The Heartbreak

Chapter 8

There were days my parents took turns to be at home. Generally, my mother would take this job more often since my father was the chef and a bit of a control freak of his kitchen. I was a lot like him in various aspects of my life.

That night my mother had arrived early, and when I decided to step out of my room, where I was allegedly too busy working on a paper for school and certainly not moping around, Van Gogh meowed at me. I ignored him as I had been doing lately, but he followed me to the kitchen hoping to be fed a treat. He was too cute to deny him something.

As I entered the kitchen I saw a small container with a note attached to it.

“Your father sent it.”

I looked behind me to find my mother standing there in her working clothes. She was the manager of our small bistro, but her outfit suggested she worked in a big corporation which I guessed she would have been doing if she had not met and married my father back when she was twenty two. She was studying to become some sort of big-shot economist, and instead she met this boy who served her coffee at two in the morning when she was studying for finals. A boy who liked to cook and was the low-life son of a high-achiever psychologist and a strict pediatrician, and yet they had instilled in him a love for food.

It was tiramisu. My favorite, which he usually made for me when we were celebrating. Or when I was depressed.

The first thought that came to mind was Miss Davenport calling my mother about Mason and telling her everything that had happened. Otherwise, how?

“We might not be home as much as we would like to, but that doesn’t mean we don’t notice things.” She walked closer to me and her gaze softened. I took a step back because I was tired of getting those pitiful looks. I had been getting them all week. “Honey.”

“He cheated on me, okay?” I spat angrily. “He fucked things up because he couldn’t keep it in his pants.” I really did not know if something more had happened between Mason and this Tania girl, but as time went by I started to make up stories and possible outcomes of what had happened. I was stupid enough to believe one of those would be Mason pushing her away and coming to me one day to beg for forgiveness, but… well.

My mother didn’t say anything about cursing around her. My father would have been giving me the reproachful look, because he was old-school like that for some things. My mom believed in equality, to which my father would say that if equality meant that women were to be just like men, God wouldn’t have made women so much prettier and smarter and he would have married a guy since they would get along much better. It was all a joke, obviously.

She handed me a spoon and motioned for me to take a seat and eat my dessert. She sat across the table and looked at me while she petted Van Gogh, who had already jumped into her lap.

“How are you feeling?”

I shot her a look because I had been answering that type of questions hundreds of times already and I hated it. She chuckled.

“Right. Sorry. Awful start.”

I suddenly thought that maybe Jack had opened his mouth about Mason, because much like mom, he never knew the right thing to say.

Dad would have looked at me and tell me Mason was an idiot for not seeing what he was losing, that if he was that kind of boy, then I was better off without him. That it would hurt but I would find someone better. All those clichés belonged to him as a father. And then he would ask me if I wanted to play videogames with him or maybe cook some old recipe his mom had taught him.

My mom sighed and shook her head.

“I don’t know what you need me to say, hon.”

And that right there was the truth I needed. I had no idea what I needed to hear either. There was no chance that all breakups could be the same. There was no recipe for a broken heart and no instructions manual, because if that was available, my heart was defective because it did not come with one. And there was no receipt to return it.