“Excuse me,” I said, loudly. “If you two are just going to argue all night, I’ll cook dinner; otherwise we’ll all be rolling in our graves from parental starvation.”
“Don’t you open up a mout like that!” Mom said.
“Go back to the living room,” Dad said. “This isn’t your problem.”
“Bullpucky!” I said, which isn’t actually the word I used, but I’m in a much better mood now than I was then.
When she heard that, Mom drew in a breath kind of like the way the ocean sucks back before a tidal wave. “What did you say?!”
“I said it’s time to eat. If you wanna fight, why don’t you lose a few teeth and go on a daytime talk show?”
Mom glared at me, and crossed her arms. “Do you hear this?” she says to Dad. “Where do you learn this disrespect, huh?”
“You don’t learn disrespect,” I told her. “You’re born with it.”
“Just keep digging that hole deeper, Antsy,” Dad said. So now all their anger had turned away from each other and was aimed at me. There was awesome power in being the center of fury.
“You want to earn your dinner, smart mout?” Mom says. “You tell us—who makes a better fra diavolo sauce. Me or your father?”
It was a stupid question, because who really cared, and yet I knew the answer was critical. The old Antsy would have found some way to distract them from the argument and, failing that, would have said something to keep the peace, like “Mom’s is better with pasta, Dad’s is better with meat” or “Dad’s is spicier, but Mom’s is heartier.” An answer would have held everything together and would have eventually gotten things back to normal.
Then it occurred to me exactly what my place in this family was, and had always been. In spite of my wisecracking, pain-in-the-neck ways, I was the clip that held things together. Unnoticed. Taken for granted. Okay, maybe I’m giving myself too much credit here, but I’d be damned if I was gonna keep on being the family paper clip.
“You gonna answer us or not?”
“You want the truth?” I asked.
“Yes, of course.”
“Okay, then. Dad makes the best fra diavolo sauce.”
Stunned silence from the both of them. They hadn’t wanted the truth. We all knew it. Suddenly I wasn’t playing by the rules. “And come to think of it, his alfredo sauce rocks, too. What else do you want to know?”
Dad put his hand to his head like he had a headache. “That’s enough, Anthony.”
Mom nodded and pursed her lips into a thin red line. “Okay,” she said. “Okay, that settles it, then.” I didn’t like the calmness of her voice. She walked over to the range, took the big pot of sauce she had made, and in one smooth motion dumped it down the drain. A cloud of steam rose and curled like a hydrogen bomb had gone off in the sink.
“You make dinner, Joe.” She stormed out of the house, leaving us all in nuclear winter. Once she was gone, Frankie pulled me aside and glared at me. “You see what you did?”
Dad did cook us dinner that night. He had to go to the grocery store to get his ingredients, so dinner wasn’t ready until nine. He made us veal rollatini, better than you’d get in the best Italian restaurants. We all ate and said nothing to one another. Not a thing, not even “pass the salt,” because it didn’t need salt. It was, at the same time, the best and the worst meal I had ever sat down to.
When it was done, we all did our own dishes and left the kitchen spotless. Dad made a plate of leftovers and put it in the fridge. I knew it was for Mom, but he wouldn’t say it.
Frankie and Christina went to their rooms, but I hung around in the kitchen a bit more while Dad cleaned the pots.
The clip is gone, I thought. The pages are flying like confetti. What a moron I am.
“So what happens now?” I asked.
“I don’t know, Antsy.”
The fact that he didn’t know scared me more than anything else that night. Was our family so fragile that this could tear the foundations loose?
“It seems like such a little thing,” I said.
“The biggest things always seem like small things,” he told me.
I stayed up as long as I could that night, waiting to hear the front door open and Mom walk in, but I fell asleep before I heard it. In the morning, I woke up feeling no better than I had the night before. Mom wasn’t in the bedroom, and Dad had already left for work. I went downstairs slowly, afraid she might not be there. What would I do if she wasn’t? What would that mean?
I don’t know, Antsy.
Parents were supposed to know the answers, and even if they didn’t, they could usually fake it really well. I wanted to hate my dad for not knowing, but I couldn’t hate him. That made me want to hate him even more.
I came downstairs, and Mom was in the kitchen. I had to hold on to the wall, as if the Big One was having an aftershock. I took a deep breath and went in. She was drinking coffee by herself, like they do on those commercials for fancy flavored coffee.
“Are you having breakfast before you go to school?”
“What is there?”
“Cornflakes, Raisin Bran. There may be some Froot Loops left, if Christina didn’t make a pig of herself.”
Most of the time Mom would get the bowl, or the box or the milk. She would always do something to be a part of the meal. Today I did the whole thing myself. It just didn’t feel right.
When I got the milk from the refrigerator, I noticed that the plate of food Dad had left was gone. The plate had been washed by hand, and now sat in the drying rack. I knew it shouldn’t matter. I knew it was just a little thing—but the image of that plate on the rack stayed with me all day. Like Dad said, sometimes the little things are the biggest things of all.
And for the life of me I couldn’t figure out whether Mom had eaten the food on that plate or had put it down the disposal.
I sat by myself at lunch on Monday. I hadn’t been sitting with Howie and Ira for a couple of weeks now. Used to be we were inseparable, but cliques are like molecules: They bind together in Mr. Werthog’s little test tube until you add something new. Then they all break up and recombine into something else. Sometimes you get these things they call “free radicals,” which are atoms that aren’t bound to anything else, floating free. That was me now. I didn’t mind it at first, because it left open a whole lot of possibilities, but after this past weekend, radical freedom didn’t feel so good.
I’m sure the Schwa was there, blending in with the Formica tables, but I wasn’t about to look for him. Right now I was hating him the way you hate the other team when they shout, “Two-four-six-eight, who do we appreciate?” after humiliating you in a shutout. The Schwa found me, though. He plopped his semi-invisible self down across the table from me.
“Do you mind? I’m eating, and it’s hard enough to keep this crud down without having to look at you.”
“I just wanted to thank you, Antsy. That’s all.”
“Thank me for what?”
“Lexie told me everything. She told me what you did.”
“What did I do?”
“Don’t play dumb,” he said. “You told her you didn’t want to be her escort, and said that I’d be better at it. I can’t believe you’d do that for me. No one’s ever done anything like that for me.”
I just sat there with gravy dripping down my chin. “She told you that?”
The Schwa grinned. “She’s teaching me Braille,” he said proudly. “It’s really cool.” He glanced at my plate, noticing I had eaten my peach cobbler first, so he scooped his onto my plate. “If you ever want anything, all you have to do is ask.”