Chapter 7

Days 50-51

By the time Jeremiah had entered high school, he had lived in six houses in four different towns. His mother liked to wander. Sometimes they’d move because she’d found a better job somewhere, other times it might have been because she was just bored of the neighborhood. He’d never been in one place long enough to make a best friend, and honestly never understood the feeling of being settled. Until he spent four consecutive years at Boston University, in fact, he’d never fully understood the notion of feeling “at home.” It was no wonder that he’d decided to stay in the area after graduating. He felt comfortable there, connected, and it seemed an obvious choice when he and Diana suddenly had to put down some roots. But even then, complacency never came easy to him. He could never escape the nagging feeling that things could change in an instant. Uprooting never seemed entirely out of the question to him. So, several weeks into the experiment, when he began to feel at ease and familiar with his routine and even a little bit comfortable with Brent, he should have been ready for the monkey wrench. But it caught him off guard, the way monkey wrenches will.

It was a Thursday, early evening, and he and Brent were scheduled to watch the clone at home. Jeremiah had already secured the last of a half-gallon container of coffee chip ice cream and had settled in on the couch.

“This is Family Dinner Night,” he said with a roll of his eyes. “Probably going to seem pretty lame to you.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know, it’s just a silly weekly routine. Diana makes a dinner, and we all have to clear our evening to make sure we’re there. It’s our scheduled family time, you know, to catch up and talk about things. You might find it sort of mundane, is all.”

“I think it’s kind of cool. My family never did that. What do you talk about?”

“Normal stuff, I don’t know. We’re just supposed to talk, reconnect and all that. Diana is a real stickler about it.” He didn’t mention, of course, that it was really all a charade—that he and Diana talked about pointless, useless things, avoiding discussion of any real issues. Secretly, though, Jeremiah had been looking forward to watching a Thursday dinner, eager, perhaps, for even the false sense of family they’d become so practiced at.

And that’s why he was so surprised when Diana wasn’t even there. The screen turned on to the clone and Parker sitting alone at the kitchen table, eating slices right out of a pizza box.

“That’s not like her,” Jeremiah told Brent, “to miss Thursday night. Where could she be?”

He knew exactly where she was.

“Maybe she had to work late?”

“That isn’t usually an option,” he said. “She’d never let me get away with it. Where the hell is she?”

Some romantic rendezvous with her secret lover.

“This is kind of a treat,” the clone said to Parker, “just the guys, having a manly dinner.”