Notes from the Blender Read online

  “I know,” I said, wondering why things couldn’t just be easy—and normal—for a change. “I love you, Daddy.”

  “Love you, too, pumpkin.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  DECLAN

  ONCE NEILLY LEFT THE CHURCH, THE WHOLE SITUATION suddenly didn’t seem so funny anymore. Also, since Neilly wasn’t crying (or present to witness my unmanly tears), it seemed like it was my turn. I felt my eyes fill up, and I started sniffling. Fortunately, Aunt Sarah saved the day.

  “So do you want a cup of coffee or something?” Aunt Sarah asked. Sarah and Lisa are complete caffeine fiends, and they got me hooked on the stuff.

  “Sure,” I said. Back we went to Sarah’s office, and I sat there and sipped my Equal Exchange Fair Trade Organic French Roast and sat in the comfy chair while Aunt Sarah sat behind her desk and pretended to work on her sermon. Above her head was the big banner that had hung over the church doors during the antigay-referendum thing a few years ago. LOVE MAKES A FAMILY, it read.

  The coffee was bitter and dark. I take it black, like my metal.

  I knew Aunt Sarah well enough to know what she was up to. Maybe this was something they taught her in minister school. Whereas Dad will pester me with questions and get a nasty argument out of the deal, Aunt Sarah’s weapon is silence. She’s perfectly happy to sit there all day and wait me out, figuring that I’ll fill the silence.

  Come to think of it, maybe introducing me to coffee was another stealth get-the-surly-teen-to-open-up move, since I get a little motormouthed when I’m under the influence.

  Joke’s on her—I usually talk about Norwegian black metal.

  Not today, though.

  Halfway through my cup of coffee, this came spilling out of my mouth: “I mean, he could have just hung up a sign that says, ‘I’m done with Declan, time for act two,’ right? I mean, what the hell is that about? New kid. I bet he just can’t wait for me to get the hell out of the house so he can start his new, tragedy-free life with his kid who won’t be damaged.”

  Aunt Sarah looked up from her computer. “Is that really what you think?”

  “Well, it’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?”

  She sighed, closed her laptop, and said, “Declan. You know I love you, right?”

  I suddenly found my shoes very interesting. “Yeah,” I said quietly. I mean, I love her, too, but it’s obvious! Why make life uncomfortable by talking about it?

  “So,” she continued, “I want you to hear what I have to say, knowing that it comes from the deep love I have for you.” I didn’t say anything. “Don’t be an idiot.”

  I’ve seen this in the movies but never really believed in it. But I choked on a mouthful of hot coffee and spat it on the floor of Aunt Sarah’s office.

  She laughed. “I was trying to get it to come out your nose, but that’ll do.”

  I laughed in spite of myself. “What do you mean?”

  “Go get a paper towel and I’ll tell you.”

  As I wiped up the coffee, Aunt Sarah said, “Declan, your dad has been living for you for the last six years. I’m not exaggerating. I’ve had a lot of late-night phone calls from him when he said you were the only thing that keeps him going, that he was so grateful he had you, because if he’d lost you both in the accident, he would have killed himself.”

  I can feel my eyes filling up with tears again, but this time Aunt Sarah had me on the ropes and showed no mercy. “He talks about how you have these facial expressions like your mom had, and how you are the only part of her he has left.”

  Oh, that was below the belt. “So now he’s getting rid of both of us,” I managed to sniff out before a really embarrassing sob escaped. Aunt Sarah waited until I got myself under control.

  “He’s not getting rid of you, Declan. He’s giving you a new life.”

  “Well, I liked the old one.”

  “Yeah, that’s why you immerse yourself in music and games that are all about death.”

  Call me an idiot, fine. But don’t mess with my metal. We’ve had this discussion before. Like, don’t you think it’s a little sick the way that most of the culture denies death? It’s there all the time, and most people act like it’s not going to happen to them. I guess it would be better if I listened to some bullshit pop music about girls with big asses dancing.

  “Hey, great pastoral counseling there, Reverend. I feel tons better. Thanks.” I walked out of her office and headed home.

  When I got home, I cranked up some Norwegian metal, popped Hitman 2 into the Xbox, and spent a nice long time “immersing myself in death.”

  But here’s why Sarah is an idiot about this stuff—I felt so much better after a couple hours of this. Like I could look Dad in the eye when he came home and actually apologize for being an asshole to him. I mean, I was still pissed, but he is giving me a chance to be in the same building as a naked Neilly Foster, and I do appreciate that. And I didn’t know that stuff about him living for me or whatever. Basically, I have no idea how to feel, but at least having had my ass kicked by some growling Norwegians helped me to feel the bad stuff strongly enough that I could put it away for a while. Or maybe not. I have no idea.

  The rest of the week was pretty normal. I guess maybe I spent even more time than usual listening to metal and playing video games, but every time I turned around, Dad was there trying to have some kind of meaningful conversation, and I just had to duck out of those. I mean, I figure if we can coexist peacefully in the house, let’s do that—why mess with success by talking stuff over?

  I saw Neilly in the halls three times over the course of the next week. Every time she saw me she at least nodded her head in my direction, and I give her a lot of credit for that. Because, let’s face it, she’s got everything to lose and nothing to gain by being nice to me in the Darwinian jungle of high school. Well, I mean, okay, it’s not like she stopped and had a conversation with me, but at least she acknowledged me as a fellow human being, which most of the kids who occupy the top of the social totem pole at our school would never do.

  Well, there are the two football players who think it’s really hilarious to call me “Columbine” every time they see me. I’m not sure if that counts. I suspect it doesn’t.

  Of course, even if Neilly had stopped to talk to me, I probably wouldn’t have been able to talk to her, because a great deal of my mental energy was now devoted to the forbidden-love-between-stepsiblings fantasy.

  I’m lying. It was much more of a forbidden-sex-between-stepsiblings fantasy. It’s not like I wanted to sit in the stands at the football game holding hands with her or take her to the stupid prom or whatever.

  This is why, that weekend, I was tongue-tied when she showed up after church as I was vacuuming the parish hall. Well, that and the fact that she was in the backseat of my dad’s car with her mom in the front seat. Well, plus the fact that my Dad had just unexpectedly picked me up at church and said, “It’s open house day, and we’re going to go look at houses!”

  I stood there for a minute. I guess I was dumbstruck. I guess maybe the caffeine I’d just pounded at coffee hour hadn’t kicked in yet. Finally I came up with, “Um, why?”

  “Well, Carmen’s house is too small, unless you and Neilly want to share a bedroom, ha-ha”—oh, please God, make it financially impossible for us to do anything but move into Carmen’s house—“and our house…well, you know.”

  “I’m afraid you’re gonna have to help me out on this one, Dad.”

  “I just couldn’t…I couldn’t share the same room with Carmen that I shared with your mom. I just couldn’t do it.”

  See, now they try to convince me that this isn’t about Dad trying to put my mom and me behind him, and then he tells me he’s selling the fucking house. So he won’t ever have to look at the place where I was a kid again.

  “You know…do you think you could just tell me something in advance once in a while? I’m getting pretty sick of you surprising me with stuff. You got any other plans to turn my life upside down? Be
cause I think I’d like to know in advance for once.”

  Dad got frustrated. Good. “Dec, you know what? Ugh, just get in the car. We’ll talk later.”

  “Like hell.” I stormed over to the car and found my seat occupied by Carmen Foster and the backseat occupied by Neilly Foster. I was still really pissed off. But on the bright side, I was going to the backseat of my dad’s car with Neilly Foster. There were literally hundreds of guys in school who would probably kill to be able to say they went to the backseat of their old man’s car with Neilly Foster. And if you took a vote among the student body for Most Likely to Go to the Backseat of Their Old Man’s Car with Neilly Foster, you would not find me in the top five hundred.

  I climbed into the backseat and saw Neilly sulking. “Hey,” I said.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “Did you know about this?”

  “No!” Neilly said to her mom.

  Her mom ignored her and turned around and said, “Declan? It’s great to meet you. I’m Carmen.” She extended a hand, which I didn’t want to shake, but I didn’t want to piss off Neilly by being a dick to her mom, so I said “Hi” and shook her hand.

  And yeah, she was a total MILF, but the implications of that were just so weird that I quickly turned the full force of my perverted imagination on Neilly, who was wearing shorts.

  We studied Greek mythology in the ninth grade, mostly so we could read The Odyssey, which I actually kind of liked because there was sex and gore in it. One thing I remember was that in the Greek hell there was this guy who was standing in a pool of water with a fruit tree hanging over his head. Every time he reached up for the fruit, the tree would shoot just out of his reach, and every time he reached down to get a drink, the pool would dry up. I can’t remember what he did to get to hell, but it must have been pretty bad for him to be punished by being so close to the things he wanted so badly and never being able to touch them. This is pretty much what it was like for me to be in the backseat of a car with Neilly Foster’s bare thighs.

  We rode in silence to some house, and Dad and Carmen got out and circled to the side of the car, while Neilly and I sat motionless. I guess Neilly was still sulking. As for me, I had shorts on and a boner, so I figured I’d just hang out in the backseat until I could get my mind onto something unsexy. I thought about asking Dad to help a brother out by flashing some back hair, but I didn’t think he’d think that was funny in front of his girlfriend, fiancée, babymama, whatever the hell this woman was.

  “Are you guys coming?” Carmen asked in a fake-perky way.

  “No!” Neilly yelled again.

  “Dec?” Dad said.

  “Tell you what. How about you guys just pick out a house and buy it and tell us the day before we have to move. Okay?”

  Dad looked mad. Carmen came around the car and linked her arm into his and said, “Okay, guys, we’re gonna go poke around. And I promise you we won’t buy anything without your approval. We thought this would be kind of fun for you guys, but I guess we made a mistake. I’m sorry.”

  They walked into the house, leaving Neilly and me in the backseat. I had to speak lest my brain explode. “Well, this is a pisser.”

  “Tell me about it. I mean, I’m not that sorry to leave our house. I’m just tired of her making these decisions about my life without saying anything to me.”

  “Yeah. This whole thing sucks.”

  “Is your house nice? You like it, I mean?”

  “I don’t know. It’s a house. It’s just that…Well, forget it.”

  “What?”

  “I just remember my mom there.”

  She didn’t say anything for a minute, and I sat there getting angrier and sadder, and finally I felt like I really needed to kick something, like my skin was tingling and the only way to release that energy was to commit some kind of physical violence. Seeing me spazzing out and hitting stuff was not the kind of intimacy I craved with Neilly Foster, so I just said, “I gotta bail. I’ll see you later,” and got out of the car.

  I didn’t even know where the hell I was; I only knew that I wanted to be somewhere else. I started just walking down the street, figuring I’d eventually come to something I recognized. It wasn’t like it was that big of a town.

  I got about a block away when I heard something behind me. I was glad Dad had come running after me. I turned around to tell him we couldn’t leave Mom behind, that I knew it was dumb, but that I felt like she’d still be in that house and we’d be living somewhere else and she’d be gone forever.

  What I saw instead of Dad was Neilly Foster bouncing toward me. “Hey!” she called.

  “Yeah?”

  “You can’t just leave me alone with them! How would you like it if you had to spend the day with just them?”

  I stopped. “Um, I don’t know. I guess that would suck.”

  “Goddamn right it would. I sent Mom a text message and told her we’d be at our house. Come on.”

  “You live around here?”

  “Like, three blocks away.”

  We walked to Neilly’s house, and I was still so upset thinking about Mom that I forgot to be lustful. I felt like I was on the verge of tears the whole time, and I was really afraid I was going to cry in front of her, so as soon as we got in the door, I said I needed the bathroom and ran in. Of course, once I was alone, I didn’t need to cry anymore. What the hell was up with that?

  I looked around. A bathroom in a house shared by two women is just not the same type of room as a bathroom in a house shared by two men. For one thing, there was this little thing on the back of the toilet—it looked like a collection of metallic ivy. One tissue poked out of the top. I guess the rest of them were in there somewhere, disguised under the artsy ivy. Why the hell would you want to pretend your snot rags were growing out of the woods? There was a bowl of some dried flowers and bark and stuff—it smelled pretty good. Next to the sink there were these little round soaps that looked like they’d never been used. Hanging next to the sink were three towels that were the exact same shade of yellow that covered the walls. They also looked like they’d never been used. I wondered if women’s dirty little secret is that they don’t wash their hands just so they can keep their bathrooms looking nice. Dad cleans the bathroom regularly at our house, so it’s not like some gross gas station bathroom or anything, but we don’t have any tissues on the back of the can, we don’t have any bowls of bark, and we only have one slimy bar of Ivory that we both use to wash our hands. I can’t even imagine wanting to spend any energy at all making the place where you shit look pretty. Clean, I get. Pretty—no. And yet, this was how it was going to be—no more old New Yorkers next to the toilet, no more rectangular soap, no more plain white towels.

  I splashed some water on my face, flushed the toilet, and left the bathroom. I found Neilly in the kitchen eating ice cream. “Want some Karamel Sutra?” she asked.

  I briefly choked on my own spit. “Some what?”

  “Karamel Sutra! It’s my favorite flavor.”

  “Yeah. Yes, I do.”

  “I got you a bowl and a spoon. They’re over there next to the sink.” The sink was not piled up with dishes from breakfast or from last night’s dinner. Another way I knew I wasn’t in my own house.

  I scooped myself some ice cream and sat down at the table.

  “I wonder,” Neilly said.

  Whether dorks are good in the sack? Try me, baby—unpopular guys work harder! “What?”

  “Whether it would be possible to, you know, break them up or something.”

  “Sounds kinda Parent Trap.”

  “Yeah, only in reverse.”

  “Well, listen, if you can somehow get Lindsay Lohan involved, I’m in. Otherwise, I don’t think it’s such a great idea.”

  “Ew, she’s like ten in that movie!”

  “Yeah, but she’s not ten now, is she?”

  “No, but she’s kind of a skank.”

  “Exactly. Anyway, I did think about this. I mean, this may come as a surpris
e, but I can be a total dick if I want to be. I’m pretty sure I could send your mom screaming for the exits if I put my mind to it.”

  She took a minute and looked at me. “You know, no offense, but I think maybe you could.”

  “None taken. I pride myself on my ability to offend. But anyway, I don’t want to do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because—I don’t know how long ago your parents split, but my mom’s been dead for six years. And growing up without one of your parents totally sucks, and I don’t want that for my little brother.”

  She smiled. “You mean my little sister.”

  “Whatever.” I ate some more ice cream.

  “You think we could all fit in your house?”

  “Well, I suppose Junior’s gonna need his own room at some point. I mean, I would not really want to share. I’m not hip to the whole two a.m. feeding thing, and, you know, I can’t have my baby brother crampin’ my style when I have a lady over.”

  Neilly looked at me skeptically but was nice enough not to interrogate me on exactly which ladies had ever set foot in my room. None, of course, but I wanted to have the option, which I certainly wouldn’t have if Junior was shitting his diapers in a crib in the corner. Though I suppose that might allow me to be able to say, Hey, baby, wanna come back to my crib? with a straight face.

  “Well, this place is definitely too small for a fam—for five people,” Neilly said. She ate her ice cream in silence for a while, so I did the same. I was glad she’d stopped herself. A family was Mom and Dad and me. Dad and I might live in the same house as Neilly and Carmen, but that wouldn’t make us a family.

  The silence started to feel awkward. I didn’t know what to say—can I see your room? Can I have a few minutes alone with your underwear drawer? And then I remembered something from this morning.

  “Hey, I have a question.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Is your dad…is he like a big guy with a mustache? Looks like he does ultimate fighting in the hot sun all day?”

  She snickered. “Not hardly. That sounds like my uncle Roger. He’s my dad’s…well, you know, the person he’s committing to, or whatever. Why do you ask?”