by Sara Zarr
“I didn’t mean . . . Sorry. That sounded bad. Obviously you’re involved now, thanks to me. I . . .” He trailed off. “Christ. Just please don’t tell your sisters. Don’t tell Nadia.”
Nadia. At Thanksgiving, on this road, they had been joking about getting married. At Thanksgiving, on the farm, he’d imaged him and Nadia in a wedding picture like the one of his parents. He’d been so into his big messy-happy family, so into showing it off, like “Someday this could be us.”
He had to tell her, right? His dad couldn’t control whether or not he said something to his own girlfriend.
“Kyle?”
“I heard you.”
“I mean it,” his dad said. “This needs to be in the vault.”
The vault.
There were a couple things between him and his dad in there. Like when Kyle drove home from Mateo’s after drinking and his dad was waiting up and immediately knew and talked to him for over an hour about “Do you want to kill a kid? Is that what you want to do? You want to hit a car and send a baby into the street?” Or “You want a record? You want to not drive again until you’re twenty-five? Or never? You want all your college applications rejected?” Then he said he believed in Kyle, believed he was smart and wouldn’t make that mistake again. “I’m putting this one in the vault. If you let me down, I can’t help you. You’ll die alone in prison.”
Another thing in there was when Kyle was on a job site with his dad and they found a mistake in how the scaffolding had been set up, the kind of mistake that could have led to the whole thing coming down and injuring or killing workers or people on the street. His dad shut down the site, fired the foreman, and oversaw the fix himself. But before that, he sat in the Baker & Najarian truck with Kyle and said, “That’s our name. Ours and Al’s. On the trucks. On the site. On the contract. And we could have just lost everything. Don’t forget this happened, but never talk about it, Kyle. Put it in the vault.”
And Kyle had all kinds of stuff between him and his sisters, pacts they’d made to keep each other out of trouble with their parents. There was also something that had to do with Megan’s shitty high school boyfriend, Adam, but Kyle didn’t know details and no one ever said his name anymore.
Now this.
Kyle leaned over again to turn the radio back up. The cooking show was over, and now it was a news quiz, with joking and laughing. They listened without cracking a smile. Eventually Kyle’s dad said, “Oh,” and retrieved Kyle’s phone. “Here.”
Nadia’s texts were there when he unlocked it.
I mean I guess ghosts COULD be a thing, who am I to say?
Hello?
The playful conversation with Nadia was from a different life. He scrolled through it. His cracks, her smileys. His photos, her replies. He had to say something, even though the Kyle in those texts had been left somewhere back behind them on the highway, tumbling into the horizon.
sorry—we’re driving into a signal dead zone now
He hit send and turned off the phone.
Then he turned it on again.
Nadia had sent a heart and a waving hand.
See ya, boyfriend who used to tell me everything!
Goodbye, boyfriend’s nice family!
He shut it off once and for all and shoved it way down to the bottom of his duffel.
“So,” his dad said as they made the turn toward the farm. “Like I said, Mom and I don’t know how this is going to play out. It could all be sort of a blip, you know, in the grand scheme of things.”
Sure. A blip.
“And if it is that, I don’t want everyone to hold it against her down the line. She already feels kind of like an outsider with my family. Anyway, this weekend is about Martie. A celebration. No need to get into anything complicated. Kyle? Hello? Can you acknowledge that you’re hearing me?”
“Dad. You’ve basically said the same thing like a hundred different ways, and I heard all of them. It’s in the vault. You don’t ever have to say anything about it again.”
“I’m sorry,” his dad said. “Sorry.”
They rounded the turn, and Kyle saw Emily on the swing set at the top of the drive. His throat closed up. How was he going to hang out with her and not tell her what he’d just found out?
“Keep driving,” he told his dad.
“You don’t want to hop out here and say hi to Em?”
Emily waved at Kyle and slid off the swing.
“Just park first.” He waved at her through the window and gestured: Sorry, no idea what my dad is doing. She held up her arms: WTF?
They kept going, all the way to the big circle of gravel and weeds behind the house that functioned as a parking lot when a bunch of people were there. Grandpa Baker was waiting under the pear tree, his cane in one hand and his big coffee cup in the other, like always, like nothing at all had changed.
2
“WHAT’S WRONG?” Emily asked—literally the first words she spoke to him the moment they were alone. She’d walked down from the swings, and Grandma Baker had already put them to work halving and juicing limes for her famous limeade, half of which would turn into infamous limeade once Aunt Brenda added tequila to it.
“Just . . . being in the car with my dad all day.”
She handed him another lime half; he pressed it into a flat disk with the old manual juicer his grandmother had been using since Kyle’s dad was a kid.
“These aren’t that juicy,” he’d said.
“Yeah, I’ve seen better.” She flexed her fingers to give them a break from slicing. “Are you bummed that Nadia couldn’t come up for this?”
Nadia. He had maybe another hour where he could use the trip and being at the farm and family as an excuse for not texting her.
“Pretty much.”
He kept pressing limes, pressing limes, pressing limes. Like a machine. Emily’s eyes were on him, he felt it. He glanced out the kitchen window. Grandma Baker was playing checkers with Alex on the patio, while Uncle Dale and Kyle’s dad were putting up the sun awning. His mom should be there, watching, with her hands wrapped around a cup of coffee, telling Dad to be careful with his knee.
What if he called his mom? Right then. Called her and said, “Dad is out there on the ladder and I think you should be here too. Give everyone the flu, it’s fine. Bring Megan. We need to be together.”
Then: oh. “I think I’m coming down with the flu” sounded like a great way to get out of a family event in order to stay home and do your cheating.
“Did something happen with you and Nadia?” Emily said. “Other than her not getting to come here?”
He shook his head. Saw his dad wobble on the ladder and Uncle Dale steady it, laughing.
“It’s not about Nadia.”
God, this was so hard and stupid. He couldn’t tell Nadia and now he was also going to stand here not telling Emily? His dad should just have left him on the side of the road.
He pressed the last lime and tossed the wrung-out peel into the compost bucket. “Does your family have secrets?” he asked. “I mean your family-family, not like all of us collectively. Like stuff they keep from the rest of the Bakers or even, like, things only you and one of your parents knows but not the other parent, or Alex or whatever?”
She laughed. “Yes. I’m not supposed to tell Grandma that my mom had a dirty play published a couple of years ago. Even though it won an award. I’m not supposed to tell Dad how much Mom really smokes. And I’m pretty sure Grandma and Grandpa aren’t supposed to know that Uncle Mike and Grandpa Navarro run a poker game out of Mike and Jenny’s house twice a month. But Great-Aunt Gina knows, because she sneaks off to play sometimes when she’s visiting.”
Kyle wished that was the kind of thing he meant, basic “Don’t tell Mom” stuff that people seemed to have even when they were adults themselves. “Nothing serious, though?”
“It depends on your definition of serious, I guess.” She divided the lime juice between two big pitchers, and they worked on the cleanup together
. “So are you going to tell me what’s up?”
Kyle leaned on the counter and met Emily’s eyes. Her face calmed him, the familiarity of it. There weren’t many people he’d known his whole life the way he’d known her. Other than his idiot parents.
“I want to,” he said. “It’s something I’m not supposed to talk about. Like, my dad told me something and I’m not supposed to tell anyone. But he didn’t say that until after he already told me the thing, which I retroactively don’t want to know, and now I’m pissed.”
“Well that sucks.”
“Also, the thing itself that he told me is pretty bad.”
“If you want,” she’d said, “you can talk to me about it like in a vague way. Without actually telling-telling. If it helps.”
He’d nodded. “Yeah, maybe.”
“Meet at the bunkhouse later? After the party and the dance?”
Kyle groaned. “God. This family and its dancing.”
“Uncle Mike has been working on the playlist for two weeks. He and my mom have been texting about it nonstop.”
“Doesn’t Martie want to do her own playlist? It’s her birthday.”
“I’m sure she has her own thing going for when her friends are here. Uncle Mike’s is for the after-party.”
It was going to be a long-ass day.
“Where’s Martie now?” He wanted to say hi and wish her happy birthday before everything got too chaotic.
“There’s a mass, I guess? At their church? With Uncle Mike and Aunt Jenny, and Grandpa Navarro, and Aunt Gina.”
The family had this whole Catholic/Protestant thing going on. Or more like the Catholic ones and then the ones who were like “Oh, I’m Protestant” but hardly ever went to church or talked about believing in anything. Grandma and Grandpa Baker grew up going to some church, not Catholic, Kyle didn’t know what it was. They were never that serious about church per se, but at the same time they were so traditional. Then Great-Aunt Gina converted to Catholicism and became a nun, and that divided their family when they were young. But everyone who’d been upset about that was dead now.
Grandpa Navarro had always been Catholic, and when Uncle Mike married his daughter and they had Martie, Uncle Mike and Aunt Jenny decided they’d raise her and any other kids they had with some Catholic traditions. There was only Martie, even though Uncle Mike and Aunt Jenny had tried to have more.
“Were we not invited to the mass, or . . . ?” Kyle asked. Emily, living closer to the rest of the family, usually knew more about what was going on.
“I guess it was optional. It’s probably mostly Martie’s confirmation class and their families. I think they assume we wouldn’t want to go and don’t want us to feel obligated.” She held up her hands. “My fingers are all pruney from lime juice.”
Kyle held his up too, and then they pressed their hands together like a super-slow-motion high five. He closed his eyes for a couple of seconds, feeling the contact, the protection of something true.
That night at the dance, Martie and her friends had gotten through their own playlist but kept dancing when Uncle Mike’s came on, while the aunts and uncles drank the tequila limeade. The sun had gone down, and the strings of lights lit up the huge patio that was also the dance floor.
Kyle had been hanging back in a shadowy corner, on a folding chair, texting Nadia. He’d been describing everything, staying focused on details like the playlist and outfits and food. Nadia was out too, at some house party, then would be leaving for Chicago in the morning. The response time between his texts and her replies got longer and longer.
Wish you were here, he wrote for probably the third time in that one conversation. He added a frown face. A cry cat. A broken heart. He knew he looked needy but he didn’t care. He felt needy. He was needy.
He waited, watched Martie and a couple of her friends and Uncle Dale do some choreographed thing, cracking up. He took a picture, sent it to Nadia. Her typing bubbles appeared, disappeared, appeared again. Finally, her reply.
I wish I was there too, but you should try to have some fun anyway!! Don’t miss out on your cousin time. We’re gonna watch a movie here and I’m putting my phone away so I can get into it. Check back with you when it’s done!
Probably because he’d sent her a picture from his party, she sent one back from hers. A selfie of her doing a tongue-out rocker face. She was nestled into the corner of a couch, wearing a peach-colored V-neck. There were other people’s elbows and shoulders around her and some people in the background holding red party cups. Kyle zoomed in on the background.
Who all is there?
“Kyle! Get off your phone!” It was Martie, shouting to him from the dance floor.
Babe, Nadia wrote, I’m going DND. ttyl. Love u.
One of the guys in the background at her party looked a lot like Jack Mesrobian, her ex. He was turned kind of mostly with his back to the camera, but Kyle recognized the dumb way he always had his sunglasses resting on the back of his neck.
is that jack? he asked.
Someone grabbed his phone out of his hand. Aunt Brenda. She held it over her head and said, “Why aren’t you dancing?”
“Come on, Kyle, it’s my birthday!” Martie hopped over to the B-52’s.
One of her friends grabbed her and they spun away, but Aunt Brenda was not going to give up that easily. She stuck his phone in her back pocket, then took both Kyle’s hands and pulled. He was stronger than her, strong enough to resist and probably topple her if he pulled back. That would only make this into a bigger scene than it already was, so he let her drag him into the middle of the patio.
“Everybody had matching towels!” Aunt Brenda shouted in his face, along with the song.
He heard his mom’s voice in his head, from when they were driving home after one of the family gatherings: Brenda just doesn’t know when to stop. Not everyone thinks she’s fun.
He wanted his mom to be here, right now. He wanted Nadia, his mom, Megan, Taylor . . . everyone who should be here to be here, not off protesting the family or studying for finals or faking flulike symptoms or doing their own thing with Jack Mesrobian lurking around in the background.
Aunt Brenda finally let go of his hands so that she could boogie down low to the ground, as Uncle Mike would say. She got too low and lost her balance. Laughing, drunk, she said, “If you help me up, I’ll give you back your phone.”
He hoisted her to her feet, but then she said, “Psych!” and went to hide behind Kyle’s dad, who was doing an embarrassing white-man two-step and looking a little sloshed on limeade himself. Was Kyle supposed to chase Aunt Brenda around and fight her for the phone? He found Emily’s face across the patio; he nodded at her and retreated back into the shadows, then away from the patio completely until he was on the pine-straw path to the old bunkhouse.
The music faded and the stars got brighter, and he found the edge of the olive grove and followed it until he saw the long wooden building with its tin roof, and the two picnic tables where the farm crew used to have their dinners outside. All of it unchanged since Thanksgiving, aside from its being warmer and greener now. He lay down on one of the tables, face up to the moon.
What was his mom doing right now? He pictured her alone at the house, eating one of her big twenty-ingredient salads and binge-watching a show, texting with whoever the guy was. Then he pictured the guy, in his own house with his own wife and own kid, texting her back. Pretending to be looking up scores or something if anyone asked.
Or maybe they were together. Right now.
Together together.
At a hotel? Where had they been meeting up? Kyle’s house? He saw them together, blinked it away, then imagined Nadia and Jack at the party—Jack looking at Nadia in that T-shirt and remembering how he’d touched her body before, wanting to do it again, trying it in the dark during the movie, and what if both of them were drinking?
It was so easy to make mistakes; everything suddenly seemed so breakable.
He heard Emily’s footst
eps in the brush. Thank God.
“I saw my mom trying to Rock Lobster with you.”
He blew out a laugh. “Yeah, everyone did.”
She sat on the other picnic table, her feet on the bench.
“You should lie down like I’m doing,” he said. “There’s a really good view of the moon right now.” It was three-quarters full, and the night was clear. He could see the valleys and craters and whatever else was up there.
“I have bad memories of ants in my hair at this place. I’ll just look up.” Crickets chirped, and they listened to that for a few minutes. Then Emily said, “Commence being vague about what your dad told you, if you want.”
He spoke slowly. “Okay. So, like. Imagine if . . .” He tried to think of a good metaphor. “Imagine if your mom came to you and she was like, ‘Oh, by the way, your dad is a bank robber, but oops I didn’t mean to tell you that, don’t tell him you know and don’t tell anyone else, either, forget I said anything.’ What would you do?”
She laughed. “My dad would be the worst bank robber, sorry. Okay. This is like an ethics quiz. My sociology teacher does this sometimes.”
“Yeah, think of it like that.”
“Is he the kind of bank robber who shoots people during holdups? Does he threaten them with a gun? Or is he more like the kind who has his finger in his pocket and pretends it’s a gun and just quietly walks away with a bag of money?”
“Um . . .”
“Just trying to get a sense of who is victimized here. The bank, obviously. Anyone else?”
“Kind of?” If the guy’s wife and kid never found out, would it hurt them? Would they only be victims if they knew?
“I guess if my dad was a violent criminal, I would have trouble living with him and not saying anything. But if he was, like, a gentleman bank robber and no one got hurt, and the money was helping us survive or he was giving it to the poor, I might be okay with it.”
“Really?” Kyle propped himself up on one elbow. “But if he’s stealing, even in a nice way, with good intentions, he’s still taking something that doesn’t belong to him. He’s breaking the rules.”