“I really appreciate the effort there, Dad. Especially the zombie apocalypse and all. But let me save you some time.” He pulls something out of his pocket and sets it down in front of me.
The shiny blue glass makes my jaw drop. One of Petra’s earrings.
“Jenna doesn’t have pierced ears,” he says. “And Mom would never wear something this tacky.”
He is right. Millicent wears diamond stud earrings. Real diamonds, not glass.
“Not much to say now, I guess,” Rory says.
Two for two. I have nothing to say.
“Don’t worry. Jenna doesn’t know about your side chick.” The smirk is back. “Yet.”
It takes a second for me to realize my son is trying to blackmail me. With evidence.
I am impressed, because he is so clever, and petrified, because the last thing I want is for my children, especially my daughter, to grow up with an asshole cheat for a father. This is the kind of thing experts say to avoid. They say it will affect her relationships with men forever. I have seen daytime TV.
Jenna cannot know, cannot even suspect what Rory believes is true. Anything must be better than that.
I turn to Rory. “What do you want?”
“The new Bloody Hell game.”
“Your mother banned those from the house.”
“I know.”
If I disagree, he will tell Jenna I am cheating on their mother. He will do exactly what he threatens.
If I agree, my fourteen-year-old son will have succeeded in blackmailing me.
I feel like I should have seen this coming. Should have seen it the day he was born. He was so quiet at first everyone thought he was dead. When he finally did cry, it was so loud it made my ears ring.
Or maybe I should have seen it the day his sister was born and he made just as much noise, not to announce his arrival but to announce his lack of attention.
Then there was the time Jenna and Rory went trick-or-treating together, and he convinced her all the mini candy bars had been poisoned by the psycho who worked at our local superstore. The psycho was a big lumberjack of a man, gentle as a hamster, but he scared children without even trying. Jenna believed her brother and dumped out all the allegedly poisoned candy. Neither Millicent nor I knew what happened, not until Jenna had nightmares for a week and we found a pile of mini candy bar wrappers in Rory’s room.
So now, while I am in the midst of being blackmailed by son, I can look back and say I should have known he would do this. But before this moment, I didn’t have a clue.
“Answer me one question,” I say to him.
“Okay.”
“How long have you known about this?” I am careful not to use the word cheat. As if it matters.
“A few months. The first time, I went down to the garage early in the morning to get my soccer ball. Your car wasn’t there. Then I just started paying attention.”
I nod. “I’ll buy your game tomorrow. Don’t let your mother see it.”
“I won’t. Don’t let her see you sneaking back in, either.”
“I won’t be doing that anymore.”
He smiles as he picks up the earring and puts it back into his pocket. Rory doesn’t believe me but is smart enough to keep his mouth shut when he’s ahead.
* * *
• • •
I should tell Millicent about our son. I think about this during dinner while Jenna does her best to make fun of Rory without getting caught. I think about it after dinner, as Millicent takes Rory’s phone away for the night. I even think about it when it’s just my wife and me, in our bedroom, going through our nightly routine. This is when I should tell her what our son is up to, but I don’t.
I don’t tell her because it will create more questions than I can answer.
It has been just two weeks since I spent the night with Petra. I think about her only in the middle of the night, when I am already awake and can’t go back to sleep. That’s when I wonder what I did to give myself away. What made her ask if I was really deaf? Did I react to a sound, did I look at her eyes instead of her mouth when she was talking, or did I pay too much attention to the sounds she made in bed? I don’t know. I don’t know if I will ever act deaf again, but this still keeps me up at night. It has become a loose thread I have to pull.
Rory’s blackmail is the same. Another mistake. Like I’d slipped and should not have let my son figure out I was sneaking out at night. Millicent would not like that.
So I don’t say anything. Rory and Petra are both secrets that I do not tell my wife. Maybe because she has her own, more than I thought she did. Rory and Petra are also both risks, each in their own way, and still my mouth stays shut.
I do not want her to know how badly I’ve screwed up.
Nine
It didn’t start out as something bad. I still believe that.
Three years ago, late one Saturday afternoon in October, I was in the front yard with Rory and Jenna. They were still young enough to be around me without getting embarrassed, and the three of us were putting up Halloween decorations. The holiday was almost their favorite, second only to Christmas, and every year we blanketed the house in cobwebs, spiders, skeletons, and witches. If we could have afforded animatronics, we would have used those as well.
Millicent came home from showing a house. Dressed in her work clothes, she stood on the front walk and smiled, admiring our work. The kids said they were hungry. With a big, overdramatic roll of her eyes, Millicent said she would go put some sandwiches together. She was smiling when she said that. I think we all were.
Things weren’t perfect, however. The house we were decorating was new to us—we had been living there only six months—and the mortgage was huge. Millicent was under a lot of pressure to sell more houses. I was under the same pressure; at times, I even thought about getting a second job.
We also had ongoing issues with Millicent’s mother. Her father had passed away two years earlier. Then her mother had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and had begun the long slow decline that came with it. We had spent a long time looking for a live-in nurse. The first two didn’t work out, because neither met Millicent’s standards. The third one was working out, at least so far.
Our family had its problems—lots of them—but on that day, we were all smiling, right up until Millicent screamed.
I ran inside, the kids right at my heels. I made it to the kitchen just in time to see Millicent throw her phone across the room. It crashed against the wall, breaking into pieces, making a mark. She buried her face in her hands and started to cry.
Jenna screamed.
Rory picked up the pieces of the broken phone.
I put my arms around Millicent as her body shook with sobs.
The two most horrific things went through my mind.
Someone was dead. Maybe her mother. Maybe a friend.
Or someone was dying. A terminal disease. Maybe it was one of the kids. Maybe it was my wife.
It had to be one of the two. Nothing else warranted this kind of response. Not money or a job or even the loss of pet we didn’t even have. Someone had to be dead or soon would be.
It came as a shock to learn it was neither. No one was dead, no one was dying. In fact, it was the opposite.
* * *