Everything You Want (9 page)

“Okay,” I say, pulling into our driveway. “The parental units await you.”

He gives an endearing little groan.

“No problem,” I say. “They love you. We all do. Jules said we had to and we always do what Jules says.”

He casts me a grateful glance, then smiles—and Jules is right: it is a smile to die for. “All right, then. I’m ready,” he says. “No
way
you’d ever want to mess with Julie.”

The way he says it—kidding, but in this sort of besotted tone of voice, like maybe he half-believes it—makes me think, yeah, this is going to be okay.

We head up the front walk, Jules insisting she’s without a doubt the most reasonable, easy-to-get-along-with person in America, and Will and I laughing, one-upping each other to remind her how perfect she’s not.

“You should see the bathroom,” Will says. “Desert Storm.”

“Yeah, well, has she dragged you to see that
Joseph and His—
” I wave my hands around. “
Coat
,” I say. “Whatever. I never can remember the whole name of that stupid musical, but I’ll tell you what. I’d rather be stabbed in the eyeball than ever go see it again.”

Jules grins wickedly and breaks into that hideous “Go, Go, Go Joseph” song from it, which she knows I particularly hate because of the way you absolutely
cannot
get it out of your mind.

“See?” I say to Will. “I’m warning you now. That’s the kind of thing she’ll do to you.”

Just then, Mom appears in the doorway and smiles at the sight of all three of us laughing. I watch her taking Will in, deciding, by whatever it is she sees in him—the way he looks at Jules, maybe, and catches her hand, as if just touching her will bring him courage—that she’s going to like him.

“Will,” she says, and opens the door wider.

Eleven

We caravan to Michigan later that afternoon—Mom and Dad together, Jules and Will in my Jeep. I ride in the Winnebago, with Gramps. I’ve forgiven him for the mortifying Bloomington visit, and, now that I’m not paralyzed with anxiety about what he’s going to say next, I get a kick out of how he acts like a kid with a new toy. I let him crank up my Lenny Kravitz CD to prove how great the stereo is; then, at his insistence, view
The Great Escape
on his mobile theater unit while he drives.

It starts snowing when we cross the state line into Michigan—big fat flakes that swirl onto the windshield and make it seem as if we’re looking at the highway through a white kaleidoscope. Up north, it’s cold and crisp. We turn onto the narrow road lined with pine trees that leads into the ski area, and when we turn again and drive down the hill toward our house, there are six deer in the meadow. The sky is black, punctured with stars.

We’re up early, on the slopes. When we get back, around two, Dad and Gramps brush the snow off the picnic table in the yard and spread tools and engine parts all over it. They’re never without some kind of project, and this Christmas vacation it’s restoring an old beat-up snowmobile Gramps bought at an auction in the fall. If you go out on the deck, you can hear them bickering.

“Goddamn it, Dutch,” Dad says. “Will you quit beating on it? You’re not going to fix it by beating on it.” Then there’s a crash—Gramps dropping something—and Dad starts laughing. “Jesus Christ,” he says. And Gramps goes at the engine again with the wrong side of a wrench, the sound of metal on metal ringing in the cold, dry air. Before too long, Will’s out there with them, all three of them drinking beer, swearing, and goofing around.

Mom looks up from sketching and rolls her eyes. “It’s a guy thing,” she says.

Jules watches through the kitchen window with a moony expression. An expression that’s been fixed on her face since Christmas Eve. Will, Will, Will. He’s all she can talk about. Doesn’t Will ski amazingly well for a person who’s only been skiing three times in his whole life before? Doesn’t he look fabulous in that orange parka? Isn’t he the most truly funny person in America?

Well, yeah, I think. So far, I like Will just fine. He gets our jokes; he likes our goofy ski house with its strange books and posters and flea market treasures. He doesn’t mind when I beat him, racing. But it’s always been just us in Michigan, and it seems strange with Will here. Not that Jules is ignoring me or anything. In fact, since Will arrived she’s been paying more attention to me than she has in a long, long time.

Over the next few days, Jules goes out of her way to make sure the two of us have the chance to get to know each other. Every night after dinner, the three of us head over to the bar at the lodge. Between band sets, Jules and I entertain him with family stories.

“Tell Will about when Mom got pregnant and they went to the doctor,” Jules says one night. “You tell it funnier than I do.”

“Okay,” I say, and tell the story.

Mom and Dad are pretty sure Mom’s pregnant—and mind you, they’re
not
married—and they decide she needs to go to the doctor, but Mom’s too embarrassed to come right out and make an appointment for that. So she makes it for a check-up instead, figuring she’ll come clean when she gets there. Meanwhile, she gets this terrible cold. So they sit in the waiting room for almost two hours on the day of the appointment, Mom hacking and wheezing like a TB victim until her name’s finally called. Dad’s a wreck, waiting for her to come out. Then, when she does, she walks right past him and keeps going.

“So he goes after her,” I say. “But when he catches up to her on the street and asks her what the doctor said, she waves a prescription slip right in his face and says, ‘I’ve got strep throat. It’s no wonder I feel so terrible. I’ve got to get this penicillin and start taking it right away or else I’m going to be even sicker than I already am.’”

“She didn’t even ask the doctor about—you know?” Will asks.

“Nope. And when Dad asked why, she had this total breakdown, right there on the street. She goes, ‘You don’t even care how sick I am! My God, I’m really, really,
really
sick and all you can think about is whether or not I’m pregnant.’” I’m on a roll now, wailing like Mom does when she tells the story.

Jules cracks up. “Mom
is
pathetic when she’s sick.”

“Yeah,” I say. “And this was the
crème de la crème
of pathetic, according to Dad.”

I’m about to go on to the rest of it: Grandma Hammond freaking out, wanting to send Mom to an unwed mothers’ home; their disastrous wedding night, when the pipes burst in the dinky little trailer they’d rented and they were ankle deep in water. But I realize Will’s not laughing.

“Your
dad
told you that story?” he asks.

“Yeah. Well, actually both Mom and Dad tell it all the time. They think it’s hilarious.”

“My parents would never tell me a story as personal as that,” he says. “But then, we don’t talk much about anything.”

I say, “You don’t get along?”

He shrugs. “Oh, we get along okay. They just don’t have a clue why I’d want to hang out in a gym when I could go to med school, which is what I originally thought I wanted to do. What they still want me to do. You know, get a real life. What can I say? They’re nice people, just—boring. The idea of them ever being young, being in love like your parents were—well, I can’t even imagine it.”

“Are,” I say. “Like my mom and dad
are
.”

Will looks at Jules and smiles. Jules smiles back. Like we are, they’re thinking. God, this is like a cheesy movie. They might as well be surrounded by a thousand points of light.

I fake a yawn. “You guys want to go back pretty soon?”

“I’m fried.” Jules reaches for her jacket.

“Me too,” Will says. “Boy, being outside in the cold all day really takes it out of you.”

Right. Like they’re going to go back and
sleep
. Later, I can hear them in the next room. They’re trying to be quiet, but there are the inevitable thumps, the muffled laughter. A society of two, just like Mom and Dad have always been.

Sometimes it made Jules and me mad when we were kids, the way their time alone was so important to them. They left us with babysitters, took vacations without us. They refused to devote themselves endlessly to teams and lessons. But as we got older, and a lot of our friends’ families fell apart, we saw their closeness differently. We realized it was no small thing that the way they were together let us keep on believing in love.

I still believe in it. I just can’t imagine it will ever happen to me. Lying alone in the room Jules and I used to share, I think about Gabe Parker for maybe the millionth time since we met and the hopeless idea that maybe … Stop right there, I tell myself. I make my mind tumble backwards to those early Michigan times when Jules and I were always together.

Saturday mornings, early, Dad would blast us out of bed with the Rolling Stones—“Start Me Up”—so we could be at the ski area the second the lifts started running. We’d be freezing as the old chair lift creaked us up to the top; we’d be clapping our mittened hands together to warm them; laughing, making our breath puff out, white as snow. On top, it seemed like you could see forever: blue-green pine forests, frozen lakes, roads flung across the hills like narrow gray ribbon. Our own brown and yellow ski house, like a doll’s house, below. We’d look a long time, then we’d zoom down, our faces burning with the cold wind our speed made.

Jules and I would ski with Mom and Dad for a while; then they’d send us off to ski North Peak where all the kids hung out. We made ski jumps near the edge of the slope, carrying snow out of the woods and packing it hard, then shoveling out the bottom with our hands to give a cliff-like effect. I lived for the moment I would be airborne, sailing up toward the sky. Then, boom, there was the thrill of starting down, hoping like crazy that both skis would touch the ground at the same time, tips apart. If they didn’t, if I fell—Jules would collect me, wipe the snow out of my face, and send me back up the chair lift to try again.

Remembering this, my heart hurts, I’m so lonely.

Jules and Will have fallen asleep in the next room, or maybe they’re just lying warm and happy in each other’s arms. I’m glad for her, I really am. So just suck it up, I tell myself. From now on, it’s going to be Mom and Dad, Jules and Will. And me.

Well, that week, me and Gramps. We ride up the chair lift together; we’re pool partners, card partners, bowling partners. When we go to restaurants, Gramps introduces me as his date. Okay, I can see why everyone thinks it’s so amusing. But sometimes I get tired of the way everything in my family is up for grabs in the comedy department. Doesn’t it occur to any of them that, when you’re eighteen, the idea of being paired up with your seventy-year-old grandfather might be just a little bit depressing—especially on New Year’s Eve?

We go to the Yuma Bar that night, a little country bar out in the middle of nowhere. Inside, it smells like beer and cigarette smoke, snowmobile exhaust, motor oil, and sweat. There’s a long bar, where the regulars lounge; a jukebox, heavy on Bob Seger; a half-dozen pinball machines. The tables are covered with faded yellow oilcloth, dotted with cigarette burns. At the Yuma, the Christmas decorations stay up year-round. Twinkling lights are strung around the bandstand and across the mirror at the bar. Ratty silver garlands wind round the rafters.

We haven’t been here twenty minutes when a woman at the next table starts flirting with Gramps. She’s maybe sixty, perky in an awful Christmas sweater with real bells sewn onto it. He’s loyal, though. “Nah,” he says when she asks him to dance. “I got a date here.” He nods in my direction.

“Go,” I say. “Dance.”

He raises an eyebrow, like—are you sure?

“You dance,” I say. “I don’t want to, anyway.”

I really, truly don’t. I want to sit here, nursing my Dr. Pepper, feeling sorry for myself. But Mom and Dad get up to dance, too. Then Jules and Will. “Dance with us, dance with us,” they beg. Gramps and his new girlfriend boogie over.

“Come on, hon.” She leans toward me, jingling. “Have some fun, why don’t you?”

“No, thank you,” I say, not very politely.

I get up and go over to the pool table, where a couple of guys are playing. They’re maybe thirty, wearing jeans and down vests and work boots, and smell of the forest. One of them, Dean his friend calls him, has a shaggy blond ponytail and a nice smile.

“So what do you think?” he says to me, tipping back on one heel, surveying the table.

I’m not the greatest pool player in the world, but I know the game pretty well from years of watching Dad and Gramps. “I’d bank it,” I say. “Go for the twelve. Right corner pocket.”

He steps back and looks at me. “You play?”

“Some.”

“Any good?”

I shrug.

He takes a quarter from his jeans pocket and puts it on the edge of the table. “That’s yours,” he says. “When I take this guy, you’re next.”

His friend laughs.

“Well, shit,” they both say, when I give him a decent game.

This cheers me considerably. We play for an hour or so, alternating partners, not talking much at all, just concentrating on the game. I hold my own. And I don’t feel self-conscious, either. Maybe because I know I’m just a kid to them. But then Bob Seger launches into “Feel Like a Number” on the jukebox and Dean says, “Hey, you want to dance?”

I don’t,
at all
. But it would be rude to say no, so I take his outstretched hand and let him lead me to the dance floor—much to the approval of my family, who beam at the sight of me. Like,
finally
a guy’s paying attention to me. Maybe I’ll get out of my funk and join the party. For a woodsy guy, Dean is a surprisingly good dancer, perfectly comfortable on the dance floor. I, however, feel as if somebody just poured me full of lead. I shuffle, trip over my own feet, all the time keeping an eye on Gramps, praying he won’t dance over here and start bragging about Dad winning LOTTO CASH.

Smile, I tell myself. At least act like you’re having a good time.

Which I guess Dean interprets as encouragement, because he grins back at me, grabs both my hands, and attempts some tricky maneuver designed to end in a spin. But I can’t do it. When he tightens his grip to give it another go, the calluses on his palms feel scratchy and hard and I think of the little crescent-moons of dirt under his nails that I saw when he spread his fingers on the table to hold the cue. Up close, he smells like smoke and sweat and cigarettes.

When the song ends, I mumble an excuse and flee to the restroom. I close myself into a stall and just sit there, ashamed for having ditched Dean the way I did, obsessing over whether or not he’ll think I was embarrassed to be with him. Was I? God. I feel like the stupid, rich, college kid I am. I stay in the stall for what seems like forever, listening to the women come in and out, gossiping, talking about the men they’re with, or men they wish they were with instead.

Which unfortunately makes me think of Josh and wonder what he’s doing tonight, if he’s with that Heather-looking girl. And Gabe Parker. He’s probably got a girlfriend at home that Tiffany doesn’t even know about. I torture myself with that until I hear Jules’ voice. “Emma, are you in here? It’s almost midnight.”