The Amanda Project: Book One

The Amanda Project: Chapter Eleven

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Lately, whenever I came up the driveway to our house, I played a little game with myself. It's called: Name the point when a stranger would realize something is very, very wrong with this place. For a while after my mom left but before my dad lost his job, you could get all the way to the refrigerator before noticing a problem, and then you would have actually had to open the door and see there was nothing inside but some condiments, at which point you might wonder, what, exactly, the inhabitants of 90 Crab Apple Road were eating.

More recently, though, you couldn't make it up the driveway without knowing something was up. Back in December, my dad had stopped paying the guy who used to mow our lawn, and now it came almost up to my knees in some places. The light over the front door had burned out months ago, but no one had bothered to replace it, and there was a whole mess of leaves and twigs and dirt that had blown up onto the front porch during the storms we'd had over the winter.

Inside was where the real fun began, though. After my dad got fired, he came up with this whole plan to make furniture for a living. Now, this wasn't actually as crazy as it might sound-my dad makes beautiful furniture. We have this amazing dining room table that he built my mom for their anniversary last summer. It's created entirely of wood (even the pegs that hold the legs on are wood-there aren't any metal nails or anything) that he took from an old barn someone was tearing down to clear the way for one of the new developments that keep springing up in Orion. Right after he gave it to my mom, her boss came over for dinner, and his wife couldn't stop admiring it. She kept going, "Tell me what you want for it." And my dad kept going, "Oh, it's not for sale." And then she'd go, "I'll give you a thousand dollars." And my dad would say, "I'm sorry, Sheila, it's just not for sale." I swear, she got up to five thousand dollars before her husband finally told her to stop (I'd wanted to tell her to stop the second she opened her mouth).

You could tell my mom was irritated by the whole thing, and after they left, she went on one of her usual rants about people who think they can just buy up whatever they want and who are totally convinced everything has a price tag and what right do they have and how dare they and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Finally my dad managed to tease her out of it by going, "Okay, honey, just tell me what you want for doing all the dishes? I'll give you a thousand dollars. Two thousand dollars. Three thousand dollars if you throw in taking out the garbage." Finally she stopped being mad and started laughing and then they started kissing, and I was like, Give me a break, I'm going to bed! since I was already mad about having had to miss a night with my friends to have dinner with my mom's boring boss and his wife-the most annoying woman in the universe.

Sometimes, like when I think back on nights like that one, I'm convinced that what pushed my dad over the edge was that everyone kept assuming they'd been unhappy together. By Christmas, even his friends were saying things like, You know, Dan, she did pack a bag and take her computer and all of her files. She clearly left of her own volition. Maybe things with the two of you weren't actually as good as you thought they were. That just killed him. So to prove them wrong, he took all of this high-level security clearance from back when he was running security for my mom's NAVSTAR-GPS team (this was in Colorado, where they met), and he started using it to look into my mom's disappearance, logging into databases he wasn't supposed to use. That's when they fired him.

But sometimes I think if anyone, anyone had believed that she hadn't wanted to leave (even though technically she got in her car and drove away), that instead she'd gone because she was somehow chased or frightened into leaving by something (or someone), maybe he would have been able to make a life while he waited for her to come back. Maybe he could have gotten out of bed every morning in order to do something other than drink his way through the wine cellar they spent years creating and filling with their favorite vintages.