Treasure Island!!!

mother clarified. “He just wanted to eat in the car.”
    “You’re kidding.” I opened up the kitchen door, which led directly into the garage; there sat the Taurus, and in the Taurus sat Dad, with the windows all rolled up, staring straight ahead, slurping his coffee. He had a view of the rakes and the half-empty paint cans. I closed the door.
    “If he’s going to sit in the car,” I said, “why doesn’t he at least park it in the drive and enjoy the daylight?”
    “Maybe he likes the gloom,” Adrianna said.
    “He can’t handle anything,” I said.
    “It’s the quiet.”
    “If he wants
quiet
, he could have breakfast in the dining room.”
    “Or in his study.”
    “Or in a box.”
    “Stop it!” my mother cried. “ I WON’T HAVE YOU TWO CRITICIZING YOUR FATHER !” She dropped her dishtowel and left the room.
    Adrianna sighed and squeezed the plastic syrup bottle until it sighed and wheezed with her. “
I
didn’t say anything! Jeez, what is going
on
with everybody? I know they’re upset about me and Don, but come on; we’re adults; we have a right to pursue consensual sexual relationships.”
    I sat down beside her and studied her graceless attack on the waffles. The house seemed extraordinarily quiet, and the counter, which had not been thoroughly cleaned last night, was scabbed with applesauce. My mother was melting down in her bedroom; my father had traded the house for his car. “Those useless parents,” I said. “They have left me to tell you.”
    “Tell me what?” Adrianna said.
    I tried to say it gently, but in my enthusiasm, I blurted out the tale more coarsely than I planned.
    “Mom did
not
,” Adrianna said. “You’re so incredibly sick. You’ve always been jealous!”
    After fifteen minutes, in which I had to hold both her wrists to stop her from hitting me, she went from outright denial to an imaginative reworking of the facts. Maybe Mom had had a crush on Don, and Dad had been jealous. Maybe there had been a kiss, at most—a quaintly romantic kiss in the very distant past. I begged her to believe me; about our own mother I would never have thought to invent, let alone burnish, these facts.
    “She fucked him, Adrianna. Ask Don, or better yet, ask Mom.”
    I dragged her to our parents’ bedroom door, which was closed tight. From inside we heard the awful high sound of our mother weeping.
     
    *
     
    For the next few days our family freaked out in a quiet way. My father went to work, but when he came home, he pulled the car into the garage and stayed there. Adrianna, who parked her car in the driveway, went to work after he had left, and continued to sleep in the house, but avoided all contact with my mother. My mother, normally in constant motion, managed to appear convincingly as a slow-moving version of herself. She continued to cook dinners, to which only she and I sat down. In order not to talk about what was happening, we stared out the window at the crust of snow on the lawn or else talked—and this was the surprisingly nice part—about
Treasure Island
. For long stretches she would be silent, pulling abstractedly at her hair, and then she might suddenly refocus on me, and ask careful, light questions about “my project.”
    “So is it an essay you’re writing? Or as Adrianna said, a log book?”
    “No and no. I don’t even know what a log book is.”
    “A log book’s where the captain writes down all the daily information he needs to keep the ship in order. Things like the ship’s coordinates. And how the wind is blowing. Fuel and provisions. Who’s on crew and what sort of maintenance is going on.”
    “Okay, I get the idea.”
    “Barometer and visibility,” she said, perking up. “Temperature and tides. The state of the sea. Squall warnings.”
    “All right.” I tried to shut her up with a wave of my hand.
    “Continuous advance of the boat, distance, ground speed, sea state, waves, wind force and direction, clouds . . . ”
    “All right already! Enough already about the clouds!”
    There was a terrible silence—it reminded me of the wedding when Aunt Boothie’s wrap-a-round skirt fell off on the dance floor and everyone froze, even the band stopped playing.
    “Your father hates me,” she said. “All of you hate me for something I did twenty years ago.”
    “We don’t hate you,” I muttered. “It’s just . . . we don’t want to hear about it.”
    Earlier I’d found her sprawled on her bed with a satin box of mementos from her