Page 34 of Play Nice

I pressed her, but she wouldn’t repeat it. She claimed she never said anything.

—

The pineapple cup. The fort. I drank out of that cup. I played in that fort.

But the fort’s supposedly traumatic destruction? Bartering for a dollar over demon info? It thinks you’re funny and wants to be my friend? No recollection. Mom must have made all that up for the book. I almost text Daffy but think better of it.

Which leaves me to sit with myself. Which leaves me alone with a bad question.

If we don’t remember something, how can we be sure it never happened?

12

Edgewood Drive, huh,” says Danny, my Uber driver, and suddenly I regret not asking Dad to pick me up from the station and take me to the house.

After reading Mom’s book and her frankly quite compelling footnote allegation, I found it difficult to hold my tongue around my father, to pretend like the seed of doubt hadn’t been planted in my mind.

It made perfect sense why he hadn’t wanted us to read the book. When I looked at him now, his halo was askew.

“What’s with you?” Daphne had asked me when she dropped me off at the train on her way back to Hudson. “You’ve been acting weird since yesterday.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” I’d said, going through her glove compartment, where I discovered a bag of mushrooms. “Shrooms? What else am I going to find in here? A flower crown? A tie-dye T-shirt?”

“Stop going through my shit,” she’d said, slamming her glove compartment shut. “Is it the house? Because I told you. Leda and I don’t care if you don’t want to do it anymore.”

“I’m still going to work on the house.”

“Okay. Is it Alexandra? Are you all right to go back to the city? I’m sure you could stay with Dad. Or you can come up and crash on my couch.”

Sometimes, I loved my sister so much I felt like I might explode.

“Thanks, Daffy.” I kissed my fingers and touched her cheek. “Do you think Dad cheated on Mom with Amy?”

Daphne almost ran through a stop sign. “Dude! Why are you asking me this? Did Aunt Helen bring it up at the fucking funeral?”

“Yes,” I’d said, because I wasn’t ready to cop to reading the book. My sisters would see it as a betrayal, and it’d become a whole thing. I didn’t have the energy to puppy-eye my way out of the doghouse.

“Yeah,” she’d said. She didn’t seem surprised. “Figures.”

I sat up in the passenger seat. “I know this tea isn’t, like, piping hot, but it’s still tea.”

“It’s bullshit, is what it is. Dad and Amy only got together after he and Alexandra split. After he started taking us to dance.”

“They never met before then?” I’d asked as we pulled into the station.

“Maybe once or twice.” She paused. Shrugged. “For, like, a minute when he picked us up. Do you have any memory of Dad chatting up Amy after class? Because I don’t. Not until well after he’d moved out and we were getting carted back and forth. It’s just something Alexandra wanted to believe. Nothing was ever her fault.”

“Yeah,” I’d said, unbuckling my seat belt as I heard the train whistle in the distance. We hugged goodbye, and I wanted to leave my suspicion in the car with her, but it followed me to the train, back to the city. Tenacious. Parasitic.

It has me avoiding Dad. Other than having coordinated with him to install the smart lock and deal with the visit from the exterminator at Edgewood last week. And the electrician.

“I’m done after this,” he’d said. “You can take it from here.”

“Promise,” I’d said.

So I hadn’t even told him that I was planning on being here this weekend. Which is how I ended up in this Uber with Danny, who is desperate to talk to me.

“Number six Edgewood, yeah?” he says. We make eye contact in the rearview.