The Moon and More (3 page)

“You’re in a mood,” my mom finally said. It was typical of her manner, as well as her approach. Where my sisters and I tended towards loud and bombastic, she was always understated and quiet. It was like raising us just sucked all the fight right out of her.

“I’ve been yelled at too much today,” I told her, getting to my feet. “And you know I hate when you guys come in here.”

“I’m sorry.” She held out the nuts to me, a peace offering. I shook my head, but still couldn’t help but pick an almond out of the mix.

“No strip-mining,” she said, helping herself to a
handful. Selecting just the good stuff was one of her biggest pet peeves. “So isn’t that engagement thing tonight?”

The nail gun popped again upstairs, once, twice. “Brooke and Andy’s. Yeah.”

“Maureen must be beside herself.”

“She is. It’s like wedding planning is a drug and she’s always jonesing for a fix.”

“Emaline,” she said, but she was smiling. She and Luke’s mom had both grown up in Colby, although my mom was seven years younger. Still, everyone knew that Mrs. Templeton had been on the pep squad and dated the captain of the football team, while my mom got pregnant the summer after junior year by a tourist boy. People didn’t forget anything in a small town.

“I’m serious,” I told her. “You should hear the stuff they are all saying about me and Luke. It’s like they expect us to announce our engagement at the wedding, or something.”

Her eyes got wide, the nuts in her hand frozen in midair. “
Don’t
,” she said, in a rare stern tone, “even
joke
about that.”

“Don’t hang out in my room,” I replied.

“It’s hardly the same offense.” She was still giving me the evil eye. “Take it back.”

“Mom, honestly. Take-backs at your age? Really?”

“Do it.”

She wasn’t kidding. That’s the thing about someone who rarely gets upset: when they do, you notice. I cleared my throat. “I’m sorry. I was just making a stupid joke. Of course Luke and I aren’t getting engaged this summer.”

“Thank you.” She ate a nut.

“We’ll definitely wait until after freshman year,” I continued. “I think I’ll need to be adjusted to college before I start all the planning.”

She just looked at me, chewing. All right, not funny.

“Mom, come on,” I said, but she ignored me, going out into the hallway as there was another pop from upstairs. “I’m sorry. I’m just …”

She was still walking, towards the sound of the nail gun.

“… being stupid. Okay?”

After a beat, she turned around. From this distance, you never would have guessed she was thirty-six. With the same long, brown hair that I had, her body toned from regular workouts, she looked closer to late twenties, if that. It was the reason she was more often taken for Amber and Margo’s sister rather than their stepmother, why when we were kids she always got That Look at supermarkets and bank lines as people tried to do the math. They could never figure it out.

“You know,” she said finally, “I only get upset because I want you to have everything I didn’t.”

“The moon and more,” I said, and she nodded.

This was our thing, from the days before my dad, Amber, and Margo came into the picture, the days I didn’t even really remember. But she’d told me often of a book she read aloud every night when I was a baby, about a mother bear and her little cub who won’t go to sleep.

What if I get hungry?
he asks.

I’ll bring you a snack,
she tells him
.

What if I’m thirsty?

I’ll fetch you water.

What if I get scared?

I’ll order all the monsters away.

Finally he asks
, What if that’s not enough? What if I need something else?

And she replies,
Whatever you need, I will find a way to get it to you. I will give you the moon, and more
.

This, she always said, was how she felt as a teenage single mother, raising me alone. She had nothing, but wanted everything for me. Still did.

Now, she pointed at me with her free hand. “You behave yourself at that party. This is about Brooke and Andy, not you and your opinions.”

“You know,” I said, as she turned around again, “contrary to what you believe, I don’t actually think everything’s about me.”

Her only response was a snort, and then she was gone. The gun continued to pop as she climbed the stairs, but a moment later, it stopped. In the quiet following, I heard her say something, and my dad laughed. Typical. We might make fun of her, but when they were together, the joke was always on us.

“I heard that,” I yelled, even though I didn’t. More laughter.

Back in my room, I surveyed the damage, which was easy because that morning, like always, I’d left the place spotless: bed made, drawers shut, nothing on the floor or bureau tops. Now, I spotted Amber’s keys and sunglasses on my desk, my mom’s flip-flops parked under my bedside table. There was also a crumpled piece of paper on the floor beside my trash can. I sighed, then walked over and picked it up. I was just
about to toss it in when I saw my mom’s handwriting and smoothed it out instead.

It was from one of the Colby Realty giveaway notepads, which were all over our house; you’d be hard-pressed to find anything else to write on. In her neat script it said simply,
Your father called. 4:15 p.m.

I looked at my watch. It was 6:30, which meant I had less than a half hour before I needed to leave for Luke’s and the party. But this was more important. I took the note and went upstairs.

The first thing I saw when I stepped into the war zone that was currently our kitchen was my dad, shooting a nail into a piece of skirting board by the pantry door. The kitchen itself was empty, as it had been since he’d been refinishing the floors. My mom was watching him from atop our new dishwasher, which was functioning as furniture, island, and catch-all area until it got installed.

Bam!
went the nail gun, and I jumped. My mom looked over at me, clearly thinking I’d come up to continue our conversation from earlier. When I held up the note, though, her expression changed.

“I was going to”—
Bam!
—“tell you,” she replied.

“But you didn’t.”

Bam!
“I know. It was a mistake. I just got distracted when you came in all upset about—”

Bam! Bam!

I held up my hand, stopping her. “Dad!” I yelled. Another pop. “
Dad!
”

Finally, he stopped, then turned around, seeing me. “Well,
hey there, Emaline,” he said, smiling. “How was your day?”

“Can you stop that for just one second?”

“Stop working?” he asked.

“Would you mind?”

He glanced at my mom, who stress-ate another handful of nuts. “All right,” he said, as easygoing as always, and put the nail gun down, trading it for a Mountain Dew sitting on the dishwasher. My mom and I were both quiet as he twisted off the top, taking a big sip. He looked at me, at her, then back at me. “Whoa. What’d I miss?”

“Nothing,” my mom replied.

“She didn’t tell me my father called,” I said at the same time.

My dad looked at her, a weary expression on his face. “This again?” he said. “Really?”

“I forgot,” she told us both. “It was a mistake.”

I looked at him, making my doubt about this clear. He put down the bottle. “But you
did
get the message. Right?”

“Only because she threw it all crumpled up on my floor.”

He shrugged, as if this actually was the same thing. “What matters is that now you know.”

I exhaled, shaking my head. Thick as thieves, these two were. I had never been right enough for him to take my side on
anything
. “I just don’t understand why you’re so weird about this,” I said to my mom.

“Yeah, you do,” my dad said.

We were all quiet for a moment. All I could hear was the TV in Amber’s room, which worked just fine, in case you were wondering. “I took the message,” my mom said finally, “then
brought it down there to leave it for you. But when I heard you coming, I trashed it, figuring I’d tell you myself. But I … didn’t. I’m sorry.”

The thing is, I knew this was true. She was sorry. In her real life, she was a capable and responsible mom, wife, and daughter. But when it came to my father, it was like she was eighteen all over again, and she always acted like it.

I looked down at the note. “Did he say what he wanted?”

She shook her head. “Just to call him when you get a chance.”

“Okay.” I checked my watch: 6:40. Crap. “I have to go. I’m already late.”

“Have fun,” she called after me as I headed back to my room. It was a peace offering, and a little bit too late, but I nodded and waved anyway, so she knew we were okay. They were quiet as I went down the stairs and started down the hallway to my room. Once there, though, I could hear their voices, muffled overhead, as she gave him the explanation she just couldn’t ever seem to relay to me. Whatever it was, it was short. By the time I was in the shower, the nail gun was popping again.

There’s a difference between the words
father
and
dad
. And it’s more than three letters.

Up until the age of ten, I didn’t know this. I also didn’t know much about where I’d come from, other than my mom had me when she was a senior in high school, which was why she was so much younger than the mothers of all my friends.
Then, one day in fifth grade, my teacher Mr. Champion got up in front of the whiteboard and wrote,
My Family Tree
. And just like that, things got complicated.

I’d always loved everything about school, from checking out the maximum number of books allowed from the library to organizing my notebooks into neat, labeled sections. Even at ten, I took my assignments very seriously, which was why I was not content to put my stepdad down next to my mom on the top of my tree, even though he’d adopted me when I was three.

“It’s supposed to reflect my accurate, genetic family,” I told my mom when she suggested this. “I need details.”

I could tell she wasn’t happy about it. But to her credit, she gave them to me. Some I had heard before, others were new. The bottom line was that she didn’t get too far into the story before I realized my tree wasn’t going to look like everyone else’s.

My mom met my father when she was seventeen, just after her junior year of high school. She was working at the realty office; he, a year older and heading off to college in the fall, had come down from Connecticut to spend the summer with an aunt who lived in nearby North Reddemane. In any other world, they never would have met. But this was the summer at the beach, and the standard rules, then as now, didn’t always apply.

They couldn’t have been more different. His parents were wealthy—his father a doctor and his mother a realtor—and he attended private school, where he’d studied Latin and played lacrosse. She was the second of three daughters of a
working-class family with a business that was mostly seasonal and always struggling to stay afloat. My mom was pretty, a known beauty; she’d dated only jocks and heartthrobs. He was a brain bordering on a smart aleck. They had nothing in common, but one night, she was heading to a party with her best friend, whose boyfriend brought along the mouthy Northerner he washed dishes alongside at Shrimpboats, a local fried seafood joint: my father. My mom was not looking for a boyfriend. What she got in the end was, well, me.

It wasn’t just a hookup: I’ve seen the pictures. They were In Love, inseparable the entire summer. He left in mid-August to go home and get ready for college, but not before they made firm travel plans to see each other again as soon as possible. The goodbye was tearful, followed by a couple of weeks of serious long-distance bills—all your typical summer romance stuff. Then my mom missed a period.

Suddenly it was no longer a romance, or even a relationship, but a crisis. Her parents were devastated, his were horrified, and what had been a singular relationship between two people became much more complicated. Calls were made, arrangements discussed. My mom had never gone into much detail, but I did know there were people on both sides who did not want her to keep me. In the end, though, she did.

For the first part of the pregnancy, she and my father remained in regular contact. But as the months passed and her belly grew, they started to drift apart. Maybe it would have happened anyway, even without a baby in the picture; maybe that baby should have prevented it. My mom, to her credit, never assigned full blame for this to my father. He was
so young, she told me again and again, away at college with parents who so disapproved of the situation. They had all those miles between them and only a summer in common. It would have been hard enough for him to relate to her world—one now focused on buying onesies and reading books on labor and delivery—even without his friends in his other ear, nagging him to go to keg parties.

By the time of my birth their contact had gone from rare to nonexistent. He was listed on the birth certificate, but didn’t meet me until I was six weeks old, when he came down with his parents for what was by all accounts a massively awkward visit.

My mom said my father’s dad couldn’t even make eye contact as she held me, instead just always looking off to her left, as if trying to see around us. To him, more than anything, we represented a wrong turn, one that if acknowledged would make their entire family that much more lost. As for my father, he was nervous and distant, so different from the boy she’d met the year before. Funny how it was only when he was finally right there in front of her, she said, that she knew for sure he was already gone. After that visit, she wouldn’t see him again for ten years.

The only good thing that came out of the whole thing, my mom always said, was a discussion about child support. She, like her parents, hated the thought of any kind of handout, but she was in high school, and diapers and childcare weren’t cheap, so an amount was set, a schedule made. My father might not have been reliable, but the money—in the form of a check, signed by my father’s father’s secretary—
always was. After graduating, my mother went to work full-time at Colby Realty, dropping me every morning with my great-aunt Sylvie, who rocked and fed me while she watched her soaps. Later, she would say these were the hardest years of her life.