The Breakup Artist (17 page)

“I’d like that,” he said, after I spent what felt like an eternity of watching his face shift between some unheard thoughts. “Should I just follow you there?” he asked.

“Yeah, it’s not too far from here,” I answered happily. He dropped his hands from my waist and said, “I’ll see you there.”

It felt odd to have someone following me to my house. In my whole life I’d never had anyone over to my house to see me. Every birthday party had simply consisted of my mom and I going out to eat somewhere, and even those events had stopped with my thirteenth birthday. Now my birthdays consisted of my mother leaving me a twenty-dollar bill on the counter with a quickly scribbled note that read “Happy Birthday! Hope you have a great day! Love, Mom.”

Even though it had only been a day since David and I had resolved our differences and decided to be an official couple, everything seemed so different. Life just held more possibilities now that I had allowed myself to experience it. Before David I hadn’t really thought that I needed any changes in my life. Everything was just fine the way it was, with the occasional plague of loneliness that lasted a few days. Now that I had changed my views so completely, it felt as if I could breathe for the first time. It was like David had enabled me to fill a hole inside of me that I hadn’t even known was there to begin with. It was a wonderful feeling, and I couldn’t get enough of it.

We arrived at my house ten minutes later, me pulling into the driveway and David parking along the sidewalk. There was a nice looking black car near the sidewalk across the street, and I wondered for a moment if the neighbors were having the president over for dinner or something. These thoughts were quickly erased, however, when David emerged from his old blue car in all of his glory. I smiled at him and held out my hand, implying that he should take it. Luckily he was quick on the uptake and immediately obliged.

“You know, as we were coming here, I realized I’ve already been to your house. I didn’t really need to follow you,” he said matter-of-factly. I simply shrugged at this statement and turned the key in the lock on our front door. As we walked through the house to get to the living room, I decided to kick off the conversation. I vaguely registered that the house smelled a bit like smoke, but I didn’t see a fire so I figured a window must have been opened to the smells outside.

“Since we’re getting to know each other better, there’s something I’ve been wondering,” I said with a glance in his direction. “Are your parents married or divorced?” As the words were coming out of my mouth we turned into the living room where my mother stood with a man in a business suit. David and I stopped dead in our tracks, and I automatically dropped his hand, though I wasn’t sure why. It wasn’t like holding hands was a crime. My mother looked equally as shocked and I noted with profound embarrassment that her hair was disheveled with a button undone on the middle of her white blouse. It looked as if she had been pretty hastily put together. The man was in better shape, though his graying hair was sticking up a bit in the back.

I could feel my face turning red at the sight before me and I tried not to think of what the whole scene would look like to an outsider. Like mother, like daughter—I’m assuming is what that outsider would think. I kept my emotions under control, reminding myself that David and I were just going to talk and get to know each other, so I had absolutely nothing to feel guilty about. My mother, on the other hand . . .

“Amelia, what are you doing home?” she said, in what I’m sure she was hoping was an offhand, disinterested way.

“School always gets out at this time,” I said simply, looking anywhere but at the man standing beside my mother.

“Of course it does, dear,” she said, trying to salvage the “unfit mother” image she had just pinned on herself with her question. “Amelia,” she said, pulling herself back together. “This is Lawrence Everett.” She motioned to the man next to her, who gave me a winning smile and held out his hand. I reluctantly shook it and got a nose full of the cigarette smell I’d noticed earlier.

Lawrence Everett wore an expensive suit. His graying hair was slicked back in a businesslike manner that made him look like a snake. I also noted that he had a gold band on his left hand ring finger.

The situation was bad, but it wasn’t one of those bad situations that has a sort of bad thing that can be overlooked. It was full of bad. There was the fact that, no matter how much David had figured out about me after watching for a year, he didn’t know that my mother’s relationship with me was nonexistent. And there was always the little concern of the ring on Mr. Snake’s finger. I looked at the ground now, though I knew it was my turn to introduce my company. I didn’t know if I should spring the title of “boyfriend” on my mom as a small, shocking payback, or just say “friend” so that we could avoid any further conversation. The room was silently expectant, waiting for me to fill the void.

“I’m David,” my wonderfully observant boyfriend said by my side. I was so relieved that he sensed my lack of ability to speak that I could have kissed him for it, though I would obviously refrain just at the moment. “Amelia and I are in the same English class and I haven’t been doing so well on my tests, so the teacher suggested I get some help from her best student.” His story was so convincingly told that I even believed it for a second.

“I’m not the best student,” I said, in what I hoped sounded like embarrassed modesty. The statement at least gave me a reason to keep my eyes on the ground so that no one would be able to tell how red my face was getting or how watery my eyes were becoming.

“Well, that’s nice of you, young lady,” Mr. Snake said. I simply nodded.

“I was just showing Lawren—Mr. Everett some houses and I forgot a key here, so we came to retrieve it. We have a lot of places to look at before the day is through, though, so I’ll see you later tonight Amelia. Nice to meet you David,” my mother said in one breath. She swept Lawrence out of the room quickly, and I didn’t move until I heard the door shut and his expensive car roar to life across the street. Oh yeah, that outsider would definitely think, “like mother, like daughter.”

As the silence in the room slowly grew deafening, I tried to blink back the tears that were threatening to pour down my cheeks. It was one thing to not be involved in your own mother’s life, but it was a completely different thing to find that what little involvement you have is discovering her heinous secrets. My bottom lip shook with the effort of holding back any emotion, and I couldn’t bear to look at David. I couldn’t even begin to imagine what he must think of me: “No wonder she does what she does—look at how messed up her home life is.” To my surprise, however, he didn’t say anything. He didn’t try to skew the truth so that it looked better than it was. He didn’t try to say it was no big deal. He didn’t lie to me. He just wrapped his arms around me and held me to his chest while I began to sob, and that alone told me more about him than any POIs could have.

☼☼☼

My mother didn’t come home that night, which didn’t really surprise me, but David didn’t seem to be scared off by the fact that it was a possibility that she could just wander in with some man. Instead of fleeing the scene when it was polite to do so, he told me I should go upstairs and get my homework done, and he would make dinner for me. I protested this idea many times, telling him that I was fine and didn’t need to be taken care of, but he won in the end.

We did compromise a bit, however, and I ended up doing my homework at the kitchen table while he looked through cupboards until he found what he needed for whatever dish he was planning on making. I tried to make pleasant small talk at first, offering smiles that were far from genuine when I really just felt like crying some more, but eventually David stopped that by simply saying, “You don’t have to pretend to be happy just because I’m here. You don’t even need to fill in the empty space with words if you don’t want to. If you feel like breaking a dish, by all means, go right ahead . . . I’ll even join you.”

His smile and complete understanding of exactly how I felt at that moment caught me off guard. I couldn’t understand how I could know someone for such a short amount of time and still be so completely in tune with him. “Thank you,” I said with a small, sad smile. I wasn’t feeling happy by any stretch of the imagination, but David’s mere presence kept me from feeling completely lost. I figured that once he left and I was really all alone, I’d have some sort of breakdown and that was something I definitely wasn’t looking forward to.

Miraculously enough, I finished all of my homework in an hour. I didn’t think I’d be able to concentrate with so much on my mind, but David’s insistence that we didn’t have to talk if I didn’t want to, and the continual sounds of him cooking kept me on track. By the time I packed up my completed homework, David had cooked some sort of baked chicken and mashed potatoes dish. He brought the plate to me along with a glass of juice and sat down opposite me at the table.

“I didn’t know you could cook,” I said hoarsely. My voice seemed to be rebelling from the hour of crying and the hour of not speaking.

“Well, I guess there’s the first answer to our twenty questions then,” he said with a warm smile. “Do you want to keep going or should we take turns?”

“Your turn,” I answered simply.

“All right.” He stopped for a moment, taking a sip of juice while thinking of what to ask. I figured he was trying to think of something he could ask me without bringing up the events of earlier today. “What do you want to study at college?”

“Marriage counseling,” I said with a small laugh. The poor boy had tried so hard to avoid bringing up any unpleasant memories, and here he had asked the question that would lead right into that horrible discussion.

“Oh,” he said awkwardly, which made me actually smile. I figured I’d relieve the situation instantly and ask him the question I’d asked before.

“So are your parents divorced or still together?”

“Still together. Have been for years,” he said vaguely. I raised an eyebrow at this. It was sad, but I was always more shocked to find out that a couple was still together than I was to find out that they were divorced.

“When did your parents get divorced?” he asked me. I guess since I had opened that up as an acceptable topic I should have expected that question.

“I don’t know that they ever really did,” I said honestly. “My father just kind of left when I was six. I don’t know if they ever made it official. My mom hasn’t said a word about him since that day, and I haven’t had any desire to bring it up with her . . . especially now,” I mumbled. David gave my foot a little nudge under the table, and I quickly went on with the questioning. “So what do your parents do?”

“Well, my mom works from home. She makes jewelry and sells it online. And my dad is a science professor over at the university in Camarillo.” I smiled at him. I could just imagine David having dinner at home with his parents—having pleasant conversations about things that had nothing to do with older married men. “You know the university where my dad works used to be a mental hospital. I guess that’s fitting, since once we go to college we’ll pretty much be losing our minds.” This made me laugh. It was a real, genuine, happy laugh, and I loved David for bringing it out in me.

By the time we finished our dinner, it was starting to get late. I wondered when David would decide to go home. I didn’t want to make him feel obligated to stay with his sad, emotionally damaged girlfriend, but I also didn’t want him to leave, knowing that when he did I’d have too much time to think about the things I’d seen today and I might lose it.

I insisted on doing the dishes since he had made dinner, so he sat on the couch in our living room with his laptop in front of him. He was typing just as intensely as he had been at lunch when I finished the dishes. I could see a document open on his screen, filled with writing, but I didn’t want him to catch me looking over his shoulder and think I was spying on him so I cleared my throat to make my presence known.

“Do you need to call your parents or anything?” I asked as I sat on the couch next to him. He closed his computer and slid it under the couch before handing me the remote to the TV. He knew me too well already. I really needed anything that could let me empty my brain of all significant thoughts, like watching TV for hours on end.

“I already did. I told them I’d be out late tonight and that I might stay at a friend’s.” He looked over at me questioningly, asking if it was all right in that one expression.

“Good,” I said simply, happy that I wouldn’t be left alone with myself. After a few episodes of old black and white TV shows, David apparently felt it was time to talk.

“So are you all right?” he asked, and I instantly knew what he was asking about.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I never wanted you to know that my home life was so . . . just . . . messed up.” I looked over at him and I could feel the burning in my eyes again. “Sometimes I go a week without even seeing my mom once.” I sighed in resignation as a hot tear slid down my cheek.

“Amelia, it’s not like I’m going to judge you because of that. I just want to be able to make you happy.” He put his arm around me, and I let my head rest on his shoulder. As I closed my eyes and took in his scent, I was overcome with just how exhausted I was. If I had any more emotionally stressful days, I’d have to start getting more sleep. My breathing slowed as a heavy lethargy rolled over me.

“Are you tired?” he asked, though his voice seemed distant.

“Mmhmm,” I answered wordlessly. I could feel David moving beside me, but I wasn’t quite sure what exactly he was doing. After a little jostling I knew that he was lying behind me with an arm draped over my shoulders. I took his hand and held it against me like a blanket. Then I let myself fall asleep in his arms.