Check, Please (Book #2)

Thirty-Three.

I'd only been home for about a week, but I was already counting the minutes until I went back to school. My family's house—though far from being small—felt suffocating, especially after a snowstorm kept us locked inside for three days. Thanks to the snow, my dad spent seventy-two hours in a bad mood because he was missing work, while my mom spent that time in a bad mood because my dad was home. Michael had conveniently disappeared to a friend's house right before the storm hit, which meant that I had the exclusive privilege of listening to them fight all day long. It was starting to feel like the set-up to The Shining, except it was hard to tell which one of us would play the role of Jack. 

By the time the weather cleared on Saturday morning, my cabin fever had reached such an unbearable level that I'd volunteered to shovel the driveway just so that I'd have an excuse to be alone. Personally, I thought it said a lot that I'd happily risk frostbite in order to get away from my family, and what it said was that my family was weird. It wasn't that I didn't like the idea of seeing my mom and dad, I just wished that there was a law preventing us from actually seeing each other for more than ten minutes at a time. Ten minutes was safe—it was hard for us to find something to argue about in less time than that.

Sometimes I wondered if the reason why we fought so often was because we didn't know each other very well. It always felt like we were strangers living in a house rather than the happy clan we pretended to be. All of us largely kept to ourselves, though occasionally I learned something about my parents or my brother that threw me for a loop. 

For instance, I hadn't known my mom was Jewish until my junior year of high school. 

Until that point, I'd always checked the 'Christian' box on forms that asked me for my religion—just like my dad—but, to be honest, I'd been a pretty apathetic church-goer from the beginning. I still dragged myself to church a few times a year, primarily when I was home for the holidays, but other than that, I was perfectly content to spend my Sunday mornings asleep in bed. If God did exist, I figured he'd understand. 

Still, religion was fiercely important to my dad's side of the family, and maybe that was why I was so surprised to discover that my mom didn't believe half of the things that she'd forced Michael and I to learn at our weekly Bible study sessions. The day I found out followed three years of suspicion—not that Mom was driving across town to volunteer at a Jewish nursing home, but rather that she was sneaking out to have an affair. It had made sense at the time, at least to me. Mom always made an effort to look nice when she went out in public, but on Wednesday and Sunday, it was different. Like clockwork, on those days she would disappear for hours after carefully styling her hair and ironing a pretty dress. Dad was rarely around to watch her leave and come back, but when he was, she would tell him that she was on her way to a book club. Or a nail appointment. Or the mall. Or somewhere that he wasn't. 

I tried to talk to Michael about my suspicions more than once but each time he'd simply scoffed and blown me off. "Mom doesn't give a shit about Dad," he explained one day. "But she'd never cheat on him. Let it go."

But I couldn't.

And so, the week after Parker got his car, I recruited him to help me follow my mom around town in an attempt to uncover the truth. I'd been expecting to see her pull into some Lothario's driveway, not the parking lot of the Beth Sholom Assisted Living Facility. I stared from across the street as Mom stepped out of her car, startled when she lifted her head and met my eye. Her lips parted and we studied each other for a long moment until I finally nodded and she did the same. Somehow I'd understood not to bring up what I'd seen with Dad, and with that small gesture, it became our secret, although I had a feeling that somehow Michael knew, too. Mom and I never talked about it, though I often wondered if maybe someday we would.