon was. In fact, Cass had already grumped about my “obsession” with my new “boy toy” and how it was sucking up all of her fun girlie time with me.
With Jon, it was different. Jon really seemed to think Jaden was some kind of predator.
Or just not a very good person, maybe.
He wouldn’t say that to me, of course. Well...not since our blowout at Mom’s. I could feel it on him, though, so tangibly sometimes I couldn’t help getting annoyed pretty much any time I tried to talk to him about me and Jaden at all.
So, yeah…zero surprise from me that Jon didn’t show.
Tugging the fabric of my dress further down over the tops of my thighs, I walked through the mostly-empty bar, glancing periodically at the even emptier stage. I knew I was a little late, but got stuck covering part of another guy’s shift when he was late into the diner. By the time I rushed home and did the shower and makeup thing, it was already twenty minutes past when I said I’d be here.