Blended

Chapter 4

AT FIRST THE word “divorce” scared me. It was like our family had come down with a horrible, incurable disease or something. Like that Kool-Aid pitcher, we were shattered, and my parents couldn’t fix whatever was wrong.
I was stupid sad after Dad left. I looked at a map of the United States at school. The distance from Ohio to California was so huge-he coulda been on another planet. It would take three days just to drive there! But even if he had just moved across town, he was gone from me. I couldn’t see him or sit in his lap when I wanted to or needed to.
And never mind what he said, deep inside I did feel like it was partly my fault. I’d messed up a lot. The Kool-Aid. The cupcakes. Then there was the time they’d given me a necklace after my first piano recital-it was a shiny musical note on a silver chain. Mom had warned me not to wear it to soccer practice, but I didn’t listen. It fell off on the field somewhere and I couldn’t find it. They said they were disappointed in me. That made my stomach hurt. So yeah, I really was one big frustration.
During those first few weeks after Dad left, I spent the days walking around what was now the house for just me and Mom, touching all the “Dad places”: the green kitchen chair-the one that didn’t wobble; the empty bathroom shelf where he used to keep his aftershave that smelled like peppermint patties; the old pottery ashtray where he used to toss his keys.
After dinner I would carefully wash his favorite plate the blue ceramic one-even though it hadn’t been used, just so it wouldn’t get dusty. I’d put it back in the cupboard next to that big red bowling plate he’d won a couple of years ago. I don’t know why he didn’t take those when he moved out, but I was glad they were still there, ’cause maybe that meant he might come back, right?
Plus, Mom’s place was just so quiet all the time. So I hauled out my Casio again and again, just to make some noise.
When my parents finally got official custody papers with legal instructions from a judge, I guess that sealed everything. We were no longer a whole, but three separate pieces. A mom. A dad. A kid sliced in half. Actually, that made us four pieces-’cause I have to be two people: Mom’s Izzy and Dad’s Isabella.
But even though I got to go to the beach whenever I visited him, and even though Dad’s California house was awesome with a big old Steinway piano he got just for me- I always felt like a visitor. Which I was. I only visited him. Daddy wasn’t… home. But I got used to it. What choice did I have?
The system worked, basically, until last year. When Dad decided to move again. And suddenly he was just across town.
And now that he’s once again living in the same city as I do, the custody rules have changed. It took a little getting used to. Okay, truth? It took a lot of getting used to.