Page 47 of The Sky in Summer
“Okay. Yeah. Love you too.”
Oh shit! I move back to the entry of the hall, pretending to just have walked up. I start singing the Stones classic that streams from Nobel’s Alexa. Off-key, loud, and I’m sure not getting it exactly right as I jump in the middle of the song. I la la la over the lyrics that escape me.
“Brown sugar you sure make me feel real good! La la all night!”
The door opens just as I approach, and Tyler exits. Red eyes give him away. I ignore the obvious.
“Tyler! Can you help me find your mom’s sweater? She said it’s downstairs here.”
“Yeah,” he says, wiping an errant tear away before he thinks I can see it.
I move past him into the bathroom and proceed to take a piss while we talk. He is standing outside the door, but I want to keep him within shouting distance. Maybe I can help the kid.
“Let’s bring some bags of gummy bears too. For you and your friends. What do you think?” I call.
“Okay.”
“I know we just ate a horse, but that doesn’t matter. I was always hungry at sixteen.”
“Yeah.”
He sounds on the verge of crying.
“You okay?”
I shake, zip up and move to wash my hands. That’s all I say, but when our eyes meet in the mirror his fill with tears.
“What’s happening?”
He doesn’t answer. I think he is using all he has to just not have a meltdown. I keep talking.
“That’s fine. I don’t need to know. But whatever it is, if you want to talk to someone apart from your family, you can talk to me.”
“Thanks.”
I move out of the bathroom and head to the kitchen. He is forced to follow and listen to my reasoning.
“Remember, I come from a family of seven. We have gone through all kinds of shit together. And not all of it was caused by us kids. My parents had their share of fuckups. We all pissed each other off multiple times. It’s normal.”
That makes him smile just a little. When you are an adult, the word fuck goes a long way in making allies of teenagers.
“Like what?”
“Like the time my mother called the girl I liked in eighth grade,Van’s little friend,in front of not only the girl, but the class bully. I didn’t hear the end of that one until I was in high school and bigger than the guy.”
“Yikes,” he says.
“You think that was bad? How about my father? He couldn’t come to my graduation because some rich client only had one day to look at the sculpture he was selling. And guess what? No sale! Man, I was so pissed at that one. Not to mention my mother who thought he had made a poor decision.”
“That must have hurt.”
“It did. I wasn’t exactly mad, but deeply disappointed. For the first time in my life, I didn’t feel like I mattered enough. Of course, I was totally wrong.”
“Why? Shouldn’t he have come to your graduation?”
“You would think so. I did. But things aren’t always as they seem. He had given me, and all us kids, ninety nine percent of himself. He was only asking for one percent of me.”
Tyler considers the concept.
