Things We Didn't Say (2 page)

“Going up to shave,” he says, leaning in to plant a quick kiss on my forehead. I would usually seize up and treasure this small affection. Today, it stings.

When I’ve heard his steps go all the way up the stairs, I check my phone.

Tony didn’t leave a voice mail. His text reads:
Caught by surprise?

I send back one word—
sorry—
and delete both messages.

So Michael hasn’t seen Angel. He doesn’t know yet. Maybe she won’t tell him at all, or maybe she’s waiting. She’s smart like that, knowing how to hold her cards until just the right moment.

Like mother, like daughter.

That’s another thing I’m not allowed to say.

In the kitchen, pouring Jewel a bowl of Honeycombs as the older kids loll at the table, I offer Angel some breakfast, as casually as I can. “Want something to eat?” I fight to keep my voice level and mild, like I’m only the recorded voice on the phone, giving out the time.

“Do I ever?” she spits.

I laugh, as if this is an amusing joke. I do this partly to deflect her, partly for Jewel’s benefit, since conflict gives her a tummyache.

I rinse my cereal bowl in the sink. Michael is to my left, pouring coffee. I don’t know why I bother, but I cut my eyes over to him, searching for him to meet my gaze. He glances up at me, and I tip my head toward his daughter.

He sighs and turns around, flashing me a quick, shamefaced look as he does, knowing his admonition will be too mild, too late.

“Angel, you really should eat. And watch your tone.”

Angel barely hears him and grunts at her phone, where she’s texting. She pauses to push her white-blond hair behind one ear. There are candy-pink streaks in it at the moment, though she’s promised the director of the school play she will bleach them out by dress rehearsal. She stretches out long in her chair, her body a graceful arcing swoop. She’s gotten taller in the short time I’ve known her, more graceful, too. Truth be told, she’s a stunner of a girl. Yet I’ve seen her scowl at herself in the mirror, caught her patting her stomach and fiddling with her waistband as if trying to check if she’s thin enough yet, beautiful enough yet.

I try to ruffle Dylan’s hair as I come back to the table, only he ducks my hand so I just swipe through the air above his head. I stuff that hand in my pocket.

“You’ve got music class today?” I ask Dylan.

“Yeah.”

I should know better than to ask yes-or-no questions. “What songs are you working on?”

Dylan shifts in his chair, shrugging like his clothes are making him itch. His hair, dark like his dad’s, flops over his light blue eyes, a combination that really should send the girls swooning. Maybe in a couple of years when his skin evens out and his voice smooths over again. “I don’t . . . know.” I note the pause. When he feels the stammer coming, he takes extra time to pronounce the word.

“You don’t
know
?” Michael interjects.

“I haven’t heard you practice in a long time,” I say quickly, interrupting his dad. Dylan used to enjoy the company when he played his sax. We didn’t talk, in fact most of the time I’d just work on my laptop, on the floor, propped up against his bedroom wall. He said it made him play better knowing there were “other ears in the room.”

“It’s okay,” he says. “You don’t have to.”

The teen kiss-off. “You don’t have to” equals “Please don’t
.
”

Jewel pushes her pink glasses up the bridge of her nose and announces to the table in general: “Did you know that humans have 206 bones in the body? And we’re born with more. Some of them fuse together, though.”

I’m so grateful to her for cutting the tension with her factoid, I want to sweep her up in a hug. I cross my arms instead and smile. “Yeah?”

She’s wearing a French braid today, which she must have conned Angel into doing. Apparently their mother was a whiz at complicated hairdos. I’ve never been good at that, and the first time Jewel asked me to fix her hair it took twenty minutes, and she cried all the way out the door with uneven pigtails.

“Yeah,” she replies, and I’m hoping she’ll continue her lecture but she refocuses on her cereal. She doesn’t have to be up as early as her big siblings, but she likes to be, she says. She likes to watch everybody head off for the day. Plus, she gets the television to herself after they leave until it’s her turn for the bus at eight thirty.

Dylan picks up his phone and reads a message, seeming to flinch. But then says casually, “Hey, Dad, Robert is sick today. Can you drive me?”

Robert is Dylan’s ride to Excalibur Charter Academy. EXA, the kids call it, like
ecks-uh
. Angel takes the bus to the magnet school in town, having won entrance with good grades. Dylan’s grades aren’t bad, nor are they exceptional. He went to the regular public high school until that gun incident in the courtyard there, and then Michael’s father arranged for him to attend his friend’s charter school. In the tradition of communicative teenage boys everywhere, Dylan says EXA is “fine.”

“Yeah, sure,” Michael says, roused from his work trance where he was mentally rehearsing his day. “Angel, I’ll take you, too, as long as I’m driving.” With a nod but no words, Dylan trots up the stairs, probably to fetch his saxophone.

Angel hops up from her chair. “Thanks, Daddy.”

In the bustle of bags and coats, I retreat to the corner of the kitchen. It’s too small for all of us in here.

Michael sweeps by me and tries to land a kiss on my cheek. He misses, and is propelled out the door by the momentum of his kids coming up behind him. Dylan says nothing on his way by.

Angel says, “Bye, Casey. I hope you enjoy this nice quiet house today, all by yourself.”

She’s turned away from me as she says that, so I can’t see her face.

How much did she read?

“Casey? Can I go watch cartoons now?”

“Sure, J. Go ahead.”

I pick up her bowl and Dylan’s Pop-Tart plate. Jewel wraps her arms around my waist, her nose buried in my belly. By the time I put the dishes back down to return the hug, she has fled to the living room to turn on
SpongeBob SquarePants
.

In the emptiness of the kitchen throbs the jagged emptiness in my chest, steadily growing in recent months, which I’ve tried to ignore but no longer can. It’s where hope briefly flickered, in the days when Michael still kissed me before he left, without fail, busy morning be damned.

I take a two-minute shower because all the hot water is gone, and when I go back downstairs, Jewel’s face is in a book called
A Kid’s Guide to Positive Thinking.
She has pulled her glasses down to the tip of her nose to read, stretched out flat on the couch, the book propped on her chest. The TV still blares, but she won’t turn it off, even while reading. Being the youngest in a house this full, she’s been steeped in noise since the womb.

“Hey, Jewel?”

No response.

“Jewel!”

“Yeah?” she says into the pages of her book.

“Ally’s mom is going to pick you up from Girl Scouts today.”

“Why?”

“Something came up I have to do,” I tell her, my voice catching a little, so I cough.

With no second car, I usually walk up to meet Jewel at the school cafeteria, where Girl Scouts meets. But if the weather’s bad, or I’m sick, I impose on one of the other parents. And they do let me know that I impose.

I top off my coffee, and at the kitchen phone, I dial up Ally’s mom, who agrees to bring Jewel home but advertises her annoyance with heavy sighs and a long pause to check her daily planner. Once while waiting to pick up Jewel I overhard her explaining to another mom: “She’s not the stepmother. The father’s
girlfriend
,” with so much stress on
girl
you’d think I was fourteen years old instead of twenty-six. That’s not so much younger than Michael, really. If we were forty and fifty, no one would even blink.

I could look older if I dressed more like the other mothers, but I’m comfortable in my baggy thrift-store Levi’s with my hair in a ponytail.

Not that it will much matter after today.

I check the schedule, and Dylan and Angel both have practices today: sax for him, school play for her, and they both have rides. Michael should be home on time, unless there’s breaking news, but in any case, Angel and Dylan will be home when Jewel gets dropped off from Girl Scouts.

So. They’re all taken care of.

I put Jewel on the bus with a wave. She doesn’t go for a hug this time, and I turn away quickly so she can’t see the wetness in my lashes. I wait until I’m back inside the house to wipe it away.

I sit down at my desk and hesitate in front of the blank paper. From here, I can see the houses across the street: tall and narrow turn-of-the-century homes nestled together like children sharing a bed. Most are in muted colors, the occasional fanciful pastel. One, across and to my left, is electric green.

I used to so much admire these houses that I imagined their interiors filled with happy, harmonious families. It’s not until these last few months I’ve become conscious of the assumption, and how ridiculous it was. We were all taught as children not to judge books by their covers, after all.

I recall Jewel’s jaunty wave as she got on the bus. I can’t imagine what she’ll think. But then I remember also the “vision board” she’s making in her room, the collage of pictures representing the things she wants to happen in her life. In the center of the board is a family picture. I’m not in it. It’s a Christmas card portrait; the last holiday when Mallory and Michael were still married.

She likes me, Jewel does, but when she’s really falling apart over something, she cries for her mother, as all children do, even the children of volatile Mallory.

Next to me is my journal. I haven’t opened it again since before dawn this morning, when I saw scribbled in red ink on the first blank page:
You sure have a lot of secrets, CASEY!!!!!!

For months I’ve been reminding myself how hard it is to be sixteen, and that for me to move in was a drastic change; maybe she feels supplanted as the reigning queen bee now that her mom lives somewhere else. That’s the story I tell myself, anyway, to explain the hostility spreading like mold over our relationship. When I was just someone her father was seeing, we had fun shopping and drinking lattes together. But the weekend I moved in, she picked a dramatic fight over my inadequate laundry skills.

Each day since then has been more of a struggle not to see her mother in that haughty raised eyebrow and upturned lip.

I shake my hands out before I begin.

Dear Michael,

I know I’m a coward for doing this in writing . . .

I seal the letter in an envelope and put it on top of his dresser, where he empties his pocket change every day, changing from khaki pants into sweats or jeans. He’ll see it as soon as he’s home from work.

There’s a picture on top of this dresser. It’s of me. I’m wearing a baseball cap and my dark blond hair is hanging in a ponytail. I’m holding a baseball bat, glaring with mock concentration at the invisible pitcher, but my eyes are smiling and I know that the minute the shutter clicked I snorted with laughter. I don’t remember the exact joke, but it didn’t take much to get me started back then. I know I kissed him as soon as I put the bat down. Michael had added text to the picture before printing it out. It says, “Casey at the bat,” in the blue sky behind me.

The ring snags on my knuckle, biting into the skin as I try to pull it off. My hands are puffy. I yank again, letting it bang again into the existing scrape, which is now blooming with a line of red.

Against my will, my mind flashes to the moment Michael slid this ring on my finger, almost a year ago, on New Year’s Eve. Mallory had the kids that night, and we sat on a rug in front of the living room fireplace. The house was then a place I only visited, a place we had to ourselves when Mallory managed to keep to her visitation days. I’d never seen its dustiest corners, never hauled the smelly trash to the curb. I knew but did not yet grasp this bit of history: it was not just a pretty house, but had been the Turner family home since Michael was a kid, and then the very home where Michael and Mallory had settled in as newlyweds. I still use the mixing bowls they got as a wedding gift to stir the pancake batter every Sunday.

That New Year’s Eve, amber firelight wavering across his face, he whispered, “I never thought I’d do this again.”

I gasped. He must have thought it was delight and surprise. It was more like a falling dream; a sickening plunge.
A stepmother?
Me?
I thought of myself drunk at the bottom of a stairwell or puking my guts out in a smelly bar bathroom.

That wasn’t the girl he wanted to marry. He never met that girl at all, never knew she existed.

It was me he wanted, the new me, the one who played board games with his kids and didn’t even like the
taste
of alcohol. He made me chicken soup when I was sick and taught me to play euchre and told me dumb jokes until I laughed when I was having a bad day. He loves me, I thought. And that will be enough
.
So I said yes.

The ring still won’t come off. I clench my bloody knuckle and resign myself to leaving it on, for now. An unwelcome loose end. I walk out of the room, no longer my room, and it wasn’t ever, really.

I pause at the front door with my hand on the knob, holding my breath, allowing myself to feel this tearing away, doubting myself. If it hurts this much to walk out this door, does that mean I should stay?

But vaccinations hurt, too. Surgery hurts. Exercise hurts. Sometimes pain is necessary.

I yank on the knob. It comes open hard, as if resisting me, but that’s just fancy. It’s a sticky old wooden door, is all.

I almost sprint down the porch stairs, my bag slapping against my hip.

I’m halfway down the block when I realize I don’t have my phone. Also, I should probably leave the key. I’ll have to get my books and things later, but I’ll do that at some appointed time, and Michael will open the door to let me in. Or maybe we can meet at a neutral location.