Then Came You - Jennifer Weiner [19]
My telephone rang. PRIVATE NUMBER, read the display. I put my finger on the button, readying myself, a backup quarterback who’d just been called into the big game. In that moment, I remembered going on the one vacation my grandparents and I ever took, to a cabin on Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire that one of their friends had won at a church auction and had, for some reason, been unable to use. One morning my opa had woken me up before the sun had risen, and we’d slipped out of the cabin, leaving my grandmother still snoozing in the saggymattressed bed. Sitting in a wooden rowboat, one foot trailing in the shockingly cold water, holding the fishing rod my opa had brought up from the basement the night before we’d left, I felt at first a gentle tug, then a sharper one. The tip of my rod bent until it was almost touching the surface of the lake. I jerked back on it as hard as I could, until my opa stopped me. Easy, he said, his arms against my shoulders. Remember. He’s a fish. You’re a big girl. Play him in easy, and remember: you’re smarter than he is.
You’re smarter than he is, I thought, and arranged my face into a pleasant smile, crossed my legs, shook out my hair, and lifted the receiver to my ear.
JULES
I was in ninth grade when my dad had his accident. Miss Carasick, the guidance counselor, who was known, inevitably, as Miss Carsick, pulled me out of French class and hustled me down the hall into her office, which was decorated with posters from different colleges. “Your father’s in the hospital,” she said.
I’d been slouching in the seat across from her desk—cringing, actually. I was afraid she’d found out that Tricia Barnes and I had been hiding out in the girls’ room after we’d pled menstrual cramps to get out of gym class. I hadn’t seen my parents that morning, but that wasn’t unusual: most days, my father left for school before I even got out of bed and my mom stayed asleep until after I was gone. “What? Why? What happened?”
Miss Carasick sat back. Her glasses shone in the glare from the fluorescent lights overhead, and I could see a sprinkling of white flakes—dandruff, or dried mousse—at her hairline. “All I know is that there’s been an accident.”
“What...” My mouth felt frozen. I wished she had caught me and Tricia; that would have been a million times better than this. “What happened?”
I remembered the way she rolled her lips over each other, her lipstick making a faint smacking sound. Later, I’d found out that my father’d had his midterm performance review the previous afternoon and gone to a bar directly after. How, at closing time, the bartender had tried to take his keys away and my father had refused. How he’d driven his little VW Rabbit through a stop sign and hit a car with a young woman behind the wheel and her three-year-old in the backseat. How both of them, mother and child, were in the hospital, both of them expected to make a full recovery, although the toddler had been touch-and-go at first. How my father had been drunk at the time of the accident, with a blood alcohol level almost double the legal limit, and how he was in the hospital and under arrest. The police, I learned later, had come by the house first thing in the morning; they’d brought my mother to see him and she’d left without leaving a note.
I thought a lot about it later: why Mrs. Carasick hadn’t been kinder; whether I’d misremembered; or if she’d actually been gloating when she’d given me the news. Years later, I’d imagine looking up her address, knocking on her door, and standing there with my hair loose over my shoulders and telling her what a bitch she’d been,