The Most Fun We Ever Had (51 page)

“I’m just going to take a look, okay? It might hurt a little when I take the gauze off.” She braced herself but her father was gentle and meticulous, slowly peeling away her bandage. “Mm,” he murmured, and she felt the tips of his fingers touching the very edges again. “Well, it looks okay. I mean—considering the fact that someone accepted money in exchange for branding a giant star onto my daughter’s neck. It doesn’t appear to be getting worse.” His voice was almost playful and she felt the familiar curiosity about her father, about who he used to be, before her, before her mother, before any of them. It seemed like her dad had always been someone’s
dad,
kind and soft-spoken and austere. “Stay still for a second, sweetie.” She felt a tiny point of pressure, not so different from the tattoo gun.

She tensed. “Daddy—”

“Sorry, sorry. Just making a pen mark so I can measure if the area’s shrinking or not.”

All this knowledge he had that she’d never considered. He reached into her nightstand for the anti-inflammatory cream and a Q-tip and he applied it to her skin and covered it with a new bandage. “This would kill Mom, Liza-lee,” he said. She blinked, and he stroked her hair, a little awkwardly. “So we’ll take care of it, okay? You stay on top of it and I’m going to check on you until it’s healed.” She shifted to face him, ignoring the pain in her neck. “We’ll keep it between us.” It was rare—extraordinary—to hear him speak like this; she knew he loved her, loved all of them, but he was not a very talkative man and even less of an emotional one. He reserved that for their mother. “If you want to tell her, feel free. But I’m not going to. It’s not my place. It’s my job to make sure you’re safe. I’ll do that part.” She opened her mouth to speak but found herself unable. He leaned down and kissed her forehead. “You’re a good egg, Lize. Let me know
immediately
if it starts to feel worse than a four.”

“Okay,” she croaked, and she watched as the silhouette of her father disappeared again into the hallway.

—

I
t had been surprisingly easy to become someone’s wife. Wendy moved in with Miles not long after they met and made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets. A year later, they married in her parents’ backyard, surrounded by Gatsbyesque strangers and awash in Dom. And after that it was like someone had flipped a switch; suddenly this three-story townhouse in Hyde Park belonged to
her,
and Miles carted her along to cocktail receptions and donor recognition dinners, and after two awkward times she figured out the dress code, what was okay (wrap dresses; pashminas) and what wasn’t (knits or anything strapless), and suddenly it was like she was meant to be there. She chatted up his older colleagues, charmed the pants off of them, and was pretty good with their wives, too, murmuring things like
I’m older than I look, trust me
and
Bunny, I have a lot to learn from you.
And it was work, but she
fit.
Finally, somewhere, she fit. She was young and beautiful and everyone thought she was quick-witted and sharp and it was just assumed that she was
keeping Miles in line,
though in actuality he was the one who kept things going. He was rich, from his grandparents, had happened upon his wealth by genetic chance, and he shared readily, adding her to his accounts without a second thought.

His job at Harold Washington gave texture to his gobs of money: his parents had, of course, wanted him to take something at Northwestern or the U of C, and certainly would have been able to make it happen for him, but he’d demurred, explaining to Wendy that spending his days teaching students whose parents could afford forty-grand-a-year tuition—students like he himself had been—would only fuel his well-oiled hatred of the American elite, into which he had undeniably been born. Her husband had a complicated relationship with his privilege, working constantly against all that he could easily be taking for granted. And he had fun with his students, she could see; he took unfathomable amounts of time grading their papers and prepping his lectures. He took his job seriously, even though technically he didn’t have to, and there was a beautiful dignity to that, she thought.

Other than his course load, he sat on the boards of a few nonprofits, but he mostly spent time with her. She started getting involved in charities and social clubs and once she had enough of those things to make a
schedule
she no longer felt bad about quitting school or her job.

She started owning it, her new life with her Audi and her checkbook and her badass contrarian husband. She was finally able to shed the part of her that was fucked-up and anxious and deficient in comparison to her unyieldingly middle-class, moderate-to-high-functioning family. She was in love, and someone loved her back.

And then one day, by some miracle, she answered the phone and it was Violet, the only person missing from the newfound wonder of her circumstances, but before she could get too excited, her sister started talking, her voice unrecognizably uneven, and everything started to slip after that, down down down, gaining speed, lightpost-bound, like a doomed kid on a sled.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

She and Matt had survived Christmas with his parents by banking on their limited acting skills, using their children as a distraction, and avoiding each other as much as possible. If his family noticed the chill between them, nobody mentioned it. There was a fog delay for their flight out of Sea-Tac so they didn’t return to Chicago until nearly midnight, and Violet, by the next morning, was so desperate to be alone that she took the boys through the drive-through drop-off lane, derided by most Shady Oaks moms as being taken advantage of by the lazy or employed.

Her mother called just as she was walking in the door.

“Are the weary travelers back?” Marilyn asked when she picked up the phone.

“Just barely,” Violet said. She made a point to sound beleaguered sometimes when talking to her mother, to drive home the point that just because she’d had half as many kids didn’t mean that her life wasn’t still stressful.

“Well, merry belated,” her mom said, sounding a little short.

“Is everything okay?”

“Yes, fine. Well. I mean, everything
is
fine, but I— Listen,
please
don’t take this out on Jonah, Violet, because he didn’t volunteer the information without my prompting, but I heard what happened at your house that night he came for dinner.”

“What did he tell you?” she asked carefully.

“Just that— Well, he told me what happened with Wyatt, the whole thing about Santa Claus, but he also told me that you’d gotten quite upset with him, that you asked him to leave.”

“I’m sorry, how exactly did you
prompt
that specific information from him?”

“He was upset when Matt dropped him off. I kept asking him what had happened and he finally told me. There’s no reason to take that tone, Violet; it was clearly an accident…”

“I don’t have a
tone
and he didn’t
accidentally
tell him; Wyatt asked him and he easily could’ve talked his way out of it.”

Her mother was quiet.

“God, Mom, what?”

“No, it’s— I’d hoped maybe he was…I hoped he’d misinterpreted your anger, I guess.”

“Did you call to scold me for getting mad because Jonah ruined Christmas for my son?”

“Jonah is also your son, Violet.”

When she wasn’t ruing it, she envied her mother’s ability to speak about the world with such frank obviousness. But right now she just wanted a few fucking minutes to catch her breath after the Christmas from hell with her frigid husband and her hyperactive children.

“Oh my God, Mom, you can’t just— You don’t have any right to—” But she recognized her anxiety as the kind that came with being caught, and she was afraid of what her mother was going to say next. Her mother, the pacifist. Her mother, who gave her such a long leash. “Christ, Mom, I never
wanted
this. I don’t have room in my
life
for this.”

“
This
being Jonah, you mean.” It was jarring to hear her mother sounding angry.

“Sorry we don’t all quite have your free-love, open-door policy, Mom. Sorry some of us actually
like
for elements of our lives to not be utter chaos all the time.”

“It’s my free-love open-door chaos that’s the reason Jonah isn’t getting shuffled through the child welfare system anymore, Violet. A fact that you’ve never acknowledged or expressed an ounce of gratitude for. This whole
family
has rallied to care for this kid, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable to wonder where you’ve
been
the last eight months. You’re his mother.”

“Look, Mom, if you want to be worried about one of us? Wendy’s been on the edge of a cliff for decades. Liza’s pregnant by a man who’s never going to be remotely her equal in terms of maturity or functionality. There are plenty of other directions for you to focus your attention.”

“I’m going to get off the phone before I say something I regret,” her mother said, her voice clipped. “I’ll be here to talk if you decide you want to, Violet.” Her last few syllables wavered, and she hung up.

She never fought with her mother; to have Marilyn—loving, patient, easygoing Marilyn—be angry with her felt uniquely awful. It dawned on her, as she went to curl up in the armchair overlooking their side yard, wrapping a blanket around her shoulders, feeling her eyes and nose leaking beyond her consent, that she had felt as lonely as she did lately only twice before in her adult life: the weeks following Jonah’s birth, and the weeks following Wyatt’s. She couldn’t talk to Wendy. She couldn’t talk to Matt. She could barely bring herself, anymore, to engage in the most base-level small talk. And now she’d driven away her mother, too, and this felt like the most damning thing of all. She wanted to call Marilyn back and tell her this—
I’m sorry, I’m lost, I know I fucked up
—but she’d left her phone in the kitchen, and she was suddenly so tired she could barely move, and so she just lay there, knees to her chest, crying in the way she’d resisted for months until she didn’t have anything left, until—empty, utterly depleted—she fell blackly asleep.

—

J
onah went to Wyatt’s school less to spite Violet than because he thought it would be nice to be a little kid and have an adult promise you something and then actually do it. He had never had that, though he was starting to understand how nice it was, because David was never late—not even by a minute—picking him up from Krav Maga, and Marilyn remembered that he hated asparagus but was okay with broccoli. So he ditched second period and took the Green Line to the Red Line to the Purple Line and then followed the directions he’d printed and jogged thirteen blocks to Shady Oaks Academy, and he arrived, both freezing and sweaty, only eight minutes after ten. He hadn’t talked to Violet or Matt since the night he’d ruined Santa. He wondered if Violet had put him onto some prep-school no-fly list and he’d be turned away by security. But he was banking on the fact that she would be too embarrassed to cause a scene and would explain him away as some poor little street urchin whom she would allow to watch her son’s performance as an act of charity. He wasn’t looking forward to seeing her again.

When he told the secretary he was there to see Wyatt, her face broke open in relief.

“Oh, thank
God,
” she said. “He’s been a wreck. Poor thing. Are you— Wait, I’m not sure I have you on the list. Are you a new babysitter?”

But suddenly there was a blue blur coming toward him, and then Wyatt was in his arms, wrapped around his torso like a koala.

“I’m his brother,” he said, the words clumsy in his mouth. Wyatt was weeping, again that sad quiet kind, almost like an adult. “Whoa, okay.” He patted the kid’s back. Then—so the secretary, whose
list
seemed pretty official, didn’t call the cops—he added: “Half brother.” He tilted his head down. “Wyatt, buddy, it’s okay. It’s all right.”

“What on earth is going on?” A woman in a skirt-suit had appeared behind the secretary’s desk, along with a scary-looking tall-haired Spandexed lady.

“This is his…brother,” the secretary explained.

“I wasn’t aware that Wyatt had an older brother,” said the principal.

He took an immediate dislike to these two women. “Violet’s my mom.” It was the first time he’d ever said it and the last thing he’d been expecting to say, and he could only imagine Violet’s reaction if she were here, the fury he would incite simply by stating the obvious. And then, with a bit more authority: “What’s going on? Why is he so upset?”

“Mr. Lowell is in a meeting,” the principal said. “And Mrs. Sorenson-Lowell is—running late, apparently.”

“Just a little case of stage fright,” the secretary said more tactfully, patting Wyatt on the back. “How’d you feel about doing your song now, with your brother here?”

“I’m sorry,” Spandex said, jutting out a hip, giving Jonah a once-over like Violet sometimes did, like he was spewing bad intentions and environmental toxins. “Who
is
this person? How did he even— Is this how lax our security has become, that we just…”

Jonah stared at her and she trailed off. “
I’m
sorry,” he said, “but who the hell are you?”

“I’m Mrs. Morley, the vice president of the Parents’ Association,” she said emphatically, but then her curiosity seemed to get the better of her. “Did you say you were Violet’s—
son
?”

“What’s your name, young man?” the principal asked, equally intrigued. “Do you have some form of identification?”

Like the cop after he’d wrecked Liza’s car. Rich people were endlessly obsessed with identity verification.

“I’m fifteen,” he said. His birthday was in two days, at which point he’d be eligible for a legitimate ID. “Jonah Bendt. You can call Matt and ask him. But I still don’t get— Wyatt, buddy, what’s the matter?”