Ordinary Lives

four.

Mom resumes her agitated staring when her, Hugh, and I arrive home and get ready to go to bed. She's always been too perceptive for her own good. When I'd abruptly quit my internship at the RoGallery, I'd tried to hide just how miserable I was and did so exceptionally well, considering that not even Gemma picked up on my unhappiness; it was my mom that looked past my overly pleasant facade and no amount of light humor convinced her that I was okay. She pressed and pressed until I finally gave up the act and told her the truth. Mom anticipates the same thing to happen tonight.

She saw the way my eyes blanked when Timothée ran out of the house, the way melancholy took host of my body and seemed to affect all of my motions afterwards, the hunch of my back, the trembling of my lip, the way my feet dragged as we walked towards our own brownstone. Mom wants to fix me; she believes talking will do the trick.

"How are you?" she asks, gently, while I sit down on the couch in our living room, shrugging off my coat and releasing my hair from it's braid.

"Alright." I finger through the kinks of my hair, applying force where it's needed to untangle where the curls have snarled into unruly, complicated knots. I like that you still wear your hair that way. In the braid I mean. Never would I wear my hair in this braid again.

"You're okay Charlie," Hugh says, kicking off his boots before falling next to me onto the couch. He puts an arm around my shoulders and squeezes in a way that is so mature and fatherly that it makes me want to sob. "At least the food was good, right?"

"Oh be quiet Hughie," Mom sighs.

Hugh grumbles at the sound of his childhood nickname. "It was good. We're mad at Timmy, not Céleste."

Mom ignores him. Hugh adores Timothée and got along with him splendidly when we were younger, in a way I was unable to until later in life. He lacked a father figure for much of his life and while I don't think Timmy was a dad to him, he was definitely like a bigger brother. Timmy taught Hugh how to play the guitar, took him to his first concert at Madison Square Garden, and gave him rides whenever he ran out of money to use the subway. I know he's lying, for my sake, and that he still really likes Timmy- to hear him say he is mad at him, that he is on my side, comforts and saddens me.

"I saw you two were talking at dinner for a little bit," Mom says to me.

"Yeah. It was kind of rough."

"What happened?"

"I don't know. I couldn't really get over myself. I couldn't pretend."

"Do you still like him?" Mom asks. She eyes me carefully. Mom knows what it's like to lose yourself to a man and I think it's probably one of her biggest fears that I'm going to turn out the same way.

"Of course not," Hugh answers for me. "He was a dick to her. She doesn't like him."

"I don't like him," I echo, lying through my teeth. I'm not fully present in the living room. I am somewhere else altogether, replaying the moment he ran out of the house, replaying the moment he looked me in the eyes after we had almost gotten as intimate as two people could, the moment he had started to cry and whispered This was a mistake, the moment I had woken up the next morning only to be told that Timothée had packed his bags and left to study at La Sorbonne for the rest of the year, the moment I had ran to Gemma's and sobbed into her arms and I keep wishing that I had something lovelier, unforgettable, anything at all to have convinced him that I was worth more than just three months spent falling in love, only to be thrown aside as a mistake.

"Did you hear me?" Mom said.

I shake my head. "Sorry. What?"

"I said, maybe you need something to keep you busy this summer," Mom says, placing a light hand on my knee. I close my eyes and bury my head into the crook of my little brother's arm. "Let him do his own thing while you do yours. Get a job."