Mama V Says No Shrunken First Semester chapter 28 by maximally

Max's dad called the Sunday after move-in would have been.

Victoria took it at the kitchen island at six in the morning, in her robe, with Max on the dish towel next to her coffee and the phone face up between them on speaker. She said she didn't keep things from him anymore. It was dinnertime wherever his dad was. Behind him there was a restaurant, forks and a TV and a language Max couldn't place.

"V. Hey. Sorry, it's insane over here." His dad's voice came through the phone the way it always did, cheerful and a little far off, a guy calling in from the other side of the planet, which he was. "So he's really doing the gap year thing?"

"He's really doing it." Victoria was looking at Max. "He's very happy. He's helping Mamá with some things. He's figuring himself out."

"Good for him. Honestly? Good for him. I wish I'd done that." Ice moved in a glass. "Hey, did the lease guy ever call you back about the Benz?"

That was the whole call. Eleven minutes, and nine of them were the lease. His dad didn't ask to talk to him. He didn't ask what helping Mamá with some things meant, or why Max hadn't answered a text since July, or where the housing deposit had gone. At the end he said, "Tell him I said hey. Tell him I'm proud of him," and hung up before Victoria could say goodbye.

She set the phone down on the granite. "Your father says hey."

"I heard."

"He's proud of you, mijo."

"For what," Max said. "Not going?"

She'd told him in July. Max knew because he'd been in her bra for it, the first week, between the pharmacy and the lawyer she never actually called: a gap year, he wants to find himself, he's so mature about it. His dad had bought it in under a minute. Six weeks later, he still hadn't asked a single follow-up question. Brianna from Residential Life had asked more follow-up questions. Brianna had asked about the mini-fridge.

Max waited to feel sad about it. He poked at the place where it should have been, the way you'd tongue a filling. Nothing much was there. A small, flat annoyance, a shoelace come undone. Then the rest of the morning.

"He didn't ask about you once," Victoria said, mostly to herself.

"He never does," said Max. "You get used to it."

She looked at him for a second too long. Then she picked him up and put him in the front of her robe, against her skin, and drank her coffee.

*

It was Saturday, the thirtieth, day fifty, the start of Labor Day weekend, and the Charger was idling at the curb by noon.

brrap-brrap-brrap

Izzy came downstairs dressed to leave: cutoffs, Miguel's chain around her own neck now, sunglasses on her head, a tote bag over her shoulder with a towel hanging out of it. She didn't sit. She leaned both elbows on the island across from her mother and smiled the smile she used on cops.

"Miguel's cousin's doing a pool thing in Milpitas," she said. "Through Monday. I'm taking Max."

Victoria was paying the PG&E bill on her laptop. She didn't look up.

"No," she said.

Max, on the dish towel by the fruit bowl, sat very still.

He had heard Victoria say no to Izzy before. No to the nose ring. No to Coachella. No to a boy named Tanner with a neck tattoo of his own name. But every one of those had turned into a yes within the week, and none of them had been about him. About him, Victoria had never said no to Izzy. Not once. The list: yes. The briefs, the shower: yes. The night in Izzy's bed, the night at Miguel's: yes, yes. Max had counted. He was the only one in the house who still counted things.

Izzy laughed. "What?"

"No. He stays home."

"It's, like, two nights."

"No."

"You let me last time."

"Mama remembers last time." Victoria typed in a number, checked it, hit enter. "Mama drove to Santa Clara at midnight in her robe. Mama remembers."

"He was fine."

"I asked to come home," Max said.

Izzy's eyes cut to him and stayed there, hard. "Nobody asked you."

"Yeah," he said. "I noticed."

"Isabella." Victoria finally looked up. "From now on, you want to hold him, you ask him. In this house. And Mama's in the next room. That's the rule."

"Since when are there rules?"

"Since now."

Izzy straightened off the island. Something went across her face that Max had seen exactly once before, in Miguel's garage, when he'd said I want Mama: sharp and small and hurt, there and gone. Only this time it didn't go.

"You've never said no to me," she said. "Not one time. Not about him."

"Then this is the first time."

"You've never. You let me do everything."

"Mama knows," Victoria said. "Mama shouldn't have."

The Charger revved twice at the curb. Izzy didn't turn around.

"Okay," she said. Her voice had gone very light, and Max knew that voice, and his stomach dropped before she'd even started. "Okay, you know what? You want to know something, Mom? Since we're doing rules?"

"Izzy," Max said.

"No, she wants to know. She's being a mom now." She put both hands flat on the granite. "I did it. Him. I did that. I got the stuff from Miguel, in June, in the parking lot behind the Valero. He had two kinds. One wears off in, like, a week. The other one doesn't. I picked the other one, Mom. On purpose. And I put it in Max's beer in the garage while you were asleep with your face mask on. I made the folder. On a thumb drive, in June. I put it in his Calc folder and I changed the date so it'd look old. I made the forum account. I searched it. Four times, Mom. Me. I wrote the list. Twenty-one things, color-coded. My handwriting. I stood right there in the doorway while you found it." She was breathing hard. "He didn't do anything to himself. He doesn't want anything. He's never wanted anything in his life. I did it. I planned it. All of it."

The kitchen was quiet. The fridge hummed. Out at the curb, the Charger rumbled and coughed.

Max watched Victoria's face. He had watched it for fifty days from every angle there was, from below her chin and inside her blouse and down the length of her body, and he knew what it did when it was surprised. Her eyebrows went up first. Her mouth went round.

Neither of those things happened.

Victoria closed the laptop. She folded her hands on top of it. She looked at her daughter.

"Mama knows, mija," she said.

Izzy laughed again. It came out wrong. "No, you don't."

"Max took AP Stats," Victoria said. "Not calculus. He never had a Calc Two folder in his life. Mama sat in the parent conference. Mama knows what he took." She said it calmly, a woman reading back an order. "You write your sevens with a line through the middle, mija. Since kindergarten. So does the list. And the week after it happened, Mama was doing your laundry, and there was a little rubber cap in the lint trap. From a little bottle. Out of your gray hoodie. The same pocket as the vape, Isabella. You always use the same pocket."

Izzy didn't say anything.

"Mama threw it away," said Victoria.

"You knew," Max said.

It came out of him louder than he'd meant. Both of them looked at him.

"Since July?" He was standing up on the dish towel. His legs were shaking, and he was so angry it felt good. "You told Abuela I searched it four times. You told her it was my browser history. You talked about my forum. I was right there."

"Mama did," Victoria said. "Mama's sorry for that part."

"Which part?"

She didn't look away from him. He'd give her that, later, when he felt like giving her anything.

"If you did it to yourself," she said, "then it was a thing that happened to you, and Mama could take care of you, and nobody had to be in trouble. If Izzy did it, then Mama had to do something about Izzy. Mama had to call someone. Mama had to look at it." She smoothed the laptop lid with one palm. "So Mama looked at the other thing. Every time. The folder, the list, the cap. Mama picked the story where Mama got to keep you and keep her too. Mama knew it was a story. Mama picked it anyway."

Max stood on the towel with his fists clenched and nothing to hit.

"That's messed up," he said.

"Yes," said Victoria.

*

Somewhere in there, he thought about Artie.

He thought about her voice on the phone at one in the morning, on the twenty-second, saying I don't know who did it. She'd said it as if it were her fault. He'd stood on the screen with the answer in his mouth: a name, a weed guy, a Valero, a beer bottle in a garage. He'd known since the second week. He'd known the whole time she was zooming in on a screenshot of a Van.

And he hadn't told her.

He made himself look at why, standing there on the dish towel. Partly it was that Artie with a name would have been Artie with a target. She'd have come down the 880 with her keys in her fist and the Berkeley girl on speaker, and maybe the cops, and Izzy would have become the girl who did it to him, forever, in every room she ever walked into. Partly it was the thing he liked less. If nobody knew, then nobody had done this to him. Staying was something he'd picked. The second somebody else knew, he'd be the guy it happened to.

He didn't think that was a good reason. It was his reason. He was keeping it for now.

*

Izzy was staring at her mother.

"You knew," she said, "and you didn't even yell at me."

"Mija—"

"I left the list on your nightstand. I circled stuff in purple. I've been waiting since July for you to find out. I thought you'd scream. I thought you'd take my phone. I thought you'd at least—" Her voice cracked, and she shoved straight through it, angry at the crack. "I thought you'd look at me. For, like, one second. Instead of down your shirt."

Victoria opened her mouth. Izzy didn't let her.

"I didn't do it so you could have a baby, Mom. I did it because he was leaving and I wasn't. Because in September it was gonna be you and me in this house and you'd be on your phone and I'd be at Miguel's and nobody would talk. I thought if he was here, at least there'd be somebody here." She laughed, short and ugly. "And it worked. Everybody stayed. And now it's you and him, and I'm the one in the doorway."

Max thought about her in the doorway on the twenty-second, in Miguel's tank top, with wet eyes, nodding at nobody. He thought about her stealing him out of Victoria's blouse and holding him for ten minutes without a word. He hadn't known what that was. He knew now. He was still mad. Both things fit in him at once, and that surprised him less than it would have in July.

"I'd rather have both of you," Victoria said. "Mama would rather have both."

"You can't." Izzy wiped her face with the heel of her hand, hard, smearing her liner. "You don't get both. That's not how it works. Somebody always gets picked." She turned to Max. "Right? Go ahead. You tell her. You pick."

She put her hand down flat on the granite, palm up, at the far end of the dish towel. Her nails were chipped black. Her fingers were shaking.

Victoria didn't say anything. She didn't reach. She just turned her own hand over on the laptop lid, a foot away from him on the other side, and left it there, open.

Max looked at the two hands.

It wasn't far. Eighteen inches of granite, maybe, to either one. He'd crossed bigger distances that summer on worse terms. He thought about Izzy's fist closing around him on the couch at one in the morning: he's mine. He thought about Victoria's palm across his back in the steam, and Victoria with the rubber cap between two fingers over the trash can, deciding.

"I'm still mad at you," he said to Victoria.

"Okay."

"Like, a lot. For a while. You don't get to mijo me out of it."

"Okay, mijo."

"That was literally—" He breathed out through his nose. Then he turned to Izzy. "And I'm way madder at you. You put something in my beer. You made me a list."

"I know," Izzy said.

"And you still have my socks. The black ones. Tenth grade."

Izzy made a sound that was almost a laugh and almost not. "You knew about the socks?"

"You tried to suffocate me with one, Iz. It came up."

Then he walked across the granite to Victoria's palm. He didn't run. He didn't look back. He stepped up onto the heel of her hand, and sat down in the middle of it with his back to her fingers, and faced Izzy from there.

"I want Mama," he said. He said it on purpose this time, all the way through, so Izzy could hear that it was a choice. "And I'm still mad. Both."

Victoria's fingers closed around him, not all the way, just enough.

Izzy looked at the two of them. She took her hand back off the counter. She held it against her stomach with the other one, the way you'd hold a hand that had been shut in a door.

"Cool," she said. "Great. Have fun."

She walked out. The front door banged. Max heard her slides on the walk, and the Charger's door open, and Miguel saying something he couldn't make out, bro in the middle of it, and then nothing.

brrap-brrap-brrap

The Charger idled at the curb. It idled for one minute, and then five, and then twelve. Victoria didn't move. Max didn't either. Out the front window, through the gap in the curtains, he could see the back of Izzy's head in the passenger seat, not moving, and Miguel's hand on the wheel, not moving either.

At fourteen minutes, the engine cut out.

The car door opened. The front door opened. Izzy came back through the kitchen without looking at either of them and went upstairs with her tote bag still on her shoulder, and her bedroom door shut, not slammed.

A minute later, Victoria's phone buzzed on the laptop lid.

She turned it so he could read it.

izzy: tell max his socks are in the bottom of my closet. he can come get them himself

Max looked at it for a long time.

"Do you want Mama to tell her anything?" Victoria asked.

"Later," said Max. "I'm still mad."

She put the phone face down on the counter, next to the closed laptop and the paid bill, and kept her hand open around him, and neither of them said anything else for a while.