“Of course not, Dad. Jesse doesn’t need to know all of that about his own father.”
“Still and all,” Clayton said. “It’s been a few months now, and you know my motto: ‘Chin up, move on.’ What the boy needs is more discipline, not more coddling. Tomorrow I’m taking him down to the club, see if I can set him up with a job for the summer. A couple of months washing dishes with the Hispanics will make him appreciate his station in life. You think those people have the luxury of moping in front of a PlayBox, or whatever it’s called, when things don’t go their way?”
Markie had seethed the entire drive home while Jesse, from all appearances, had forgotten about it by the time they pulled onto the interstate. “They’re old,” he said. “You’ve gotta let them say some stupid stuff.” Now he was chatting with them over the Internet like his time with them in the summer had been filled with praise and hugs.
Markie took a five-dollar bill out of her wallet and set it on the kitchen counter. The boy deserved to walk up to the sandwich place around the corner on Monday and treat himself to something better than microwaved pizza rolls. She watched in awe as he leaned against the kitchen counter, laptop in front of him, and laughed generously at another of Clayton’s jokes.
She didn’t know if it was a teen thing or only a Jesse thing, but even on his grumpiest of days, he could always scrounge up some cheer for his grandparents, the same way he had morphed from tired and annoyed to charming and affectionate with Mrs. Saint the day before. She had seen him do the same with their former neighbors, and while her first feeling used to be resentment that he could smile for other people but not his own mother, she had been working on replacing that emotion with something else.
She knew most teens broke out of their sullen phase at some point, but she wasn’t sure about the ones who, in addition to having to deal with the regular and painful-enough aspects of being a teenager, were also saddled with the humiliation and heartache of their parents’ very public breakup. She couldn’t tell herself with certainty that Jesse’s bitterness would be gone in six months, or a year, or by high school graduation, or ever. She didn’t want him to grow up to be one of those people who are permanently in a bad mood, and especially not because of something she had done. So when she saw him smiling, laughing, and offering words without the listener having to drag them out of him, she tried to feel grateful that someone was getting him to be sociable and tried not to care that the someone didn’t ever seem to be her anymore.
Jesse chatted away as he walked around the house, holding his open laptop high in the air, facing away from him so its camera could feed his grandparents images of each room. It was their first tour of the bungalow, and if Markie could manage it, a virtual tour would be the only one they ever got. It would take her at least the duration of their half-year lease to build up enough emotional reserves to see them in person again.
As her son worked his way from room to room, Markie could hear her father exclaiming in the overly cheerful, paternalistic way he reserved for the young and the elderly—and, she guessed, the Hispanics at the club. She could also hear him using words like tiny and cute and starter home. These words did not hold a complimentary place in Clayton Wofford’s vocabulary.
Lydia’s tight “Mmm-hmm’s” let everyone know she was no more impressed than her husband. Jesse rounded the corner into the living room, and Markie heard her mother say, “Oh, and there’s mother’s spindle-leg furniture.” She punctuated the statement with a sigh, and Markie knew what it meant: while some parents might love the idea of their children making use of family heirlooms, Lydia saw it as a sign of failure.
The Woffords had avoided cocktail hour at the club for a full month after Markie broke the news. “Imagine what that was like for us,” Lydia told Markie later. “Not that our reentry was a piece of cake. All the questions! You wouldn’t believe how critical some people can be.”
“Is that my daughter in the corner of my screen?” Clayton asked. “Zoom in!” It was his latest joke, ever since Jesse explained that they didn’t need to put their faces up to the screen to be seen, and that when they did, the view from his end was “Um, a little more detailed than I think you want other people to see. As in, I can see right inside Grandma’s nose right now.”
Lydia was horrified, but Clayton had tried to turn it into a “bit” that they’d all do together—you “zoom in” close to the camera and show me your nose hairs, I’ll zoom right back and show you mine, hardee-har-har. There can’t be tension as long as someone’s laughing, right?
“In all seriousness, though, Markie,” Clayton said as Jesse stood beside his mother, leaving her no option but to join him in the frame. “You need to do a walk-through to check that everything’s as advertised—”
“And if it’s not,” Lydia cut in, “you could use that as an excuse to back out. Take another look for something in a . . . different area.” She meant a better area. The bungalow’s zip code would impress no one. Plus, how would Markie show everyone in her old circle that she was doing just fine if she lived too far away for them to see? It was one thing to have them run you off, another altogether to let them keep you away.
“All moved in, Mom,” Markie said. “And I dare you to tell Jesse he has to load and unload another rental truck sooner than six months from now.”
Jesse shook his head, and Lydia smiled, nodded, and backed out of the frame to “go check on the tea.”
“Like I was saying,” Clayton continued, “you need to make sure the tub drains okay, toilet doesn’t run, faucets don’t drip all night. The key is to assess it all now and make a list of anything that’s not up to par. In fact, Jesse, why don’t you take me around with the computer? We can have a look-see, come up with a punch list. It’s not something your mom needs to be bothered with anyway.”
For a while, Markie had tried telling herself that her father’s belief that women didn’t, and shouldn’t, know about certain things was the explanation for how Kyle had been able to spend their entire savings and their son’s school fund without her noticing. Lydia had never once questioned Clayton about money—Markie was only acting the way she’d been brought up. But she had made her way through all the stages of How Did My Life Come to This? and she had passed finger-pointing long ago. She was standing in a minuscule, badly furnished rental house, sixty-eight dollars in her pocket and not much more than that in the bank, an angry boy beside her and newly disappointed parents in front of her, for one reason: her own willful blindness.
“We should really give the fuse box a once-over, too,” her father told Jesse.