We always meet at his house, which looks a lot like mine, so whatever was the cause of Dominic and Shelby's divorce, it was not disagreement over decorating. Shelby herself is always around, almost always on the phone. Josey's mother was not wrong that she's a gossip. One evening while I'm over, I make the mistake of mentioning in front of her that someone's suspected of cheating in my History class, and she's on the phone five minutes later with God knows who trying to narrow down who it could be. Who knows why she's so interested in high school gossip. My guess is that it's for the same reason she wears so much makeup and so many ironic t-shirts; she does not want to to grow up. I think that might have been a reason for the divorce, which brings me comfort because my mother is a woman through and through.
“Seriously, another verbal section?” Lucas says. “Can't we do another math?”
“All we did was math last week,” I remind him. “You're just lucky the PSAT doesn't have a writing portion.”
“I like writing more than all this reading.”
“Just take your time,” I say.
We're on the couch in his living room, flanked by two china cabinets filled with trinkets, a lot like the one Dominic has in his dining room. While he works, I make my eyes slide over each knick-knack, carefully, because I'm having an extremely hard time focusing on just about anything. There's just too much going on right now. Too much I can't talk about.
And Lucas always wants me to. “So how's your untraditional relationship going?” he says, without looking up from his work.
“It's okay.”
“Untraditionally okay?”
“Yeah.”
“It's pretty impressive you're making this work,” he says. That's nice of him.
I give him a gentle shove. “Stop stalling, read the passage.”
“Uuuugh.”
I smile a little.
“Okay,” he says after a minute, “I can't just sit here and read in silence. It's not math.”
“Math needs silence, but reading doesn't?”
“Don't question my methods, Taylor.”
“So what, you want me to talk about my untraditional relationship?”
“So sue me, I'm curious. It's weird.”
“Oh, now I'm just dying to talk about it.”
“Don't be like that. Cool weird.”
“It's kind of rocky at the moment actually,” I say. “Just because Josey has a lot of stuff piled on her all at once, so we're all feeling it, and she kind of withdraws when things get bad. And Theo and I are both the type of people who dump stuff all over each other. So she wants us to leave her alone and we want to bring her cupcakes.”
“You can bring me cupcakes.”
“Are you going through personal trauma?”
“Yeah, lack of cupcakes.”
“Woe is you.”
“Me is what now?”
“Do your damn work.”
Dominic and my mother have their first fight since we've lived here. I get home from Lucas's house right in the middle of it. Dominic has his elbows on the counter and his head in his hands. My mother's yelling at him all high-pitched and incoherent, and she's crying, which doesn't always mean much—she's weepy in general—but I don't like this at all .
I go to her and wrap my arms around her. “What's going on?”
She pulls away from me just enough to wipe her cheeks off. “Nothing, nothing.”
“She wants to change the date,” he says.
I say, “Mom. You can't change the date.”
“Eduardo can't come on the 28th,” she says, and okay, that's not good. Eduardo is her only cousin, and since both my mother and her mother were only children, he's one of the only extended family members we have. He and Mom were very close growing up, and even though we don't see him much—he's in California—it was very important to her that he be there.
“Why not?” I say.
“It's Candice's graduation.” His daughter.
“And that's incredibly sad,” Dominic says. “But we can't change the date now. It's too late.”
“Who's going to walk me down the aisle?” she says.
“I will, Mom,” I say. “You know I will.”
“See?” Dominic says. “So it's all taken care of.”
But that makes me angry, because it's not taken care of, because my mother is still upset. The logistics are worked out; we can cancel his meal, we can rearrange the tables, I can walk her down the aisle. But she's upset, and that isn't going to go away just because she knows how we're covering up one detail. So I'm angry.
And, no, it doesn't exactly help that my mother doesn't seemed soothed or even touched by the idea of my giving her away.
I hug her tight and don't look at anyone, because the truth is that she is right and he is wrong and I am on her side and not his and I don't know how these things are supposed to work, and for the first time in very many months I think that maybe three is too many people.
21
Josey has one of her rare free days about a week after the rejection comes in, and Theo and I decide together that the two of them should have some alone time. I do want to have one-on-one time with her as soon as she has the time, but so far the only times I've really gotten to see her are our lunch periods, where she never wants to go into it, just alternates between quietly raking through her vegetable medleys and talking manically about her promotion to assistant to the floor manager at the food bank or how she definitely thinks she's starting to understand multivariable calculus, and the next test is going to go perfectly, and then UPenn will see her perfect second semester grades and see, everything will be fine.
Besides those extremely reassuring demonstrations of her mental health,
