Leaving Home: Short Pieces (Kindle Single) Read online

“I’m not making a point, Ian. I’m just…taking a vacation.”

  A vacation. My mother is taking a vacation. From all of us.

  “I don’t understand,” my father says.

  “Well, you should,” my mother replies. “I’m doing what you do, every day: trading futures.” As soon as she hangs up, Devon dials *69.

  “Good evening, the Ritz-Carlton,” a honeyed voice says. “How may I direct your call?”

  My father pushes a button, disconnects us. “Mom’s staying at the Ritz-Carlton?” I ask.

  “You could cut off her credit cards,” Devon suggests. “I saw that on Law & Order, once.”

  “I’m not cutting off your mother’s credit cards,” my father replies. “This is just her way of going on strike.”

  “Maybe we should cross the picket line, then,” Devon suggests.

  “We,” my father announces, “will hardly even notice she’s gone.”

  #

  That night, we make a plan. I will be in charge of dishwashing; Devon – in spite of his lousy track record – will do the laundry. Dad will take over vacuuming and mopping of all floors. When we go to bed, the house is sparkling, perfect. Mom will come home, I think, and will be absolutely stunned.

  Assuming we can keep it up.

  My father comes in to tuck me in, even though he usually doesn’t do that anymore. He sits down on the edge of my bed. “Dad,” I ask. “What do you do, for real?”

  “I’m a trader, honey. You know that.”

  “Yeah, but what do you do?”

  “Say I want to buy oil for the house for next winter. I can commit now to buy it at a certain price arranged by the oil company. But maybe I have a different view about what the price of oil is going to be. Maybe I think that war will break out again, and the price of oil will rise. Maybe I think that after the election, the price will drop. My job’s about hunches…if I think the price will be lower in the future, I can agree to sell oil a year from now that I don’t own yet. If I’m right, I can buy that oil in the future and immediately resell it to the company I contracted with and make a profit. Of course, if the price of oil actually goes higher, I lose big time. Basically, I’m betting on the future. And I can bet it’s going to get better, or I can bet it’s going to get worse.”

  I wonder what commodity my mother thinks she is trading in. Love? Respect? Self-confidence?

  My father leans over and kisses my forehead. “You look so much like her.”

  I have heard that all my life. “Do you really think she’s just taking a vacation?”

  “How could it be anything else?” my father says, but I get the feeling he’s asking me, not giving me the answer.

  #

  Before you could see the hairline cracks in our family – when Dad was actually home for dinner; before Devon hit puberty and became the slouched, hairy, sarcastic beast that he is now; back when my mother seemed happy – we used to play a game at dinner. Each night we’d take turns asking a question for which there was no easy answer: If you had a million dollars, what would you do with it? If you could change one event in history, what would it be? What would the title of your biography be, and who would you want to write it?

  I can’t remember all the answers, but there were definitely some that surprised me. Like when Devon said that if he had to choose one person to have dinner with, it would be Nelson Mandela, when I would have bet my entire state quarter collection that he hadn’t even known who Nelson Mandela was. Or when my father said that the one thing he’d take to a desert island – the only thing he needed – was not his Blackberry, but my mother. The one that sticks in my mind, though, was a question my mother had asked: If you had to have amnesia for the rest of your life, and you could only keep one memory, what would it be?

  We all had a different one. My father talked about the time we all went to a Mexican restaurant and stole the balloons reserved for little kids, then sucked out the helium and sang like the munchkins from the Wizard of Oz. Devon picked the time he gave me a haircut the day before my birthday – and clipped off my bangs right at the scalp. For me, it was the school play where I was the buttercup fairy. My mother had stood up in the audience the whole thirty seconds I was on that stage and whistled through her teeth so loud it was hard to hear the other kids with bigger parts speaking their lines.

  At the time, I’d thought my mother’s memory was a cop-out – not detailed enough, not specific. “The last best one of the four of us,” she’d said.

  #

  The morning after my mother leaves us, I am the Queen of Energy. I set bowls on the table, and spoons, and a variety of cereal. I feel so helpful I can barely stand it; usually I sit down and wait for everything to be brought to me while I yawn my way into consciousness. Devon clatters into the kitchen, his hair still wet from his shower. “I’m starving,” he says, pouring himself a mountain of Special K.

  “What do you think they serve for breakfast at the Ritz?” I ask.

  “It’s the Ritz,” he mutters. “They probably serve you whatever you want.”

  “Waffles?”

  “With whipped cream and strawberries.”

  “Omelettes,” I say. “Made to order.”

  Devon snorts. “Special K. Except it’s more special there.” He reaches for the milk and shakes it. “Is there any more in the fridge?”

  “No.”

  “Well, this is empty.”

  “It’s not my fault,” I shoot back.

  “What else is there to eat?”

  “How am I supposed to know?”

  We both stop arguing; this is usually the moment where Mom turns around at the stove and tells us to do that very same thing. Devon reaches across the table for the carton of orange juice and pours it over his cereal. “What?” he accuses, when I stare at him. “It’s orange juice plus calcium. That’s practically milk.”

  Last week, during dinner, Devon had announced he doesn’t want to go to college. He wants to travel the world with his band, go build huts on a tropical island, find himself. My father had hit the ceiling at this announcement. You couldn’t find yourself with both hands free, he said. You want to find yourself? Do it with a good, liberal arts education. Devon had lashed out like a bear caught in a trap he hadn’t seen coming.

  How could Dad know anything about the world when he hadn’t seen anything but the inside of the New York Mercantile Exchange for the past twenty years?

  By now, my father’s come downstairs. He smells like the weekend: shampoo and fresh cut grass and aftershave on his cheeks. “So!” he says, too brightly. “What’s for breakfast?”

  I picture Mom eating her Belgian waffle in bed.

  After the fight with Devon, my father had turned to my mother: Charlotte, tell him I’m right.

  I try, but I can’t remember what she said.

  #

  Three days after my mother leaves us, we realize that the vacuum cleaner is missing. What’s really unfortunate about this is that we make the discovery after Devon has knocked over a spider plant – and all its soil – onto the living room rug. Four days after she leaves us, we give up trying to cook a meal and get all its bits and pieces – meat, potatoes, vegetables – on the table at once; instead, we order in pizza.

  At school, I’ve had to make excuses – the reason my mother can’t come to the Art Open House is because she’s visiting her sister; she didn’t sign my independent reading sheet because she’s gone to a conference on Sanibel Island. The only person who knows the truth is my best friend, Nuala. I can trust her implicitly; I swear I could tell her I’m a hermaphrodite and she wouldn’t even blink. When I said that my mother had left, she asked if it was an affair, something that I hadn’t even thought of.

  One day Nuala comes into homeroom with an article she’s printed off the Internet. “Check this out,” she says. “Someone did a study on stay-at-home moms and figured out what their salary would be if they had one.”

  I scan the article. Basically, the salary was a compilation