The Moment Before

Chapter Seven

SEVEN

The summer before my freshman year, after Sabine’s first year of high school, Dad had a midlife crisis. In family therapy we refer to that summer, three years ago, as Johnsaffair. As if the entire season, the June, July, August of it had been replaced by a ninety-day month called Johnsaffair. An anomaly, like a leap year that only happened once. But Mom will not let it go. Nothing in our house has been the same since.

            The woman who had a starring role in Johnsaffair was a fitness model for Nike, where Dad and pretty much everyone in suburban Portland work. She was seventeen years younger than Dad, but without makeup she was plain, sort of mannish. Her golf game was better than Dad’s, and she was a ranked tennis pro. Her name was Natalie.

            When Mom found some weird receipts in Dad’s wallet, he confessed right away. I can still hear the scream that came out of the kitchen that night. The shrill piercing of a cat being squashed by a linebacker wearing an army boot. Sabine and I were watching The Bachelor reruns in the family room, and then all hell broke loose. Casserole dishes against cupboards. An entire closet of sports jackets flung out the front door. Mom and her Italian temper. Dad’s car keys hurled against the big living room window and the spider crack that happened because of it.

            Sabine came over to my La-Z-Boy and we squished in together like kittens, while above us, a flurry of angry words.

            Mom’s voice: Never. Fucking. Believe.

            Dad’s voice: The girls, Sonia.

            Mom’s voice: Get used to it.

            Dad’s voice: Talk. Love. Calm.

            Mom’s voice: Out. Never. Don’t think that.

            Dad’s voice: Reason. Work this out. For the best.

            Mom’s voice: Cheat. Lies. Dead.     

            And on it went, Sabine and I quiet until she said, “I knew about it.”

            I still didn’t know what they were fighting about. I thought maybe Dad had lost money in the stock market, or something was wrong with Nona and Dad had been insensitive. But they’d never fought this way before. “About what?”

            “Natalie,” she said. “I saw them out together. They didn’t see me. But I saw them, you know, kissing.”

            “Natalie? Who’s Natalie?”

            “Dad’s girlfriend. His lover.”

            The word lover rolled off my sister’s tongue like a foreign thing. As though she’d said Amiga, over pronouncing it with a fake accent.

            “Mom’ll kick him out,” Sabine said. “I know it.”

            That night was like when I was eight, the only girl in second grade who still believed in Santa. Cathi Serge set me straight on the jungle gym when I asked her if she’d written her letter to Santa Claus yet. The steely hard truth clunking down from a cloud to smash the fancy dream apart. “Oh, Brady, you don’t still believe, do you?”

That early June night, it was another betrayal. My parents had other lives besides being parents. My heart felt pried open; moths flew out. I put my hands over my ears like the “hear no evil” monkey as the crashing and shouting and sobbing above us continued into the night. Sabine put her arm around me. We tugged Nona’s black afghan tight around us, making an Irish twin cocoon, my fingers and toes crossed for luck.