Page 48 of Only If You're Lucky
“But what are you going todowith that, though?”
“Honey,” my dad interrupts. “Let’s let her get unpacked first.”
“Right, right,” my mother says, holding up her hands. “And your friends?” she asks. “They’re good?”
“They’re good.”
I force myself to smile, walking around to the trunk and hoisting a duffel bag out of the back.
“Well, I would hope so, considering they’ve completely stolen you from us.”
“They haven’tstolenme,” I say, pulling the bag over my arm. “I’ve just been busy.”
“You’ll tell us all about them,” she continues, a command more than a question, before turning around and making her way back toward the house. My father nods at me, his version of a hug,before twisting around and trailing her silently. “Everything there is to know.”
Dinner goes by in the way it always does: the clinking of silverware against my mother’s best china, the three of us rattling off the kind of sterile small talk you’d expect to overhear at a networking event. It’s so vastly different than the family dinners I used to have at Eliza’s, I can’t help but compare them: the ever-present music filling their house compared to the long, heavy stretches of silence in ours. Their belly laughs and genuine conversation next to our stale, recycled lines. I know there’s nothing inherentlywrongwith my parents. They’ve always loved me, provided for me, given me whatever I’ve needed and more—it’s just that they don’t really seem to like each other that much. Their marriage feels like a transaction, purely business, and I am the output of twenty years’ worth of work. Maybe that’s why my mother hounds me so much about my life, my choices. Why my father always seems to be silently assessing me like I’m a line item in one of his spreadsheets.
I am an investment to them, their only child. If I fail, they fail, and everybody knows it.
My mother leaves my dad to the dishes once we’re finished and the two of us walk to my bedroom together, like she’s positive I must have forgotten the way. I open the door to find they’ve left it virtually untouched, the entire space like a time capsule preserving the person I used to be.
“You know, you can donate this stuff,” I say as I flip on the lights, scanning it all. The stuffed animals I used to sleep with are still propped on my bed like they’ve been waiting for me this entire time, disappointment stamped across their fuzzy faces at how long I’ve stayed away. The clothes I didn’t take to college are still hanging in my closet, by now outdated and most likely too small, and there’s even a picture of Eliza and me tacked to the wall: that one in ourgraduation caps, stiff smiles in the auditorium, the edges curling in on themselves like a ribbon of shaved wood. “I don’t need it anymore.”
“I would never,” she says, crossing her arms in the doorframe.
“You could make better use out of this room, too,” I say, taking in the faint lines of the vacuum on the carpet, the chemical smell of Windex on the windows. Imagining my mom coming in here, week after week, cleaning it for nobody. “Turn it into an office or something.”
“Why are you so eager to move on from us, Margot?”
I turn to face her, the comment taking me by surprise. I never really thought my mom registered the way I’m always shrugging her off, pushing her back, letting her adulation slip away like salt water on sunscreened skin. I never considered myself worthy of such praise—I know I am, and always have been, painfully average—so I always assumed she was doing it for her own benefit: inflating all my attributes, reciting them in the mirror like an affirmation, a prayer. Like if she said it often enough, I might actually become the daughter she always wanted me to be.
“I’m not,” I say, cheeks burning.
“You are. You never come home. We missed you on Thanksgiving.”
“I’m busy at school—”
“You’re avoiding us.”
My mother gestures vaguely around the room and I know what she’s saying, the silent insinuation: that I’m not only avoiding them, butthis.Her. Eliza and the memories of the two of us here, in this very room: faded pencil lines etched onto the trim, marking our growth spurts. The pictures we ripped out of magazines and taped to the wall. There are reminders of her everywhere, and I drop my bags on the floor and sit on the bed.
If only she knew the reminders were even stronger at school: between Lucy and Levi, Eliza is everywhere now. There’s nowhere safe.
“You should go see them,” my mom says, walking over to sit next to me. “I bet they’d love it.”
“Yeah,” I say, although the thought of visiting the Jeffersons is almost too much to bear.
“They’re bulldozing it, you know. Where it happened.”
I look at my mother, eyebrows lifting. Just like I’ve been avoiding home, I’ve been avoiding the thought of that place, too. Like a pothole in the road, a puddle in my path, my mind skirting around it if only to make myself more comfortable. I saw it on the news in the days immediately after, of course, that old, abandoned building with caution tape stretched tight across the ash-black entryways. Little red flags stuck in the grass, plastic flapping in the breeze.
“When?” I ask.
“Three weeks.”
“That’s good.”
“It is good,” she says. “They should have done it a long time ago. It’s completely unsafe, not to mention an eyesore.”
