Fourth Comings_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [84]
“Dad?”
“Yeah?”
“Did you crash your bike on purpose?”
“Who told you that?” he asked, eyebrows raised. “Your mother?”
I nodded, then waved my hand dismissively. “I know. She’s crazy.”
“She is crazy,” my dad replied, his mouth turning up at the corners. “And she’s also right.”
Just then the nurse in the Hello Kitty scrubs threw open the privacy curtain. “Looks like we’re almost finished here, Mr. Darling!” she chirped. “Is your daughter driving you home?”
I was rendered speechless by my dad’s revelation, so he answered for me. “My wife should be on her way.”
Hello Kitty clucked sympathetically, then said, “The hospital can’t release you without a ride home.”
Hello Kitty was a short, wide-hipped bottle blonde, whose birth date was probably within a year or two of my mother’s (actual versus claimed) D.O.B. The nurse’s rucked face and shirred neck flesh indicated that she was doing little to fight the advances of late middle age, or that those measures that she had taken were not successful. Meanwhile, my mother was at the aesthetician erasing decades from her appearance with the help of synthetic injectable gelatins not yet approved by the FDA.
It was all so completely fucked up.
How did my parents get like this? I asked myself. And how can I stop it from happening to you and me?
I laboriously pushed myself up out of my chair, winded by my dad’s confession and the prospect of trying to track down my mother. “I’ll go down to the lobby and call her on a pay phone. I’ll get her here.”
No sooner had the words left my mouth than I heard heels clacking across the linoleum.
“No need,” my mother said, breezing through the curtains with a triumphant air. “I have arrived!”
fifty-four
My strange day stretched into an even stranger evening.
The first strange development was the car ride back to my parents’ place on the bay, which was strangely free of palpable parental tension and controversy. This would be strange enough on an ordinary day, never mind one during which my dad spent six hours in the hospital getting intravenously rehydrated after crashing his bike into a parked car in the failed attempt to steal my mother’s attention away from her rising career and her falling face. Their interactions were neither hot nor cold, but not quite warm, either. Their temperate discussion included driving (Dad got behind the wheel because Mom was worn out from her appointments), dinner (Dad wanted it but Mom didn’t want to make it), and their younger daughter (Dad encouraged me to spend the night, and Mom agreed). It did not include edema (Dad’s swollen face from the excess saline, Mom’s from a wrinkle-filling syringe) or any other topics outlined in the previous pages.
The condo hadn’t changed much since the last time I was there. It was still as beige and tasteful as ever, but with a cold, unlived-in quality. My mom’s own home seemed a lot like the empty rooms she was paid to fill with borrowed furniture and accent pieces to move white elephant properties off the market. I was standing in the foyer, overnight bag in hand, deciding what to do next, when I noticed that both my parents were staring at me expectantly, wondering the same thing. I felt that whatever I decided to do next was of monumental importance, as it would determine what we all did next. If I said, “Hey, let’s order a pizza,” we would order pizza, eat it together, and maybe, just maybe, have a conversation about what happened today. If I said, “Hey, I need to get away from you two because I’m totally freaked out about what happened today,” we would all go to our separate rooms. To be honest, I was feeling more in favor of the latter than the former, yet I was overwhelmed by a sense of familial obligation, to be the good daughter, to be the one who kept us all together.
“Hey, let’s order a pizza,” I suggested.
My mom picked invisible lint off her creamy sleeveless turtleneck. “I’m not hungry,” she said. “And I’ve got invoices to look over….” Without