“You probably just surprised him,” Mom pointed out. “He wasn’t expecting you to be there and it freaked him out.”
“Okay,” Nana murmured to herself in concentration. “I should also probably take out the part where I ask if I could have your stuff if you ever overdosed. That doesn’t seem applicable here.” She crossed out even more. I wanted to ask her how many pages her intervention speech ran, but didn’t think I wanted to know the answer.
“You probably would have done the same thing,” my dad said. “Scratch that; I know you would have done the same thing. But it’s not about you. This is about him. This is about how he’s going to lose his mother very shortly. This is about how he’s going to need someone to lean on and that someone should be you.”
I tried to stand, but they wouldn’t let me. I was starting to get pissed, but at who, I didn’t know. “You know,” I growled at them all, “everyone keeps saying that to me, that he’s going to need me, that he’s going to depend on me, but that’s bullshit. If he needed me, he wouldn’t have sent me away. If he needed me, he would have told me what was going on. If he wanted me as much as he claimed, he would have fucking let me in instead of allowing me to act all stupid and do what I did. So you’re right. This isn’t about me. This is all on him.”
“That’s not fair,” Mom said firmly. “It’s not fair and you know it. Everything around him right now is heightened to an extreme.”
“Exactly,” I snapped at her, trying to ignore the hurt look on her face. “Everything is heightened. There’s no way he would have fallen for me that quickly. There’s no way I could love him this fast. Everything is just moving at light speed, and it’s because of what he is going through. That’s all it is. It’s just that and nothing more.”
Dad snorted. “You were always such a terrible liar.”
“That’s a good thing, though,” Mom said. “Rather him be bad at it than good.”
“He tried to tell me once that this singlet I found at the thrift store looked good on me,” Sandy said. “But he kept twitching like he’s doing now and it totally gave him away.”
“Did you buy it anyway?” Dad asked.
“No. Paul made the very good point that most likely someone else’s balls or vagina had been smooshed in that before I got my hands on it, and I couldn’t in good faith wear it without getting grossed out.”
“Oh, man,” Dad groaned. “Maybe I should be a homosexual. Smooshed vagina? No offense, Matty, but yuck.”
“I’ll support you with whatever you decide to do,” Mom told him, reaching over me to hold his hand. “I could always be your fruit fly if you do come out.”
“That would be interesting,” Dad said. “Do you think I could be a leather daddy?”
“You could pull it off,” she said. “I know you can.”
“Paul has chaps you could borrow,” Sandy said, a little bit of Helena poking through. “I would have no problem seeing that. You’d be pretty hot, Larry.”
“I probably shouldn’t add that I’d have Johnny Depp officiate your funeral,” Nana muttered, scribbling furiously. “Somehow, I don’t think that would be appreciated.”
“I’m pretty sure I’m the only person in the world who wishes he could be deaf,” I said to no one in particular. “And blind.”
“You don’t wish that,” Mom said. “What an awful thing to say.”
“You should probably take that back,” Dad said. “You don’t want to piss off God and wake up tomorrow blind and deaf.”
“Fine, I take it back,” I mumbled. I didn’t really want to be blind and deaf. “But if God is granting wishes, I wish you’d all go away.”
“I don’t think God is a genie,” Sandy said. “But if he is, I wish for those two-thousand-dollar boots I saw in the boutique downtown. In red.”
“I wish for world peace,” Nana said. “And then six billion dollars.”
“I wish for more wishes,” Dad said.
“I wish for my son to stop being so pigheaded,” Mom said.
We waited.
“And for Vin Diesel to come to my house and be my naked maid,” she finished with a blush.
“I could take him in a fight,” Dad said, flexing his arms. “I’ll be your naked maid when we get home. Do you need dusting, Mrs. Auster?”
“I am feeling pretty dusty,” Mom agreed, winking at him.
“I’m sitting right between you two! Gross!”