Peter had never been much of a rule breaker or a boundary crosser, had rarely attempted to stick a toe over any sort of line, and he could blame Dad all he wanted for this. But a small part of him also knew that the reason he’d never ventured anywhere was because of the worry that the reality of the world wouldn’t match up to his dreams.
Still, their argument yesterday had triggered something inside of him, and Peter had spent much of the night staring at the lacework of shadows across his ceiling, wakeful and restless. The keys to the blue convertible were tucked away in the toe of one of his sneakers, and he got up twice during the night to fish them out, turning over the cool metal in his hands, running a finger along the rabbit’s foot as if testing his luck.
The thing was, he and Dad didn’t usually fight. They snapped at each other from time to time—they cast dirty looks and sighed with heavy, pointed sighs—but mostly they just kept their distance. So when Peter had padded down the stairs this morning, already stiff and awkward at the idea of their inevitable interaction, he wasn’t surprised that Dad didn’t even look up from the paper.
“Morning,” he greeted him, and he saw Dad’s left eye twitch, just slightly, though his gaze never wavered from the sports section. This was their usual way of dealing with things—to ignore them, to pretend they’d never happened, to forget about them and hope they might go away—and normally that was just fine with Peter. But as he poured himself a bowl of cereal, he realized for the first time how much the silence bothered him.
Last night hadn’t been an argument over picking up his dirty socks or forgetting about what was in the oven so that the whole house smelled like a campfire. It hadn’t even been about where he wanted to go to school next year. It had been much deeper than that. They’d talked about his mother—the rarest topic of all in a house where most topics went untouched—and the very mention of her should have warranted something more than this evasive shuffling of newspapers and clinking of cereal bowls.
And so Peter fixed a falsely bright smile on his face as he sat down. “Anything going on in the world?”
“The Mets lost to the Cubs,” Dad grunted, not bothering to look up from the paper. This, of course, was a deliberate jab at Peter, a reminder of Dad’s disappointment that his only son found sports to be pointless and boring (running in circles around some bases? tossing a ball into a hoop? grown men tackling each other on a muddy field?).
Normally, these attempts at conversation flickered out with the first sports reference of the morning, but today Peter beamed at Dad across the table. “Hope they can pull it together this season.”
Dad raised his head to look at him with undisguised suspicion. “What’re you trying to talk about baseball for?”
Peter shrugged. “What else would we talk about?”
“Look, if you’re trying to make some kind of point—”
“I’m not trying to do anything other than talk.”
“I’d think you were all talked out after last night,” Dad said coldly, setting down the newspaper as he collected his plates. He dumped what was left of the mushy cereal into the garbage, then stood washing his dishes at the sink, his back to the table.
Peter cleared his throat, determined. “Last night you said that Mom—”
But Dad whirled around, spraying the room with soapy water. “Don’t you know when to quit?” he said, his voice hard. “Just leave it already.”
Peter took off his glasses, wiping away the flecks of soap with the end of his shirt. He was on the verge of losing his nerve, and wasn’t entirely sure why he was still pressing the issue. He took a deep breath.
“You were saying how much Mom loved this town,” he ventured again, the forced cheeriness now entirely gone from his voice. Because this was the thought that had kept him up last night. He’d known that they’d grown up here, that they’d met in high school and gone to prom together and been married in the chapel on the hill. But he didn’t know any of the particulars, and hearing something other than a fact—that she was born this year and died that one—had reminded him that she must have once taken walks here, picked flowers in the park, and said hello to neighbors on the street. It was a testament to how little he knew about her that it took something as mundane as this to send him vaulting into a past that didn’t belong to him, fueled by curiosity and frustration and a desperate longing to shout when all he’d ever been allowed were a few timid whispers.
But Dad was looking at him now with such abject disbelief that Peter nearly brought a hand to his face to make sure nothing was growing there.
“Of course she loved it here,” Dad said, and for a moment Peter thought maybe this was the beginning of something, that they’d sit back down together, lean across the milk-stained tablecloth, and have an actual discussion. But then Dad’s left eye began to twitch again, and he brought a heavy hand down on the back of Peter’s chair and lowered his face. “It was her home.”
“Yeah, but—”
“She was smart,” Dad said mildly, as if this quality weren’t necessarily numbered among the things he missed about her. “Very smart.”
Peter opened his mouth, but Dad scraped back a chair and sat down again across the table, giving him a long look.
“She didn’t feel like she had to go running off to see the world,” he said, bowing his head to examine the tablecloth. He used his fingernail to chip at a crusted piece of ketchup left over from last night’s dinner. “Her life was here. She was happy here.”
“It’s not that I’m un happy here,” Peter said quietly. “It’s just that there are other things, other places …”
There was a long silence, interrupted only by the dripping of the kitchen sink and the hum of the air-conditioning from the next room. Finally, Dad shook his head, frustrated, and stood up to leave. He tipped the contents of his coffee mug into the sink, tried twisting the faucet off again, then grabbed his sunglasses and hat from the counter. Peter watched all this with a sort of detached fascination, aware that something had shifted between them, an opening of something that perhaps should have been left closed.
Dad had a hand on the back door when he turned around once more. His eyes flicked across the room, taking in the drab green curtains and the faded floor tiles, the fraying tablecloth and his improbable son.
“She wasn’t happy here in spite of being smart, you know,” he said. “She was happy here because of it. She was smart enough to know a good thing.”