Ask the Passengers (27 page)
Read Ask the Passengers Online
Authors: A. S. King
When Ellis appears at the dinner table, she is in full sulk.
Mom says some stuff to her without looking, and then when Ellis doesn’t answer, she turns and says, “That does it! I call an impromptu Mommy and Me night!”
“No,” Ellis says.
“I’m not taking no for an answer,” Mom says, and she proceeds to drag Ellis from the chair and up the steps.
By the time Dad gets home with the pizza, the two of them are screeching like preteens, and all is back to normal. If you want to call this normal. Mom tells him that she’s made reservations at the country club. “Don’t wait up!” she says.
He looks at me and tosses the pizza onto the table, and I dish out a little salad and pour iced tea, and we’re both on our second piece of pizza when Mom and Ellis leave through the front door without saying good-bye.
I think again about how Dad and I could fix this. I mean, he could be warmer, right? Not so disconnected and stoned? He could at least say “Have a good time!” and demand a kiss or something. And I could giggle with them and show them that it doesn’t bug me that I’m not invited. Because I’m over it.
He leans back and reaches into the fridge for a beer.
“Want one?”
I consider it for a second. “No, thanks.”
He closes the fridge door, twists the cap off his beer and drinks.
They say:
My God, look at him. He’s like a dog in a cage.
“So, here’s to this week being over,” he says. He holds up his glass, and I pick up my iced tea and clink with him, and we both drink.
“The curtains look great,” I say.
“Shoot me now,” he says.
“I’m really sorry I put you through all that.”
“You mean the curtains or the other shit?”
“All of it,” I say. “I hate lying to you. But I can’t tell her anything or else—you know.”
“No. Or else what?”
I sigh. “Or else she’ll ruin it?”
“Oh, that,” he says, and takes another drink. “Yeah.”
I go to bed after the
SNL
Weekend Update, and I hear him come up at around one. I don’t hear Mom and Ellis come in. I remember waking up at around four and fearing that they’d both been in an accident. I remember wondering how it would feel to lose them.
My alarm goes off at five. I take a quick shower and see that Ellis’s shoes are on the floor in the bathroom. This makes me happy, because I want to make things okay, because she’s my sister and I still want to save her from the flying monkeys.
On Sunday morning, I ask Juan, “Why do people love shrimp so damn much?” He shrugs and drops the box on the sink’s edge for me, and I start deveining before six. Dee is late and gets in at 6:15.
“Oversleep?”
“Forgot to set my alarm.” She turns to Juan. “Sorry.”
“Slow day, ladies. You’ll be out of here by ten, I bet.” He goes to the schedule on the wall. “And no work at all next weekend. Have a happy holiday, yo.”
Once I get set up with my knife and my shrimp, Dee asks, “Did you do it?”
“Do what?”
She lets her face fall into a disappointed scowl. “Forget it,” she says, and goes back to her brassicas.
“Nobody was home,” I say. “What was I going to do? Wake them up at five this morning? I didn’t know you were on a strict schedule.” I’m aware that came out a little bitchy, but she’s being too pushy, so I don’t care.
“Sorry,” she says.
After some silence, she says, “You ready for your big day this week?”
“Yep,” I say. “I still have to make my toga.”
Jorge hears this. “You having a toga party?”
“Kinda.”
“Jorge, you didn’t know that Astrid here is a brain? She’s, like, a real live philosopher.”
“Seriously?” Jorge asks.
I smile. “I guess.”
He nods. “So what’s your philosophy on shrimp?”
I stare at the small case of it. “Shrimp is good.”
“That’s it?”
“Or shrimp is bad,” I say.
Jorge looks at me like I must be high. Frank S. gives me a thumbs-up from over by the big industrial mixer. Dee still has a look on her face like she’s losing me. Because she might be losing me.
At home, we eat DIY dinner because none of us are hungry at the same time. I do leftover pizza. Cold. Ellis eats a can of meatballs. Mom has a salad. Each of us seems to be in our own little world with our own little shadows.
After dinner, I go out to the picnic table and I try to think about the Socrates Project and my toga, but I’m distracted by the realization that I’m completely alone right now. No friends. No family. No Dee. I look at the planes and picture the passengers feeling sorry for me for shutting people out. For having to do what I have to do next, which is figure out all the ways to not be completely alone. I ask them:
Do you think one day they might let me love them again?
PASSENGER #1008
MIKEY JO MARTINEZ, SEAT 1D
FLIGHT #4430
DALLAS TO JFK
What people don’t tell you about this part of breaking up is the embarrassment. I’m Mikey Jo Martinez, man. Always a happy guy. A good father. A good husband. I go to church, and I volunteer at the soup kitchen twice a month, you know? And all I feel is embarrassed right now. I almost didn’t make it onto this plane because I thought about taking a bunch of pills last night. That’s a first. Mikey Jo Martinez doesn’t think about shit like that. Ever.
Donald and Glen told me that divorce was freedom. They said that they have more time and less worries, and no one bitches at them anymore. But they didn’t love their wives, either. I do.
More than I ever did before.
You know that saying about how you don’t know what you have until it’s gone? I already did know what I had, and now that she’s gone, I know even more.
Donald and Glen said something about dating honeys. How they go clubbing. Shit, man, I’m thirty-five years old. I don’t want to go to a club. I don’t want honeys. I want Noelle back. I want my kids back. I want to hit Rewind. So I’m going back to Jersey to see if she’ll try one more time.
And I’m landing in an hour, and I don’t know what to say. All I know is that nothing I ever said before worked.
She said she loves me. She said she doesn’t want to do this to the kids. She said that she really wants it to work out. But she said it’s up to me… and I don’t know what that means.
I can admit that at first I was a jerk. She gave me some self-help book, and I threw it on the ground, but I was mad. Really mad. And I’m still mad and embarrassed.
What’s scary is that I still feel that way on some days. Like I have anger issues. Like I’m some animal. When, really, I know I’m a good guy. I mean, most of the time, you know?
My favorite part of flying is when we break through the clouds. Seeing them from above is magical, but flying through them to see the landscape below is beautiful. As we do it this time, we hit some turbulence, and I focus on some tree-covered mountains in the distance and the dark yellow of the setting sun hitting the edges of the scattered small clouds between me and the mountains. While I do this, I hear Noelle’s voice in my head—the last thing she said to me on the phone. She said, “If you’re coming back here, then you’d better have something new to say, because I’m not going to sit and listen to the same old excuses, Mikey. You either need to own up to your shit or just stay in Dallas with your mother, because this is your last chance.”
She means it, too. Noelle Martinez doesn’t say anything she doesn’t mean, which is why I love her as much as I do. You can count on people like that.
I look out the window and see the sun getting lower and the mountains in the distance getting yellower, and I feel this sharp pain in my chest like someone just shot me. It hurts, but it’s good, too. Like it’s letting the pressure out of my chest. It’s a relief. Like someone somewhere is releasing the embarrassment and letting me think straight.
Suddenly, I know what I’m going to say.
I’m going to say:
This was all my fault. I’m so sorry. I didn’t appreciate you, and I didn’t help you.
She will look frightened because Mikey Jo Martinez has never admitted stuff like this before. I will ask her to hug me. When she does, I will ask:
Will you let me love you again?
WHAT WOULD SOCRATES DO?
“HEY,” KRISTINA SAYS.
It startles me out of my love-sending, and I sit up.
“Ninja,” I say. “Didn’t even hear you come out the door.”
“I snuck around the side,” she says. “I don’t feel like seeing Claire right now. Or your sister.”
“I don’t see why not. They still probably like you more than they like me.”
“Look,” Kristina says. She sits down on the table next to me, our feet on the bench part, and I share my blanket with her. “You have to understand some stuff.”
“I understand enough,” I say. “You lied about me. I’m not your best friend anymore.”
“Please! Just stop!” she says, and she starts crying a little, and I feel like shit—a little like my mother. Twisting the knife once it’s in and all that.
She reaches into her coat pocket and gets a tissue, and she blows her nose a few times. Finally she says, “I did make it up. But I had to.”
“You
had to
? That’s even lamer than denying it.”
“Let me finish,” she says. “You don’t understand what it’s like to be from here. You don’t understand what it’s like to have a family who’s
always
been from here.”
“And this makes it okay to tell lies about your best friend how?”
“God, you can really be like Claire, you know that?”
“Thanks.”
She looks at me and starts to cry again. “I’ve lost everything! Can’t you see that? Everything!”
“No. I can’t see that,” I say.
“I was Kristina Houck—”
“You’re still Kristina Houck!”
“I was Kristina Houck: Homecoming Court, Unity Valley girl. I had a
reputation
. I had status. I had a future. Recommendations to the best colleges. Connections. People,” she says.
I interrupt her. “You still have all that stuff. Doesn’t explain why you lied about me. Which, if you look at it from my point of view, looks like this: Townie girl with
status
and
connections
makes up lie about her pseudo–best friend who moved here and was never accepted by the townie people, and then denies it and makes a shitload of excuses, as if it’s okay for
good Unity Valley girls to lie about big nothings from out of state.”
