Chapter 7: The Summer of 1985

The One Who Leaves—the summer Mom met Dad and everything changed

*Audio player is located at the end of the chapter. Scroll down to play.

Mom met Dad two years after her father died. It was the summer of 1985 when she heard a knock at the door. Looking out the window, she saw that it was Craig and her high school friend, Chris. She was about to tell them to come in when she saw someone at the curb, stepping out of Craig’s little Opel GT. In one squinted glance, her breath dissolved. She hit Chris on the arm and shot her chin into the air behind him.

“Who the fuck is that?” she asked.

Chris peered over his shoulder. “Oh. That’s Craig’s younger brother, Joe.”

“Man, are you crazy or what? How come you’ve never brought him over here?”

Chris looked back again and shrugged.

“I can barely get him to leave the house most days,” Craig said.

“He looks like a damn movie star. I’ve never seen someone so good looking in my whole life.”

Craig laughed a big laugh and shook his head. “All he does is sit in his room and read books.”

“Psh, well that’s gonna change,” Mom said. Then she tapped Chris on the arm again. “Hey, go tell him I love him.”

Craig and Chris both chuckled.

Dad turned to shut the car door and tucked a book into the waistline of his jeans against the small of his back. Mom noticed the way his sand-colored hair fell on his sun-drenched shoulders and the way his eyes looked like rainclouds, gray and wet and full of life. In a way, he looked like Craig, but the bones of his face were softer, more feminine, and his eyelashes were so long they created flickering shadows on his cheekbones.

“This is Tammy,” Chris said. “She’s my weed dealer.”

“She’s the one I told you about,” Craig said.

“I guess that makes me your dealer, too,” she said to Dad.

Dad’s face bloomed with color like the head of a radish fresh-picked from the earth.