Last Seen Leaving by Caleb Roehrig Page B

more laid-back.”
    â€œShe used to be,” I said finally, my own peace offering. “Sort of. I mean, she could be kind of difficult sometimes? Like, if January said something even a little bit disrespectful, Tammy would start sobbing and going on about all her sacrifices and ‘this is the thanks I get’ and all that stuff. But she was usually pretty cool. She didn’t talk down to you, and she didn’t act like she thought you were too stupid to understand her.… She told jokes, and she laughed a lot, and she swore like a prison guard; she was fun.” I could remember being at January’s old condo, back before we were dating, sitting on the couch and watching Tammy blitz through the room, her mousy hair bundled up in a lopsided chignon. Nobody look at me, I’m a fucking mess! I’m going to sue Sarah Jessica Parker. Sex and the City did not prepare me to be a single woman in her thirties without designer heels and amazing sex! “Tammy changed a lot when she remarried. In their old condo, she had one of the walls in the kitchen covered with that chalkboard paint so people could write all over it? In their new house, she had white carpeting put down in one of the rooms on the first floor, and now no one’s allowed to even go in there because she doesn’t want it to get dirty.”
    â€œFortunately, it looks like they have more than enough rooms to spare,” Kaz remarked drily. “Still, though. Maybe January’s mom is the animatronic one. Walker owns a software company or something, right? Maybe he built a replacement Tammy and installed the Anal-Retentive Rich Lady personality as part of the upgrade.”
    â€œActually, January made almost that exact same joke.” I smiled at the memory. “I wouldn’t use the word upgrade when you mention it to her, though.”
    â€œI can’t believe she hates it here so much!” Kaz exclaimed suddenly. Doing a one-eighty, he walked backward next to me, spreading out his arms to encompass the receding mansion and the expansive, landscaped lawn. Even in late October, under gray skies, it was pretty impressive. “I mean, sure, it’s a little over the top, but it’s still freaking amazing. If I lived here, I’d spend all my time walking around these fields with my camera.”
    â€œYou’re a photographer?”
    â€œYeah. Well, I mean, you know, not really .” He swung back around. “I’m still a total amateur. I wanted to make photography my major, but my parents— Doctor and Doctor Bashiri—weren’t too amped about the idea, and they’re the ones paying my tuition, so…”
    â€œSo you’re studying premed?”
    â€œYeah. And, I mean, I don’t hate it; I always liked my science classes and stuff, and my parents have been prepping me for a medical career since I was, like, four, so it could be a lot worse.” He sounded doubtful, though. “It’s just … I don’t love it.”
    â€œAnd you love photography.”
    â€œIt’s, like, my passion.” He kept his eyes on his feet. “I got my first real camera for my tenth birthday, and I immediately went outside and took, like, a hundred super-close-up pictures of our birdfeeder. They were all totally out of focus, but I decided that made them ‘artistic,’ and I wanted to put them all over the walls of the dining room—because that was our feeder, get it?” He was laughing, but his face was pink with embarrassment. “I thought it was the deepest metaphor ever, and that if I took pictures of my pictures in the dining room, that picture could be put in a museum or something. Ugh .” He squeezed his eyes shut for a second. “I cannot believe what a freak I was. Thank God I didn’t have a Tumblr account back then.”
    I was laughing a little now, too, in spite of myself. “I take it your ‘human feeder’