The Trouble Is

Chapter 20: Fast Forward

The summer moves on, and each day appears to be a copy and paste of the day before, unless you look closely. It's kind of like this: Some days there's cereal for breakfast, and other days there are Pop-Tarts. But every day, there's breakfast.

I'm almost halfway through my last summer as a high school student now. Katie likes to put a lot of drama around the days, saying how this is her last time to do this or that. She acts as if going to college is the end of life as she knows it. I keep reminding her that we will still be here next summer.

"Yeah," she says. "But it will be different. We will be different, A. We will be college students. That's practically adulthood. Check that—it's practically old age."

She may be right, even with the exaggerations. I'm sure that we will be unimaginably different next summer. However, these copy and paste days make it hard for me to view this summer as anything other than another summer. Well, other than the whole "I have a boyfriend" thing.

I've been checking off all those things that summer requires, just like the last few summers. I've finished the volunteer work, cleaned out everything Mom asked me to clean out, and read three books for AP English. I know that I haven't written any insightful thoughts in the journals we are required to submit on the first day of class. I never do that until the week before school starts, anyway. If I do it too early, it ends up feeling alien to me when school starts, like someone else wrote it. I'm not worried about it, though. I always do pretty well on those things.

I've been hanging out with East pretty regularly now. Skip likes to ask if we are "dating as in steady." He says it just like that, with the words running together. Katie loves that kind of talk from Skip. She says his '70s speak is her favorite part of the whole retro Skip, who is heavy into saving the planet and improving the nation's nutrition, one jar of organic jelly at a time.

My mom has been in some kind of remission, according to the doctors. It's no guarantee, they say. We should enjoy each day but not push too hard. I get it. She is not getting worse, but she's not cured. She's in limbo, and we are all hanging there with her for now. We can't quite celebrate, but we don't need to grieve. It's kind of a weird thing, to know that you need to find a way to be ready for a life without someone, and then get a reprieve, whether it's temporary or long term. It's hard to trust it. I've added it to List #25: Things You Can't Trust. You can't trust limbo.

Mom says to focus on the positive.

"We can't worry about some great unknown," she says. "We should live in the now."

She doesn't seem to know that worrying about a great unknown is exactly how her son is spending his summer. Doug has made it out of Judaism and is now firmly entrenched in the trappings of Catholicism. Just yesterday he gave Katie the sign of the cross and let her kiss his ring. I don't have any idea where he found that tarnished old ring, but there's no way I'm kissing that thing.

"This too shall pass," Skip says when I try to talk to him again about the many phases of religion.

I get it. We are going to live in "the now" for now. I can't help but think that if I Googled "coping with fear," the first bullet-pointed advice from some television shrink would be to "live in the now."

"Whatever," I say. "I'm going with East and Katie to the lake."

I'm inside East's truck, sitting between them by the time Mom gets the front door open to wave goodbye.