Gina
“Damnit,” he swore quietly, thinking I couldn’t hear as he attempted once more to pick up a piece of broccoli with his chop sticks. He practically threw them down in exasperation and sat back against the couch, crossing his arms like a stubborn little four year old who wasn’t getting his way.
“Problems?” I asked as I stuck a carrot into my mouth and chewed it while waiting for an answer.
“Chopsticks are impossible. Can’t I go get a fork or something?” he said, the tone of his voice on the verge of whining. I never did quite understand why he didn’t just get up and go into the kitchen to get a fork. It wasn’t like when he was little when I could actually force him--teasingly--to use chopsticks.
“Oh come on, it’s easy,” I said.
“For you,” he retorted, picking up one of the sticks and beginning to push his food around his plate with it. “For me you may as well be taping my left hand to the desk to try and make me write with my right hand even though I can’t like Mrs. Baines in second grade.”
I nodded, remembering his bitch of a second grade teacher. She used to send him home with reports of bad penmanship all the time, but when I sat down with Parker to practice like she told me to, his writing was fine for an eight year old. Finally it was enough so that she called me in for a parent/teacher conference and that’s when I found out what had been happening. She’d been taping his left hand to the desk so that he’d have to write with his right hand. That was why he had come home in tears nearly everyday. And I was the one who sat on the couch to comfort him and I was the one who stood up for him and got him into a different class. Not Annie.
“It’s not as bad as all that. Here, I’ll show you,” I said, scooting over to where he was sitting. “Hold this one like you would hold a pencil.”
He did so.
“That’s how you hold a pencil?”
“Yeah...,” he said slowly.
“Oh. Well. Um, here, take this other one between these two fingers,” I said, putting the other one where it was supposed to go. “There, now you’re holding them correctly.”
“Yeah, but every time I try to move my hand, they fall,” he replied, demonstrating by attempting to pick up the same bit of broccoli he’d been trying to pick up for nearly an hour to get into his mouth and dropping it about halfway there. He had been expecting it, so his plate was underneath, ready to catch the whole time.
“Okay, okay. You win. Again. Go get a fork,” I said, waving him away.
“Finally,” he mumbled as he got up from his cross-legged position on the floor with his back against the couch. I watched him leave the room and go into the kitchen, unable to suppress a smile. He reminded me so much of Annie... Man, I wished I could get her out of my head for just a few minutes.
“I’m back,” he announced as if it were necessary.
“I see that,” I replied, scooping up the last bit of rice on my plate and putting it into my mouth.
“You suck,” he said as he finally started chewing the broccoli.
“Thank you so very much,” I said, jokingly narrowing my eyes.
“You’re welcome,” he said in an ironically apologetic tone.
“Remember when we used to arm wrestle each other?” I said out of the blue after a moment of silence between us.
“No, but I remember when we used to have pillow fights,” he replied, looking at me through those wine-glass blue eyes that I’ve always admired.
“Oh yeah,” I said, laughing at the memory of one of the times when he had been sick and was sleeping on the couch. It had been time to give him his medicine so I had to wake him up and when I did, he hit me with a pillow. A rather destructive pillow fight ensued, causing the breaking of a glass and aporcelain dog knick-knack from my sister that I had never liked much anyway.
“We never do that anymore,” he said. He scrunched up his nose in distaste. “Ick. This is cold. I’m going to go heat it up in the microwave.”
“All right,” I said, gesturing toward the kitchen.
I sighed, picking at the fraying fringes of one of the couch pillows. Suddenly, a mischievous plan came to mind.
I quietly stood up and picked the small pillow off of the couch. I hid it behind my back and sauntered casually into the kitchen, where Parker’s back was turned to me as he watched his food heat up in the microwave. It was too perfect.
I walked up behind him and easily bopped him in the back of the head with the pillow. He whirled around at the unexpected blow, with a surprised look on his face that made me wish I had had a camera with me.
“You are so dead!” he cried, chasing after me as I ran away from him into the living room, which I soon found was a bad move when I felt a blow to the side of my head with the remaining couch pillow.
And so it started. I swear we must have hit each other thousands of times, trying to knock the pillow the other one was holding out of their hands and claim victory. We went from room to room, picking up bigger pillows as we went along and giggling the whole time. Miraculously, nothing broke this time.
At the end, we had to call truce as we both fell onto the blue semi-shag rug in Parker’s bedroom, laughing our heads off, pillows by our sides.
“You should’ve seen your face!” I said between giggles, putting the pillow under my head as we lay there, staring at his plain white ceiling.
“That funny, huh?” he said, laughing too, though his were more quiet chuckles while mine were obnoxious chortles.
I nodded, which is hard to do when you’re laying down.
I calmed down after a moment and stared around the room at Parker’s belongings. His CD collection, his various posters, his comforter, some of his clothes that were strewn all over the floor and hanging out of his closet and dresser, a professional photograph I had done of the two of us hanging on the wall, a photograph of him and Taylor at Darien Lake the last we had seen the Hansons, and most of all, the photograph of him and Taylor as babies I had given him for his birthday. Before any of this had happened. I wished like hell we could go back and I could tell him that he couldn’t go to that concert with Theresa and her friends. But if there’s any one thing that I’ve learned in all my years (and there haven’t been that many of them despite what you may think--but I have to sound sage here for a second), it’s that you can’t rewind time. I’m just glad I didn’t have to learn it the hard way like Annie.
“Gina?” Parker said suddenly, his voice derailing my train of thought.
“Yeah, Parker?” I said.
“I love you,” he said, folding his arms under his head.
I smiled to myself.
“Thanks. I needed to hear that,” I said.
We were silent for another moment.
“Do you love me, too?” he asked.
I felt my brow crease as I propped myself up on my elbow and tried to look him straight into the eye. He averted them as if he expected me to say no.
“Parker,” I said slowly, playing with the sleeve of his shirt, “there isn’t one thing I can think of on this planet that I love more than I love you.”
He blushed.
“Even air?” he attempted to joke, but his voice faltered slightly. He cleared his throat.
“Even air,” I replied, smiling, getting a bit teary-eyed myself.
“But you couldn’t live without air,” he said, looking me in the eye for the first time.
“And I probably couldn’t live without you either,” I said.
He smiled coyly, the tears that had been threatening to spill over since the beginning of the conversation finally sliding silently down his cheek. We both sat up and hugged each other for the longest we had ever hugged. I began crying a little bit myself as I began thinking about the words I had just said to him.
It might have seemed like an overly sappy thing that anyone in my situation or one similar to it would’ve said if they had just been asked that question. But it was true for me. I don’t know if I would have still been on this earth if it weren’t for Parker. He was what motivated me to really straighten up. He was what motivated me to go back to school and get a good job. It was all him and my responsibility to him which I found disappearing more and more everyday.
“I’ll come back,” he promised in my ear.
I closed my eyes. My conscience was telling me that I needed to tell him not to say that yet. That he just might like it down there and decide to stay. That he might choose his mother and brother over me. But I didn’t because I wanted to believe what he had just said as much as he did.
An empty in-box is like an empty stomach.
Chapter Eight
Chapter Ten