Getting Over Jack Wagner Read Online Free PDF Page B

crack a joke, to startle her, but I didn’t. I couldn’t. I felt too embarrassed for us both. Instead, I crept up to my room and drowned in “All I Need,” over and over, until Dad got home.
    As it turned out, my subtlety didn’t matter. Mom’s covert operation failed, the damaged chair proving to be a) too old, b) too soft, and c) too sentimental to be done away with. In the end, the scratches stayed, the chair stayed, and so did daily proof of the fact that my father would never be as committed to my mother as she wanted him to be.
    â€œWhat,” Dad replied to her. His tone was flat as an ink stamp. Living with Mom had drained the man of his energy, until his speech began losing punctuation. Question marks had been missing for at least a year. He hadn’t managed an exclamation point since 1979.
    â€œLook at her,” Mom snapped. I cringed, as I did every time she got angry with my father, wishing she would be nicer so he wouldn’t take off for Acapulco to team up with Mr. Sousa. “Her shirt. It’s a decal. From a mall. One of those shack-type places.” This was delivered as if the Everything Ts and Sunglass Shed were of a lower caste than the Gap and Crabtree & Evelyn.
    Dad sipped his beer, not even glancing at me. This was not unusual. He didn’t interact much with any of us, unless it involved passing food at the dinner table or changing channels on the TV. As a seven-and eight-year-old, this didn’t strike me as strange. For all I knew, this was how all fathers behaved. It wasn’t until I met Hannah’s family, and saw The Cosby Show for the first time, that I realized not all dads were as distant and disinterested as mine.
    â€œFor God’s sake, Linda,” he sighed, running a hand through his thinning, rumpled hair. A hiss of a sigh, like a tire sagging. Every day, a little more sagging. His chair, his shoulders, his tone of voice. “Leave the kid alone.”
    I was triumphant. At that moment, it didn’t matter that Dad never tucked me in at night. That he never taught me to ride a two-wheeler. That he never took me on secret Dairy Queen runs like Hannah’s dad. Sitting in his embattled armchair, he was my ally against my mother. When he disappeared less than a year later, it was for California, not Acapulco, and it seemed only appropriate that the chair was the first thing to hit the curb.
    *  *  *
    The June after fifth grade, exactly two months before Dad/Lou would leave us, my love for Jack Wagner grew more organized. My friends and I created a fan club for our rock stars named, brilliantly, Official Rock Star Fan Club. We convened on Saturday afternoons. We carried handmade club membership cards. We tossed around the phrases “old business,” “new business” and, for reasons unknown, “order in the court.”
    The ORSFC consisted of me, Hannah, Katie Brennan, and Cecilia Kim. Cecilia was the shyest among us. Her father sold home security systems and, maybe as a result, her life was airtight. She wore her hair caught back in long braids, pinched at the ends with rubber bands (not hair elastics, but actual rubber bands, the brown ones that came wrapped around broccoli and newspapers) and was not allowed to stay out past five or drink anything carbonated. Cecilia’s house was rigged with an elaborate security system, epitomized by the pulsing red dot in a corner of the living room ceiling that we tried to outsmart by squirming around the floor on our bellies. If the system got accidentally set off, we all knew the password—BABA, after Cecilia’s teddy bear—which Mr. Kim had chosen and which seemed, to me, the ultimate act of paternal love.
    Katie Brennan, on the other hand, was the renegade. Blond-haired and blue-eyed, she was a girl just killing time until she got old enough to date. She straightened her teeth with braces, curled her hair with Party Perms, experimented with