The Petty Details of So-And-So's Life by Camilla Gibb Page B

think of anyone other than yourself, not ever,” she snapped.
    â€œBut all I—”
    â€œI don’t want to discuss it.”
    â€œDiscuss what?”
    â€œJesus, Llewellyn, stop playing games. Just … leave your mother in peace, will you? I’ve got enough problems as it is.”
    The fantasy of being orphans was only appealing when they actually had parents. They needed her now—more than they wished to—but the more they needed, the less she had to give.
    Emma and Blue gradually learned to stand at greater and greater distances. Emma filled the tumbler with two cubes of ice and three fingers of Scotch, and wordlessly handed it to her mother. Blue just slept most of the time. This was the new language of home.
    â€œI saw Dad today,” Blue said one day after Elaine had slammed her way back into the house. It had been about eleven months since Oliver had done what Blue saw as his Houdini-like disappearance from the garage. Elaine had no observable reaction. She sat back in the comfychair and raised the glass to her lips and asked Emma and Blue whether they’d finished their homework.
    In bed that night Emma stared at the stars on the ceiling and wondered what her mother had done with that piece of information. It seemed to have gone in one ear and straight out the other. Maybe it was living like a rotting rodent in the pit of her stomach. She was beginning to think Elaine might have animals living inside her—blood-sucking, flesh-eating reptiles that were turning her brittle and cadaverous.
    Emma rapped the secret knock on her bedroom wall and listened for the hinges on the door to Blue’s room.
    Blue sat waiting for her on the cement floor of the basement and yawned. He was wearing what Emma saw as his embarrassing Smurf pyjamas.
    â€œYou really saw Dad?” Emma whispered.
    â€œI think so.”
    â€œDid he have any hair?”
    â€œYeah.”
    â€œBut where did you see him?”
    â€œAt the schoolyard.”
    â€œHe came to your school?”
    â€œHmm.”
    â€œDid you talk to him?”
    â€œNo. But I waved.”
    â€œDid he wave back?”
    â€œKinda.”
    â€œI wonder if he came to my school, too,” Emma thought aloud. “Did he look okay?”
    â€œI guess so. He looked, you know, like Dad.”
    â€œJust the same?”
    â€œYeah. Like Dad before he slept in the garage, except old.”
    â€œMum thinks Dad is mentally ill,” Emma said. “Did he look mentally ill to you?”
    â€œI don’t know. What does mentally ill look like? I told you—he looked like Dad,” Blue shrugged.
    â€œDo you think he’ll come to your school again?”
    â€œI don’t know,” Blue said, frustrated now with all his sister’s questions.
    Emma kept a lookout in the schoolyard the next day, wondering if it was her turn to see their father. She hoped it was, but at the same time she didn’t want her father to see her being taunted in the schoolyard now that she had a reputation for being a lezzy. Junior high school sucked. She wished her dad would come roaring by in an expensive European car and pick her up and take her out for ice cream. She didn’t care that all the other kids would tease her, call her a daddy’s girl or a loser because it was uncool to have parents, let alone have parents who picked you up at school. She might have felt that way about Elaine, but Elaine was still technically more of a parent than Oliver. She did at least live in the same house. Elaine was Elaine, but Oliver wasn’t always, necessarily, Oliver.
    She kept a lookout for the rest of the school year, but if he came by, which Emma was sure he must have, she never saw him. She felt like she and Blue had their very own ghost, their ever-present invisible father. She couldn’t tell anyone. It was bad enough they called her a lezzy—she didn’t want to be called a lezzy who saw