Chapter 3 - The Dinner Table
Rebecca came home at four-thirty PM, carrying two white paper bags from an boutique grocery store on Harvard Street. She was wearing her beige wool coat, her hair styled in the smooth blonde bob she maintained every three weeks, her gold earrings catching the afternoon light from the hallway window.
She set the grocery bags on the granite island, hummed a few bars of a pop song, and pulled out a bottle of white wine.
"Elias?" she called out, seeing my work boots sitting by the back door. "Why are you home so early? Did the site close because of the rain?"
I was sitting in the dark in the corner dining chair, my jacket still on, the ledger resting flat on my lap.
"The site didn't close," I said.
Rebecca turned around, holding a wine opener in her right hand. She frowned slightly, her eyes sweeping over my dusty trousers and unwashed face.
"You look terrible," she said, setting the wine bottle down with a small, irritated click. "And why are the lights off? Did you fix the garbage disposal like I asked you on Tuesday?"
"I hid under our bed this morning, Rebecca," I said quietly.
She froze for half a second. Her hand stayed resting on the neck of the wine bottle, her knuckles tightening slightly, but her face didn't break. She pulled her shoulders back, adopting the smooth, dismissive tone she used whenever I brought up household expenses.
"What on earth are you talking about?" she scoffed, turning back to the groceries. "Are you playing games now, Elias? You're forty-three years old."
"I hid under our bed at nine-twenty," I repeated, my voice remaining flat, low, and steady as an iron beam. "I watched Josephine come up the stairs in her school shoes. I heard her sit on our mattress, pull a bag of prescription amphetamines out of her backpack, and sob until she couldn't breathe because her heart was beating at a hundred and twenty beats a minute."
Rebecca stopped unpacking the bread. She didn't turn around.
"She’s stressed," Rebecca said quietly, her voice losing its cheerful cadence and hardening into something sharp and defensive. "It’s sophomore year. Everyone at Brookline High takes study aids. It’s competitive."
I stood up from the dining chair. The wooden legs scraped against the floorboards with a long, harsh shriek.
"Study aids?" I stepped closer to the kitchen island, pulling the black spiral ledger from my coat pocket and throwing it onto the granite counter between the organic lettuce and the wine bottle. "She’s taking forty milligrams of black-market methylphenidate a day, Rebecca! She’s taking Diazepam at night so her body doesn't shake itself apart! She’s vomiting in the school bathrooms!"
Rebecca glanced down at the open ledger page. Her eyes scanned her daughter’s tight handwriting for three seconds, then she pulled her gaze away, looking out the kitchen window at the fence line.
"She has to get into Tufts, Elias," Rebecca said, her voice dropping into a desperate, furious whisper. "Do you have any idea what the acceptance rate is now? Six percent! If she doesn't have a 4.0 and three AP courses by the end of this year, she’s nowhere! She’ll end up at a community college!"
"She’s fifteen years old!" I yelled, my voice finally breaking through the quiet of the house, echoing off the high ceilings I had installed five years ago. "She’s a child! She’s breaking down on our bedroom floor every afternoon because she thinks if she gets a B-plus, her life is over!"
"Because it IS over!" Rebecca turned on me, her face flushed red, her wine opener pointed at my chest like a small metallic weapon. "You don't understand how the world works outside your construction sites, Elias! You think you can just work hard and pay a mortgage and everything is fine? People look at us! They look at what we have, where Josephine goes to school, what clubs we belong to! I’m not going to let her be a failure!"
"Where did she get the money, Rebecca?" I asked, stepping right up to the edge of the granite.
Rebecca’s mouth closed tightly.
"Where did she get four hundred and twenty dollars to pay a kid named Marcus at her school?" I asked again, my voice dropping back down to an icy whisper. "Because I checked the safe in the closet today. The three thousand dollars I saved for our tax bill is gone."
Rebecca swallowed hard. She looked down at her polished fingernails.
"I took fifteen hundred for the club deposit," she muttered. "And... Josephine knew where I kept the remaining cash in my dresser. I knew she was taking twenty-dollar bills here and there. I let her take it."
I looked at my wife.
I looked at the woman I had married twenty years ago in a small chapel in Quincy, when we lived in a one-bedroom apartment with two folding chairs and a foam mattress on the floor.
"You knew," I whispered. "You knew she was buying drugs with our tax money, and you let her do it as long as her report card came back with A’s."
"I was helping her!" Rebecca shouted, tears finally spilling over her mascara, running down her cheeks in dark grey tracks. "I was keeping her focused! You were never here, Elias! You were out at five in the morning and back at eight at night! You left me to manage her entire future by myself!"
The front door opened.
The noise cut through the kitchen like a razor blade.
Josephine stood on the rug in the foyer, her navy backpack slung over one shoulder, her white high-top sneakers covered in wet autumn leaves.
May you like
She looked at her mother’s tear-stained face. She looked at me standing by the counter holding her black spiral ledger.
Her face went completely white. She dropped her backpack onto the floorboards, took one step backward toward the open door, and began to hyperventilate.
