Chapter 3: The Airport Comes Home

Carrie’s father Kevin came home in the afternoon with the particular energy of a man who had survived a trip to the airport and wanted credit for it. I had known him for eight years. He was about six-foot-two, extremely fit, muscular in the way men get when they decide the garage gym is not decorative. He was in his mid-forties and good-looking enough for an older man in the objective, almost clinical sense that even a shy girl can admit without it meaning anything. He made me laugh. He was a good dad to Carrie. I thought of him the way you think of furniture you like: present, solid, not a candidate for any other category. I had never once put him in a sexual sentence in my head. That would have been weird; he was Carrie’s dad and, in some ways, a surrogate for my old absent father.

Andrew was with him.

I had not really seen Andrew in almost three and a half years. Sure, there had been brief moments when he had decided to come home for break or a holiday, and we gave each other the kind of hello you give in a doorway while someone is looking for keys, or a wave as you park in the driveway as they are leaving in another car. The Andrew I remembered was the 18-year-old version, tall and super skinny, all gangly and awkward. His face was covered with acne, which he tried to hide by looking at the floor. He was shy, got nervous around girls, and never talked to me much, always seeming in a hurry to leave whatever room I walked into. He had always been nice to me in the small ways that matter. He was Carrie’s older brother and gross in the categorical sense; siblings’ brothers are supposed to be gross. Off-limits by the simple law of friendship and the fact that I had watched him eat cereal like the objective was to shovel as much into his mouth as rapidly as possible, regardless of how much ended up on the table, the floor, or himself.