Zen and Xander Undone (17 page)

“There's no dignity in lying” is what she always said to us, with such conviction, her pointy chin jutted out, her eyes fierce. And I knew she was right. As much trouble as Xander and I caused, we never did lie to her. When we were caught, we told the truth and faced the consequences.

Could this really be? Could Mom really have been such a liar? Such a hypocrite? How could she leave behind such a mess? How could she do this to us?

“H
APPY
B
IRTHDAY, JAYBIRD!
” Dad says as he emerges from the basement on the morning of Xander's eighteenth.

“Thanks, Dad,” Xander says, bleary-eyed. She's still wearing her clothes from the night before, and she's huddled over her bowl of cereal, taking huge, rueful bites.

Dad lowers himself onto a kitchen chair across from us, rubbing his belly.

“Nice to see you upright,” I tell him.

“It's nice to see you at all,” Xander adds.

Of course we've seen him around the house, but only in passing, near the kitchen or bathroom. Now that he's sitting at the breakfast table, I can get a good look at him. His blond hair is matted to his head and super greasy. He's grown a beard, and the wiry white hairs are poking out of his cheeks and chin like scraggly blades of grass. His breath smells like he's been subsisting on a diet of roadkill.

But hey, he's up before noon for the first time in months.

Looking at Dad now, sitting here at breakfast, I hurt for him. Does he know that Mom had been with another man?

“Want to go to the Red Lantern tonight?” he asks Xander. “Or we could take in a movie.”

“Nah, Dad, thanks,” Xander says. She pours milk into her bowl of cereal. “I'm going out with Margot.”

“But it's your birthday!” I say. “We're always together on our birthdays!”

She forces a huge bite of Cheerios into her mouth and chews loudly.

“It's your eighteenth. It's special,” Dad pleads.

“Let's just get a cake, okay?” I say. “Chocolate? And you can eat it before you go out?”

She picks up her bowl and gets up from the table. “Look, I don't feel like celebrating, okay?”

“Oh, come on!” I whine.

“I mean it!” she yells as she backs out the kitchen door.

Dad and I listen to her pounding up the stairs to her room. Then Dad turns to me. “She leaves us no choice.”

I look at him. He's shapeless and smelly and unshaven as ever, but there's a fun little smirk on his face that I haven't seen since before Mom got sick. Dad's mischievous streak is waking up. In fact, it seems like the whole of Dad is waking up from a long hibernation. His shoulders aren't so slouched, his eyes aren't so hooded. He seems ready to stop being a slug, and it's about time. So even though I didn't plan on spending the day arranging Xander's birthday, I latch on to Dad's new mood and suggest, “Surprise party?”

“I'll order the cake. Be quiet about it. She's hard to fool.”

The phone call to Phillips has been getting to both of us, but Xander is especially tormented. The fact that Mom probably cheated on Dad, cheated on
us,
is more than Xander can stand. It's easier for me, probably because of my shotokan training. In Buddhism, you learn to accept everything in life without judging it. That's what I've been concentrating on, accepting that Mom had a private life, that she wanted to keep it private, and that John Phillips was a part of that life. It takes a lot of concentration to keep myself from thinking the worst of her. Still, all the meditation in the world won't keep me from feeling angry.

Dad stands up from the table, patting at his belly. “It's time I got off my duff. I think I'll go to the library.”

“Shower first.”

“Nah!” He winks. “I'll cut through the stockyard to cover my body odor.”

“Great idea. While you're at it, swing by the sewer for some mouthwash.”

He throws his head back and really laughs at that one. He seems almost happy, like he's been away from me and Xander for a long time and he's glad to be back.

Since Xander has the ears of a bat and the eyes of an eagle, the only way to plan this thing is to use Adam's phone across the street. I slip into my chunky jeans and my Yosemite T-shirt and kick over to his house in my flip-flops. As I cross the street, I look down toward Lake Champlain, which you can see if you crane your neck. The water is brilliant blue and winking in the sunlight, and it makes me feel happy for a second. Things have been bad. They've been really bad, but that doesn't mean life isn't good. It seems like Dad is starting to remember that.

I knock and open the front door. “Hello! Anybody home?”

Nancy bounds out of the kitchen. She's still wearing her red flannel bathrobe that Mom bought for her one Christmas. Her bouncy brown hair is ratted around her small face, and she doesn't have any makeup on, so she looks kind of pale, but really cute too. When I look at Nancy, I never notice her funny features so much as her awesome personality. I can't help but see her as pretty, even though traditionally she's not. “Heya!” she says. “What's the good news?”

“It's Xander's birthday today. We're throwing a surprise party.”

“Yippie!” she says and swoops me into a waltz. She whizzes me around the living room, humming Strauss under her breath, her brown eyes looking dreamily on the ceiling. Nancy is a nut.

She twirls onto the soft, poofy couch. I lower myself carefully, feeling at my back to make sure I'm okay. “Oh, damn!” She covers her mouth with her fingers. “I forgot. Did I hurt you?”

“Nah,” I say. “Not that fragile.”

She jams her shoulder into the couch so she can face me. “How's my odd little neighbor today?”

“Fine. How's my neighborly oddity?”

“Equally fine. Eggs? Coffee?”

“Son?”

“Upstairs.”

I go up, calling out in a booming voice, “Adam Little, you're wanted for questioning in connection with being a fuddy-duddy and a general stick in the mud!”

“Not to mention he didn't eat his squash last night at dinner!” Nancy calls.

Adam cracks his door open and I see one bloodshot eye peering into the hallway. “It's eight o'clock in the morning,” he intones.

“Time for your enema,” I say, tapping my wrist as if I had a watch.

He stares at me blearily for a second, letting me wonder if he's mad at me for waking him up, but then he grins. “Enema before breakfast? How droll!” he says. “Give me a second.” And he disappears behind his door again.

I lower myself onto the top step and wait while he gets dressed. The carpet on the stairs is threadbare green, but it looks pretty with the sun shining through the small stained-glass window at the top of the stairs. Squares of yellow and orange light glow on my skin, and I wiggle my fingers, watching them change color. I hear a door click behind me, and a clearing of the throat. Adam is standing on the top step in oversize khaki shorts and a lopsided polo shirt. “Ahem. What are you doing?”

“Tripping on Motrin. Want to help me put together a birthday party for Xander?”

“She
wants
me to help?” he asks, surprised.

“No. She doesn't even want the party.” I smile sweetly.

“So this will piss her off and generally make her miserable?”

“That's the overall goal.”

“Well then, definitely, yes, I'd like to help.” He rubs his hands together and cackles like a mad scientist. “Mwah ha ha ha ha!”

I
T STARTED OUT SMALL
and simple. Me, Dad, Adam, Nancy, Margot, and Xander. But then Dad wanted to invite Grandma, and she wanted to bring a friend, which is odd because I didn't realize she
had
friends. Then when Adam and I went to see Margot at the pizzeria, she said her boyfriend would bring his friend along as a blind date for Xander. “He'll be our gift to her!” Margot said, with a satisfied look at Adam's wan face. And then she
had
to say in front of Adam: “Aren't you going to bring that guy, Zen? What's his name?”

At which Adam raised his eyebrows and asked, “Is this a hubba-hubba situation?”

“His name's Paul. And I don't really know what constitutes a hubba-hubba situation.” I felt myself turning purple, and at first I didn't want to invite Paul, but then I thought,
Why not? What's stopping me?
So I used Adam's cell phone to get Paul's number from directory assistance, and talked to him right there while Margot served us each a free slice with red pepper flakes and Parmesan.

“I can't go,” Paul said, “unless I can bring my cousin along? Would that be okay? She's cute.”

What could I say? “Sure, bring her!” Once I hung up I said to Adam, “I think Paul is bringing a blind date for you too. His cousin. He says she's cute.”

Adam slapped his forehead. “So how many are we up to?”

Margot counted under her garlicky breath. “Like a dozen?”

“We can't sneak that many people into the living room while Xander's upstairs,” I said.

“Let's have it at my house, then,” Adam said before taking a disturbingly large bite out of his pizza. Why do guys eat like that?

So we raced back to his house to find Nancy gathering up a box of party decorations. “We're having the party here, Mom,” Adam said.

“Not without a good scrubbing,” she replied.

So Adam and I spent the whole day vacuuming and dusting and sweeping and mopping, and throwing away old magazines, and organizing his CD collection. Nancy flitted here and there, hanging up streamers and making a huge banner for Xander that said
WELCOME TO THE LEGAL VOTING AGE
, and blowing up balloons. Dad came in looking freshly shaved, holding a huge sheet cake with sloppy lettering on it that said
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, JAYBIRD
, and we all sampled a fingerful of white frosting. It was fluffy and too sweet, just like birthday frosting should be.

Margot was supposed to swing by our house at six o'clock and make some excuse to drag Xander over to Adam's, so at five-thirty we called up the Red Lantern, Xander's favorite Chinese restaurant, and we ordered enough General Tso's chicken and Szechuan beef and vegetable lo mein to feed an entire platoon of ninjas. Grandma agreed to pick it up on her way over, under strict instructions from Dad to park in the alley behind Nancy's house and come in the back door so Xander wouldn't see her.

Which is what she does, at five forty-five, to find me, Dad, Nancy, and Adam all leaning on the center island, talking.

“Hello!” she calls in her prissy-polite voice she uses in front of nonfamily. “We come bearing fortune cookies!” She marches in playfully, which is weird because she never does anything that is playful.

Behind her is a man with lots of thick white hair, and a huge smile on his face. His blue eyes follow Grandma's every move. She wipes her feet on Nancy's welcome mat, and he does too. She puts her bags of food on the counter, so he puts his there. When she starts to take off her pressed navy blazer, he jumps into action and takes it from her, looking for a place to hang it.

“This is Neil,” she says casually to my father, who is staring at the scene with his mouth fully open.

“Put ‘er there, pal!” Neil booms, and shakes Dad's hand hard enough to break a small bone in his wrist. “Neil Ackerson. Do you know Ackerson Muffler and Lube? That's me.”

“Oh, yeah, I bought some tires there once.” Dad's eyes slide over him in utter confusion. “Pleased to meet you.”

“Any son of Felicia's is a friend of mine,” he says loudly, and slams Dad in the back a couple times with his palm. It's meant to be a friendly gesture, but it makes Dad shrink away from him. The guy is old, but he's strong.

“Nice to, uh . . .” Dad says, and trails off, staring at his mother.

“Well,” Grandma declares, “I'm here, though I didn't get so much as a phone call since Xander's graduation.”

“Oh, I'm sorry, Mom,” Dad says. “We've just been . . .” He doesn't finish his sentence, probably because he's starting to realize that it's getting a little old, him always playing the grief card.

Grandma's narrow eyes wander the kitchen, over Nancy, who is giggling with Adam, over the cake, which looks even sloppier now that Grandma is looking at it, over the streamers that messily hang over the doorway, finally to my big turquoise earrings, which represent the sum total of effort I put into my appearance tonight, and she sniffs. Sniffing is Grandma's way of expressing displeasure. Then, mechanically, she lifts her arms in a hugging gesture, and nods at me as though I've been standing here longing to hug her and only waiting for permission to run into her arms.

“Hi, Grandma,” I say, and pat her back, much more gently than Neil patted Dad. The contact forces a small amount of gas to escape from her ass in a musical little note. “How are you?”

“I'm fine, as you can see,” she says coolly. She fluffs the silk scarf at her neck, and Neil leans in to fluff it a little more for her before sliding an arm around her bony back.

“She's as fine as a spring day!” he booms before kissing her forehead, holding his lips to her wrinkled skin for an uncomfortable amount of time. She pats at the side of his head, laughing, a little coy, a little embarrassed. She farts again, this time loudly, but this goes unnoticed by Neil. I realize he probably talks so loud because he's hard of hearing.

If he has a weakened sense of smell, it's a match made in heaven.

Dad watches Grandma cuddling with her date, his face taking on a strange pallor. I imagine that he wishes he could slink back into our basement and hide there until either Neil or Grandma goes into a nursing home. I might join him.

There's a knock on the back kitchen door, and it opens again. In walks Paul, and on his hip is a baby girl who looks about eighteen months old. Curly blond hair floats over her cherub pink face. Grandma sees her and squeals, “Oh! Who's the little lover?”