The Art of Adapting Page 4

  “Some manicotti thing. Pretty good. You’ll like it.”

  “Awesome.”

  Dinner at Byron’s house wasn’t the same after his dad moved out, so he avoided it as much as he could. Nobody talked anymore, there was never any laughter. It was strange that it was any different, because Graham was a late-working type who had rarely made it home for dinner anyway. But something about the fact that he wasn’t coming home just as they finished up each night had changed everything. Lana fretted over every little thing, and weird Uncle Matt had all these systems and rules for eating, and Abby just sat there sulking until she was excused each night. Eating with Trent, making faces at each other while Tilly gossiped through dinner, was a lot better than that.

  They picked up speed, Byron skating and Trent running around him, trying to make him crash with sudden swerves and stops. Byron had pretty good balance, and with his new free-running training it was getting harder for Trent to throw him. When the taunting didn’t work Trent resorted to kicking the board out from underneath him. Byron jumped in the air at the exact moment Trent’s foot connected with the skateboard, and the board skittered away sideways, while Byron landed catlike on the ground. Solid.

  “Dude!” Byron yelled.

  “Fucking awesome!” Trent cheered. “That was so Bruce Lee. Let’s do it again.”

  Trent fetched the skateboard from the bushes for another go.

  One of the other reasons Byron liked Trent’s house was Betsy. She was Trent’s sister, a college girl, and too mature to notice Byron, which just made her hotter. She was big, like her mom, but not the sad kind of fat. Betsy was all curvy and confident. She liked to lie out by the pool in low-cut tops and shorts, reading magazines and chatting on her phone. Whenever she bent over, Byron was mesmerized by her enormous breasts threatening to escape from her spaghetti-strap top.

  She went to San Diego State, lived on campus there, and came home without warning whenever she felt like it. She’d bring home big Hefty trash bags of laundry, dump them out in the middle of the kitchen floor, and go sunbathe while her mom washed it all, folded it with love, and talked, talked, talked.

  They entered the cool, quiet house and dumped their backpacks. Trent headed straight for the fridge. “Motherfucker,” he said into the appliance.

  “What?”

  “Someone ate it.”

  “What? Who?” Byron feigned irritation to match Trent’s, but inside his belly did a little flip. Betsy must be home. He checked out by the pool. Nothing. Checked the laundry room just off the kitchen. No trash bag of clothes. He sighed, frustrated with the whole thing. Nothing ever worked out the way he wanted anymore.

  “Bet my mom took it to work. She’s got this new boss, kind of a jerk, but he likes her cooking. I bet they end up screwing.” Trent made a face, grabbed a bag of chips, and threw it at Byron. Byron couldn’t believe the way Trent talked about his mom sometimes. Trent grabbed a box of cookies and two Cokes. They watched TV, played a new video game where you got to shoot Nazis who shouted German curse words at you before they died, snacked on Doritos and salsa and ginger snaps, and at some point Byron realized he actually missed Tilly and her endless jabbering. It seemed like nobody had a regular family anymore.

  Byron wasn’t really in the mood for gaming, but there was always the possibility that Betsy would appear, so he figured he might as well camp out and wait. More and more Byron felt like he was always waiting these days, for something, anything, to happen. And then the only stuff that ever happened wasn’t the kind of stuff he wanted to have happen, like his parents splitting up.

  Last year had been pretty good. Being on track and swim team meant that, for a freshman, Byron knew a lot of upperclassmen, so he never got hazed. He’d worked his way into the jock crowd before he realized that the rebels hated the athletes. So he spent his summer hanging around a couple of members of the lightly rebellious set. And now he was straddling both groups, which gave him decent social status at school. Not that it had done him much good. He was pretty much a third wheel in both groups and Trent was still his only real friend.

  School itself was a grind. Byron wasn’t a nerd like his sister, so he had to actually earn his grades, wading through boring novels and his fat U.S. history book and biology BS. It wasn’t that he couldn’t do the work—he wasn’t stupid—it was just that he didn’t see the point of most of it. Seriously, when in life would he ever need to be able to recite a whole passage from Macbeth? Or identify the body parts of a dissected rubbery stinky frog? Or recap the Declaration of Independence?

  And then there was his dad. Graham had taken Byron and Abby out to dinner the night before, which meant a tedious hour and a half of sitting in a corner booth in a diner while Abby drank water and ate nothing and Graham lectured Byron on all the ways he needed to “step up.” He told Byron he was the man of the house now, and had to take on more responsibilities, not “skate by” anymore. Byron didn’t know what Graham wanted from him. Not only was Lana fine taking care of Byron, even happier when she was doing it, but there was Matt now. Wasn’t he the man of the house? Didn’t Byron get to keep being a kid for a couple more years? Graham had nothing but advice for Byron, always implying that whatever Byron was doing, it wasn’t good enough.

  “Sports is the key,” Graham had said. It was a speech Byron knew well, brought on by the scribbles Byron always drew on napkins at the table. “I mean, art is a great hobby, but there’s no money in it. No career.”

  “Right,” Byron said. He wasn’t really considering a career in art. But he also didn’t think track or swimming were keys to anything, any more than Shakespeare or frog dissection.

  “Now, I don’t mean a career in sports, mind you,” Graham went on, while Byron sketched the man with a tiny dog who was standing outside the restaurant. It was just getting dark and the streetlight above the man was on, casting a milky shadow. Byron couldn’t get it right on the napkin, though. He’d shaded to the point of tearing through the first layer of the napkin. “But a college scholarship in track or swimming, that’s a launching pad to whatever you want to do. Business. Law. Hell, maybe even medicine.”

  Abby snorted and squinted at Byron, cocked her head to one side as if trying to see how Graham could possibly see a doctor in him. Not that Byron disagreed with her, but still. He wadded up his straw wrapper, tucked it into his straw, and blew it at Abby. She dipped her fingers in Byron’s water and flicked them at Byron. Byron jabbed at her with his pen, drew a line down her arm. She picked up an ice cube and threatened to go for the collar of his shirt with it, but just as Byron was deciding between calling a truce or smacking her, she popped it into her mouth and smiled, fluttered her eyelashes all innocent-like. All of this childish behavior, super-inappropriate in a restaurant, going on two feet from Graham, and he either didn’t notice or didn’t care. They never would’ve acted like this around Lana.

  Graham wasn’t a bad father, not that Byron had anyone to compare him to, but he was never really all there. He was like a cardboard cutout dad, like one of those life-sized movie star things you saw in movie theater lobbies. He’d ask them what they did at school, but then Byron could tell he wasn’t really listening to whatever they said. Whenever they’d stop talking, Graham would look up from his phone or come back from staring off into space or checking out some girl across the restaurant and say, “Oh, that’s good. What else?” to get them going again. It was obvious that Graham didn’t know what to do with them. Back when their parents were together, Lana took care of everything kid-related, and now, whenever they were alone with Graham, Byron could see how uncomfortable Graham was. They’d lived together Byron’s whole life, but they hardly knew each other.

  Trent elbowed Byron as a Nazi came around the corner, headed straight for him. Trent took him out just in time. Byron wasn’t concentrating on the game and kept getting shot. Trent wasn’t competitive, so it didn’t hurt to lose to him. Trent never really cared much about anything, which made him pretty easy to be around.
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br />   “You ever hear from your dad?” Byron asked.

  “Who?” Trent said.

  “I mean, birthdays or holidays or whatever. Or is he just, like, gone?”

  “I don’t know. He has a new kid now, you know? He’s all about that little bastard. Doing the second-chance thing.”

  “You call your brother a bastard?”

  “He’s my half-brother. And he is a bastard. My dad won’t marry her.”

  Trent was the only guy who knew about Byron’s parents splitting up. They didn’t talk about it much, but Byron liked that Trent understood without Byron having to explain. He got why Byron didn’t want to be at home much these days. He usually made Byron feel better. Only now he had Byron wondering if his dad was going to disappear like Trent’s. Take some job across the country and just never come back. Start a new family and forget about his old one.

  “But what about you and Betsy? Doesn’t he want a second chance with you guys?”

  “What about us? We don’t need that asshole,” Trent said. “Bets and I are fine.”

  Byron shoved a handful of chips into his mouth, washed them down with Coke, and it made him feel ill for a moment. He needed to get going, back home to Lana and her new nervousness and Matt and his weird food rituals and Abby and her boring perfectness. He had a ton of homework to do, too.

  “No worries,” Trent said. “It gets easier. Much like you’ve gotten used to me kicking your ass here.” He gestured toward the TV, which Byron wasn’t paying any attention to.

  Byron nodded and sat up. “Rematch, asshole. I was just getting your confidence up. Now your ass is mine.”

  “My ass is Fiona’s,” Trent said. “When we were screwing she dug in so hard she left scratch marks on my left cheek. That shit hurt for a week.” Trent smacked his own butt for emphasis, and Byron shook his head. Life was so unfair.

  Despite being part of the jock crowd, Byron rarely got invited to the cool parties, and worst of all, he still didn’t have a girlfriend. He’d come close with Trina, before she shut him down over some crap about her best friend feeling jealous every time Trina was with Byron. So that was it for them. One kiss, followed by a tizzy from some basket-case girl who called herself a friend, and Trina was no longer speaking to him. No other girls really paid him any attention, except as a guy who could introduce them to someone else—someone more popular, or more edgy, or just less dull. Somehow Trent had managed to hook up with a friend of his cousin’s over the past summer, despite looking like a cross between an overgrown hobbit and Spicoli from Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Where was the justice?

  “We can make sandwiches,” Trent said, checking the fridge again as if the leftovers might have magically reappeared. He came back and took the controller for his turn.

  “Nah, I’m not really that hungry. Maybe I’m going to go,” Byron said, shaking the crumbs from the bottom of the chip bag into his mouth. “I have that history report.”

  “You even read the section yet?” Trent asked, back to firing rounds at a stubborn Nazi who refused to go down.

  “I don’t need to. I have Uncle Matt.” Byron jumped over the back of the couch and clipped his heel, barely making it. He needed to work on that move some more.

  “Lucky dog,” Trent said. “I have that calculus test. Is he good at math?”

  “He’s a fucking genius. He’s good at everything.”

  Byron dusted the crumbs from his hands and pants onto the floor so Sparky, the rumpled little gray mutt, could lick them up.

  “Good at everything except being a normal human being?” Trent asked, just as he got taken out by the Nazi.

  “Yeah, except that.”

  5

  * * *

  Lana

  Graham had left full closets behind when he moved out. Lana figured he’d come for it all eventually, but as the months passed it was starting to seem unlikely. She touched the familiar fabrics, felt the cool weight of them, marveled that something so simple, so inanimate, could elicit so many emotions. The clothes reminded her that while she’d been willing to stick it out no matter what, still would if he would be willing to work on their issues, he had walked away clean and hadn’t looked back. How did people do that? Simply let loved ones go and carry on like they never mattered in the first place?

  Lana had the opposite problem. She kept everyone. Even the sitters who’d never cleaned up after the kids though she specifically asked them to, the undependable friends who always canceled last-minute, the father who’d never really had time for her. Lana toted them around with her everywhere she went, weighed down by their unreliability, holding out hope for the day they’d finally rise to her expectations. She missed them when she didn’t hear from them. The kids hadn’t had a sitter in years, but Lana still kept in touch with the ones she’d used. She still made regular lunch plans with friends who almost never kept the date. She still called her father, trying to time it for when her mother was at her weekly bridge game, to see if he was in there, the dad she’d lost so long ago.

  “Well, now, kitten,” Jack would say. “What’s new out there in Cali-for-ni-ay?”

  And Lana would start to tell him about how well her kids were doing in school, how they excelled at sports, how amazing they were. And Jack would launch into a diatribe about something a lot less pertinent than his only grandchildren.

  “They’re trying to close one of the parking lots here at the villa. Turn it into a putting green. Now, you know I appreciate a man’s need to fine-tune his game, but do you have any idea how many golf courses there are in Florida? Or how lousy some of these old folks are at parking? I had my door dinged twice last week by some old fart parking his Caddy too close to me and opening his door into mine. Can’t we keep it a parking lot, designate it for people who aren’t fit to park among us civilized folk?”

  Lana would try a few times to get Jack back into the realm of the relevant, but there was no stopping him once he started talking. Eventually she’d hang up, unfulfilled, frustrated, vowing to stop setting herself up for disappointment. Then a week later she’d miss his booming voice and rants about old ladies feeding pigeons off their balconies, and the bird droppings all over the walkways below, and give him another chance.

  As for Graham, it was time to stop waiting for him to come around. He had a totally new wardrobe. He had reinvented himself. He wasn’t coming back for these things. Lana had bought five large plastic bins with snap-on lids months ago, then forgot about them. She hauled them up from the garage and started stowing Graham’s clothes in them. With each armload carefully folded into a bin, the weight of the room lifted. She finished in record time. Months of procrastination resolved in a half hour of effort. She stood back and admired her handiwork. The closet was wide open, spacious as a promise.

  She emptied his dresser drawers next: socks, underwear, an array of ties and cuff links he’d never worn. And that’s when she found it: Graham’s wedding ring. A simple gold band resting in a carved wooden bowl they’d picked up on a trip to the Grand Canyon, mixed in with paper clips, a memory stick, a brown button, some change. Had he forgotten it? Left it on purpose? She set it on her dresser and tried to decide what to do with it. Ignoring it seemed like the best option for the time being. She still had the bins to contend with.

  She hadn’t thought about how to get the bins downstairs. They were heavier than she’d expected, crammed so full that some of the lids wouldn’t latch. She dragged them to the top of the stairs and considered her options. She was tempted to shove them down the stairs, sledlike, and see what happened. But if they caused any damage to the walls on the way down she’d have no one but herself to fix it. It wasn’t like she could ask Graham to help her carry them when he came to drop the kids off. Or she could, but she wanted this to be hers, this cleansing act. He could fetch his things from a dusty corner of the garage like a proper ex.

  Matt sat by the front window, staring out at the world passing by, a fish safe inside his aquarium. His blond curls and green eye
s were set aglow by the sun, his pale fluttery hands busy in his lap, tinkering with some object she couldn’t make out. Lana cleared her throat, wanting to get Matt’s attention without startling him, and got no response. Throat-clearing was one of those signals that had to be learned, and Asperger’s made it harder for Matt to absorb social cues.

  “Matt?” Lana said. He jumped, as always. She hated startling him, but hadn’t figured out how to draw him back from his reveries without doing so.

  “What’s in the bins?” he asked. Lana smiled. How he knew exactly what she was up to without knowing that she was about to say his name was one of the many Matt mysteries.

  “Some of Graham’s things. I need to put them in the garage, but I’m afraid if I try to lift them by myself I’ll fall down the stairs.”

  “Do you remember when Grandma fell down the stairs?” he asked. Matt had been only four when that had happened. Their grandma had broken her hip, and had never fully come back from it. Lana wondered if Matt remembered visiting her in the hospital afterward, or if he just remembered the stories.

  “Yes, maybe that’s why I’m afraid to try.”

  “You’re much younger than she was, so I bet it wouldn’t hurt you even if you fell,” Matt said. Lana nodded, waiting. He turned back to the window, rotating out of the conversation. Lana was being too polite, trying to get him to offer to help. She knew perfectly well that she needed to be direct and blunt with Matt. Subtlety was wasted on him. She’d been so good at dealing with Matt when they were younger, but years of marital diplomacy had taken their toll. She’d become too mousy.

  “I was wondering if you could help me carry them,” she said.

  Matt turned as if surprised to see her still standing next to him. He leaned around her and looked up the stairs at the bins perched on the landing. He nodded. “I can carry them,” he said, making no move to leave his window. He tracked a bird fluttering from one branch to another in the big tree out front. Just as Lana was about to prompt him again, he rose and headed toward the stairs. Lana followed him. Halfway up the stairs he turned and glared at her shoulder. “You can wait in the other room,” he said. His way of telling her to back off. Motherhood had made her into a hovering nurturer. Being married to Graham had bred a need for attention that she loathed in herself. Matt liked personal space, and lots of it.