“Thanks,” Mike said, coming over to sit next to J.J. “If we could never mention this again, ever, I’d be really happy.” He reached for a cookie.
“So . . . are your clothes still up in the tree?” Linnie asked, still chuckling.
Mike nodded. “My shoes, too. I guess . . . Corrine will try to get them down in the morning?”
I started giggling again as I reached for a cookie, broke it in half, and held out the other half to Siobhan, who took it.
“But seriously,” Mike said, turning to our mom. “This doesn’t go in the strip.” My mother hesitated, and it was like I could see it playing out on her face—she was already lining up the panels and the punch lines in her mind. “Really,” Mike said, not a trace of a smile on his face any longer. “Corrine’s parents are super strict.”
“That must be nice,” my dad said under his breath.
“They’d freak out if they knew I was over there when they were gone,” he said. “Mom? Promise?”
“Mom won’t put it in,” Linnie said around a yawn. “Well, this has been fun, but I think we’ll say good night now.”
“Night,” we all chorused, and a second later, my screen went dark.
“And if we could also not tell Danny?” Mike asked hopefully.
“Scoff,” said J.J.
“I think it’s going to be hard to keep this one under wraps,” my dad said, shaking his head. “But it’ll stay just in the family.” Siobhan cleared her throat. “And Siobhan.”
“Well,” Mike said, getting up and edging toward the stairs. “I’m going to bed and to try and forget this ever happened. Night.”
“Don’t forget to put the floor mat back in the car,” my dad called after him.
“And maybe clean it first?” J.J. called, which started me laughing again.
I had thought that would be it—Mike went to Evanston to begin his winter term, J.J. went back to Pittsburgh, and I returned to being the only kid left in the house. It was about seven weeks later, in February, that Mike called when I leaving school, juggling three separate canvas bags and a stack of books, cursing the fact that the junior parking lot was so much farther away than the senior lot.
“Hey,” I said, tucking the phone under my chin after I answered it. “What’s up?”
“Have you seen today’s strip?” Mike asked, his voice tight.
“No.” I stopped walking. “What about it?” My mom had just wrapped up a storyline about Lindsay and Lawrence (the name of Rodney’s doppelgänger) in a fight with their neighbors, so I had no idea who she was focusing on next—she tended to rotate the storylines between characters.
“Read it.” Mike’s voice was serious enough that I set my bags down, put him on speaker, and pulled up the Sentinel website on my phone. Feeling my eyes start to get blurry from the cold, I read it. The panels intercut between me spending the night at home watching TV, with Waffles and a bowl of popcorn, and Mark, home from college, carefully getting ready and then finally showing up on the doorstep of his girlfriend, Alice. Alice had long been a fan favorite, and my mother had put her in the strip right around the time Mike started dating Corrine. But even though Alice physically looked like Corrine, she was the complete opposite personality-wise. Alice was sweet, nicer, and got along great with the family, like my mom was trying to will into being the girlfriend she wished Mike had.
“Okay,” I said, reading it once again, and then a third time, wondering if I’d missed something. “What about it?” I asked, picking up my bags and walking to my car—it was really getting too cold outside to keep standing around.
“She’s writing about what happened.”
“You mean the car mat thing?” I looked at my phone again. “This could be about anything.”
“Bet you twenty bucks,” Mike said, his voice clipped and angry. “After she promised—”
“Let’s not jump to conclusions,” I said, getting into the car. “At least see where she’s going with it.”
“Wow, you’re taking her side. I’m utterly, utterly shocked.”
“Mike—” But I didn’t get to say anything else, because he’d already hung up.
I wanted Mike to be wrong. I wanted this to be something my mother wouldn’t have done. But Mike had sensed it from the beginning, and the story started unfolding, nearly exactly as Mike had described it to us, culminating in his—or rather, Mark’s—near-naked run through the kitchen. (In the GCS version, he interrupted book club night.)
The night the story line ended, Mike called as I was emptying the dishwasher. My dad answered and put him on speaker—what he always did whenever any of my siblings called home, so that we could all talk. “It’s Mike,” he called, and my mom looked up from where she was reading the paper at the kitchen table. “Hey, son,” my dad said. “How’s—”
“Is she there?” Mike asked, his voice shaky, the way it got when he was really angry but trying not to show it. “Is Mom there?”
“I’m here,” my mother said, getting up from the table. “Are you okay?”
Mike let out a short laugh. “Um, no, mother, I am not okay. How could you do that to me?”
“Do what?” my dad asked.
“The strip,” I said quietly.
“Yeah, the strip,” Mike said through the phone, his voice getting louder and shakier. “Mom, I asked you not to put it in. I specifically asked you—”
“Put what in?” my dad asked, frowning as he put on his glasses and started flipping through the paper.
“Floor mat,” I muttered. “And . . . nudity.”
“Honey, I promise it’s not a big deal,” my mom said, leaning closer to the speaker. “When I mentioned it to my syndicate, they loved it. And I was just thinking about how funny we all found it—I mean, even you were laughing . . .”
“At something private,” Mike snapped. “At something that I didn’t want to go beyond our family. Why is that so hard for you to understand? Do you even get that this is my life? And that it’s not just there for you to get material from?”
“Mike, I think you should calm down,” my mother said, exchanging a look with my dad.
“Calm down? You’ve just wrecked my life with your comic strip!”
“I’ve hardly done that.”
“Oh, really? Well, guess what. Corrine’s parents read your stupid strip. And they figured out what happened. And she’s in trouble with them and just broke up with me over it.” Mike’s voice cracked on the last word.
I exchanged a glance with my dad. I didn’t like Corrine—none of us did—but that didn’t mean I’d wanted this to happen. Not like this.
“Oh, honey.” My mom had gone pale, and she put her hand over her mouth. “I didn’t . . .” She took a breath. “What if I called the Nelsons? Maybe explained things?” She shot me a look, and I could see genuine regret on her face, like she hadn’t realized until right this moment what the consequences might be.
“Yeah,” Mike said, his tone dripping with sarcasm. “That’s what I really want here. You making things better when you’re the one who caused this in the first place.”
“Michael,” my dad said, putting down the paper. “I know you’re upset, but you can’t speak to your mother that way.”
“Fine,” Mike said. “Then I won’t.” And a second later, the phone went dead.
* * *
I stared at the strips in front of me, still rooted to the same spot even though Danny had wandered into the next gallery. You would have thought the resolution in the fictional world of Grant Central Station was the end of it. But it wasn’t—nothing had been resolved as tidily as it had in four black-and-white panels.
Mike had stopped talking to our mother, but she was sure it was just a phase and would blow over. This was around the time that her newest collection was gearing up for publication, and a reporter from USA Today was reaching out to all of us for a human-interest piece on “Growing Up Grant.” I’d e-mailed my few sentences to the reporter after clearing them with my mom and hadn’t thought anyth
ing about it until I saw the interview, printed below the fold on the cover of the USA Today arts section.
Mike had apparently taken his opportunity to speak to a national reporter and ran with it—unloading everything he was currently feeling. He told the reporter that he loathed how our mother cannibalized our lives for strangers’ enjoyment. How he always felt like he was being pushed into the mold of a perfect son in a perfect family, when the reality was much messier than that. How much he’d hated being a Grant.
I’d heard the fight he’d had with my parents the night the article came out—I’d been sitting on the kitchen stairs, hidden from view but able to hear the conversation. My dad had tried to give him a way out, suggesting that maybe he’d been misquoted. But when it became clear that Mike had meant what he’d said in the national media, every word of it, the fight really started in earnest. And even though I couldn’t hear what Mike was saying, judging by my dad’s yelling and my mom’s crying, it was clear he wasn’t doing much of anything to fix the situation, and was in fact, doubling down.
We were all mad at Mike—me more than the rest of my siblings. Even though we could all understand why he was upset, talking to USA Today about how much you hated your family was too much for all of us.
But I had just assumed that, eventually, it would blow over. Soon we’d all be past it, or pretend to be past it, and then it would be like it never happened. But even though Linnie mediated, my mother refused to apologize and Mike refused to apologize, and so they’d stopped talking. And then Mike stayed on campus for the summer. He claimed he was going to be taking summer courses, had already registered for his dorm, and just wanted to stay. And when the fall rolled around, he told my dad in a terse e-mail that he’d be paying his own way in college from now on, signed up for work study and took out loans. When Danny tried to tell him, over group text, just how punishing student loan debt could be, he replied that he didn’t want anything that had come from Grant Central Station. It was like he was in a cold war with my parents, one that only escalated when he didn’t come home for Thanksgiving or Christmas.
And the longer he stayed away, the harder it became to see how this would ever resolve. It was like the distance between him and my parents—especially between him and my mother—seemed to get wider and wider, so that it was like a chasm that couldn’t be breached, so far apart that you couldn’t even see the other side any longer, and eventually, you even forgot that it was ever there.
I looked around and saw that Danny had made his way to the end of the exhibit, and I hurried to catch up with him. As I did, I caught a glimpse of the lobby once again and saw Brooke standing on the other side of the ribbon, craning her neck, clearly trying to find out where Danny had gotten to.
And I knew I could have called out to her, or waved her in, or just pointed across the exhibit to where my brother was. But I just turned and walked over to join Danny, not letting myself look back. It wasn’t asking too much to have just a little time with my brother, in an exhibit filled with our mother’s art. Brooke would be fine for another minute or two. Danny gave me an easy, untroubled smile as I came to join him at the end of the exhibit. There was an empty space on the wall, reserved for where the final strip would go—it would be placed there after it ran on Sunday.
He nodded to the wall, where there was an updated portrait of all of us—a reference to the strip’s header, and the portrait that was at the beginning of the exhibit. This one showed us as we were now, but in the same spots as before, and not behaving a whole lot better. Danny slung an arm around my shoulders and gestured around at the exhibit. “Look at it all,” he said softly. He shook his head. “It’s really something, isn’t it?”
I leaned against him, resting my head against his arm as I looked at everything that was there—everything our mother had done, for good and bad, this whole world she’d brought into existence with some paper and ink. “Yeah,” I said. “It really is.”
CHAPTER 13
Or, Plus-One
* * *
SO, WHAT DO YOU THINK?” J.J. asked, as he rocked back on his heels. “Do you feel rehearsed?”
“Um.” I glanced around the lobby of the Inn to make sure that Linnie and Rodney weren’t in earshot. “Not really.”
To put it mildly, the rehearsal part of the rehearsal dinner had not gone according to plan. When we’d all returned home from the Pearce, it was to find that the house had gotten a lot more crowded since we’d been gone. All the out-of-town guests, and people who would be at the wedding but weren’t in the wedding party, had begun to gather in our house, taking over the kitchen and the family room, with people spilling out onto the deck. My mother had ordered a huge number of pizzas and stacked them on the counter, telling everyone to help themselves. Waffles had not seemed very happy about all the new people who had arrived and had escaped to the upstairs landing, his ears pressed back. I’d almost tripped over him when heading up the stairs, and he gave me a look that was incredibly put-upon, like he was despairing of his lot in life—which seemed a bit extreme to me, since only a few hours ago, he’d been in a shelter.
Because we didn’t have a tent up yet, Will had tried to take us through the rehearsal in the middle of the backyard, which was empty except for the tent pegs that had already been hammered into the ground and which we were explicitly told to avoid, so we wouldn’t trip over them.
But it became clear after a few minutes that the rehearsal wasn’t going great. Max kept trying to run through the ceremony, but Linnie and Rodney had written their own vows and wanted to say them for the first time on their wedding day. And any rehearsal was going to have to be repeated tomorrow, since we were missing half the wedding party. Three of the bridesmaids were delayed—one on a late plane, one stuck in traffic, and one lost, driving around in circles in the back of the “world’s worst Uber.” Finally, it was just easier to tell them to meet us at the Inn for the rehearsal dinner. But more importantly than the bridesmaids—Mike wasn’t there.
He’d texted me as I was changing into my rehearsal dinner dress—deep midnight blue, with a low neck, and a twirly, swingy skirt.
Mike
Hey can’t make rehearsal see you at the dinner
As I read it, a wave of annoyance crested over me—because not only was Mike bailing, but he was expecting me to be the one to tell everyone about it. I’d sent it to the group text with the rest of my siblings and found that when I came downstairs, Linnie seemed more resigned than angry. “The bridesmaids are MIA,” she said with a shrug. “And Rodney’s cousin Marcus can’t come until later. So it’s not that big a deal.”
But I felt it was, and even though Mike wasn’t the reason the rehearsal wasn’t going well, if he’d been here, there would have at least been one less unknown for tomorrow. After a few attempts, Will gave up on the rehearsal and suggested we just head over for the dinner. My mother had made sure that all the guests remaining behind were fed—Aunt Liz had promised to help keep things humming, and reorder pizza as needed—and we’d all caravanned over to the Inn.
Since we were pretty early, the private room in the restaurant was still being set up for us—but I’d texted with Bill and he’d assured me that everything was on track with the decorations. So while we waited, we were hanging out in the lobby.
I saw Linnie and Rodney standing over by the bar, with both sets of parents and Rodney’s older sister, Elizabeth, and her husband, and once I’d verified they were not in earshot, I turned back to J.J. “I just hope everything goes okay tomorrow,” I said, shaking my head.
“It’s going to go great,” someone said as they bumped me with their hip. I turned around, startled, and the next thing I knew, I was being hugged from both sides, enveloped in a cloud of perfume and spearmint gum by two of the bridesmaids—Jenny K. and Priya. When they stepped back, I saw Jenny W. standing slightly apart, and she gave me a smile.
There were five bridesmaids altogether, including me and Elizabeth, but it had never been a question that the Jen
nys and Priya would be in Linnie’s wedding party—they’d been best friends since Dartmouth.
“Hey, guys,” I said, but that was all I managed before they started talking over me.
“You look so great!” Priya said, running her hands through my hair, pulling it forward over my shoulders, then pushing it back. “Jen, doesn’t she look so great?”
“She does,” Jenny K. agreed, smiling at me. I’d never understood it, but the three of them always seemed to know who was talking to whom, despite the fact that two of them had the same name. People got the Jennys confused occasionally, which made no sense to me, since Jenny Kang was taller and curvy and Jenny Wellerstein was tiny and whip-thin. Priya Koorse fell somewhere in between the two of them, both in height and in temperament.
I’d gotten to know them all over the last ten years—they’d sometimes join Rodney in coming to our house for holidays, or would just show up with Linnie on a random weekend, the four of them driving down from Hanover, all of them saying they couldn’t stand to be in New Hampshire for a moment longer.
“Did you get a haircut?” Jenny W. asked. “I love it!”
“No—”
“I liked it better longer,” Jenny K. said, which was pretty much par for the course—the two of them could argue about anything, with Priya and Linnie playing peacemaker.
“Did you guys come from the house?” I asked, looking around and not seeing any suitcases. “You get settled in okay?”
“Yes,” Priya said, then rolled her eyes. “But Jenny is worried that having roommates is going to crimp her pickup prospects.” I was about to ask which one when Jenny W. smiled at that and smoothed down her sweater.
“What can I say?” she said, giving me a wink. “I’ve always had good luck at weddings. If you know what I mean.”
“We always know what you mean,” Jenny K. said, rolling her eyes. “And like I told you, you’re not going to find anyone dateable at this wedding.”
“I beg to differ,” J.J. said, smiling widely at them.
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