I knew they were sick. I had felt their foreheads myself, and I was the one who’d convinced Mom to keep them home.
“We were sleeping all day,” Lucy went on. “But then we woke up, took medicine, and had some soup, and now we feel okay.”
“Mom gave you medicine?”
Mom was seldom capable of doing much, apart from sleeping and throwing together mediocre dinners some nights, it seemed, and the idea of her managing to give my sisters the medicine they needed to feel better was hard to believe. Yet they nodded.
“But we’restillsick,” Grace was sure to point out.
I smiled as they both prattled on and pulled off my backpack to open it. From inside, I pulled out the two small bags of potato chips I had bought in the school cafeteria and dropped them down in front of my sisters.
“Here,” I said.
“Thank you!” they cheered in unison.
Before I could say anything else, Mom wandered in from the kitchen, still wearing her robe. It was almost four in the afternoon, but she looked like she’d just rolled out of bed. Some people might’ve assumed that she wasn’t feeling well, that maybe she’d caught whatever my sisters had come down with.
But I knew better.
I couldn’t remember the last time my mom had gotten dressed or brushed her hair or made any sort of attempt to look alive.
“Oh,” she muttered, passing me without looking in my direction. “You’re home. You can take care of them. I’m going back upstairs.”
Immediately annoyed, I watched through narrowed eyes as she shuffled past me.
“What about dinner?” I asked her back as she approached the stairs.
“Figure it out. I’ve done enough today.”
“Dad’s gonna expect dinner to be ready,” I pressed further.
She huffed a humorless laugh, but didn’t say anything else as she continued to disappear upstairs.
I blew out a long, heavy breath through my nose as I stared blankly at the empty stairwell. I was sixteen years old. I wasn’t a little kid—I knew that—but I sure as hell wasn’t an adult. Yet, in this house, I was expected to take on the responsibilities of one without earning the respect one would demand, and as I looked ahead toward the stairs, still envisioning my mother as she faded from view, it struck me just how much bullshit that was.
Ricky was responsible for doing his homework, washing the dishes, cleaning his room, and doing his own laundry. That was it. Hell, recently, he’d gotten a job down at the local McDonald’s, and because he was working, Mrs. Tomson no longer expected him to wash the dishes every night.Onlyon the nights he wasn’t working. And sometimes, I thought Ricky was lazy for expecting his mom to do so much, but other times, I thought my father was a tyrant for expecting me to do more thanmymom.
But most of the time, I just thought he was an asshole.
Yet the worst part of it was that, even knowing what a cruel person he was, I couldn’t stop myself from seeking his approval and attention. I was always, always desperate to make him happy, to maybe find that one thing that would make him smile, so I could do it over and over again and maybe hear him say somethingniceto me. He said nice things to my sisters sometimes, so I thought, surely,he might one day say something nice to me. If I ever could find that one thing he found worthy of his pride.
Maybe cooking dinner would be it.
So, I dug through the kitchen in search of something to make. I opened one of Mom’s dusty cookbooks, found a recipe that required things we already had in the house, and fumbled through making meat loaf and baked potatoes. Grace and Lucy helped by opening a can of green beans and dumping them into a pot, and then they set the table just in time for Dad to come home. My sisters and I hurried to lay dinner out on the table, and even though it didn’t look quite like the picture in the book, it smelled pretty good.
Honestly, I felt good. I feltproud. And I hoped Dad would be too.
He walked in without ceremony, put his briefcase on the table beside the door, and silently walked into the kitchen, where my sisters and I waited. His expression was stoic as he swept his eyes over the table, then looked directly at me.
“What is this?”
I lowered my gaze from his to eye the table. “Dinner, sir.”
“Obviously,” he muttered as if this interaction was already boring him. “Didyoudo this?”
“Max cooked,” Grace said with an air of awe that puffed my ego just a little more.
“We helped,” Lucy added.
