Rules of the Road Read Free Page B

it’s fine to look the best you can, but when that’s the biggest thing you concentrate on, you can miss the fun of life’s grungier moments like hanging around in men’s pajamas, eating pork fried rice from the carton with chopsticks, and not caring how much gets ground in the rug.
    “Do you think he does miss us?” Faith asked.
    “I think he’s got a disease, Faith, that keeps him from being the person he could be.” I learned this when I went to Al-Anon, a group that helps families of alcoholics. Faith didn’t go. “Faith is handling things,” Mom explained. “She doesn’t have the memories you do, Jenna. She was so young when your dad and I divorced.” It made me feel like some big infected boil that needed lancing. Faith always got off easy.
    Faith looked at the cover of
Vogue
sadly. “Do you think he ever misses us, Jenna? I mean
really?
”
    I grabbed a garbage bag. “I don’t know.”
    “If he really cared about us, he’d stop drinking.”
    “It’s not that easy.”
    “
Well, don’t you think I know that, Jenna? What do you think I am, some moron?
”
    Faith flung her hand across a corner of the table, knocked my personal pile of
Travel and Leisure
magazines on the floor, ran into her room, and slammed the door.
    Part of me felt like kicking in her door, telling her to grow up. It wasn’t my fault she never saw Dad. It’s not like she was missing much. Everyone loses when Dad comes back.
    I knelt down to pick up the travel magazines, knocked one off the top with an article about Texas. “Everything is Bigger in Texas” the headline read. I threw it at Faith’s closed door.
    “
I don’t think you’re a moron,
” I shouted as Faith’s sobs filled the apartment.

    I was standing at the stove, having just flipped my world-class grilled mozzarella and tomato sandwich in the pan. It was perfectly brown on one side, the mozzarella cheese was melting and oozing from between the seven grain bread. Ooze was the whole point of a grilled cheese sandwich—my grandmother taught me that.
    I read my mother’s note that she had taped over the sink of dirty dishes:
    Someone wash these. It doesn’t matter who. What matters is that when I return home after ten hours on my feet patching up emergency patients that I will not see the pot roast pan from four days ago with petrified gravy still on it. Make no mistake about it—this is a test.
    It was signed, “YLM” for Your Loving Mother. Mom is an emergency-room nurse at St. Joseph’s Hospital and is working the night shift for the time and a half pay. We don’t see her much, which is hard, but Mom’s schedule is toughest on Faith. She needs more of Mom’s time than I do. Faith is at that age where she hasn’t seen enough of the world to know she can handle herself.
    Mom works hard to spend time with each of us. She and I like to take long walks together all around Chicago—being Type A personalities, we do our best talking when we’re moving. The thing we’ve got most in common is our independent streak—we know how to take care of ourselves and we like being on our own. But sometimes my mother goes into guilt overdrive. Saying how she should have been tougher on Dad and left him sooner. Then she tries to make up for everything in my life that she thinks made me the social zero that I am today.
    Wouldn’t you like to have a big party? she asks. I know we didn’t have your friends over much when you were younger, but parties are a good way to get to know more people.
    Not really, Mom. I don’t like crowds much.
    Maybe you should go to ballroom dancing class, Jenna. Having social dancing skills is always important later in life.
    The boys come up to my armpits, Mom.
    Maybe you shouldn’t work such long hours, honey. I’d like you to have time to just be a teenager.
    I’m trying to make money, Mother. I like selling shoes.
    I’m more like my dad than my mom. That used to scare me because I thought it meant I’d end up like him. But