Chapter 1
My name is Jason Mercer, and the night my father stood in the rain outside my brother's apartment door, I was the one who made him wait.
I want to start there because the waiting matters. Not the rain, not the flickering hallway light, not the charcoal suit he wore to important meetings at the firm now soaked through at the shoulders. What matters is that I was seventeen years old and I had the power to open a door or not open it, and that was the first time in eight months that I had possessed any power at all in a situation that involved my father. I want to be honest about what that felt like, which was not triumph and was not cruelty but was something quieter and more complicated than either of those words.
My mother died when I was fourteen. Ovarian cancer, fast, the kind that gives you time to understand what is happening but not enough time to accept it before it is already done. Her name was Patricia, and she had dark hair and a way of laughing that involved her whole face, and she used to keep a photo album on the lowest shelf of the living room bookcase so I could reach it without asking anyone for help. When she died, my father put the album in a box in the closet and I waited two weeks and then I took it back out and put it on the lowest shelf where it belonged, and he never said anything about it, which I took at the time as permission.
My father's name is David Mercer. He is a partner at a family law firm in Cincinnati, which is the detail that will become ironic later. He is a good lawyer. He was a good father for the first fourteen years of my life, which is a true thing I want to say plainly before I say the harder things, because the harder things are not the whole story and pretending they are would be its own kind of dishonesty.
He met Carla eighteen months after my mother died. She was introduced through a colleague, she was pleasant at the dinners I attended, and she seemed to make my father laugh in a way that I recognized from before and was glad to see return. When they married a year later, I stood beside my older brother Ryan at the ceremony and I was genuinely happy for my father, or as genuinely happy as a fifteen-year-old can be when his father is marrying someone who is not his mother fourteen months after his mother died.
What happened after the wedding happened slowly, the way that the worst things tend to happen, in increments small enough that each one seems manageable until you step back and see what they have accumulated into. Carla had two sons of her own from a previous marriage, both older, neither of whom lived at home. She had ideas about how a household should run that were different from my mother's ideas, which she was entitled to have, and which I tried to accommodate because I understood that this was her home now too and accommodation was the reasonable response.
What I could not accommodate was the specific quality of her attention to me, which was the attention of a person who has decided that something in her space does not belong there and is waiting, patiently and without urgency, for it to sort itself out. She never said anything cruel. She never raised her voice. She declined to attend my school events with my father, saying she thought it was important for us to have our father-son time, in the tone of someone doing me a favor. When I had friends over, she would appear in doorways and ask questions about when they were leaving. When I left dishes in the sink overnight, which I did twice, she discussed it at dinner in the careful language of someone raising a concern about household systems rather than directing it at any specific person, while looking at me.
My father watched all of this and said: she's still adjusting. He said: you both need time. He said: I know this is hard. He said all the sentences that translate to I see this and I am choosing not to intervene, wrapped in the language of patience and process.
The specific conversation that ended things happened in March. I was in the kitchen doing homework when Carla came home from lunch with a friend and I heard her on the phone in the hallway, not loud, not whispering, the middle register of a person who believes they are alone. She was telling whoever was on the other end that David had been looking into boarding schools for the fall. That there was a good one in Vermont. That it might be better for everyone, including Jason, to have some structure and independence.
May you like
I sat with my textbook open on the counter and I listened to her describe the arrangement as being in my interest, and I thought about my mother's photo album on the lowest shelf, and I thought about my father's silence at dinners, and I thought about the word everyone in the sentence better for everyone, and I understood.
I called Ryan from my bedroom. Ryan was twenty-four, working at a logistics company in Columbus, living in a two-bedroom apartment that had a pullout couch in the second room he used as a home office. He had always been the kind of older brother who answered when you called. He listened to the whole thing without interrupting. When I finished, he said: pack what matters. I'll be there Saturday.
