“Maybe talking about her cooking is helping her cope,” Nicki says to M.
I am going to slap these two in a minute. Why can’t they let it go?
“Is he going to make it?” M asks in a voice barely above a whisper.
“Who?” We are officially in the Twilight Zone. What is she talking about?
“Your dad,” they both stage-whisper at once, and neither says “jinx.”
There’re a few seconds of silence as I try to make sense of this. We were talking potatoes, weren’t we? Where on the planet does my dad fit in here?
“My dad?” I finally ask, still not comprehending.
Now they look confused. M cocks her head at me and squints her eyes. “Everyone heard. It was on the police scanner the janitor keeps in the side office. It was your dad they said. He had a heart attack or stroke or something. He collapsed, a bunch of people saw it! That’s why you got called to the office this morning. That’s why your mom was here.” Nicki is nodding, agreeing with M.
“What . . . what? WHAT?” It’s the only word I can muster.
Nicki makes a little cucumber stack in the container, waiting for me to say something else, but I can’t. I feel like someone dropped me on an alien planet and forgot to tell me what language the natives speak.
“Maybe it wasn’t a heart attack?” M finally asks.
Suddenly I flash on a bunch of little moments from my morning: the looks of sympathy and kind glances from normally mean or indifferent kids, Mr. Kraft tactfully ignoring my late entry into homeroom, the click of Kayla’s French manicure as she brushed my shoulder. They thought something had happened to my dad. It suddenly makes sense. But it also makes no sense. How did we go from a bee sting kit to this? If something did happen to him, my mom would have told me when she was here, right?
“It was my bee allergy stuff,” I say dumbly to Nicki and M.
Now they look lost. I start to explain, but only get to the part about going to the school office and seeing my mom there. I stop talking when Jerrod, a really cute guy from the water polo team, passes by and says, “Hang in there, Ariel.”
And just like that I choose to play a part. “Thanks, Jerrod, I will,” I say and smile bravely. Jerrod winks and gives me a thumbs-up.
M and Nicki just stare at me.
For once all three of us are speechless.
Once Misunderstood Twice Baked Potatoes
4 large baking potatoes
2 T. butter
¼ C. or less milk
½ C. sharp cheddar cheese, grated
5 slices bacon, cooked crisp and crumbled
1 T. grated onion
1 t. minced garlic
salt and pepper
crushed (seasoned) dry stuffing mix
Preheat oven to 425°. Scrub potatoes and prick several times with a fork (or they will explode and dump potato guts all over your oven—trust me on this). Put potatoes directly on middle rack in oven and bake about 35 minutes, or until they feel soft and squishy inside when poked. Using a kitchen towel or pot holder, remove them and cut them in half. Use a spoon to scoop the soft baked potato into a bowl. Use an electric mixer to beat the potatoes with the milk. Use just enough milk to make the potatoes creamy but still very thick. Stir in all the other ingredients. Spoon the potato mixture back into the skins. Put them in a 13x9˝ pan, cover with tin foil, and return to oven for 15 minutes.
My Really Old, Kinda Famous Dad
I should back up and explain something about my dad and why it is in the realm of the believable that he had a stroke or something. And why everyone would care if he did. The first thing is he’s old. Really old. Sixty-six “years young,” as he likes to say (and I hate that stupid expression more than you can ever know). He is my mom’s second husband.
Mom married hubby numero uno right out of college, and they got divorced when she was twenty-eight. They lived in San Francisco and didn’t have kids. They drank a lot of coffee at little artsy cafés and took ballroom dancing lessons. They were like that. I met “Stan the Ex” one time when we went to Disney World in Florida. He lives in Florida now. We met up with him at a dingy IHOP and my mom and he quizzed each other about old friends and acted quite friendly over a stack of buttermilk pancakes, while Ryan and I shredded napkins and kicked each other under the table in boredom.
Stan seemed nice actually. Apparently, and these are my mother’s words, they “were more like pals with mutual friends and shared activities, but not much else, so we decided to move on and stay friendly.” I always thought the idea of a nice divorce was odd. I mean, you’re purposefully killing this really serious relationship, and that can be friendly? M and I have talked about this a lot because her parents also had a friendly divorce. But that’s different.
I remember watching Stan closely, imagining him as my father. Obviously, if he was I wouldn’t be me, I mean the genes and all, but I wondered what it would be like if Mom had decided to have kids with him. I guess I wouldn’t be here at all, but in a purely imaginative way, I could see having a dad like Stan . . . so young and cute and normal. It made me ashamed thinking like that, like I was betraying my own father, which I guess I was. My dad is old, no way around that. It has embarrassed me a lot over the years. Strangers sometimes think he’s my grandfather.
My mom divorced Stan and thought she’d be a single gal forever, but then my dad came along. Mom was working at McPherson and Kidd, this huge law firm in San Francisco, and Dad came in one day to sign some stuff. He was a client, there for his business (more on that later), and Mom brought him Earl Grey tea and papers to sign. Dad complimented Mom’s silver bracelet. Mom noticed Dad’s thick white hair and thought it was distinguished (me and Ryan always groan at this part of the story). Dad was in his late forties, and Mom was like thirty.
My parents will launch into this “how we met” story at the slightest mention of the subject. It is creepy but cute at the same time. They got married six months after their first encounter. My brother Ryan was born eleven months after that, and I was born a couple of years after Ryan. By then my dad was fifty-three.
Everyone knows him too. My dad has lived in Alameda his whole life. His family has run a candy and confection store called Island Sweets since 1922. My dad took it over from Grandpa when he was still in his twenties, and has personally made it the loud, popular, crowded place it is today. Every kid in Alameda has eaten a Chocolate Lava Lover’s Birthday Cakelet (you get one for free on your birthday). Dad also does these zany ads on local cable where he acts like different characters from movies and does little spoofy skits that somehow involve stuff the store sells. All of them are quite embarrassing. He has tried to get Ryan and me to be in a couple, but there is a less than zero chance I would ever do it. The ads are seriously dorky.
All this is to say that my dad is old and well-known here in Alameda. His name on a police scanner is something people would notice and want to gossip about. It is a freakish coincidence that my mom came to school and this rumor about Dad happened at the same time. I need to call home and ask my mom about this crazy story, and then figure out how to handle the other kids.
Dang though, it is really cool having everyone pay so much attention to me (and not because of my bra size or my hair color) and be so nice. I wish, in a weird way, it were true about Dad. I mean, true that something dramatic happened to him, but that he is okay and all, of course. Then I could keep the sympathy wagon rolling. I think I might be a bad person for just admitting that.
Nicki