by Sara Zarr
And then: You probably have a real best friend, I just mean, you know, I tell you more stuff than I tell anyone else right now. It’s probably a phase hahaha
God, he sounded so dumb and pathetic. He was almost certain now that she was just being nice. Being family. Acting as his crisis counselor for the last few months.
You can depend on me, too, you know, he added, now desperate for her to reply. He put his earbuds in and stuck the phone under his leg so he wouldn’t be tempted to say more, and so he wasn’t staring at her typing bubble feeling like an idiot.
He imagined her in her room, sitting on the floor with her short hair raked back, tossing her phone aside so she could concentrate on her homework without her emotionally fragile cousin bothering her every five minutes.
“We’re family,” she’d said. Was she saying it like . . . We’re not actually best friends, we’re family? Or like We’re family, which means we’ll be best friends forever?
He brought up Hamilton, the only modern musical he really liked, and tried to relax in his chair, eyes closed again. “Say No to This” started. Kyle immediately skipped it. Too intense, too much like his life. Skip skip skip till he hit “One Last Time,” when he leaned his head back and wondered if he could somehow manage never going into the house again.
Someone kicked his foot.
He opened his eyes and stared up at Taylor. She took her hands out of the front pocket of her USC pullover, gestured to her ears, and waited. When he didn’t move, she leaned over and yanked his earbuds out.
“You’ve been sitting here forever.”
His phone vibrated under his leg. “Hang on,” he told Taylor.
“Who is it?”
“No one. Seriously, just like . . .”
She sighed and went to drag another chair over. While she cleaned it off and got settled, Kyle read:
I remember when we all used to sleep in the bunkhouse at the farm. It was always you and me staying up and talking way after everyone else. You’ve always been the one I look forward to seeing the most. Maybe because of us being the same age or maybe because Megan scared me and Taylor thought I was annoying or because I didn’t feel girlie enough for them or whatever, I don’t know. You never treated me like I was strange or different. So I trust you more than any of the other cousins. It makes me happy that you trust me, too, and that I can be here for you now while you’re going through all this. And you shouldn’t worry about it so much.
He reread it twice.
I trust you.
Man, he’d needed that. So she didn’t actually say, “You’re my best friend too,” so what. He immediately forgot the sense from mere minutes ago that maybe it was not ideal to depend on one person so much for his whole entire sense of well-being.
Then she inserted a gif of James Cagney tap dancing down a staircase in a way that looked physically impossible. Kyle smiled. How does he not fall?? he asked.
Gravity can’t touch him.
Taylor is here now, he wrote. I’m gonna talk to her, okay?
TALK talk or taaaalk?
He sent her a shrug and a screaming cat face, then stuck his phone in his pocket.
“Sorry I invaded your privacy,” Taylor said. “Usually you hide in your room when you want privacy.”
“I’m so tired of my room. And it’s nice out.”
“So,” she said. “What’s going on.”
It was a question and a statement and a plea and it sounded like she knew something, but in case his interpretation was off, he asked, “What do you mean?”
She stared at him like Are you serious?
“Um, me and Nadia breaking up? Did Megan tell you?”
“Oh, shit, Kyle, no, I didn’t know. Are you okay?” She searched his face. “You’re not okay.”
“Not really. Not yet.”
She put her hand on his arm for a couple seconds, patted it, then said, “But you and Nadia aren’t what’s making Mom and Dad weird.”
If she’d only been home a few hours and already sensed it, telling her something would not be this huge reveal. Still, he hesitated. “The farm stuff, maybe,” he offered.
“Yeah, that is terrible and depressing, but . . . it’s like they won’t really look at each other?”
Light flooded the yard; their dad had gone into the kitchen. They watched him move things around in the refrigerator, his back to the windows.
“Bigfoot,” Kyle muttered, and Taylor let out a single loud laugh and put her hand over her mouth. Megan had started calling their dad that years ago, because of how hairy the back of his neck could get. Just straight-up fur, disappearing under his shirt collar.
“Bigfoot hungry,” Taylor said.
“Bigfoot need food. Need food now. Enchilada plate not satisfy.”
Their mom was the one who would shave and trim his neck before it could get bushy. Now there was no one tending to him, feeding him, grooming him.
Kyle thought of about six different ways to say it, but ultimately went with the most direct.
“Mom is having an affair.”
Taylor laughed.
“I’m not kidding,” Kyle said.
“Wait. What? Mom is?”
“Yes.”
Taylor sat with that long enough for Kyle to experience the crash of anxiety at having told a secret, and then the subsequent wave of relief that now he had both of his sisters in the ring with him.
“How do you know?” Taylor asked. “Did you see something on Mom’s phone or something? Maybe it’s not what you thought?”
“I know because Dad told me. And Mom admits it. And keeps telling me not to tell. And . . .”
“And?”
“I know who the guy is. His kid is in this group I help coach.”
“Oh my god. She met him through your baseball team or something?”
“No, I don’t know how she met him, but I guess like Dad always says—it’s a small town.”
Taylor looked toward the window, where their dad finally closed the fridge and, still empty-handed, turned off the light and walked offstage. Bigfoot sad.
Kyle filled in more details of what he knew and how he’d found out. The car ride to Martie’s birthday, the things they’d said about not wanting to make any decisions yet, the financial issues affecting everything. “Allegedly affecting everything,” Kyle said. “Megan thinks that’s an excuse.”
“Megan knows? You told Megan and then neither of you told me?”
“I did tell you. I just told you.”
“You know what I mean.” She started to sniffle, wiped her face with her sleeve.
He glanced at her. “Are you crying because of Mom and Dad or because I told Megan first?”
She laughed a little. “I don’t know.”
“Emily knows too, so go ahead and yell at me about that, I guess.”
“Emily, our cousin?” She wiped her face again. “Okay.” She slumped down in her chair and shoved her hands into the pouch of her sweatshirt. “I’m shocked, but I’m not shocked. I knew things here weren’t good, even back at Thanksgiving and Christmas. There’s a reason I haven’t come home much since.”
“You noticed stuff at Thanksgiving?”
“Mom was off by herself a lot. On her phone whenever she had a chance. She just seemed kind of . . . disengaged? Even when she was right there. You didn’t notice all that?”
He chewed on his knuckle. “No.”
“You were busy falling in love, Kyle.”
Right as she said that, something rustled behind them, and then a possum shot out of a shrub and darted past their chairs. Taylor shrieked and lifted her legs off the ground. The possum went left, then right, then turned and looked straight at them like it was going to ask for directions.
“Get away!” Taylor shouted, and it did, straight down the walkway between their house and the neighbors’.
“Dude, it listened to you!”
Kyle started laughing and Taylor did her Taylor laugh—covering her mouth with her hand and s
haking, her eyes alternately going wide and squinching shut. They couldn’t stop. Kyle felt himself losing control and kept his arm over his own mouth so that he couldn’t get too loud and wake up the whole neighborhood.
The kitchen light came on again. They looked up. Their dad stood in the window, craning his neck to see what was going on. Kyle pointed. “Bigfoot,” he said, almost crying. “Bigfoot curious?”
Their dad tapped on the glass, then pointed at his wrist. Taylor took her hand off her mouth long enough to barely manage to say, “He’s not even wearing a watch,” before having to cover her mouth again. She rocked back and forth with tears coming out of her eyes, and Kyle clutched his stomach, finally losing control after all these months of doing a pretty good job keeping it together, finally dissolving into the terrible, ridiculous, unbearable ache of it all.
Part III
Summer, Nowhere Farm
1
ON THE morning of departure for the farm, Kyle overslept. He hadn’t set an alarm because in every previous version of his family’s existence, his mom or dad would go around and wake up Kyle and Megan and Taylor early and make a whole big deal out of it. In this version, Kyle shuffled down the quiet hall and through the empty kitchen, then found his dad in the driveway, tossing a duffel bag and a small cooler into the truck.
“How come nobody woke me up? Where’s the rest of the stuff?”
“Once you load up anything you want to bring, I think we’re good to go.” His dad leaned into the truck cab and collected some empty soda cans and food wrappers.
“But . . .” Kyle noticed his mom’s car was gone. The garage was open and Taylor’s was parked inside.
“They already left.”
Separate cars? Separate cars and no wake-up and no one had prepared him? It wasn’t like he thought it would be the same as ever—stopping in Pacific Grove for a picnic, doing rest-stop jumping jacks with his sisters, playing each other music from their phones.
“This is the last summer at the farm,” Kyle said, watching his father carry garbage to the can in the garage. “Are we really going out like this, Dad?”
“Looks like it.”
The last few weeks of school had been a mix of better and worse than the couple of months leading up to it. Just having Taylor in the house and knowing what was up helped Kyle feel way less alone. They’d talked about telling their parents that she knew too, but then Taylor said, “Let’s put it in the vault. For now. Mom and Dad aren’t the only ones who can keep secrets.”
At first they shared a lot of glances and emails and analyzed stuff with each other and on their text thread with Megan. But then Megan said she didn’t want to hear about it anymore, and not long after that, Taylor confessed that she wished she didn’t know, too.
“Farm week is going to be ruined,” she’d said one night, when they finally did go to Cold Stone to use the gift card. “Maybe it is better to pretend.”
“We are, Taylor. That’s exactly what we’re doing.”
She looked down at her ice cream, running her plastic spoon around the edge and eating toward the middle, like she’d been doing for as long as Kyle could remember.
“I could try pretending to myself?”
“I tried that,” he’d said. “It doesn’t work that well, usually.”
School sucked, because school. Also he had to keep seeing Nadia and Mateo. They weren’t super couple-ish at school, but they were obviously close. And when Kyle heard they were going to junior prom together, he of course thought about how he and Nadia had talked about that. Talked about getting a hotel room, even though they’d already gone from longer and more complicated make-outs with less and less clothing to going all the way on New Year’s Eve, in Nadia’s room while her parents were out at a party. A hotel room would be different, though. It would mean getting to spend the whole night together. Opening his eyes in the morning and seeing her there, getting to hold her while the sun came up.
Maybe she did all that with Mateo on prom night. Maybe she didn’t. He stayed away from social media and any conversations around school about that night.
He’d finished strong with his mentoring gig with Coach Malone’s kids, putting the info about Jacob’s dad into some kind of vault within a vault in his mind. Pretending to himself, like Taylor said, which he could manage for a few hours a week. As long as he wasn’t at home comparing the past to the present. Malone gave Ito a good report, and Ito said Kyle could start next season with a clean slate, if he wanted.
But that would mean more Mateo.
The Mateo and Nadia situation was the one thing he hadn’t told Emily.
Every time he thought about it, he’d stop himself, worried he was one of those basic people preoccupied with romantic drama. And worried he’d get into talking about sex. Which he didn’t want to do with her, not so much because he was shy about it or she didn’t have a lot to say on the topic but, like, it was almost like his and Emily’s connection was too pure for that? Maybe that was dumb, or belittling to her in some way, or maybe he was just private and didn’t really want to talk about sex with anybody he wasn’t actually having it with. He wasn’t sure.
He’d been telling her everything else, though, and she’d been keeping him updated with Uncle Dale and Aunt Brenda’s issues. And last night she’d texted, Only one more sleep till I get to see my most favorite cousin! and it felt like the best thing she’d ever said to him. Or second best, after saying she trusted him.
Now he took a quick shower and finished packing, then jumped in the truck with his dad. When they were a few miles from home, his dad said, “Taylor and your mom just wanted some quality time together. The separate cars thing. And I need to have the pickup in case there’s a work emergency or anything I need to get back for.”
“Sure, Dad. Makes sense. Also the fact that you and Mom don’t want to be trapped in the same vehicle for five or six hours.”
“Also that.”
Did you leave yet? he asked Emily. Taylor and Mom will probably get there before us. Separate cars.
She replied, On the road now. My parents had a big fight because my mom bought a margarita machine to bring and it was like 200 bucks and took up all this room in the trunk but really they’re fighting about her drinking and just not saying it. And my dad has a cold and is being a baby about it. So now we’re listening to podcasts and no one is talking. She punctuated it with a thumbs-up.
Sorry but tbh I feel better not being the only one dealing with parental misconduct.
Also, I can’t wait to see you, he added.
She sent back a gif of Maria from The Sound of Music swirling around on a mountaintop.
Then he texted Megan for the fourth time since last night. ARE YOU COMING YES/NO. Her last update said she’d gotten the time off one job, but not the other. After that she went MIA. Don’t leave me and Taylor hanging, he added. Even if you can only come a couple days. We need you, is all I’m saying.
During the drive, Kyle endured the sense memories of the last time they’d been on this same drive. How one minute he’d been texting with Nadia, then the next minute his dad had dropped his four-word grenade.
Now his dad was on a call with Al Najarian, his business partner, on speakerphone. Annoying, but it killed some time. They were going through a punch list for a remodel and complaining about the client and then about some subcontractors.
“Just get that completion payment,” his dad said. “Do whatever you have to.”
When his dad was off the phone, Kyle asked, “Is Baker and Najarian okay?”
“It’s fine.”
“Really.”
“Kyle, don’t worry about it.”
“Why shouldn’t I worry? You keep saying don’t worry about money, don’t worry about you and Mom, it’s fine, you’re figuring it out. But it’s not fine and you’re not figuring it out, and I’m worrying. Worrying isn’t something you can just tell someone not to do. You do know that, right?”
His dad didn’t react.
Kyle scanned through the radio stations and couldn’t find anything he liked.
“Just turn it off,” his dad said.
“We’re going to drive in total silence?”
“Okay, then plug your phone in and put on your show tunes, but I don’t want to listen to three seconds of one song and then three seconds of a different song and three seconds—”
“Got it.” Kyle turned off the radio. They were only an hour into the trip. He sighed. He didn’t want to put on show tunes. Show tunes were private. Something for him and Emily. He sent her a check-in text and she replied with a picture of Uncle Dale asleep in the back seat of their car, clutching a fistful of tissues. There’s drool, she said.
They joked a little more, when what Kyle was really thinking was how there was this excitement at the pit of his stomach that within hours, they’d be seeing each other. The first time since Martie’s birthday. Since everything.
He texted Taylor. Thx for saying goodbye this morning and telling me wtf is going on
Taylor: I was surprised too and you were asleep!
welp, see you there I guess
They hit some road construction and slowed to a ten-miles-per-hour crawl.
“So,” his dad said. “Mom says your grades weren’t great this year.”
Kyle exhaled a laugh. Now they were going to make conversation. Okay. “They weren’t. But I brought them up and I think I did okay on finals.”
“Oh, okay. Good.”
They inched along. Kyle stared out the window at the road crew in their orange vests, talking on two-way radios.
“Got a girl?” his dad asked. “Since Nadia?”
“Dad. Could we not?”
They’d literally never talked about the breakup before. Or about his grades all year. Or, for that matter, baseball or his coaching or anything, stuff he and his dad would talk about if this year was normal at all. Yet Dad was getting info somehow, through dad osmosis. Indirect communication or no communication at all. Maybe that’s what his mom was sick of. Maybe her boyfriend could just come out and say stuff instead of circling and circling thoughts and feelings and opinions like a spooked deer.
The lanes opened back up, and his dad stepped on the gas.