Things We Didn't Say_ A Novel - Kristina Riggle [4]
I recall Jewel’s jaunty wave as she got on the bus. I can’t imagine what she’ll think. But then I remember also the “vision board” she’s making in her room, the collage of pictures representing the things she wants to happen in her life. In the center of the board is a family picture. I’m not in it. It’s a Christmas card portrait; the last holiday when Mallory and Michael were still married.
She likes me, Jewel does, but when she’s really falling apart over something, she cries for her mother, as all children do, even the children of volatile Mallory.
Next to me is my journal. I haven’t opened it again since before dawn this morning, when I saw scribbled in red ink on the first blank page: You sure have a lot of secrets, CASEY!!!!!!
For months I’ve been reminding myself how hard it is to be sixteen, and that for me to move in was a drastic change; maybe she feels supplanted as the reigning queen bee now that her mom lives somewhere else. That’s the story I tell myself, anyway, to explain the hostility spreading like mold over our relationship. When I was just someone her father was seeing, we had fun shopping and drinking lattes together. But the weekend I moved in, she picked a dramatic fight over my inadequate laundry skills.
Each day since then has been more of a struggle not to see her mother in that haughty raised eyebrow and upturned lip.
I shake my hands out before I begin.
Dear Michael,
I know I’m a coward for doing this in writing . . .
I seal the letter in an envelope and put it on top of his dresser, where he empties his pocket change every day, changing from khaki pants into sweats or jeans. He’ll see it as soon as he’s home from work.
There’s a picture on top of this dresser. It’s of me. I’m wearing a baseball cap and my dark blond hair is hanging in a ponytail. I’m holding a baseball bat, glaring with mock concentration at the invisible pitcher, but my eyes are smiling and I know that the minute the shutter clicked I snorted with laughter. I don’t remember the exact joke, but it didn’t take much to get me started back then. I know I kissed him as soon as I put the bat down. Michael had added text to the picture before printing it out. It says, “Casey at the bat,” in the blue sky behind me.
The ring snags on my knuckle, biting into the skin as I try to pull it off. My hands are puffy. I yank again, letting it bang again into the existing scrape, which is now blooming with a line of red.
Against my will, my mind flashes to the moment Michael slid this ring on my finger, almost a year ago, on New Year’s Eve. Mallory had the kids that night, and we sat on a rug in front of the living room fireplace. The house was then a place I only visited, a place we had to ourselves when Mallory managed to keep to her visitation days. I’d never seen its dustiest corners, never hauled the smelly trash to the curb. I knew but did not yet grasp this bit of history: it was not just a pretty house, but had been the Turner family home since Michael was a kid, and then the very home where Michael and Mallory had settled in as newlyweds. I still use the mixing bowls they got as a wedding gift to stir the pancake batter every Sunday.
That New Year’s Eve, amber firelight wavering across his face, he whispered, “I never thought I’d do this again.”
I gasped. He must have thought it was delight and surprise. It was more like a falling dream; a sickening plunge. A stepmother? Me? I thought of myself drunk at the bottom of a stairwell or puking my guts out in a smelly bar bathroom.
That wasn’t the girl he wanted to marry. He never met that girl at all, never knew she existed.
It was me he wanted, the new me, the one who played board games with his kids and didn’t even like the taste of alcohol. He made me chicken soup when I was sick and taught me