Right now, Josh Raymond kicks at the table leg and stares at us over his plate with the enormous, unblinking eyes of an owl. I say, "How's it hanging, little man?"
He squeaks a reply, and my father the Slammer strokes his perfectly stubbled jaw and says in the soft, patient voice of a nun, "Josh Raymond, we've discussed kicking the table." It is a tone he has never once used with me or my sisters.
Decca, who has already filled her plate, begins eating as Rosemarie serves everyone else one by one. When she gets to me, I say, "I'm good without, unless you've got a veggie burger on there." She only blinks at me, her hand still hovering in midair. Without turning her face, she swivels her eyes in my father's direction.
"Veggie burger?" His voice isn't soft or patient. "I was raised on meat and potatoes, and I've made it to thirty-five." (He was forty-three in October.) "I figured my parents were the ones putting the food on the table, so it wasn't my job to question it." He pulls up his shirt and pats his stomach—still flat, but no longer a six-pack—shakes his head, and smiles at me, the smile of a man who has a new wife and a new son and a new house and two new cars and who only has to put up with his old, original kids for another hour or two.
"I don't eat red meat, Dad." Actually, to be technical, it's '80s Finch who's the vegetarian.
"Since when?"
"Since last week."
"Oh, for Christ's ..." Dad sits back and stares at me as Decca takes a big, bloody bite of her burger, the juice dripping down her chin.
Kate says, "Don't be an asshole, Dad. He doesn't have to eat it if he doesn't want to."
Before I can stop him, '80s Finch says, "There are different ways to die. There's jumping off a roof and there's slowly poisoning yourself with the flesh of another every single day."
"I am so sorry, Theo. I didn't know." Rosemarie darts a look at my father, who's still staring at me. "How about I make you a potato salad sandwich?" She sounds so hopeful that I let her, even though the potato salad has bacon in it.
"He can't eat that. The potato salad has bacon." This is from Kate.
My dad says, "Well, he can goddamn pick it out." The "out" sounds like "oot," a relic of Dad's Canadian upbringing. He's starting to get annoyed, and so we shut up because the faster we eat, the faster we leave.
At home, I give Mom a kiss on the cheek because she needs it, and I inhale the scent of red wine. "Did you kids have fun?" she asks, and we know she's hoping we'll beg for permission to never go there again.
Decca says, "We most certainly did not," and goes stomping up the stairs.
My mother sighs in relief before taking another drink and going after her. She does her best parenting on Sundays.
Kate opens a bag of chips and says, "This is so stupid." And I know what she means. "This" equals our parents and Sundays and maybe our whole screwed-up lives. "I don't even see why we have to go over there and pretend to like each other when everyone knows that's exactly what we're doing. Pretending." She hands me the bag.
"Because people like you to pretend, Kate. They prefer it."
She flicks her hair over her shoulder and scrunches up her face in a way that means she's thinking. "You know, I've decided to go to college in the fall after all." Kate offered to stay home when the divorce happened. Someone needs to look after Mom, she said.
Suddenly I'm hungry, and the two of us pass the bag back and forth, back and forth. I say, "I thought you liked having time off from school." I love her enough to pretend along with her that this is the other reason she stayed home, that it had nothing to do with her cheating high school boyfriend, the same one she'd planned her future around.
Chapter 7
Start from the beginning
