“You never helped me with my divorce out of the kindness of your heart. You were setting up an alibi.” My mom pauses a few feet from the witness she is about to badger, just shy of being able to poke his chest.
“Nicolas was going to leave you with pennies, Kristen. Of course I wanted to make sure your ex didn’t absolutely ruin your life just because he had a lawyer and you didn’t. I’m just sorry that you blurred the lines of my kindness. Babe—” Mr. Fuller turns toward his wife, his body rigid and fists at his sides. This is the posture of a desperate man. “She’s twisting reality. And I’m so sorry you have to hear it. What happened was a mistake, but I guess to her . . . it meant more.”
Mistake.
He has no idea how much of a trigger that word is.
“Is Mrs. D’Angelo a mistake too?” I expect the words to be coming from my mouth, but they aren’t. Lucas has injected himself into this mess, standing up to his father and hitting him at his weakest point.
“The twins’ mom?” Mrs. Fuller is catching on. She strides toward her husband and shoves at his shoulder. He desperately grabs at her wrist, catching it to block her swings, but she comes at him with another shove.
“Who told you that? Did she?” Mr. Fuller points at my mother, his finger a searing point right at her nose. It’s a marvel my mom doesn’t bite it off.
“I did,” I step in. My body is trembling, but sometimes dominoes make a big quake when they fall. And the ones toppling now? They’re enormous.
“Baby, she’s lying. I mean, come on!” Todd Fuller’s nervous laughter is paired with a whole lot of sweat. He’s literally backed into a corner. The only thing left to do is to put him out of his misery. And the only person who deserves to do that is my mom.
“Tell me everything,” Mrs. Fuller says, magic words that are about to change the face of her family forever.
The truth takes almost an hour to piece together between us, both me and Lucas’s mom filling in gaps as my mom shares the true side of her story. When all is said and done, the illusion Todd Fuller worked so hard to create is a long-gone mirage, and the carnage left in its wake is irreparable.
As my parents’ marriage was rapidly approaching a cliff, Mr. Fuller was just beginning to stray from his wife. It started during football camp our freshman year, when he and Natalia D’Angelo both volunteered as chaperones for the team trip down to Florida. Two weeks at a resort hotel while the boys were busy being molded for the gridiron gave them idle time, and I guess somewhere along the way, their fucking clothes fell off.
Lucas’s mom was becoming suspicious, and when his dad caught her checking his phone, he panicked and changed the contact name from NATALIA, to ?MAYBE. His clever ruse sent her searching the wrong rabbit hole, and while the real texts my mother had with Lucas’s dad were short, curt and confined to legal business, the fake ones were dirty and disheartening. That’s because those texts were with Natalia, whom he has been sleeping with for almost three years now.
Mr. Fuller hooked my mom into his web by taking advantage of her despair. My parents were separated and my father was not going to pay to support me. Of course, he didn’t really want me either. So when the kind neighbor whose name is on the letterhead for a fancy Indianapolis family law firm offered to help her out, pro bono, my mom leapt at the offer. It meant she sometimes had to drive downtown to meet him, and sit through after-hours negotiations with my dad’s lawyer with Todd Fuller at her side. Not wanting to be a complete snake, when he negotiated a settlement of ten grand to cover my mom’s legal expenses, Mr. Fuller gave that money to her. He handed it over in a seedy manila envelope, and he did it like that because he knew his wife was watching—or at least the private investigator she’d hired a month before was.
A spiraling drinking habit coupled with a prescription overdose led to a complete breakdown, and that’s when Lucas’s mom went into the hospital. My parents’ divorce finalized that same week, and from her hospital bed, Mrs. Fuller begged her husband to end it with my mom. She played right into his hands, telling him she already knew everything. Of course she did. He made sure she knew what he wanted her to, which was nowhere close to the truth.
His long business trips while his wife struggled to find her mind weren’t really about business. While Mr. Fuller snuck off with his son’s best friend’s mom, Lucas was terrified that his mom would never be the same. He spent every free moment with her in the hospital and then eventually at home when she was released. She didn’t go back to work for three months, the demands of her ad agency job too much to handle. Her son held her together. And he made her promises.
He did whatever she asked. And when the ask came to cut me out of his life, he did it. I was already deep in my own shattered family crisis, helping my mom angrily pack up my father’s things for donation and acting as the go-between for some of their phone conversations when he refused to pay bills he still owed her for. I didn’t exactly reach out, but only because Lucas didn’t either. The polarizing effect was a widening divide that made it easy for Lucas to buy into his father’s lies. And since I was so used to being tossed away, I assumed Lucas and my dad were alike.
“Get. Out!”
Those two punctuated words, screamed by Lucas’s mom, cut off Todd Fuller’s litany of reasons and excuses. He stammers out a few more words, his face red and his arms flailing, fingers pointing. His fingers are always pointing—everywhere but to himself.
“Babe, you’re not being rational,” he says, belittling her in front of all of us. This time, though, instead of falling apart, she doubles in size and strength.
“So help me God, Todd, if you do not run upstairs and grab a bag full of your shit and leave this house right now, I will throw your things out the window and advertise free yard sale goods,” Lucas’s mom says.
Abby chortles over my shoulder, and I turn with my mouth wide. I almost forgot she’s there. I am so rapt by the truth that I haven’t looked around at all throughout the shouting. I’m too focused on inserting my facts where I finally discover they fit. Sometime, though, in the middle of it all, Tory walked up. He stays back to let the chaos roll, but he’s definitely close enough to hear the heartbreaking facts that pertain to him.
“Tory,” I croak. Lucas turns to see his friend. Abby shoots around on her heels. And the adults behaving like children let their shouting simmer into sudden quiet.
Tory’s jaw is tense, a brewing anger in his eyes that’s so opposite of the good-humored prankster that usually lives there. His glare is set on Lucas’s dad as he moves forward, parting our small crowd. He stops at his friend’s chest and places his palm flat over Lucas’s heart, patting it kindly but firmly, a gesture that says, “I got this one.”
It takes him approximately five more steps to square his body with Todd Fuller’s, and even though Lucas’s dad has about four inches on him, the youth and discipline Tory has in the gym make him no match.
“Leave my family the fuck alone,” he says. “Oh, and your son . . . he’s going to MIT. And you . . . you were a shitty football player.”
The swing is hard and swift, Tory’s fist landing in the soft cushion that separates Mr. Fuller’s top teeth from his bottom along his cheek. The cracking sound is sharp and timed perfectly with the landing. A broken jaw is probably pretty painful. But even more so is an obliterated ego, which Tory puts the final nail in before walking back to his car and speeding away.