CHAPTER SIXTEEN
No matter where we were stationed, my dad always chose to live within the gates of the post, in the housing that was offered. From both of the Carolinas, down to Georgia, to Texas. I didn’t mind it so much when I was young, because the small handful of friends I had lived very close by, but as we moved, then moved again, and again, it got old fast. I started to hate the groomed cul-de-sacs, all the American flags and impeccable yards, and the lines of cars at each gate every single time we left the post. The older Austin and I got, the more we hated it. But our dad loved his Army life: the commissary and the PX convenience store, both tax-free, and the company where he worked every day just down the street. He felt empowered in this domain, but as Austin and I grew up, we started to feel trapped.
Austin and my caged feeling was nothing compared to our mother’s. When we were younger, she was alive and bright with the excitement of a new place, a new environment every time we moved. But as the weeks went by she would begin to pace around the new house, picking at little things, rearranging the dolls in her open glass cabinet, to introduce her own bit of chaos to the pristine quarters my dad expected her to maintain. She was always up, up, up or down, down, down. There was never an in-between.
There were these hours of madness that seamlessly morphed into days of lunacy. They began in small stretches of mornings when the curtains were never opened, lunches weren’t packed, and my dad yelled about the empty coffeepot or the laundry left in the dryer for days. My mom would start to smoke again on the porch, staring at the replicated identical houses on the street. When it got really bad the couch turned into her bed and Austin and I knew better than to comment on our parents’ sleeping in separate parts of the house. We also sort of enjoyed the peace that came with their distance.
As I stared at the road in front of me, Kael’s quietness allowed me to continue thinking about the slow unraveling of Mrs. Fischer the First. Her decline was subtle, with each episode lasting only a few days and mostly peaking when my dad was at work. She had two personas for most of our life, and we watched her switch gears in an instant from military wife to a woman falling apart: the paranoia, the anxiety, the messiness of her ashtrays on the porch, and the stains on her clothes. By the summer after eighth grade, her mania had completely taken over. She woke up later and later, took fewer showers, stopped dancing, and even stopped pacing. She would stare at the wall in silence for hours, and even her fairy tales turned sinister and eventually burned out.
“You think I’m funny?” Kael’s voice drew me out of my memories of my mom just as a knot in my chest was beginning to move up toward my throat.
He was eyeing the green light above us. I pressed the gas.
“What?” I faltered, clearing my throat. I was reliving my childhood while he was still on a question I had asked him. My chest was aching, and focusing on his cool voice and his steady eyes helped fade the image of my mom.
He turned his body toward me. I kept my attention on the road. We drove past a Subway and it reminded me of my brother always craving their cookies when he was stoned.
“People don’t usually ask other people if they’re funny. It kind of ruins the joke,” he said, and stared out the window.
I gave him an annoyed look. “Do you want me to apologize for asking you about your humor? Is this a thing?” I turned onto the main road and tried to figure out where I was.
“No. Not a thing.”
“Okay, so we’re going to my dad’s house and not only am I late, which he hates, he’s kind of . . .” I exhaled, trying to pinpoint such a complicated man with one word. “He’s sort of—”
“Racist?” Kael asked.
“What? No!” I felt a little defensive over his question, until I turned toward him and saw the look on his face. It said that he figured that was what I was going to say and that I couldn’t find a tactful way to say it.
I didn’t know what to think about that.
“He’s not racist,” I told Kael as we drove. I couldn’t think of anything my dad had ever said or done to make me believe he was. “He’s just kind of an asshole.”
Kael nodded and leaned back in his seat.
“This dinner will drag on longer than it should. Too much food for three people. Too much matching cutlery, too much everything.”
Kael nodded again. Ugh, his silence here wasn’t helpful. He wasn’t prepared for my father.
I made sure to stay on the main road, really the only route I could navigate without getting lost in the sprawl of Fort Benning. We were less than five minutes from my dad’s house. But I was more than half an hour late. It would be fine. I was an adult, and something came up. They would get over it. I repeated that to myself and began to concoct an excuse that didn’t necessarily involve a stranger staying at my house.
My phone vibrated in the cupholder between us, and I reached for it the moment I saw that it was Austin calling. I couldn’t remember the last time he’d returned one of my calls.
“I’m going to get this, it’s—” I didn’t finish explaining to Kael.
“Hello?” I spoke into the phone but got only silence.
I lifted it from my cheek. “Damn it.” I’d missed the call. I tried to call him back, but he didn’t pick up. I hated feeling like I let him down by missing a call or not being there for him, even though he had no problem ignoring my calls and casually treating me like an inconvenience.
“If you see the screen light up, tell me. The sound doesn’t always work.” I looked down at my phone and Kael agreed with a nod.
“Another broken thing,” I swear I heard him say. But when I asked him what he’d mumbled, he shrugged.
I turned onto my dad’s street and tried to spend the last two minutes of the drive conjuring up an achievement, or something I could stretch to sound like one. I would need something to talk about after the scolding for my extreme tardiness. My dad always asked his darling wife and me the same questions. The difference was, it only took her planting a flower bed or going to someone else’s kid’s birthday party to get praise, when I could save a small village and he would be like,That’s great, Kare, but it was asmallvillage. Austin once saved a slightly larger village and Estelle created two villages.
It wasn’t healthy to compare myself to his new wife or to my brother—I was self-aware enough to know that. But the way he cosseted her still bugged the hell out of me. And then there was the fact that Austin was my dad’s doppelgänger, and I was my mom’s. We were twins, but he looked like him and I looked like her. This worked out better for my brother than it did for me; to my dad, I was a copy, and a constant reminder of my mother.
“We’re almost there. My dad’s been in the Army a long time.”