I cringed. “You . . . saw that?”
“Saw him do it. Right after you snuck back in.” He raised his bushy eyebrows at me, folding his arms across the belly he’d never had before.
“You snuck out?” my mom demanded, glowering at me and then turning her glare on my dad, probably for not cluing her in sooner. “How could you . . . do you have any idea . . .” She stammered, unable to come up with the right argument. And then seemed to deflate all at once. “Kyra, you can’t do that. We . . . just got you back.”
And that was it. That was the right one, and even though I was technically an adult, her words were like a knife through my heart.
“Sorry,” my sixteen-year-old self mumbled, feeling properly scolded.
“She was fine.” My dad assured, reaching over and patting my hand, maybe because he couldn’t pat hers anymore. “They went to the park and came right back. They were gone less than half an hour.”
My eyes widened. “You knew? The whole time?”
He lifted his still-black coffee to his lips, and his mouth turned downward evasively. “I might’a followed you, might’a didn’t.” He winked then, and I shook my head, thinking of the way I’d heard something in the trees. Had he seriously been spying on us?
“That’s weird. You’re weird.” But it felt better, joking with him like that, like nothing had changed. Well, not as much at least.
My mom cut in. “I think we should get you some clothes today.” She eyed my outfit skeptically, and I was tempted to remind her it was hers. “And maybe a new cell phone.”
A loud wail erupted from down the hall, and I felt myself blanch as she jumped up from the table. I’d practically erased the kid from my memory, almost as effectively as I’d forgotten the past five years. If only.
With my mom gone, my dad leaned in, and I could smell his breath. I wondered if he wasn’t still a little drunk from the day before. “I’m not much of a shopper. I think I’ll leave you all to it. I should probably get home and see how Nancy’s holding up.”
Nancy. I let this new name sink in, even as my world tilted sideways once more. Suddenly there was a Nancy too. What was that all about? Now I had two new parents to deal with?
I no longer had a bedroom, or parents who could stand each other, or even a real home of my own.
My vision blurred, and when I couldn’t stand to look at him for another second, I let my eyes slip to the digital clock on the microwave. It was 8:31.
After a moment he got up from the table, his chair scraping along the tile floor. He kissed me on the top of my head, his beard catching strands of my hair as he did. “I’ll come back later, kiddo. We can talk more then.” My mom came back into the kitchen carrying her new kid, and my dad smiled, but it never really reached his eyes. “Maybe I’ll even bring Nancy so you can meet her.”
Shopping with my mom and the new kid was less like shopping and more like wrangling an errant steer. The kid had to be herded and restrained at every turn. But I kept my mouth shut because I didn’t want to hear my mom call him “my brother” again.
She kept saying that. “Your brother holds a spoon just fine, Kyra. He’s only two.” “Can you hold your brother’s hand while we cross the street?” “Your brother has a name; it’s Logan.”
It was as though, if she said it enough, she’d somehow force some nonexistent bond between us. Make me feel something for him.
Fine, whatever. He might be my brother by blood, but that didn’t change the fact that he was a virtual stranger.
Worse, he was the brat who’d stolen my mom.
By the time we reached Target, which was only our second stop after the cell phone store, my mom managed to secure the mangy little beast into a shopping cart with a strap that was surely meant to contain monkeys. She got him to shut up for five whole minutes by buying him a bag of popcorn that he threw around like it was confetti and the New Year’s Eve ball was dropping in Times Square. He was the most embarrassing thing ever, and I couldn’t believe she thought I’d ever lay claim to him.
He didn’t start screaming until he realized he couldn’t wiggle out of the shoulder harness he was strapped into.
After about fifteen minutes of that I covered my ears. “Forget it.” I glanced at what was in the cart: a couple of T-shirts and one pair of jeans I’d already picked out. “I don’t wanna do this anymore.” I glanced meaningfully at the kid writhing in the seat and held out my hand for the keys. “I’m going to the car. Pay for this stuff, or don’t. I couldn’t care less.”
I stayed in my fake bedroom the rest of the afternoon; at least there it was quiet. And away from the kid.
My mom tried to come talk to me, but everything was so different now—even with her. It was like chatting with a stranger.
When The Husband came home, which was earlier than I expected, she asked if I wanted to try again with the whole shopping thing. I refused, deciding I’d rather have my fingernails ripped off one by one than suffer through more of her painful attempts at small talk. I worried that letting her go by herself to “bring me back some things” would mean my closet would soon be overflowing with mom jeans and cardigans in every color of the rainbow. I’d be the youngest forty-year-old on the block. But it was worth it since all I wanted to do was scream at her for not being my old mom, the one who could talk to me about anything, and everything, and nothing at all.