She couldn’t. Mom wasn’t able support us, not on a cafeteria worker’s salary. And she’d never been good at being alone. It was the mortgage, or a busted pipe, or a broken-down car, or just loneliness, but it always ended the same—asking Dad to come back.
“Please, try to act happy that he’s home,” Mom said.
I plastered a huge fake smile on my face. “How’s this?”
“Please try, Clara. He’s sorry.”
He was always sorry. There were holes all over the house that he’d been sorry about later. Sorry I kicked a hole in the cabinet while we were fighting. Sorry I threw the doorstop through the window after I had a bad day at work. Sorry I put Clara’s head through the wall.
Mom was looking at me like she was expecting an answer. Like I was still a ten-year-old girl who would tearfully agree with her—Dad was sorry, and things would get better.
“Sure, Mom,” I said dryly.
“He’ll apologize to you. He promised.”
“I can’t wait. I’ll treasure every moment.”
Mom didn’t know how to deal with sarcasm, so she just pretended she hadn’t heard it. “There will be plenty of cake,” she said, and left.
3
Dad would be home at six.
I trudged out of my bedroom at 5:58. It would be worse if I ignored him.
The painting of Texas had been set straight. I hated it, and I wasn’t sure if it was because it covered the hole made by my head or simply because it was Texas. I despised this state, even though I’d never visited the forty-nine others. The only place I’d ever been was Guanajuato, Mexico, to visit Mom’s family. Tía Julia paid for plane tickets for just Mom and me two years ago, and then tried to convince Mom to stay once we arrived. I’d been in favor of it. I loved the city, with its brightly colored buildings and streets so narrow you couldn’t drive cars most places. I could step out of the house and get lost in the winding roads.
No one walked in Dallas. I could walk to the bus, which would take me through miles of suburbs and into the city, and I still wouldn’t have seen most of the Dallas–Fort Worth area. It was too big. All of Texas was too big. It made it too hard to escape.
Mom was in the kitchen again, stir-frying like her life depended on it. Laurence brushed past me and raised his eyebrows as he looked at the meat and vegetables over Mom’s shoulder.
“Is Dad going to like that?” he asked.
“I’m using the sweet sauce he likes.” Still, worry crossed her face. It was risky, trying a new recipe. Dad enjoyed barbeque and burgers and fried Americanized Chinese food.
Mom took me to a ramen restaurant once, for lunch, just the two of us. Let’s not tell your father, she’d whispered in my ear as we left, because Dad was the sort of man to get angry about noodles.
The television was on, the news blaring, and Laurence walked into the living room and flopped onto the couch. My eyes drifted to the screen.
“We have reports that three thousand people have already signed up to join Grayson St. John’s team,” the male anchor said.
He had two guests on the program with him, and the blond woman shook her head.
“Who are these people?” she asked the anchor.
“From what we’ve heard, they’re mostly young people, and they’re from all over the world.”
“It’s been suggested that some of them were rejected from the military in their countries,” the blond woman said.
“That’s just speculation at this point,” the anchor said. “And some are too young to even join the military, since the minimum age for these teams is only sixteen. But St. John has made it clear that the training will be rigorous, and they won’t accept people who aren’t fit to fight.”
I swallowed. One in five. Was that fit to fight?
I looked away from the television and caught Laurence staring at me. The thing about quiet people was, they were always watching. And listening. And noticing things I’d rather they didn’t notice.
“Those idiots are going to get themselves killed,” Mom grumbled.
“I think it’s brave,” Laurence said quietly, still watching me.
Outside, a car door shut.
Mom frantically wagged her hand. “Turn that off, turn that off.”
Laurence grabbed the remote, and the television screen went black. I pressed both arms to my chest, my left hand tightly clasping my opposite wrist. It was all I could ever think to do to protect myself.
There wouldn’t be any danger immediately—Dad was always on good behavior at first—but my body didn’t know that. It had been trained to tense up at the mere mention of Dad.
The door opened, and he stepped into the house. Dad was well over six feet tall, with shoulders so wide he sometimes had to turn sideways to go through doors. He’d been good-looking in his youth. Now he always looked like someone had just spat in his tea.
Dad’s eyes skipped over me, standing in the middle of the living room, to Laurence, perched awkwardly on the edge of the couch. I wondered what it was like to live in Dad’s world, where everyone shifted things to your liking. At work, did he walk into rooms and wonder why it wasn’t quiet, neat, and full of nervous energy?
Mom’s face lit up as she stepped out of the kitchen to kiss Dad on the cheek.
Why anyone would get excited to see Dad was beyond me, but I guessed Mom had found something to like about him. They were opposites in appearance (Dad: white, blond, built like a linebacker; Mom: Latina, olive skin, brown hair, short and thin) but alike in other ways (love of football, hatred of crowds, an impressive ability to completely ignore reality).
I, thankfully, took after Mom, except taller and with more curves. I had serious curves, the kind everyone liked to comment on. Those are birthing hips, mija, Tía Julia said. That is an ASS, a random guy at 7-Eleven said. That shirt makes you look like a whore, Dad said.
My boobs looked great in that shirt. I wore it several more times, until it mysteriously vanished one day.
“Laurence,” Dad said, clapping him on the shoulder. Laurence clearly wanted to disappear. “You think about what I said?”
Laurence nodded.
“And? Dallas is a lot bigger than Tulsa. You can’t find a job here?”
Laurence shook his head.
“What’s there to do in Oklahoma anyway?”
Laurence shrugged.
“It’s just a construction job,” Dad said. “It’ll be over in a few months. What are you going to do then?”
It took my brother a moment to answer, and when he did, it was with a sigh, like being forced to actually say something was tiresome. “I guess I’ll find a different job. Or move somewhere else.”
A look crossed Dad’s face, like he was both surprised and dismayed. “I don’t know where you think you’ll go,” he muttered.
I realized suddenly why Dad was trying to convince Laurence to stay. He wasn’t going to miss him; Laurence could barely muster up the energy to be marginally polite to Dad. There was no love lost there.
Dad was scared that his son would be better than him. Dad had never been anywhere. He grew up a few blocks from where we lived now. He visited Austin once with Mom and declared it “terrible.” He was a plumber, a job that only required travel within the Dallas–Fort Worth area.