Page 3 of Thicker Than Water
“I thought everyone loved Dad’s boss,” Aiden says. “Didn’t he, like, save the company by turning in some dude for fraud?”
“The merger thing?” Sienna clarifies. “Big deal.”
This is not the first time Jason’s boss has been in the news. A couple years ago, Gavin had been set to merge Integrity Plus with a rival home services company, Higher Home Improvement. But when Gavin discovered that his soon-to-be partner had been falsifying financial records, he reported him to the IRS.Our name is Integrity Plus for a reason, Gavin told a reporter, who’d caught wind of the failed merger, and in the end, when Higher Home folded—the fallout from an enormous fine and a mountain of back taxes—Integrity Plus absorbed a lot of their customers anyway.
“Anyone can do the right thing once,” Sienna continues. “It’s the bad things they do that define them.”
“Guess we can’t define you, then,” I joke, “since you’re a literal angel.”
Sienna feigns a bashful smile. Then she lifts one hand to just above her head, moves it in tight circles as if rubbing something invisible.
“I’m polishing my halo,” she explains.
“It’s very pretty.”
“Here.” Sienna mimes plucking the halo from the air and placing it above my head. “You should borrow it, since you’re an angel, too, and your halo is… at the cleaners,” she improvises.
“It’ll go witheverything!” I say, and Aiden rolls his eyes again, impatient with our antics.
“Can I go now?” he asks.
Sienna dismisses him with a wave. Aiden takes a couple steps but stops before turning the corner. Without looking back, he asks, “When’s Dad getting home?”
It takes me a moment to realize he’s addressing me. “Oh! Probablynot for another hour. He had a late sales call. Why, do you need help with something? I can—”
“No,” he says. Then he clomps through the front hallway and plods up the stairs.
Sienna arches an eyebrow at me. “That’s partially on you, you know.”
“What is?”
“That.” She gestures to the space where Aiden stood. “You need to speak up. Tell him he’s being weird and dismissive and it’s bumming you out.”
I shake my head. “I don’t want to make it worse.”
“Jules. Did you learn nothing fromLiar Liar? Wejustrewatched it.” She shoots her arms above her head, affects Jim Carrey’s shrill, victorious voice from the final courtroom scene: “And the truth… shall set you free!”
“He could be depressed or something,” I say, “and I’m not sure how to navigate that. I’ve been thinking I should call his doctor.”
Sienna drops her arms. “Maybe. What’s Jason say?”
“Nothing.”
“What do you mean ‘nothing’?”
“I haven’t brought it up. And he hasn’t seemed to notice. He’s been distracted lately, even before what happened to Gavin. He’s up for that big promotion—although, who knows if that’ll even be a thing now that his boss is dead—and he and I—”
I stop myself from mentioning it: the night in December that unraveled something between us.
“And you and him what?” Sienna asks. She never misses when I swallow my words.
Jason and I haven’t spoken of it much, except for his assurances that he’ll make things right. Still, it’s shadowed our interactions for months: quiet dinners, Aiden’s head shooting between us as ifkeeping score of our silence; the flinch of my hand whenever Jason reaches for it; the travel magazines he keeps bringing home for me, even though I’ve removed all my multicolored tabs from the ones I already have; the way I feigned sleep on Friday night when he slipped into bed, finally home from his post-conference dinner.
But Sienna doesn’t know that things have changed between me and Jason—it’s the rare secret I’ve kept from her—so I distract her from the question by letting her win. “Nothing. You’re right, I’ll talk to Jason about Aiden.”
Before this shift in Aiden’s demeanor, my son was softer, easier. He’d tell me about the play he wanted to audition for, the study hall teacher who lets him practice guitar instead of doing his homework, the kid in his English class who thought Julius Cesar wroteRomeo and Juliet. But back in December, he became stiff and guarded around me, like his skin, his muscles, had been replaced with armor, and I can’t help but wonder what he might have overheard between me and Jason. Or wonder, if he did overhear, why his resentment is aimed at me instead of his father.
“In the meantime,” I say, before Sienna can push the issue harder, “can you watch how you talk to Aiden? You shouldn’t scare him with the Gavin Reed stuff.”
