Breakable

This year was supposed to be our year to host. Instead, Dad and I drove to their house, each silent, hating and enduring the stupid Christmas carols on the radio. Neither of us moved to change the station.

My mother had loved holidays – all of them. For her, none were spoiled by too much hype or commercialism. She made heart-shaped cookies in February, oohed and aahed over fireworks in July, and sang along the moment Christmas carols began playing, no matter how many weeks it was until December 25th. I would never hear her voice again. My stomach heaved and my jaw clamped tight, my body launching a protest against the meal we were about to have. Without her.

I sat in the front seat with a store-bought pumpkin pie on my lap and a can of whipped cream in a bag at my feet. We’d burned the edges of the crust, and Dad had scraped off the blackened parts, leaving the pie looking as though squirrels had broken into the house and sampled it. It had to be the most half-assed contribution the Maxfields had ever made to Thanksgiving dinner.

I was smart enough to keep this thought to myself.

The meal was bearable, but grim and pretty quiet until Caleb – who was almost four and still considered cutlery optional – stuck his finger through the whipped cream and pumpkin filling and then sucked it off.

‘Caleb – fork,’ Cindy said gently, for the fourth or fifth time since we’d begun eating. She rolled her eyes when Cole copied him. ‘Cole,’ she said less gently. I couldn’t help smiling when both brothers stuck their pie-coated fingers in their mouths. Carlie snorted a laugh.

‘Wha?’ Cole asked his mother, faking innocence, unapologetically sucking whipped cream from his finger.

Giggling, Caleb copied his older brother. ‘Yuh – wha?’ Then, for some inexplicable reason, he glanced around the table, popped his sticky finger from his mouth, and lisped, ‘Where’s Wose?’ Everyone froze, and his eyes filled with tears. ‘Where’s Wose?’ he wailed, as though he’d just figured out that when your parents tell you someone has gone to heaven, that person is never, ever coming back.

All the food in my traitorous stomach surged up at once. I leaped from my chair and ran to the guest bathroom, the memory of that night condemning me. The sounds I would never forget. The futile screams I’d shouted until I could do no more than rasp her name, until the tears stopped because I literally couldn’t produce them. The useless son I’d been when she needed me.

I puked up everything I’d eaten, gagging on sobs when nothing was left in my stomach.

A month later, Dad quit his job, sold our house and moved us to the Gulf Coast – to my grandfather’s house – the last place he’d ever intended to live again.

LUCAS

I had dinner with the Hellers once a week or so – whenever Charles barbecued or Cindy made a huge pan of lasagne. The Hellers always tried to make me feel like I belonged to them, like I was one of them. I could pretend, for the space of one or two hours, that I was their son, their big brother.

Then I returned to reality, where I had no connection to anyone, except a man who lived hundreds of miles away and couldn’t look me in the eye because I was a reminder of the night he lost the only person he ever loved.

I knew how to cook, but I’d never moved beyond a basic range of meals, most of which I’d learned from my grandfather. He’d been a simple man with simple tastes, and for a time, I’d wanted nothing more than to be like him.

During meals with the Hellers, I steeled myself for the inevitable semi-veiled queries, especially from Cindy – lines of subtle interrogation her daughter had recently taken up. I wondered if Carlie had been deployed last month to find out if I was secretly g*y or just perpetually girlfriendless. She was her mother’s daughter – interfering where she believed she was needed, and often too uncomfortably close to target.

I couldn’t be upset with either of them for trying to draw me out, but there was usually little, if anything, to tell. I went to school and I worked. Sometimes, I went downtown to hear a local band play. I attended monthly Tau Beta Pi meetings. I studied and worked some more.

I sure as hell wasn’t going to bring up Jackie Wallace, Charles’s student – and mine – who’d progressed from capturing my attention during class to stealing into my conscious and unconscious fantasies.

This morning, my alarm began blaring in the middle of a dream about her. A vivid, detailed, solidly unethical dream.

She had no idea who I was, but that fact didn’t stop my mind from imagining that she did. It didn’t stop the sweeping disappointment when I woke fully and remembered what was real – and what wasn’t.

Purposefully arriving late to econ, I slid into my seat, pulled out my programming text and forced myself to read (and reread and reread) a section about transfer functions so I couldn’t watch her tuck a strand of hair behind her ear or stroke her fingers across her thigh in a measurable rhythm that progressively drove me crazy.

Definitely nothing going on in my life that would make it to dinnertime conversation.

I arrived to find that I wasn’t on the agenda, which was all good until I knew why. Carlie, who’d always been a wisp of a girl despite her hearty appetite, sat poking at her food with her fork and eating almost nothing. Cindy always made a small, separate dish of meatless lasagne in deference to her daughter’s refusal to eat ‘anything with a face’. It was Carlie’s favourite meal, but she wasn’t eating.

A worried glance passed between her parents, and I wondered what the hell was going on.