Out of Nowhere (20 page)

We’d known about this event for weeks, of course, but I’d been hoping all this time that Rudy would need me to work that Saturday and I’d have an excuse to miss it. Even worse than seeing my mother so on edge was pretending to enjoy myself in a room full of old people who all asked me the same questions, over and over. Not to mention I always seemed to be assigned the task of keeping Tristan from destroying the ugly, breakable knickknacks my grandmother insisted on displaying at his eye level.

Resigned, I shut my book and slid out of the chair, thinking I’d better get in the shower before Jeff beat me to it. On my way to the bathroom, I passed Mom’s closed bedroom door and heard Jeff’s voice, murmuring soothingly. I figured he could calm her better than I could, especially since there was still some tension between us from all the bickering we’d been doing lately. The day after our latest battle, I had to promise to stop letting Cole come over when I was home alone, just to get her off my back. But we both knew it was pointless. Banning him from the house was like closing down one fast food chain in an effort to combat obesity. There were always other options. We had the backseat of his car, which was cramped and uncomfortable but doable in a pinch. And now that I’d been introduced to and subsequently approved by his parents, we had his house, where we made out in the darkness of his basement bedroom. Unlike my mother, Cole’s parents didn’t feel the need to chaperone their teenager like a third-grader. Or maybe they assumed we were playing Scrabble down there or something. In any event, they rarely ventured downstairs.

An hour and several freak-outs later, we were on our way to Oakfield, finally. We took Jeff’s truck because unlike our car, the air conditioning worked one hundred percent of the time. I sat in back with Tristan, balancing a casserole dish of macaroni and cheese on my lap, our contribution to the potluck dinner. Mom sat in the passenger seat, biting her pinky nail, which she only did when she was super stressed because it ruined her manicure. Jeff, oblivious as usual, bopped along to the radio as he drove, every so often reaching over to squeeze Mom’s knee.

Because we were almost a half hour late, every available spot in front of my grandparents’ small, bungalow-style house was taken when we arrived. We ended up having to park a few yards away in front of someone else’s house, adding another couple of minutes to our walk. This seemed to stretch my mother’s already taut nerves, and by the time we reached the house she looked like she wanted nothing more than to turn around and go back home.

“Hello, hello!” My grandmother, in a pale yellow dress and open-toed heels, waved to us as we walked in the door. She excused herself from the circle of women she’d been conversing with and came over to us. “We’ve been waiting for you all to get here,” she said, leaning in to give us each a brief hug. I caught a whiff of lavender, her signature scent. “Michelle is back in the kitchen. She’ll be so glad to see you. Come in, come in.”

The entire time she spoke, I noticed her eyes flicking over each of us in succession, as if making sure we were decent enough to mingle with her friends. My grandmother was all about appearances. “Here you go, Grandma,” I said, holding out the casserole dish I’d carried in. “Happy anniversary.”

“Thank you, dear.” She took it from me and smiled, revealing a set of too-perfect teeth that I knew weren’t hers. “My goodness, Riley, you’re getting tall. Kimberly,” she said, turning to my mother, “she’s so much like you were at that age.”

My mother smiled placidly, but I could tell what she was thinking:
Yes, except she isn’t carrying a bastard child.

“And how’s my sweet boy?” Grandma cooed at Tristan. She passed the mac and cheese to Mom and lifted the baby out of Jeff’s arms, holding him against her hip. He started yanking on the beads she wore around her neck, but my grandmother barely noticed. She kissed his forehead and then patted his bottom. “Tristan,” she said in a high voice, “you tell your mama it’s time to start toilet training you. You’re getting too big for these silly old diapers.”

“He’s only eighteen months old, Mom,” my mother said, looking exhausted already.

“Nonsense. Both you girls were fully toilet-trained by eighteen months. All it takes is a little perseverance.”

Mom’s knuckles turned white as her grip tightened on the casserole dish. Fearing a macaroni mishap, I took it from her and brought it to the kitchen, catching a few snatches of murmured conversations along the way. This seemed more like a church meeting than a party. I even caught sight of their minister—who I recognized from the handful of times my grandparents took me with them to church—holding court in the dining room.

“Is that
Riley
?” a voice gasped as I entered the warm kitchen. I turned to see my aunt Michelle walking toward me with her arms spread wide. I didn’t even have a chance to put my dish down before she was on me, squeezing me against her chest. “Look at
you
,” she said, pulling back and beaming at me. “You’re all grown up. Wow.”

The last time I’d seen Aunt Michelle was at Christmas and I hadn’t changed at all since then, as far as I could see. But I just smiled and thanked her. “It’s good to see you,” I added. “I like your hair like that.”

“Oh,” she said, smoothing the short, dark strands with her fingers. “Thanks. I chopped it all off a few months ago. Just needed a change, I guess.”

I nodded, thinking of the old photo album Mom kept in our coat closet that featured her and her sister as teenagers. Michelle’s hair was different in every picture. At one point, in high school, she’d rocked a pink Mohawk. Apparently she was a pretty wild kid, to the dismay of my grandparents, who preferred to pretend their daughters’ teenage years didn’t exist. If I concentrated really hard, I could sort of remember my aunt as she was back then, before she straightened up, grew her hair in, and went off to college to study photography. But mostly, I knew her as she was after she moved away and married Brad, a boring, nerdy accountant with inordinately hairy arms. My grandparents had scads of pictures chronicling those years, but they didn’t seem to possess any photos of Michelle with the pink Mohawk, or my mother when she was pregnant with me. If they did have them they were probably in a drawer somewhere, hidden from the public eye.

“This needs to be either refrigerated or heated,” I said, remembering the macaroni in my arms.

“The oven’s on,” she said, flitting over to the counter, where she’d been tossing a salad when I first walked in. “Just stick it in. The food’s almost ready to be laid out. Where’s your mom?”

Before I could answer, Mom entered the kitchen with Tristan in her arms. On her heels was my grandfather, who wore a polo shirt the exact same shade of yellow as my grandmother’s dress. Cute.

“Kimmy!” Michelle shrieked as Grandpa came over to kiss my cheek. He smelled like
his
signature scent, Old Spice.

“Happy anniversary,” I said over the squeals and laughter of my mother and aunt, reuniting by the dishwasher.

“Thank you, my dear,” Grandpa said, patting my shoulder with his gnarled, arthritic hand. Then he grabbed a bowl of peanuts and went back to the living room, as if he’d done his duty and could now safely escape. Typical. My grandfather never did have much to say to me, aside from “How’s school?” and “Can you pass the salt?” Mom said he was the same with her when she was a teenager. It was like he was scared of anyone between the ages of twelve and twenty.

“He’s getting so big,” Michelle said, her eyes misty as she looked at Tristan. She and Brad planned to have kids but not until it was “economically feasible”, as Brad liked to say. My grandmother did not understand this. According to her,
not
having a baby when you’re thirty-two and married was just as unacceptable as having an illegitimate one at eighteen.

Soon, it was time to eat. Mom pawned Tristan off on me while she and Michelle brought the food out, arranging it on the dining room table along with stacks of plates and cutlery. People started swarming before they even finished. When the mob finally started thinning, I made up a plate for Tristan, who was whining in my ear. Then I got a plate for myself and we sat on the floor in the living room, next to a leafy plant. Tristan took one bite out of a cracker, threw it down, and then—before I could stop him—proceeded to tunnel his hands into the moist soil of the plant. I started silently counting to ten like the childcare books say to do.

“Tristan, no,” I said, pulling his hands out of the dirt. He giggled, quite pleased with the sight of his grimy fingers. I snatched him up and headed for the bathroom, leaving our little picnic behind.

Before we could reach the bathroom we were waylaid by Jeff, ostensibly en route to the dining room for seconds (or thirds). “What happened?” he asked, taking in Tristan’s hands and the set of filthy handprints that now adorned my white shirt.

“Your son…” I started to say, then shook my head and handed the baby over to him. Let him deal with this. “I’m going to the washroom.”

Five minutes later, after some vigorous scrubbing and more than a little cursing, my shirt was damp but relatively clean. As I emerged from the bathroom, I saw that the door to the guest bedroom was open a crack. Through the opening I could see a woman sitting on the bed, her long legs crossed at the ankle. I recognized the shoes, and a few seconds later, the voice. It was my mother, talking to someone.

“…don’t know how she’s going to react,” she was saying as I flattened my body against the wall by the door, out of her line of sight.

“She might surprise you,” said another voice. My aunt Michelle.

“Hmm,” my mother said, unconvinced. “It’s just—she seems to almost
hate
him, you know? I don’t know where it comes from.”

“Well, she was so close to Matt. Maybe she feels like you’re replacing him.”

“She knows I’d never try to replace her father.” A moment later I heard a sniffle and realized she was crying. My breath caught in my throat. She hardly ever cried, at least not in front of other people.

“Kim, I’m sure she wants you to be happy,” Aunt Michelle said soothingly. “And she’s leaving for college next year, right? It’s not like she has to live with him for very long.”

Live with him?
Heat rose in my face as I slowly pieced together their conversation.

“She’s probably going to college here and living at home,” Mom explained, still sniffling. “I want her here, of course, but I don’t think I can handle the two of them under one roof on a fulltime basis. She’s always less tense when he’s away and it’s just the three of us.”

The bed springs creaked as one of them adjusted their position. “At some point you’re going to have to start thinking about your own happiness,” Michelle said. “Riley isn’t a little girl anymore. Don’t you think she’ll adjust?”

I stared straight ahead, keeping my eyes on the giant wooden cross that hung on the wall across from me. I knew I should leave now, go back to Tristan, but my body felt glued to that wall. I needed to hear my mother’s answer.

“I don’t know,” she said after a minute. “She and I have been butting heads a lot lately. She gets so defensive whenever I try to talk to her.” I heard the sound of a tissue being ripped from its box. “Getting engaged should be a happy occasion, right? But all I’ve been feeling since he asked me is dread. I mean, it’s been two weeks and I haven’t even worn the ring he gave me because I’m so terrified of Riley’s reaction.” She paused to blow her nose. “Maybe I should have said no.”

“Stop talking silly. He’s your baby’s father and you love him. Of course you should marry him if that’s what you want.” Michelle’s voice got lighter, like she was smiling as she spoke. “And I’m not a mom yet, but Riley sounds pretty normal to me. Most teenagers think they know more than their parents.
We
certainly did.”

Mom let out a little chuckle. “True.”

The bed springs groaned again, followed by the thump of shoes on the floor. I glanced around, looking for the fastest escape route. The bathroom was closest, so I sprinted in there and shut the door, my heart thumping in my chest. A second later I heard them pass by the door, laughing, as if the bedroom heart-to-heart was already forgotten.

I stayed in the bathroom, perched on the edge of the tub, until guests started knocking on the door. Quickly, I peered at my reflection in the mirror, making sure I looked normal enough to fool people into thinking everything was fine. My eyes were still red from crying, but most of the people out there were short-sighted or had cataracts anyway. They wouldn’t notice.

“Riley, dear,” my grandmother said, sidling up to me as I stood near the French doors to the dining room. “Did you get enough to eat?” Her fingers closed around my upper arm. “You and your mother…skin and bones, the both of you. Try some of those stuffed peppers Dottie made, they are
fantastic
.”

“I’m full, Grandma,” I said, even though I’d only gotten two bites of Caesar salad before Tristan’s plant excavation.

“Not too full, I hope. We’re cutting the cake soon.” She patted my hand and headed for the kitchen, where I could see Michelle and a few other women powering up the rented coffee urns. Soon, the rich smell of percolating coffee drifted through the house.

I looked over at my mother, who was sitting on the couch next to Jeff, nodding at something he was saying. Tristan sat on Jeff’s lap, clutching a dinner roll with his now-clean hands. As usual they looked like a brochure for The Perfect Family—attractive thirty-something couple, complete with adorable blond baby.

But nowhere in that brochure was there room for a surly teenage girl with a chip on her shoulder. She’d just spoil the illusion.

* * *

That night, as I somehow knew she would, my mother knocked on my bedroom door. Without lifting my eyes from the article I was reading on stem cell treatments, I told her to come in.

“Sorry to interrupt,” she said, sitting gingerly on my bed. I glanced up and saw that her face was pinched with worry, just like it always was before she sprang something big on me. She had no idea I already knew what that something was.