Say You'll Remember Me(62)

“Soooo I’ve been meaning to call you,” she said, swiveling the iPad to the tip screen.

“What about?” I said, hitting the 25 percent option and putting my card back in my wallet.

“The other day your parents were here.”

I froze. “Okay…”

“I just thought you’d want to know. They were with another couple having lunch. Your mom asked about you.”

“What did she want to know?” I asked.

“She asked if you still come in. She told her friends your best friend’s mom owns the place and that you’re a veterinarian. It was sort of braggy actually, kind of pissed me off.”

It pissed me off too.

What was the point in her talking about me? To stake some claim on my successes? To act like she had anything to do with them or that I was somehow the result of her parenting when she hadn’t so much as sent me a birthday card in twelve years?

“Thank you for letting me know,” I said.

“Yeah. Xavier? I know how shitty your childhood was. I mean, I know we weren’t close, but I saw enough. I wasn’t nice to her—and I might have served them old coffee the whole time they were here.”

I scoffed. “Thanks.”

“Anytime. You know, you can call me if you ever want to talk, or go get a drink or something.” She looked at me hopefully.

I put my wallet away. “Tell Donna hi,” I said, and I left.

The thing with my parents bothered me all day. There was something unnerving knowing they were lurking in my spaces. Getting more comfortable with adjacency to me. It was one thing to see them watching my stories or to get guilt phone calls from their friends, but it was something else for my parents to be somewhere they could actually bump into me.

I had a humming under my skin that I was so unused to, it took me half the day to even realize what it was. Anxiety. They’d shaken me up enough to make me anxious. The way I used to feel twenty-four-seven living with them, like something bad was going to happen and I didn’t know what and I had to be braced for it.

Back then the sound of the front door opening or a floorboard creaking could send me into a panic. It took years to unlearn that response. And now it was back.

I was almost thirty, I was six two. I was not a scared little kid or a lanky teenager, I was a grown man and they were two pathetic excuses for humans. I’d seen people ten times more intimidating than my parents in my line of work and I’d had to call them out for animal abuse or neglect and I had zero problems with that. But something about my parents shrank me. Made me feel five years old. And I hated it.

Later that night Samantha got home ten minutes after I did.

“How was your day?” I asked, kissing her hello.

“Ugh, exhausting. I found out the real reason they wanted everyone in the office,” she said, taking off her blazer. “They’re merging with Kraft Heinz.”

I drew my brows down. “They sold?”

“Yup.”

“What does that mean?” I asked, taking her jacket to hang.

“It means they didn’t like that we were cornering the organic mustard market. We outsell their organic brands. So they made the family a very good offer that they couldn’t refuse.”

“And your job?”

She shrugged. “Not changing. They said nothing’s really going to change except maybe our benefit package will get a little better.”

“Okay. Well that’s good.”

She pulled her hair into a ponytail. “How about you? How was your day?”

I blew a breath through my nose. “Let’s figure out food first. What do you want to eat?”

She wrapped her arms around my neck. “I want to eat whatever you would eat if I wasn’t here.”

I arched an eyebrow. “So whatever food Maggie and Tina have sent home with me?”

She laughed. “Okay. Your favorite restaurant, then. And can I wear one of your hoodies?”

“You can have anything of mine on your body, anytime.”

“Oh, I will absolutely take you up on that.”

We drove to Champlin and went to my favorite hole-in-the-wall sushi place, Ginza. I ordered us my favorites: gyoza, the hibachi, and an Old Man & the Sea, and a mango roll. Once we ordered our food, I told her what Janessa had said to me about my parents. I also told her how I was feeling about it.

“I don’t know why they still get to me,” I said.

“Because they’re your first bullies. For some reason you never grow out of the way you feel about the people who hurt you when you were a kid,” she said. “I’m still low-key terrified of Shannon Horwedel from the third grade. She made fun of some white shorts my mom had washed with a red shirt and it turned them pink. She called me Pinky the whole rest of the school year and got all the rest of the kids to call me that too. I hate her to this day. I saw her once at the Grove and I did this tuck-and-roll thing behind a bush.”

I snorted.

“You have way more reason to hate your parents than I have to hate Shannon,” she said, eating some edamame.

“I didn’t like how she was throwing around my profession. Like she was taking credit for what I’ve done with myself,” I said.

“Uh, she is,” she said. “Narcissists are the fucking worst.”