“You should talk to him,” she said.
A week later, Brendan withdrew from ECC and started working full-time as a plumber’s apprentice. He took to it right away. He enjoyed the physicality of the work, the tools and the terminology, the sense of accomplishment he felt at the end of the day. It could definitely be gross, but he said you got used to that pretty quick. The starting pay wasn’t bad—way better than minimum wage—and it would get a lot better in a few years, after he passed his exams and got his journeyman’s license. A six-figure salary by the time he was thirty was definitely not out of the question. It was even possible that he could someday take over the business, be the Son in Rafferty & Son.
Eve told him not to get ahead of himself, to just take things one step at a time. She was disappointed by his decision to give up on his education, but she was relieved to see him so upbeat and purposeful, with some of his old confidence restored. It was a huge improvement on the sullen, beaten-down version of her son she’d gotten used to living with over the past winter and much of the spring.
*
I was hungover pretty bad on the day of my mom’s wedding, but at least I had a good excuse. After the rehearsal dinner, I went to George’s house and stayed up really late, drinking vodka shots with his daughter Katie and her boyfriend, Gareth, this tall, skinny dude who seemed about ninety-five percent gay.
“We’re gonna be stepsiblings,” Katie said. “Might as well get to know each other.”
It was weird that I’d never met her until the night before the wedding, considering how much time I’d spent with her father, way more time than I spent with my own. George and I were like family already. But she’d been living in Ithaca for the summer, tutoring underserved youth, and it was too long a drive to just pop home for the weekend.
“I don’t know.” She glanced around the living room, which was full of family pictures that included her dead mother, and gave a little shudder. “It’s just really hard to be here. I feel like crying every time I walk through the door.”
“It’s a grief museum,” muttered Gareth. He had a goth thing going on, hair that was really short on one side and really long on the other. The long side just kinda flopped over his face, covering one eye.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m sorry about your mom.”
“Thanks.” Katie tried to smile. She showed me the inside of her forearm, her mother’s name tattooed in graceful cursive letters. “She was a great person. You would’ve liked her. Though I guess if she was alive, you two would never have met.”
“Probably not,” I said.
Gareth poured shots and we all drank to Katie’s mom.
“It’s kind of amazing,” she said. “She hasn’t even been gone for a year, and here’s my dad getting married again.”
I asked if that bothered her, and she shook her head, no hesitation at all.
“I was worried about him over the winter. He was a real mess. But he’s been a lot better since he met your mom. I think he just needs a woman to take care of him. He doesn’t do that well on his own.”
That made sense to me. I remembered how George had just kinda showed up at our house in the spring and made himself a fixture. Right from the start, it seemed like he belonged there, like he filled an empty space in our lives. But I guess we’d done the same for him.
“You know what?” Gareth said, as if an idea had just occurred to him. “Fuck cancer.”
“I’ll drink to that,” Katie said, and we did.
Cancer was too depressing to think about, so I asked them how long they’d been together. They traded a quick look, like maybe this was a more complicated question than it appeared to be.
“We’re, uh . . . not really together together,” Gareth said.
“Yes we are.” Katie sounded a little annoyed. “We live together.”
“Yeah,” Gareth conceded. “But we don’t have sex.”
Katie nodded, maybe a little sadly.
“Gareth is an ace,” she told me.
“A what?”
“Asexual,” he explained. “I want to be with people. I just don’t want to do anything with them.” He made a face, like he was thinking about a food that grossed him out. “I never got what all the fuss was about.”
“That’s cool,” I said. “To each his own.”
We drank a shot to that, to people being whatever the fuck they wanted. I was feeling pretty loose by then, so I looked at Katie.
“So . . . are you like that, too? Asexual?”
“Only with Gareth,” she said. “If I’m attracted to a person, I tend to mold myself to whatever they are.”
They were sitting together on the couch, and she dropped her head affectionately on his shoulder. After a few seconds, he reached up with his hand and started rubbing her back in a circular motion, kind of like he was cleaning a window.
“We do a lot of cuddling,” Katie told me. “That’s the best part anyway.”
She was prettier than I’d expected—in the pictures I’d seen, she looked kinda plain—with her red hair and freckles, and kind of a soft, earth-mother body. Actually, she reminded me a lot of Amber, which was weird, because Amber had just sent me a long email a couple of days earlier, totally out of the blue. It was the first time I’d heard from her since I’d come home in the fall.
She said she’d just gotten back from Haiti, where she’d spent her summer volunteering in a women’s shelter in the capital city. It had been an amazing and humbling experience, trying to help women who were so much braver and more resilient than she could ever be. Women who had so little to begin with, and had to struggle just to survive—to feed their kids, to keep them healthy, and, maybe, if they were very lucky, to send them to school so they could learn to read and write and maybe someday have a shot at a better life. It was a transformative experience for her, an experience that made her realize how trivial her own life had been, especially her life at college.
She said she was dreading the thought of going back to BSU, getting sucked into that meaningless vortex again—the parties, the softball team, the social media, the dining halls, with all that food getting thrown away every day.
She said she’d been meaning to write to me for a few months, but kept putting it off, because part of her had wanted to apologize and part of her thought that other part was insane. She certainly didn’t want to apologize for anything she’d done—not for punching me, which I’d totally deserved, or kicking me out of her room, or ignoring the messages I’d sent her—but only for Cat’s painting, which didn’t accurately reflect her own feelings.
I’m not saying you weren’t a disappointment to me, Brendan. But so many guys have disappointed me, I don’t think it’s fair to single you out.
Also, if you were going to be up on that wall, I should have been up there with you. Because I’m the one who gave you the power to disappoint me. In that sense, I disappointed myself, which is just as bad, if not worse.
I’m not going to let that happen again.
I hope you had an okay summer,