Page 65 of The Fix-Up

MOM: One more thing, sweetie.

ME: Yes?!

MOM: How is that slipper going? You think it will be done by Easter?

ME: I’m on it!!!!

I always used entirely too many exclamation points when I texted with my mother.

Everything’s great! No, no, you should all come for Easter! The house is absolutely falling apart but definitely come! I don’t have a strange man I secretly think is kind of hot living in my house! Can’t wait to see you!

There may have been a few things I’d kept from my parents. Honestly, I tried to tell Chris as little as possible, too. It was easier that way.

There was a part of me that would always feel guilty over how much grief I put my mom and dad through. It was always me not quite toeing the line in a family full of line-toe-ers. I was the one who got the phone calls home from teachers, the afterschool detentions for being tardy, or the barely passing grades.

My mom was a teacher herself and worked at the same elementary school that all us kids went to. She’d never admit to this, but I think there was an expectation that teacher’s kids had to be a little bit better than everyone else. The thing was…I wasn’t. I was fine. I wasn’t a bad kid. I didn’t purposely seek out trouble although sometimes it did find me.

I was just okay, middling, fine.

But in a family with a sport star brother, a talented artist-turned-teacher, and a brainiac sister, being okay never felt good enough.

I was eleven when my youngest sister Millie came along, born with a congenital heart defect called HLHS. Mom quit teaching and spent her days in hospital rooms, doctors’ offices, and surgery waiting rooms, especially those first couple of years after Millie’s birth. She lived on prayer and caffeine and kind of disappeared from our lives, when she’d always been the most present mom.

When I moved away at eighteen, it was to seek fame and fortune (major fail), and maybe a small part was to get away from my family, to prove I could do great things and that I didn’t need them. Only to find out I did need them. But I was stubborn and couldn’t admit that back then. It was hard to admit even now.

At this rate, I was going to be seeing Sunny for the next thirty years.

Now that I was a mother, I can see how that must have hurt my mom more than she ever let on. When I called to tell her I was pregnant she’d been so calm, so understanding, so comforting. Three years later when I’d been drinking too much, spiraling out of control, and so utterly lost, she’d flown to LA and kept Oliver for a month while I checked into a sort of treatment center.

And still she loved me, comforted me, never let me know she was disappointed.

Which was probably for the best. I was disappointed enough in myself for both of us.

I guess that was why I tried my hardest to make sure she only knew of the good things in my life. For once, I didn’t want her to worry about me.

Hence all the exclamation points.

Hence the churning pool of panic when I even thought of my entire family coming to visit.

’Cause they were about to find out things were not quite so picture-perfect as I’d been telling them.

TWENTY-SEVEN

[Love is…] when two people like each other and it gets stronger and stronger.

—EMMIE, AGE 8

From the sticky note correspondence of Gilbert Dalton and Ellie Sterns:

Eleanor—

We need to talk.

—Gilbert

Dearest Gil,

No person in the history of the world likes to see the words “We need to talk” directed at them.

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