JAMIE: Huh. I bet my mom was all over that. She was queen of the PTA.
SHAY: I remember.
（Silence.）
JAMIE: Why was your mom out so late? At the shelter?
SHAY: This was before that. In elementary, she worked retail—Payless, then Walmart, too. Looking back, her getting a second job should’ve been a clue something had changed.
JAMIE: What happened when she came home?
SHAY: She was tired. She came home with her clothes wilted, carrying weight in her shoulders. It made me nervous right off the bat. I should’ve listened to my instincts. But instead, I followed her. That annoyed her. She stopped in the living room and snapped, “What?”
I said, “Mrs. Carroll says I’m not allowed to go to the lock-in because you haven’t done your PTA hours.”
I knew immediately I’d said the wrong thing. She slammed her purse on the coffee table and said, “Is that right? I dropped the ball, huh?”
Her tone was the one she used whenever she argued with my dad—Nina, the self-righteous martyr. I said, “I’m the only person who can’t go.”
She rolled her eyes and said, “I’m trying to make rent, Shay, so we’re not sleeping in the street. Trying to keep you in clothes when you grow like a weed. I have to take care of you all by myself, since your father decided we weren’t worth his time. And this lady says I’m not doing enough?”
My vision kind of tunneled. I remember fixating on the scratches on the coffee table. I said, “Dad’s on a work trip.”
For some reason, that made her angrier. She wrestled out of her jacket, threw it on the floor, and said, “A work trip. Let me tell you a secret about Peter Herazen. Peter Herazen has better people to spend time with than us. More beautiful, sophisticated women. Your dad’s not on a trip, Shay. He left us. Because you and me are small potatoes.”
I said, “He didn’t.”
My mom always hated when I was soft. She said, “News flash. Welcome to men. This is what they do. They take your heart and your body, use it all up. And in return, they refuse to marry you. No Herazen name for us, oh no, god forbid. And they step out. Every time. They’re the ones who get to come and go. We’re the ones who are stuck.”
I was acutely aware she meant she’d been stuck with me.
She started rooting around in her purse and said, “Here I am, mending a broken heart, and they want me to volunteer for the f-ing PTA?”
I was certain of one thing: my dad might leave my mom—they did argue a lot—but he wouldn’t leave me. He and I had a tradition. Whenever he got home from a trip, the first thing he’d do was take my hand and walk me across the street to the park. He’d play any game I made up. For hours, I got his undivided attention. Most of the games I invented ended with him chasing me. He’d give me a head start, count until ten, then sprint after me around the park. I can still feel my heart pounding, my feet slapping the grass, that joy and the tiniest sliver of fear every time he caught me. I always screamed.
I loved it. For a few hours, I was my dad’s sole pursuit. We usually stayed at the park until the sun went down and the air was blue and dense like water. I can picture it so clearly.
JAMIE: So can I.
SHAY: Then he’d put me on his shoulders and carry me home. I was always a little scared up there, so he’d tease me, call me Shay, Queen of the Playground, to make me feel better.
He loved me. He would never leave.
I told my mom that, and she stopped searching in her purse for a cigarette and bent over until we were eye level. She said, “It’s hard now, but one day you’ll thank me for ripping off the Band-Aid. Your dad never wanted us, Shay. He used to leave for months at a time, and I wouldn’t know if it was for work or for play. When he came home, all he wanted was someone to wait on him. I had to beg him to spend time with you. Beg him to take you to the park, because you adored it. If your father did ever love us, it was never enough.”