“I’ll be the first one, then.” She sighed. “So the dog is my sickness, right?”
“I think the dog is your immune system, and it’s attacking you for no real reason. Or maybe it’s overreacting to a reason, but doesn’t realize it. I think. Right?”
“Dr. Indigo is smarter than us.”
“We’re plenty smart.”
“Then why couldn’t I calm the dog?” Kylie’s frustration was palpable.
I slammed on the brakes—damn Uber drivers!—and looked at my daughter. Her face was red, and tears were collecting in the corner of her eyes. “Because you weren’t prepared. Neither was I. Why couldn’t I stop the dog either? Because it’s really stinking hard to control an angry, vicious dog! Almost impossible. Stop beating yourself up.”
We drove in silence until we got home. Matt’s ancient Chevy truck sat like a beached whale in the driveway.
“Dad’s here,” Kylie said. “But it isn’t his day. That’s okay, right?”
Anxiety wrenched my stomach. “Yeah. It’s fine.”
“Why do you think—”
My phone made a doorbell noise. Some kind of app notification. “I’ve got to look at this. Might be something important.”
“Uh-huh,” Kylie said. “I’ll wait for you.”
My daughter knew me well. I didn’t like surprises when it came to Matt. And I didn’t feel like explaining anything to him. I didn’t feel like being around Matt at all. Today felt like a failure. I felt like a failure. And I didn’t want him adding to the doggie-pile of mortification I was already suffocating under.
I made a pretense of studying my phone. A notification had come through, from Your Past Is a Present. Maybe a response from Micki Patel? I could feel my heart beat in my throat, pumping blood into my warming face. I clicked on the app, which took an eon to load. “Come on, come on . . .”
“What, Mom?”
You have a new report from Your Past Is a Present!
Are you ready?
Based on your DNA, Kylie, you are unlikely to have smelly pee when you eat asparagus.
I stared at the message for a moment, deflated.
“What is it?” Kylie asked, a note of worry in her voice.
“A notice from the DNA place.”
“What did they say? Does everyone in our family get sick?”
“Oh, honey, no. They said you can eat all the asparagus you want, and your pee won’t smell.”
She crinkled her nose. “So, my people don’t get smelly pee? That’s like, our thing? Well . . . I guess I’ve got that going for me.”
“Better than nothing—” I said.
“Because it’s something,” Kylie finished.
We sat for a moment until I realized how badly I was procrastinating. “I guess it’s time to see your dad.”
Kylie put her small hand on my arm. “I’m not going to tell him about the dog,” she said. “If you’re worried about that.”
“You can tell your dad anything at all. I don’t want you to think that way. Don’t worry about me.”
“I’m not. I’m worried about Dad.”
“Why?”
“Because he’d destroy the dog if it was hurting me.”
“He’d feel badly about it afterward,” I said. “But yeah.”
“I need to learn to calm the dog myself,” Kylie said. “So it’s not anyone else’s problem.”
“Honey, it was just an exercise. The dog is imaginary.”
“The doctor said my systems were attacking me. That’s the dog. I know what she was talking about. I’m not dumb.”
“I never said you were. I think you’re very smart.”
“If that’s true, then I’m going to learn to calm the dog.”
“I don’t think it’s an easy thing.”
“Mrs. Loftus says anything that’s too easy usually isn’t worth doing,” Kylie said.
“I’m pretty sure she stole that from somewhere. And I’m not sure if I agree with that.”
“Well, I do. The hard stuff matters.”
In dealing with Matt, I was about to do some of the hard stuff. Did it matter? Would it accomplish anything?
“I’m going to go say hi to Dad,” Kylie said. “You should come inside too.”
She was right. I had to stop being such a chicken. After she dashed into the house, I pulled the car up farther, parking next to Matt’s. I sat there a few minutes longer, telling myself I had to wait until the end of whatever song was playing on the radio, and then finally headed inside.
Matt wasn’t in the house. My mom was—studying a Pottery Barn Kids catalog like it held the meaning of life. Kylie had grabbed an apple and was sitting next to her, her small face scrunched up in thought just like Mom’s. I kissed my mother’s cheek, and she murmured hello.
“Where’s Matt?”
“Where he belongs,” my mom said. “In the garage. He’s not allowed in the family home. The family home is for family.”
“Seriously, Mom.” I shoved my arms back into my sweater and headed to the garage, being sure to let the door shut loudly on my way out. I wasn’t a slammer, but I still wanted to make a point.
My mom didn’t understand why, absent cheating, drugs, or abuse, two married people would decide to separate. Actually, she couldn’t accept that her little girl had failed at anything, so it had to be Matt’s fault. She’d already had one man turn away from her family, and though she probably always knew Jimmy wasn’t going to stick around, she wasn’t going to accept two. To Sophie Stefancyk, it was a crime punishable by banishment.
The banished one stood at my mom’s workbench, staring at the lamp destined for Kylie’s room.
“She’s doing a great job with this,” Matt said. He turned, and I got a good look at him. I could see the lines in his hair from when he combed it. He wore a neatly pressed light-blue shirt and a navy-blue tie. Khakis with a knife pleat. Brown loafers. Where were the concert T-shirt and worn-out jeans? The beat-up Converse?
“You look . . . professional.” That seemed like a neutral word.
“I look like an overgrown Eagle Scout.” He gestured to the almost-wired lamp. “Your mom is competent. I am incompetent. I don’t know how to do any of this stuff.”
“She would have taught you. If you’d asked.”
Matt’s mouth went flat. “Are we going to start?”
“I didn’t mean anything by that. Just that . . . she would have.”
He ran his hand along the wire snaking down the workbench. “I’m . . . on my way to a meeting.”
“For faculty? At this hour?”
“No . . . uh . . . a date. I met her on Cupidworks.”
Even though he’d prepped me for this, I still had to clench my jaw to keep my mouth from hanging open. Though our marriage was slowly dissolving, the outline was still there, watery and vague as it was. The rules still applied. But who would enforce them?
“I didn’t mean to upset you.” Matt looked more like a Cub Scout than an Eagle Scout at that moment. A little boy sorry he’d gotten caught stealing cookies from the pantry. Vulnerable and almost sweet, and . . . guilty? Maybe.
“It doesn’t,” I lied. “It’s nice, I guess.”
“It is?” He raised an eyebrow.
I exhaled loudly. “No. It isn’t nice at all. I honestly don’t know why you even told me.”
“Because she lives in town. I thought you might spot us, or I might run into someone we know, and it would get back to you.” He ran a hand over his face. “I don’t know how to do this. There isn’t a guidebook.”
“It’s just . . . embarrassing. Every part of it.”
“I disagree,” Matt said. “I think it’s necessary. Isn’t that what people do? Move forward? Dating Cassie is me moving forward.”
“Cassie?” I only knew one Cassie who lived in our small suburb. “Cassie Flores?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re seriously going on a date with Cassie Flores.” I’d cut Cassie’s hair for about a year after
I graduated from beauty school. She liked caramel-colored highlights and talking about her dog. That’s all I remembered. But still. There was a connection, however slight. “I know her. That’s not . . . that’s not how we’re going to do this. If you go on a date, it has to be with a person I’ve never come in contact with. That’s it.”
“That’s going to be pretty difficult given my time constraints and the size of our town.”
“Then it will be difficult.”
“It’s just a single date with a nice woman. I think you’d actually like her. She’s a lawyer at some downtown firm, but she’s not snobby. Her son is eight and just two grades below Kylie. She’s running for the open position on the school board, just to give something back to the community. Cassie runs marathons, for heaven’s sake. You have to be a semidecent person to run for twenty-six point two freaking miles.”
“Or a complete psychopath,” I said.
I watched the anger bubble up, and I watched Matt decide it wouldn’t get the best of him. “Maybe we shouldn’t talk about anyone we see unless it gets serious.”
“Maybe we just shouldn’t date yet. At all.”
Matt sighed. “Okay. Subject change. I came to talk about the DNA test. I don’t want to know how much it cost.”
“I had a Groupon.”
“I’m sure you did,” he said. “Was it weird for you? I saw . . . Italian. Irish. I can’t imagine what it’s like to look at something that definitive.”
“It was definitely weird, staring at those percentages.” I wanted to tell him about Micki Patel and the message I’d sent. I wanted to tell him about my curiosity, my confusion, my anxiety. I opened my mouth and shut it just as quickly. Those thoughts were mine, and sharing them with Matt, such a normal part of life before the separation, now seemed dangerously vulnerable. As much as I didn’t want to, I needed to start protecting the new me forming under my skin. The me without him. “I’m okay with it all. I mean, we did this to help Kylie.”
“What did Dr. Indigo say about the medical information?” Matt asked.
“Nothing yet.”
Matt frowned. “Why? Wasn’t that the whole purpose of your visit today?”
“Only part of it. I’m sure she’ll discuss the results next time. I plugged the data into the medical website. I have the results, but they don’t make much sense to me.”
“They don’t need to make sense to you,” his voice growing angrier. “They only need to make sense to the doctor who asked you to buy this test.”
“I’ll make sure she covers that next time.”
“Do that.”
Time to switch subjects again. “Did you check out your half of Kylie’s DNA?”
“Yeah.” He almost smiled. “The Scandinavian part . . . that’s me.”
“Did your family ever mate outside the tribe?”
“Apparently not,” he said, disappointment underlying his words. “I kind of wish there was something in it that surprised me.”
“Maybe the Ashkenazi Jew or the North African?”
We both laughed, puncturing holes in some of the tension. Matt was so pale he needed sunscreen indoors, and his hair was the color of hay.
“My parents weren’t very connected to their culture,” he said. “You know I grew up on Wonder Bread and bologna sandwiches.”
“That’s a sort of culture.”
He made a face. “Doesn’t feel like it. There should be a connection, and I felt nothing. It’s just data on a page.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “It doesn’t have to mean a thing if you don’t want it to.”
Matt’s expression softened. “I guess it doesn’t. Hey, did you tell Sophie about the test? It might be weird for her too. She never seemed all that comfortable with talking about your biological family.”
“I told her. She’s not comfortable with it.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t have told her.”
“Or maybe she should have told me some things a long time ago. Sophie hasn’t been entirely honest.”
“Maybe your expectations of people are too high.” Matt leaned back against the bench and crossed his arms. His muscles strained against his shirt, and I fought down the urge to ask him to hold me up. I suddenly felt very, very tired.
“I don’t think that’s true,” I said.
“Okay, maybe I should have said your expectations are unrealistic. You expect people to think the way you do.”
“Is this your way of telling me you think I shouldn’t give you a hard time when you want to parade around town with a woman both of us know, even though you’re not divorced yet?”
“One doesn’t have much to do with the other.”
“We’ll just have to agree to disagree,” I said.
“I hate that phrase,” Matt said as he headed for the door. “It’s a cop-out.”
“No, it means we can both be right.”
“Or both be wrong, I guess.”
It took my brain a while to settle that night. It felt like I’d just drifted off to sleep when Kylie bounded onto my bed, complaining of a nightmare.
“The dog,” she whispered. “It was chasing me, and my legs wouldn’t run.”
She pressed her cheek to my bare arm. She felt warm . . . too warm?
“You feel okay, baby?”
“I’m fine.”
Fine.
Great.
I tried to keep my breath steady until her body relaxed into sleep. Mine wouldn’t. I stared at the shadows on the wall for a while until I gave up and padded into the kitchen. My laptop sat charging on the counter.
I fought the urge to try again with Micki Patel, and instead walked over to my mom’s bedroom. The door was open a crack, just as it had been throughout my childhood. Her soft snores reached my ears, and I just listened for a moment. Usually, the sound of her breathing soothed whatever was jumping through my nervous system, but tonight, it wasn’t enough. Wake up, I thought. Talk to me.
She didn’t stir. Disappointed, I returned to the kitchen to make some chamomile tea.
When Kylie was a baby, I used to find a quiet house at 3:00 a.m. peaceful. Now, it was simply lonely. I poured a mug of tea, opened my laptop, and logged on.
There was a message waiting for me.
Your Past Is a Present Message Center
You have a connection!
September 17, 2:48 a.m.
Micki Patel to Kylie Anderson
My late sister Cissy, may she rest in peace, never stopped thinking about you. She hoped you were living a good life, and I hope you really are. Would I like to meet up? Of course! If I knew where you lived, I’d probably show up on your doorstep. We’re family, honey. Since we are practically neighbors, I was thinking this Sunday at around 1 p.m. 959 Main Street in Willow Falls. Can you make it? Please say yes. And, who is this Kylie? Is she family? Bring her with you!
Love,
Aunt Micki
Love, Aunt Micki.
Oh my God.
I let that phrase roll around in my head. My Aunt Micki. Kylie’s Great-Aunt Micki. My biological mother’s sister.
Aunt Micki’s late sister.
My biological mother was dead.
That stopped me cold. I felt like I’d dropped something valuable into a deep, deep well—there was only a split second to register the loss, and then it disappeared, forever gone. My throat seized up and my eyes watered. Was I mourning? Did I even have a right to? I grabbed my phone.
“I’m sorry!” I squeaked. “I know it’s three a.m. I just . . . need you.”
“Why do you think I keep my ringer on?” Heather said, her voice gravelly with sleep. “I’ve always wanted a middle-of-the-night phone call. It’s so dramatic.”
I started seriously crying then, huge, body-wracking sobs.
“Oh, Ally. What’s wrong?”
I spilled everything to Heather.
“Feelings are okay,” she said when I’d finished.
“Who are you? Mr. Rogers?” I sniffled. “I feel hea
vy. There are too many emotions crowding up my body. Guilt? Sadness? Pissed-offed-ness? I don’t know which one is going to come out on top.”
“I’m going to ask you a shitty question.”
“Go.”
“What are you going to do?”
I answered from the gut, no thinking things through. “Meet Micki Patel. I have questions and I want answers. I don’t need to tell anyone.”
Heather laughed. “You just told me. So that means I get to go with you.”
CHAPTER 5
The drive to Willow Falls took only forty-eight minutes.
During which I thought I was having heart failure about 367 times.
“This town has got to be a set from a Hallmark movie, like, Autumn in Harmless-Looking White People Land.”
Heather talked nonstop, probably trying to distract me from my nerves.
“You’re a harmless-looking white person,” I said.
“Way to rub in my blandness. I’m going to get a tattoo. Or a nose ring. Something.”
“Don’t be a cliché. You’re too old for conformity.”
“Will you dye my hair pink?”
“You’ll look like Frenchy from Grease.”
She laughed. “I’d rather look like Rizzo. At least she got some action.”
It was easier to devote what coherent thoughts I could manage to Heather’s life instead of what awaited me in Willow Falls. Since befriending her five years before, I’d listened to countless complaints about the horrors of living single, but not once did I see her take action to change her situation. I tried, encouraged, pushed, and prodded, but eventually I stopped trying to shove Heather into the world of dating, figuring she had reasons she wanted to keep to herself. And when my mind processed all the reasons that might keep someone from pursuing a relationship, I figured I wasn’t helping the situation if I kept pressing. We buried the topic with humor, never discussing it directly. But now that my romantic circumstances were less than ideal, could I gently bring it up?
“This is probably the most dangerous thing I’ve done in ages, maybe longer,” Heather continued. “Who knows what the mysterious Micki Patel is going to be like? Is she hiding something? Who is she really? I love this.”
Love was not quite the word I would use. My stomach felt like it was turning itself inside out. I glanced in the rearview mirror to check on Kylie, who’d fallen asleep in the back seat. I’d had no intention of bringing her. Really, I hadn’t. She had a rough night, her sleep punctuated by nightmares, so she clung to me like plastic wrap on Jell-O. Mom had to go to a wake, and Matt . . . well, it was my day with Kylie. Selfish, maybe, but it was too hard to give up time with my girl. Heather and I devised a plan—Micki would be the aunt of a client, and I was making a house call. I had the iPad with me, stocked full of the fashion games that could immobilize Kylie for hours. I’d sent a message to Micki, explaining the situation, and she agreed to the ruse. I ignored the nagging internal voice telling me I was being a hypocrite. I’d just given Matt a hard time for wanting to tell a white lie, and here I was, telling a whopper.
The Other Family Page 6