I giggled to myself and kept drinking my tea.
It didn’t taste so bad that afternoon.
“You’re not listening to me, Eric, I just want to make sure we’re doing the right thing,” Mama said to Daddy later that night as he paced the living room. She held a glass of wine in her hand and sipped at it while speaking to him. I sat at the top of the stairs with Cheryl beside me. “Maggie dating Brooks might not be the best thing for anyone. Loren said—”
Daddy snickered sarcastically. “‘Loren said’. Jesus, of course. You know, for a second I believed they didn’t get to you when they came to visit, but it seems I was wrong. I should’ve known this had something to do with those women.”
“Those women are my friends.”
“Those women couldn’t care less about you, Katie. You think they come here to hang out with you because they care? They come here to mock you, to tell you to think about moving, knowing you can’t. To see how your life is so fucking depressing compared to their perfect lives, which is fine, but when they sit all night talking about our daughter—”
“They meant no harm. They were giving me information on how to help her.”
“They were belittling her!” he shouted. Cheryl and I both jumped out of fright. Daddy never shouted. I’d never seen his face so red in my life. “They were belittling her, insulting her as if she were deaf and couldn’t hear them. I don’t know what’s worse, the fact that you let those women into our house to gossip about your own daughter, or the fact you that you stood up for Maggie just to take it back a few days later. You’re sitting here worrying about her having a boyfriend when she’s the happiest I’ve seen her in years. You’d see it too if you actually looked at her.”
“I look at her.”
“You look, but you don’t see, Katie, and then you invite those trolls to our house, and they talk about Maggie as if she’s nothing.”
“She is something. Don’t you see? This is why I want to try the therapist Wendy—”
“She’s happy, Katie!”
“She’s sick!”
“She’s getting better right in front of us, and it’s like you secretly don’t want her to. Don’t you want her to leave? To live?”
Mama hesitated before saying, “But Loren—”
“Enough!” he hollered, swinging his hands in annoyance and accidentally knocking the wine from Mama’s hand, sending her glass to the carpet where it shattered.
The room went quiet.
Daddy took off his glasses and rubbed the palms of his hands against his eyes before placing his hands on his waist. The two stared at the red stain on the carpet, the same type of accidental spill that used to happen before, when they were happier together, before I began to break their love apart.
Without any more words, they went their separate ways.
“What just happened?” Cheryl whispered, her body shaking slightly.
I took her shaky hand into mine to try to calm her nerves.
In that moment, I was happy I didn’t speak, because otherwise I would’ve had to tell Cheryl the truth. I knew what was happening to our parents: they were falling out of love right in front of my sister and me.
Falling out of love meant you couldn’t laugh at mistakes.
Falling out of love meant you screamed your irritations.
Falling out of love meant going your separate ways.
“A box of goodies for Maggie May,” Brooks said later that night, standing in my doorway.
I smiled his way, uncertain of what he had in mind. He walked into my room and sat on the floor, placing the box in front of him. He patted the floor, inviting me to join him.
What did he have planned?
“It’s a taste test,” he explained as I sat down. “Since you can’t speak, I want to at least know everything else about you—the way you react to certain things, your expressions—so we are doing a blind food taste test. In this box are random foods—some sweet, some mushy, some sour as hell—and you are going to taste them. Then, we are going to switch.”
I sm