“Playing with your old toys, I see?” She rubs at the spot where a tiny Pontiac Firebird nailed her about six inches below her knee.
“I fucking hate this school!” I rip the intact tracks apart in my mini tantrum. I snap out of it quickly and am met by my mom’s disappointed stare. “Ducking, sorry,” I correct.
Her straight-lined lips curl up on one side as her eyes squint in tepid forgiveness. Our swearing arrangement is we can auto-correct swear in front of each other. Ducking gets used a lot.
“Coffee break?” She’s still giving me her sideways look as she sets a plastic bag on the counter and pulls out a roll of towels and a package of our favorite brew. It’s her silent acknowledgement of my bad mood met with her own warning that I’ve used my free pass. I breathe in and hold my chest full for a few seconds, then relax my shoulders with a heavy exhale.
“Coffee break, yeah,” I relent. I got hooked on coffee after dad left. Mom sometimes got up really early in the morning for no reason, and I’d find her down here before the sun came up sipping on straight black coffee. I acquired the taste after six or seven cups, and now coffee breaks have become our thing.
She fills the pot at the sink and holds up her fingers, switching between one and two.
“Two,” I say, answering how many cups I want. “Always two.” A pathetic, tired laugh falls from my lips and I rest my head on my arms on our kitchen table. I roll one of the cars back and forth in front of my face while I consider finding this stupid experiment on YouTube so I can copy someone else’s results.
Once the coffeemaker starts brewing, my mom leans against the counter with her hands gripping the edge on either side of her.
“So, what is this mini Daytona thing all about?” she says, nodding at the few pieces of track that ended up on the floor. I bend down and pick them up, slapping them on the pile on the table.
“Physics experiment on velocity,” I say.
“Ah,” she says, the brewer gurgling behind her. She turns to watch it finish. We both like our coffee piping hot, even in the heat of summer. “Seems like a lot of moving parts to do on your own.”
“Yeah, well my partner sucks,” I let out, not really thinking.
“Already? On day one?” she asks.
“Uh huh,” I mutter, hoping that now that she’s busy pulling the pot from the warmer and pouring our cups she’ll move on to something else. She slides my cup to me and leaves what’s left in the pot to keep it warm. When she joins me at the table, cradling her World’s Best Mom mug in both hands as she blows steam from the rim, I know she’s going to keep fishing.
“Most people met right after school or during study hall, but my partner plays football.” I lift one brow and tilt my head to the left, toward the Fuller’s house. She studies me a for a few moments then slowly nods, a faint frown at her lips.
“I see. Hence why you couldn’t meet up after school. Convenient you live right next door to each other though, so maybe . . .” She leans her head to the right and glances toward the Fuller house. It’s been a while since she suggested I do anything with Lucas. I guess after the dozens of excuses I gave her, she got the point.
I laugh, probably harder than she expects. Instead of getting into it, I take a long sip of my dark night coffee. It’s acidic and delicious in a way that has the power to burn away a bad day. I will it to work on this one. My mom takes the same kind of sip, which softens me a little. I forget how hard all of this is on her. I know how tight our bills are. And I know how small the support checks are from my father. He’s a con-man. Not literally, but enough of one that he got the judge to believe his salary was a third of what it really is. I think if I weren’t so close to graduating, Mom would sell this house and move us into something cheaper. Maybe I should bring it up so we could move into a different school district.
“You and I have never really talked about it, you know,” my mom says. I’m not sure which it she’s talking about. There are many—their marriage troubles, the miscarriage I know she had when I was eight, the new woman in Dad’s life.
She means Lucas.
“What’s to talk about?” I say, testing the temperature of the coffee against my lips. It’s no longer scalding so I take a bigger drink.
“You guys were so close.” She’s inching into the topic so I start to rebuild the track for my project.
“Yep.” I’m short. Probably overstepping my free pass to be a bitch but I really, truly, do not want to get into the saga of me and Lucas Fuller.
After a few breaths of quiet, my mom snaps together pieces of track with me, putting them in pairs and passing them my way until I again have one long, twelve-foot strip. We admire our work, finishing our coffee in silence. My mom twirls the worksheet around on the table so she can read the instructions, and I gauge her reaction in her eyes. She’s exaggerating a little, grimacing at the calculations and the number of trials I’m supposed to conduct to find averages and means. I know better than to ask her for help. She long ago made the point that she would never enable me from having to face challenges, especially when the adversity was something as solvable as being strong enough to stand up for myself.
It’s weird how effective her silence is. The shadows cast across our ceiling are familiar, the same ones I’ve memorized during football season for the last two years. Lucas’s practice is over, the glare of his headlights through our windows lining up right where it should when he parks. The brightness dims, followed by the heavy clunk of a truck door. I glance from the window to my mom, and find her eyes waiting on me. She doesn’t say a word, instead reaches for my empty cup, her tight smile holding so much inside.
It’s hard not to imagine how different things could be. Like right now, my mom’s back turned to me as she rinses out our coffee mugs. In some other dimension, maybe I’m not sitting at this table alone. Maybe my father kept his promise to stay through thick and thin. Or maybe . . . maybe the one soul I trusted all of my secrets with didn’t pull away. I half imagine Lucas knocking at our side door and turn my head, wishing to see his shadow at the window.
“So, I have some bad news.” My least favorite sentence pulls me back to reality. Just hearing it makes me want to rip my track apart again.
“Hit me with it.” I sit back in my chair and brace myself for something heavy. She does the same against the counter. Her eyes are tired, the dark circles a shade of purple now that they’re not hidden by makeup. She cut her hair super short a few weeks ago, buzzing the back and sides. She said she wanted something easy to do, but I think she liked the idea of something inexpensive. It looks nice on her, though she keeps mentioning how much she hates how it brings out her grays. I’ll be gray too one day, just like her. Our natural hair color is exactly the same.
“It’s more of a good news, bad news thing,” she begins, and I relax a little. The last bad news thing was when she lost her job. “You know how I said I booked two shoots?”
I nod, my mind racing with possibilities. Is it someone famous? It’s for a magazine! Maybe a royal wedding?
“It’s in Dayton. The wedding?” I blink a few times, slowly, mentally working through what she’s saying.
“We’re going to Dayton?” The divot between my brows is so deep I can actually feel it on my face without using my hands.