Friends from Home Page 9

  I said this to Michelle.

  “Well, if your daddy really does live here,” she countered, “then it’s not some stranger.”

  She was wrong, though. He was a stranger. I didn’t expect Michelle to understand why it suddenly felt that way. But I realized that it had been almost ten years since I had seen him, and I felt the weight of every one of them as I sat there in front of the house, afraid to move.

  She clicked the button to unlock the car and threw open her door. I knew she would walk up the path to the front door and ring the bell, with or without me. So I swallowed my fear, got out of the car, and followed her.

  In my fantasy, he answered the door himself, but of course he didn’t. Instead, the door swung open to reveal a woman of slight stature, with a close-cropped blond bob and pink lipstick. She looked to be in about her late twenties, and I felt my heart unclench a little bit. We had the wrong house. She regarded us with a furrowed brow and a confused expression as a miniature poodle trotted across the hall behind her, yapping.

  “Can I help y’all?” the woman asked, propping the door with a manicured hand, flashing long acrylic nails that looked like talons.

  “Um, sorry to bother you. I think . . . ,” I said.

  “We’re looking for David O’Brien,” Michelle jumped in.

  The woman sniffed but then turned to look over her shoulder. “David, honey,” she yelled loudly. Blood rushed to my head. “Some . . . girls are here to see you. Now, what is this about?”

  “We were just . . .”

  “This is Julie O’Brien,” Michelle said. “His daughter.”

  The woman immediately backed away from the doorway, blurring into the background of the entryway like a film dissolve. A man appeared in her place, his bulk filling the doorframe. He looked heavier and shorter than I remembered him, but there he was, with his same coarse, wiry eyebrows and broad shoulders. My father.

  He crossed his arms in front of his body and spoke before I could find my words. “Well, this is a surprise. Did Judy send you out here?”

  No greeting, no smile, no surprise. Nothing. Like I was a solicitor he wanted to dispatch as quickly as possible, instead of his daughter.

  “No. I found out you lived here and I . . . wanted to see you?” I didn’t mean for it to come out like a question, but it did, just the way it always had when I was scared. I hated my stupid, scared voice. When he didn’t respond, I thought maybe I hated him, too.

  “Mr. . . . O’Brien, sir,” Michelle began, polite but insistent. “Julie and I drove a long way to see you.”

  “Julie, maybe your friend can wait in the car while we talk? It’s been a long time.” He stretched out the word long, and I couldn’t tell if it was for emphasis or if he had developed a drawl in the decade I hadn’t seen him.

  Michelle stayed put. I couldn’t tell if I wanted her to never leave my side or to evaporate immediately.

  “Maybe we could get together another time,” I offered. “I know it’s a surprise, us just showing up. Is that your . . . is the woman your . . .”

  “She’s my girlfriend.” He slumped against the doorframe, and for a moment it looked like he had fallen and caught himself. I wondered if he could be drunk. “Look, Julie, I’m sorry. This is a surprise. I . . . it is good to see you. You’re almost all grown up.”

  A pause.

  “But I decided—we decided, Judy and me—a long time ago that, uh, I wasn’t cut out for the parent thing. Not then.”

  I took a step back, shrinking away.

  “And I don’t know about now, either. I’m just being honest. Don’t want to make more problems than I already have.” He sighed. “But look, here’s what. You could give me your number, and maybe I could try to call? Let you know the next time I’m down the Birmingham way? We could have lunch.”

  He didn’t pull out a cell phone, so I reached into my bag to search for a pen, my heart beating all the way up in my throat.

  And then I realized: Birmingham. Michelle hadn’t said where we had driven from, but he knew. He knew. My cheeks burned, humiliation and anger coursing through me as swiftly as my own blood.

  “You knew I was in Birmingham? The whole time?”

  “Well, Judy—your mom—”

  “No, you know what, you can’t have my number,” I spat. He could have come to see me anytime. He doesn’t care. He never cared. “And we’re leaving.”

  I heard him say my name, “Julie,” in weak protest, but Michelle and I were already barreling toward the car. We ran right through the flower bed, her hand in mine, and we didn’t look back.

  * * *

  • • •

  We pulled into my driveway at dusk. The sun hung low in the sky, sagging slowly behind our roof. Michelle and I hadn’t talked much on our drive home. I issued a matter-of-fact “Fuck him” when we got in the car, a declarative statement meant to sound more confident than I felt. Michelle said it back like an echo, “Fuck him,” even though she never swore, and then we let the radio take over.

  “Thanks for going anyway,” I told Michelle as I unbuckled my seat belt. “You’re the best best friend.” I had never meant it more.

  “You, too.”

  “Get home before your mom calls Rebecca’s entire family.”

  “And the police.” Michelle laughed. “But you know what? I’m staying, if that’s okay. I’ll just call and say I wanted to go over to your place for a while.” This was unusual: I could count the number of times Michelle had hung out at my house on one hand. I always stayed at hers.

  I looked at her, and she stared back at me. Her expression solemn, she just nodded. I’m staying. She knew when I needed her, in a way no one else in my life had ever seemed to.

  We walked up to the faded blue door together, me full of a mix of feelings toward my mom that I hadn’t felt before: sadness, but remorse, too. When she had kept me from calling my father, when she had stalled or lied about his visits, she wasn’t keeping him away from me because she was angry. She had been protecting me from him. From the fact that he couldn’t or didn’t want to be the kind of father I needed. She let me be angry with her instead.

  I kicked off my shoes quickly on the frayed mat next to the door, and I called out for her. She had said she’d be waiting for me for dinner after I got back from Rebecca’s.

  “Mom?” I called in the direction of her bedroom. “Michelle’s here.” There were only six rooms in our ranch house, so she must have heard me. Had she gone out? Then I walked into the kitchen and saw it. Scrawled on the whiteboard affixed to our refrigerator, a message: “Out with Hank. Left money for pizza. XO.”

  My desire to apologize to her melted away faster than an ice cream in an Alabama summer. She couldn’t have known that this, tonight, was the moment I most needed to see her, but I blamed her for it anyway. I opened the refrigerator door just to slam it shut. If everyone in my family could disappear at any moment, then fine. So could I.

  Michelle didn’t try to tell me this was okay. “I’m sorry,” she said quietly.

  “I was going to apologize to her. Tell her I knew why she didn’t want me to see him.”

  “You still can,” Michelle offered. “You can talk to her tomorrow. But you also don’t have to.”

  I made a noise that was somewhere between clearing my throat and a laugh, and I knew she recognized it to mean “as if.”

  “Let’s just go back to my place, then.” I started to follow her out the door, and she paused for a minute. “I’m not going to say this is all okay, because it’s not. But you have us, Julie. You’ve always had us.”

  I nodded, but the thought didn’t comfort me, not really. Right then, I didn’t care about whom I had, only whom I didn’t. My own mother, my own father.

  That night at Michelle’s, I did what I always did: I helped Marcia braise the chicken; I laughed at Rich’s stories about impo
ssible clients. Michelle said nothing about our trip, she didn’t bring up my dad again, but she also didn’t leave my side all night. It was true, I thought to myself, I did have the best best friend in the world. But as much as I wanted her family to truly be mine, they weren’t. I could sit on their veranda, sleep over in Michelle’s canopy bed, study Marcia’s movements as she expertly prepared dinner for the whole family—complete with a homemade pie. But it wouldn’t erase looking at my dad in that doorway, knowing that he didn’t really care if he ever saw me again. I hadn’t seen him since.

  There wasn’t anything for me in Alabama, not really. I started researching out-of-state colleges the very next day.

  CHAPTER 11

  The day of the bridal shower, I called an Uber to Michelle’s parents’ house.

  We drove through town, passing the Langham outpost of Jack’s burger chain, my old high school with hydrangeas blooming at the foot of a letter-board sign that saluted the football team with a go mustangs!, and the local library where I had once checked out musty Baby-Sitters Club paperbacks. When I finally wound my way up the hundred-foot drive to Michelle’s parents’ house, it felt like I had traveled back in time.

  The walk to the front door reminded me of dozens of times I had been dropped off there, a gift in my hand on my way to one of Michelle’s elaborate birthday parties. Marcia would meet me on the porch between the azalea planters and usher me inside, and I would feel equal parts happy and welcome, but also guilty that I wanted to be a part of their family so much more than I wanted to be a part of my own.

  Marcia opened the door this time, like always. Because I still pictured her in my mind at thirty-five, I was always surprised to notice that she had aged, but she had done so gracefully. Her porcelain skin seemed thinner, a bit stretched, but her foundation was immaculate—a look I could never achieve—and her green eyes still held their signature balance of sparkling warmth and subtle iciness. Another feature, clearly unchanged, that she was still taking seriously: the classic southern maxim “the higher the hair, the closer to God.”

  She pulled me in to kiss my cheek right away.

  “Darlin’! We’re just so happy to see you. It’s been so long since you’ve been here,” she added, a remark that could have been either an observation or a judgment. “Michelle is in the living room. Go on in.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” She looked down at my feet commandingly, one eyebrow raised, and I slipped off my sandals—no shoes in the Davis house, even during parties—and I smiled sheepishly in return, ending our wordless exchange in which she both reprimanded me as a daughter and then forgave me with a look. When I moved to New York, I learned that many people characterized the South by its “belles,” painting them with one brush as soft southern flowers, but this depiction rarely left room for the quiet strength and authority of its women. Marcia wasn’t a flower; she was an oak, unchangeable over the course of decades, like centuries of southern women before her.

  “The prodigal daughter returns,” she called out from the foyer as I made my way to where Michelle sat in the formal living room, flanked by the two earliest arrivals, her college sorority sisters Jen and Sylvie.

  “Hi, Julie,” they chorused together.

  I crossed the room hesitantly with my gift, as though I had disturbed a sisterhood that I didn’t belong to. I shrugged off the thought; I had known Michelle for longer than any of them. I also chided myself mentally for acting like a teenager back in the high school cafeteria, thinking of people as divided up into cliques. I smoothed the bottom of my dress as I sat down on the plush sofa across from Michelle, Jen, and Sylvie.

  “How are you?” Michelle asked, reaching across for a hug. “Tell me everything. Flight was good?”

  “I think I forgot how much strangers talk to you down here. I’ve been in New York too long. But, yes, everything’s good. Mark says hi.”

  “Mark is her boyfriend,” Michelle clarified to the others. “They’ve been together for a while. Over a year now!”

  Jen flashed me a knowing “you’re next” smile, displaying what seemed like a hundred perfect teeth, as Sylvie said, “How sweet!”

  I didn’t have a reply, and I was grateful when the doorbell rang, announcing the arrival of the next three shower guests.

  “We’ll talk more later,” Michelle mouthed at me.

  * * *

  • • •

  The shower consisted of the usual guessing games and storytelling about the bride and groom, mostly led by Michelle’s college cohort, who had known both Michelle and Jake from the beginning of their relationship.

  I watched as Michelle delicately folded colorful sheets of tissue paper pulled from gift bags to save for future use, a carbon copy of Marcia at our childhood birthday parties. She had always done the exact same thing, shadowing Michelle as she opened presents to ensure that nothing got torn and there was never a mess. I snapped photos as Michelle had instructed, while Sylvie sat next to me writing notes in a Lilly Pulitzer planner, matching each gift to its giver for future thank-you notes. Michelle detailed how she might use each thing, talking about desserts while she examined a KitchenAid mixer, and cooing as Jen praised a cobbler recipe as “totally perfect” for a summer picnic.

  I had no interest in talking to Michelle about any of these things. And still I felt excluded.

  Even though I made a show of rolling my eyes at Dana when Michelle posted floral arrangements on Instagram, and even though I spent hours at brunch complaining about the drama over the bridesmaid dresses, I was still somehow jealous of the intimacy. Of what I thought maybe we had lost. I hadn’t even known what to get Michelle for a shower gift. In September, I had seen a bauble necklace in the window of a boutique in Williamsburg that looked like something she would wear, and I bought it excitedly. Then I told Dana and Ritchie, and Dana informed me that bridal shower gifts were “like, houseware stuff,” and her sister had received mostly kitchen supplies. I couldn’t believe we were supposed to buy whisks and tea towels for our friends, but I put the necklace away for Christmas and bought a set of colorful, overpriced spatulas at Williams Sonoma. Looking at all the other gifts Michelle had opened, I was glad I had listened.

  Discreetly, I turned my phone faceup on the sofa next to me and typed a text.

  “Do you know how to make cherry cobbler?” I fired off to Dana.

  “Wtf?” she responded only a minute later. “Why would you ask me that?”

  * * *

  • • •

  After the last of the shower guests finally filed out three hours later, Marcia slipped into the kitchen to rinse plates, and I found myself in a rare moment alone with Michelle. I grabbed her hand and pulled her along with me toward the sofa, and when we sat down, I crossed my legs under me and faced her like we did when we were kids. She had launched back into discussion of wedding centerpieces when I surprised myself by blurting, “Michelle, how did you know?”

  “Know I wanted peonies? Well, it wasn’t going to be roses, was it?” She sniffed.

  “I meant . . . wait, what’s wrong with roses at a wedding?”

  “You’re not serious.”

  “What? Never mind. No, I mean, how did you know you wanted to marry Jake? You’ve been talking about it since college, but when did you really know?” Spending the day with her at the shower had finally made everything feel real: Michelle was really going to get married, and I was really going to stand up beside her. I wanted to understand what made her feel ready to bind her life to someone else’s, while meanwhile I didn’t even feel ready to commit to a commercial-free Hulu subscription. “And don’t give me any of that ‘I just know’ bullshit.”

  She laughed. “But it sort of is the kind of thing you just know, Julie. You feel it. We can’t all be as analytical as you.”

  “Okay, fine, so you always knew. When did you decide?”

  “Well.” She paused. “Maybe first right before w
e graduated, when he promised to do law school here because I wanted to stay near home. He was planning his future, see, and I knew I was in it. And then when Jen and Sylvie got married, and we went to their weddings together, I knew I wanted that for myself, too. For Jake and me, I mean.”

  I remembered that. Jake’s decision to stay in Alabama for law school because of Michelle made me realize for the first time that their relationship was truly serious.

  “I actually think Mark might be getting serious about us staying together, and I don’t know how I feel about it,” I told her, volunteering more than I had about our relationship in a long time. I hoped the admission would make it so that conversation could flow easily between us again, that we would finally feel as though we were standing on common ground. “He asked if I would move to Philadelphia if he goes to Penn for an MBA. I don’t know if it’s that I’m not sure about him, or if it’s just that I don’t see why things can’t stay the way they are. But what if I try to move and then I change my mind about him—or he changes his mind about me? There’s a lot of life left, Miche.”

  Michelle cocked her head quizzically. “Hon, you love Mark. Don’t you?”

  “I . . . yes?” Could it all be that simple? “He’s a big part of my life.”

  “Then maybe you’re overthinking it,” Michelle said, appearing satisfied. “Y’all are a wonderful couple. And when it’s the right time, I think you’ll know.”

  “But what if there’s never a right time?” Waiting for the “right time” was useful only to people who thought such a thing existed. I had never seen a reason to believe that any kind of fortune existed in life other than the luck you made for yourself.