Read What Happens to Goodbye Online

Authors: Sarah Dessen

What Happens to Goodbye (3 page)

We pulled right up to it, neither of us saying anything. Then my dad cut the engine, and we both leaned forward, looking up through the windshield as it loomed above us.
A basketball goal. Of course. Sometimes life is just hilarious.
For a moment, we both just stared. Then my dad dropped his hand from the ignition. “Let’s get unpacked,” he said, and pushed his door open. I did the same, following him back to the U-Haul. But I swear it was like I could feel it watching me as I pulled out my suitcase and carried it up the steps.
The house was cute, small but really cozy, and had clearly been renovated recently. The kitchen appliances looked new, and there were no tack or nail marks on the walls. My dad headed back outside, still unloading, while I gave myself a quick tour, getting my bearings. Cable already installed, and wireless: that was good. I had my own bathroom: even better. And from the looks of it, we were an easy walking distance from downtown, which meant less transportation hassle than the last place. I was actually feeling good about things, basketball reminders aside, at least until I stepped out onto the back porch and found someone stretched out there on a stack of patio furniture cushions.
I literally shrieked, the sound high-pitched and so girly I probably would have been embarrassed if I wasn’t so startled. The person on the cushions was equally surprised, though, at least judging by the way he jumped, turning around to look at me as I scrambled back through the open door behind me, grabbing for the ob so I could shut it between us. As I flipped the dead bolt, my heart still pounding, I was able to put together that it was a guy in jeans and long hair, wearing a faded flannel shirt, beat-up Adidas on his feet. He’d been reading a book, something thick, when I interrupted him.
Now, as I watched, he sat up, putting it down beside him. He brushed back his hair, messy and black and kind of curly, then picked up a jacket he’d had balled up under his head, shaking it out. It was faded corduroy, with some kind of insignia on the front, and I stood there watching as he slipped it on, calm as you please, before getting to his feet and picking up whatever he’d been reading, which I now saw was a textbook of some kind. Then he pushed his hair back with one hand and turned, looking right at me through the glass of the door between us.
Sorry,
he mouthed. Sorry.
“Mclean,” my dad yelled from the foyer, his voice echoing down the empty hall. “I’ve got your laptop. You want me to put it in your room?”
I just stood there, frozen, staring at the guy. His eyes were bright blue, his face winter pale but red-cheeked. I was still trying to decide if I should scream for help when he smiled at me and gave me a weird little salute, touching his fingers to his temple. Then he turned and pushed out the screen door into the yard. He ambled across the deck, under the basketball goal, and over to the fence of the house next door, which he jumped with what, to me, was a surprising amount of grace. As he walked up the side steps, the kitchen door opened. The last thing I saw was him squaring his shoulders, like he was bracing for something, before disappearing inside.
“Mclean? ” my dad called again. He was coming closer now, his footsteps echoing. When he saw me, he held up my laptop case. “Know where you want this?”
I looked back at the house next door that the guy had just gone into, wondering what his story was. You didn’t hang out in what you thought was an empty house when you lived right next door unless you didn’t feel like being at home. And it was his home, that much was clear. You could just tell when a person belonged somewhere. That is something you can’t fake, no matter how hard you try.
“Thanks,” I said to my dad, turning to face him. “Just put it anywhere.”
Two
When your dad is a chef, people always assume that at home he does all the cooking. This was not the case in our family. In fact, after spending hours in a restaurant kitchen either preparing food or overseeing others as they did so, the last thing my dad wanted to do when he finally got to leave was turn on the stove.
Because of this, my mom was always left to her own devices, which were decidedly not gourmet. If my dad could make a perfect white sauce, my mom preached the gospel of Cream Of: Cream of Chicken soup over chicken breasts, Cream of Broccoli soup over baked potatoes, Cream of Mushroom over, well, anything. If she was feeling really fancy, she’d sprinkle some crumpled potato chips on top of whatever she’d thrown together and call it a garnish. We ate canned vegetables, Parmesan from a shaker, and frozen chicken breasts, thawed in the microwave. And it was fine. On the rare nights my dad was home and could be coerced to cook, it was always on the grill. There, he’d flip salmon steaks or thick T-bones between layups on our battered basketbnneoal, the backboard of which was papered with Defriese stickers so completely you could hardly see any white at all. Inside, my mom would open a bagged salad, toss on some boxed croutons, and top it off with bottled dressing. The contrast might have seemed weird. But somehow, it worked.
When my parents’ marriage first imploded, I was in a total state of shock. Maybe it was naïve, but I’d always thought they had the Great American Love Story. She was from a wealthy southern family that bred beauty queens, he the late, only child of an autoworker and a third-grade teacher. They could not have been more different. My mom was a debutante who literally went to charm school; my dad wiped his mouth with his sleeve and did not own a suit. It worked until my mom decided she didn’t want it to anymore. And just like that, everything changed.
When she left my dad for Peter, I honestly could not believe it was happening, even as I witnessed the debris—snickers in the hallways at school, her moving out, the sudden, heavy fatigue in my dad’s features—all around me. I was in such a daze that I didn’t even think to object when it was decided for me that I’d spend the weekdays with my mom at Casa Hamilton and the weekends at our old house with my dad. I just sleepwalked along with it, like everything else.
Peter Hamilton lived in The Range, an exclusive gated community by a lake. You had to pass through a guardhouse to get in, and there was a separate entrance for landscapers and repairmen, so the residents could be protected from the sight of the lower classes. All the houses were enormous. The foyer of Peter’s place was so big that whatever you said there rose up, up, up toward the high ceiling overhead, leaving you speechless. There was a game room with a Defriese pinball machine (a welcome gift from the booster club) and a pool with the Defriese insignia painted on the bottom of the deep end (compliments of the contractor, a huge DB fan). It always struck me, without fail, that the one person who would have truly appreciated these things was the only one who would never get to: my dad. I couldn’t even tell him about them, as doing so seemed like yet another insult.
As far as cooking went, Peter Hamilton didn’t. Neither did my mom. Instead, they had a housekeeper, Miss Jane, who was pretty much always on hand to prepare whatever you wanted, and even what you didn’t. There was a healthy, pretty snack waiting for me every day after school, a balanced dinner—meat, vegetable, starch, bread—on the table promptly at six on nongame days. But I missed the Cream Ofs and the potato chips, the same way I missed everything about my old life. I just wanted it back. It wasn’t until my mom told me she was pregnant with the twins, though, that I understood that this was never going to happen. Like a bucket of water over the head, the news of their impending arrival snapped me out of my daze.
My mother didn’t tell me about this when she split with my dad, but if I did the math—and oh, how I hated having to do the math—it became clear that she not only knew about it, but it was the reason she finally came clean. All I knew was that there was so much news coming at me at such a fast clip (such as: we’re separating, you’ll be moving to another house for half the week, oh, and the restaurant’s closing) that I didn’t think anything else could shock me. I was wrong. Suddenly, I had not only a new stepfather and a new house, but a new family, as well. It wasn’t enough to wipe out the one I loved: she was replacing it, too.
My parents had separated in April. That summer, when I knew I had half siblings on the way, my dad decided he would sell Mariposa and take a consultingjob. The owner of EAT INC, an old teammate of his from college, had been trying to hire him forever, and now what they were offering seemed like just what he needed. A change of direction, a change of place. A change, period. So he said yes, planned to start in fall, and promised me that he’d come back whenever he could to visit me, and fly me out during the summers and vacation. It didn’t occur to him for a second that I’d want to come along, just as it didn’t occur to my mom that I wouldn’t move in full-time with her and Peter. But I was tired of them—of her—making my decisions for me. She could have her bright and shiny new life, with a new husband and new kids, but she didn’t get to have me, too. I decided I was going with my dad.
It was not without drama. Lawyers were called, meetings were held. My dad’s departure was held up first weeks, then months, as I spent hours sitting at a conference table in one office or another while my mom, red-eyed and pregnant, shot me looks of betrayal that were so ironic they were almost funny. Almost. My dad was quiet, as her lawyer and his had me clarify again that this was my choice, not his urging. The court secretary, flushed, acted like she didn’t spend the entire time looking at Peter Hamilton, who sat next to my mom, holding her hand with a grave expression I recognized from double overtimes with only seconds left to play and no timeouts left. After about four months of wrangling, it was decided that—surprise!—I could actually make this decision for myself. My mother was livid, because of course she knew nothing about doing what you wanted, and only what you wanted, other people’s feelings be damned.
Our relationship since I’d left had been tepid at best. Under the custody arrangement, I was required to visit in summers and for holidays, both of which I did with about as much enthusiasm as anyone would do something court ordered. Each time, the same thing immediately became clear: my mom just wanted a clean, fresh start. She had no interest in discussing our previous lives or the part she may or may not have played in the fact that they no longer existed. No, I was supposed to just fold myself in seamlessly with her new life, and never look back. It was one thing to reinvent myself by choice. When forced, though, I resisted.
In the two years or so we’d been on the road, I did miss my mom. When I was really homesick in those first lonely, bumpy days at a new place, I wasn’t lonely for my old house or friends, or anything else specific, as much as just the comfort she represented. It was the little things, like her smell, the way she always hugged too tight, how she looked just enough like me to make me feel safe with a single glance. Then, though, I’d remember it wasn’t her that I was really yearning for as much as a mirage, who I’d
thought
she was. The person who cared enough about our family to never want to split us all into pieces. Who loved the beach so much that she thought nothing of packing up for a spur-of-the-moment road trip east, regardless of weather, season, or if we could really even afford to stay at the Poseidon, the dumpy ocean-view motel we preferred. Who sat at the end of the bar at Mariposa, glasses perched on her nose, reviewing receipts in the lazy hours between lunch and dinner service, who sewed together cloth squares in front of the fire, using all the bits and pieces of our old clothes to make quilts that were like sleeping under memories. It wasn’t just me that was gone. She was, too.
When I thought of my mom most, though, was not on the first day of a new school, or a holiday we weren’t together for, or even when I caught a glimpse of her—fleeting—when the TV cameras flashed to her at a Defriese game before I could change the channel. Instead, weirdly enough, it was when I was cooking dinner. Standing in a strange kitchen, browning meat in a pan. Adding a chopped green pepper to a jar of store-bought sauce. Opening a can of soup, some chicken, and a bag of potato chips at dusk, hoping to make something from nothing.

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