The Most Fun We Ever Had (58 page)

Weakened by fatigue and vodka, she told him.

“He sounds like kind of a tool,” Jonah said.

“He was being
honest
with me.” She had never understood why men were so quick to throw each other under the bus. “How does that make someone a tool?”

“Sorry.” He nodded toward the bar. “What’s the deal with that guy?”

The Irish bartender was chatting with an older man by the top-shelf liquor, but it was undeniable that he kept glancing over at their booth. “Nothing’s the deal.” She pushed the drink across the table toward him. She could not recall if it was their third or fourth. Time had been moving weirdly since she’d gotten the call about her father.

“What’d you say his name was?”

She felt her face heat up again. “I didn’t. Luke. Why?”

Jonah crunched an ice cube. “No reason.”

“Can we talk about what happened?” she asked. “My father’s in the hospital.” Her voice broke, startling her, and Jonah, as well, apparently, because he sat up straighter.

“I wasn’t— I didn’t mean to…”

She paused, feeling a creeping sensation at the back of her neck. “Didn’t mean to what?”

“I shouldn’t have let him go up there in the first place. I’m like a thousand years younger than he is. I had one job and I couldn’t even—”

“My dad’s been climbing around our house for decades. There’s no way you could have stopped him.” She watched him, her sisterly upper hand now allowing her to feel a pang of sadness for him, this confused kid without a family, now caught in the tornadic swirl of hers. “And Jonah, he— My dad
wanted
to hang out with you. That’s just how he—” She faltered before using the word
is.
“My dad cares about like six things in the world. Spending time with us is one of them.” The shift in the power dynamic, for whatever reason, was enabling her to speak without getting choked up. “My parents are crazy about you, Jonah. My dad asked you to help him with the tree for the same reason he used to ask me to rake leaves with him. So he could spend
time
with you.”

His eyes were an unearthly blue and swimming with tears. “Yeah, but I— It was the fucking dog. He got loose and he startled me and I would’ve been holding the ladder otherwise.”

The creeping was replaced by a heavy sadness. “Jonah, it’s just a thing that happened. What could you have done? Broken his fall? He still had a heart attack.”

“But I should’ve been the one to go up there. I shouldn’t have let him—”

“Jonah, I— How bad did he look?” she asked, and her voice broke on the penultimate syllable. “Seriously. Don’t tell me the—”

“Really bad,” Jonah said, and he looked down, and he seemed like a little kid again, shoulders caved inward and hands pulled into the sleeves of his shirt.

She tried to imagine what that meant. She pictured her dad blue and bleeding; she wondered what it would sound like if he screamed. Her dad, who’d sat with newborn her in his arms, at her mother’s bedside, not knowing if she’d ever wake up. Her dad, who’d never not been there. She closed her eyes and took a few breaths. “Why doesn’t my family care that I’m alone here? Why are— I mean, no offense, but why are
you
the one who’s here instead of one of my sisters? Why are they not calling? He’s, like, my favorite person in the world.”

“Sorry,” Jonah said.

“It really is nice to have you here,” she said finally. “It’s nice to have a person who—looks like people who I look like. No one’s been to visit me in a while.”

“You think I look like your family?”

She cocked her head, felt it dip a little too much to the left, heavy with drink. “I do. Not—well, not in the way that my other nephews do. But you definitely seem
familiar
to me.”

His eyes bored holes into the table before him. “Do you know anything about my dad?”

She realized anew how much differently from her this kid had experienced the world. To not know your father’s
fate
was one thing, but to not know your father at all was another entirely. The curiosity reminded her, again, of how young he was, how lucky
she
was, grand-scheme.

“Violet had this boyfriend for a while,” she said. He straightened to attention. “I don’t remember his name, but I—I remember thinking at the time that he was probably really smart, but in hindsight it just seems like he might’ve been super douchey.”

His face fell. She remembered both her audience and the carelessness of what she was saying, that if asked to describe her own father she could go on for hours, cataloging his nuances, his quirks, his favorite things, his dumbest jokes, all the times he’d been there for her, cared for her when she was sick, tucked her into bed, moved her into dorm rooms and apartments. Her dad, assembling the cheap Swedish heft of her bed.
It’s in my dad contract.

“I don’t mean— I was in like second grade, so my memory isn’t…And just because someone’s dad is shitty doesn’t mean that…”

“You aren’t really the authority on shitty dads,” he said.

“You’re right,” she said.

He glanced at her empty glass, then looked up at her. “You’re in law school, right?”

She didn’t answer.

“If you’re in law school, why do you live in, like, a shed?”

Her eyes filled again, this time in shame.

“No offense or anything. It just seems weird that you— I don’t know.”

“I’m not—
in
law school, per se,” she said. “Not exactly.” All the times she could have confessed—
should
have confessed, prior to this. To be speaking the words aloud now, to the only member of her family younger and more helpless than she, was almost kind of funny. And then she took a breath—weak, terrified, and for the first time in ages in the company of someone who had some of the same genes she did. “I didn’t get in anywhere. I’ve been lying to everyone. I
do
live in a shed. I have no idea what the fuck I’m doing.”

Jonah looked sort of uncomfortable. “Wow. Your parents are, like, super proud of you. They talk about you all the time.”

She bent her straw, angrily, into a knobby spiral. “That’s funny,” she said, “that they’d talk a lot about someone who they basically forgot existed.”

“Dude,” he said. “Your bedroom’s like a shrine. Although I was
way
more impressed by your TV on the Radio poster than I was by the Coheed and Cambria, by the way.”

She colored. “I was fifteen.” Then, remembering her new role: “You’ll have to dip back into the annals of your memory to recall what that was like.”

“Seriously, it’s like you’re still a little kid. Like they’re just waiting for you to come home and revive your Tamagotchi.”

“Which is part of the problem,” she said. “Everyone refuses to see me as an adult, and because they’ve been denying the fact that I can ever
be
an adult, I’m a total fucking mess.”

“I actually saw it more as, like, two people who really like their kids and are sad they’re not living in their house anymore,” Jonah said. “It’s actually really nice, I think.”

She crumpled, at that, and after about fifteen seconds Jonah was sitting next to her, not the most comforting presence but trying nonetheless, patting uneasily at her shoulder with one hand and holding an ineffectual wad of napkins in the other. Finally, less because she was finished crying and more to put him out of his misery, she dried her eyes and snarfed in her snot.

“You’re a really nice kid, Jonah,” she said.

“I really have to pee,” he replied with apology.

When he disappeared she tried to compose herself, checked her phone fruitlessly for nonexistent messages from her family members. She sent off identical texts to Wendy, Violet, and Liza:
Any updates? I feel really out of the loop.

“Hey,” Jonah said, appearing at her elbow. “That guy at the bar likes you.”

“Excuse me?”

“He asked if I was your little brother.”

“Ah, yes. Inquiring after one’s siblings. The natural aphrodisiac.”

“I can just tell. He seems nice. You should go talk to him.”

She scoffed. “Okay, Casanova.”

“I’m really tired anyway. I can go back to your house. I promise to let you in when you get home.”

“You’re acting as though I’ve already agreed to this.” But she looked up, and Luke the Irish bartender met her eyes and offered her a genial little salute, and she was reminded of the night of her faux-breakup with Ben, how kind he’d been. She smiled at him.

“See you in the morning,” Jonah said, snatching the keys from her hand, and he was gone before she could change her mind.

As she watched him go, her phone dinged with a reply—from Wendy; characteristically underwhelming:
All good. Go to bed.

She shoved the phone in her pocket and made her way to the bar.

—

H
e knew he should probably call someone. Wendy. She’d give him an update. But if the update was bad, then
he’d
have to break the news to Grace, and he couldn’t handle telling Grace.

It wasn’t his fault. Was it? As Grace had said, it wasn’t as though he could have cushioned David’s fall. What had even
happened
? God, what if he’d watched someone die and didn’t even know it? Watched
David
die. David, who was so dorky and dad-jokey, who worried so much about his daughters, who actually seemed to enjoy the time he and Jonah spent together rehabbing the sick basement shower and watching the Blackhawks. There was no way he’d forgive Jonah—obviously not if he was dead, but also not if he was alive and learned that Jonah had stolen his car and driven to Oregon and set his daughter up with an Irish bartender. Jesus.

A knock on the door caused him to jump nearly a foot in the air, even though he’d promised Grace he’d wait up. It was almost midnight. Fortunately, it hadn’t sounded forceful enough to be a cop. He went to the door, holding one of Grace’s pathetic string cheeses, and opened it to find a twenty-something guy in a Pearl Jam T-shirt. “Yeah?” he said, as though he had a leg to stand on, squatting in a city he’d never been to, on the lam, eating someone else’s cheese.

“I— Did I get the wrong—” The guy looked past him, seemed to take stock of the photos, the curtains, all of Grace’s little efforts to make her house look less like a psychiatric hospital. “Where’s Grace?”

“Out.”

“Who are you?”

“Who are
you
?” He missed these kinds of banal confrontations, he was surprised to realize, marking one’s territory, the way he’d learned to fight with other guys at Lathrop House over who claimed which bed or what they’d watch on TV. He was good at it.
Wielding authority,
his Krav Maga instructor called it.

“Is Grace okay? Is she—”

“We’re related,” he said, because the guy seemed nervous, and he didn’t want him calling the cops.

“You and Grace? Related how?” Then a moment of recognition. “Are you Jonah?”

It moved him, a little bit, that there was a stranger in Oregon who’d
heard
about him, who knew his name because his aunt had told him it.

“I’m Ben,” the guy said, holding out his hand. “I’m a friend of Grace’s. Is she around?”

“No.” He released the handshake.

“Are you staying with her?”

“Just temporarily.”

“She hasn’t been answering my calls.”

It struck him, then, that this was the breakup guy Grace had mentioned at the bar. The guy who’d dumped her. “I doubt she’s coming home tonight,” he said, and it took a minute for the guy’s face to rise and fall with the realization.

“Oh,” Ben said. “I— Do you know where she— Never mind. Nice to meet you, man.”

“You too.” He watched the defeated slump of the guy’s back as he retreated. “I’ll let her know you stopped by,” he called, but Ben didn’t turn around, just raised a hand in thanks and kept walking. He felt a little bad; he’d just been messing around, trying to fuck with the guy a little bit and see how much he could get away with—kind of, it occurred to him, like how he’d been trying to keep up with Ryan and had gotten carried away and blabbed about Liza’s hookup. And he realized that he’d done it again, fucked things up for yet another member of the Sorenson family.

It was his sixteenth birthday. He hadn’t told Grace because he hadn’t wanted her to feel the need to do anything for him, and because he hadn’t wanted to feel disappointed, as he always had, on every birthday of his post-viaduct life. Because he had been really looking forward to a dorky birthday with his grandma and grandpa, Marilyn’s overcooked chicken and that Stones album she loved on the stereo, talk of his upcoming Krav Maga tournament, a chocolate cake with his name on the top. Just a quiet night with his grandparents, who never seemed disappointed to see him, their applause as he blew out his candles and made a wish for the coming year.

He remembered the envelope he’d found in his grandfather’s desk, the one he’d been smashing in his back pocket for two days while he drove. He removed it, creased and crumpled. The letters were all caps except for the
J,
which had a big cursive loop at the bottom. He took a knife from Grace’s kitchen drawer and slit the envelope open. A hundred-dollar bill fell out first, followed by a folded slip of paper.

Dear Jonah, at the start of your sixteenth year—happy birthday. Wishing you great things to come. Thank you for joining us. —David/Grandpa

PS—Use this for something fun. & don’t tell Marilyn; she thinks it’s crass to give $$.

How would it have felt to open this envelope across the big dining room table from his grandparents? How would it have felt to use part of the money for a new basketball hoop to replace the old one so he and David could shoot layups together in the evenings? How would it have felt to blow out his candles? Instead he was alone, as ever, everyone he knew in the world either ignorant of the fact that it was his birthday or separated from him by his own doing. This was what happened when you got too comfortable. Though Violet had rejected him before he’d had time to establish a comfort level, separated herself from him before they’d even met. Not to mention that if anyone in the whole fucking world should know when his birthday was, it was Violet. He allowed himself to acknowledge how fucking much it hurt that she didn’t want him around. That if they could do it all over again, he’d want her to unfuck whoever his secret dad was and spare him this whole fucking existence. A couple of tears leaked from his eyes and he brushed them away angrily. No matter how much anyone else in the family accepted him, she never would, and he couldn’t make himself stop wanting her to. But he had his emergency fund, plus an extra hundred dollars, plus a couple of twenties that Grace kept in a jar on top of her mini-fridge, and so he could get the fuck out of Dodge and pretend that this whole stupid year had never happened.