How I Saved My Father's Life (and Ruined Everything Else) by Ann Hood Page A

they were two parts of one word: powder puff, coffee cake, Ava Pomme.
    â€œOf course I’d feel bad!” I said. “And so would you.”
    â€œBut if she died,” he said, “then Dad would come home.”
    As dumb as that was, even I considered the possibility.
    â€œI don’t like her,” Cody whispered, all sad and guilty.
    He made a list of all the things he didn’t like about her and decided to recite it to me right then, for about the millionth time. This was a trick he’d picked up from our mother, who had picked it up from her therapist.
    â€œHer tarts,” he told me.
    â€œHer tarts,” I reminded him, “are famous.”
    â€œI only like Pop-Tarts,” Cody said. Then he imitated Ava Pomme’s horrified voice: “Surely your mother doesn’t give you those?”
    â€œPop-Tarts,” I said, jumping to Ava’s defense, “are totally revolting.”
    â€œHer clothes,” Cody continued. “They’re black. All of them.”
    I sighed. “Of course they’re black. That’s sophisticated.” Our mother’s wardrobe of various types of khaki trousers—capri, flat front, side zipper, loose fit—floated through my mind.
    â€œThe noisy elevator that goes to her apartment,” he said.
    â€œCody,” I reminded him, “it goes to their apartment.”
    â€œIt’s for deliveries,” he practically shouted. “I hate that sliding grate that you have to close after you already closed the door. Then it goes up so slow, and it makes that noise that sounds like at any minute it will break and everyone in it—you and me and stupid Ava Pomme—will smash to death.”
    Twice Cody had hyperventilated in that elevator, forcing Ava Pomme to stick his head in a bag of tomatoes one time and a bag of sourdough bread the other time. When he caught his breath, he threw up: once in the elevator and once on Ava’s black shoes.
    â€œThat baby,” Cody said. “Zoe.”
    I frowned.
    â€œKiss your baby sister,” Cody said in his Ava Pomme voice.
    Zoe didn’t seem real to me. She didn’t do much of anything except get carried around and look cute. When I was a baby, my father used to carry me on his back in a big forest green backpack. I had pictures of that, with my parents standing together on a beach somewhere and my own baby face grinning out over my father’s shoulder. I loved those pictures. No Cody. No Ava Pomme. No Zoe. Just a family.
    The idea that Zoe would one day turn into a person, someone to contend with, made me nervous. I didn’t like to think about it.
    I hated divorce. It should be illegal or something. All it did was cause problems for everybody. Sometimes I felt like I was getting pecked apart by crows, pieces of me scattered from here to New York. I wished I was still whole, the way I had been before my mother messed up everything.
    One time, right after Baby Zoe was born and I was feeling about as low as I ever had, my mother came in my bedroom and found me crying. When she walked in, I put a pillow over my face so she couldn’t see me all red and blotchy and sad. She sat on the bed, took the pillow away, and put her cool hand on my forehead, the way she used to when I waslittle and felt sick to my stomach. “I know, I know,” she kept saying, but she didn’t know. She didn’t know that I thought everything was her fault. She didn’t know how it felt to have your father leave and marry some other woman and then have a new baby.
    So I told her. I sat up and let the pillow drop to the floor and shook her hand off my forehead and said, “It didn’t have to be like this! Why do you go and mess everything up?” She looked shocked. “How did I mess everything up?” Mom asked me. “By being so ordinary,” I told her. Then she started to cry, too. She said, “Oh, Madeline.” In a movie, we would have