The detail was extraordinary, actually — the kind of work that costs real money, a realistic portrait done by someone who knew what they were doing. Shading. The specific quality of light. Eyes that looked, from the shoulder of my eighteen-year-old son, directly at me.
Barbara.
My ex-husband David’s wife, whom he had married two years ago after dating for one, whom Marcus spent three nights a week with as part of the custody arrangement we had negotiated in the relatively civil aftermath of a not-very-civil marriage.
I knew Barbara.
She was pleasant enough. She was organized and kept a clean house and had opinions about nutrition that she shared freely. Marcus tolerated her with the specific neutrality of a teenager who has learned that tolerating is less expensive than resisting. He did not dislike her. He did not particularly like her. They coexisted in the way of people whose relationship has been assigned rather than chosen.
He had never, in my memory, mentioned her with warmth.
He had never mentioned her with anything that would make me think he would put her face on his body.
We sat at the kitchen table.
My heart was doing something I could feel in my throat.
“Love,” I said. “I need you to be honest with me. Why did you really do this?”
His smile disappeared.
“What? I thought you’d like it. She’s family.”
“That’s sweet,” I said, trying to keep my voice level, which required genuine effort. “But who paid for it?”
Because here was the thing about Marcus at eighteen: he had graduated high school two weeks earlier and was working twenty hours a week at a grocery store and had, as far as I knew, approximately two hundred dollars in his account, which he was saving toward the first month of his freshman year in the fall.
A realistic portrait tattoo like that cost four, five hundred dollars minimum.
“Dad paid for everything,” he said.
I looked at him.
“And why did your father decide to spend five hundred dollars putting his wife’s face on your arm?”
He started scratching his head.
He started shifting in his chair.
These were the Marcus tells I had been reading for eighteen years.
“Well,” he said. “It was kind of Dad’s idea.”
What he told me, across the kitchen table on a Sunday morning in June, while my coffee got cold, was this:
David and Barbara had been going through a difficult period. Barbara apparently felt that the family didn’t function like a real family — that Marcus kept her at arm’s length, that David didn’t insist on more integration, that the household had a quality of coexistence rather than belonging. She wanted to feel like a real stepmother. She wanted to feel like she mattered.
David, who I knew well enough to recognize his particular problem-solving style, had landed on a solution.
If Marcus would get the tattoo, it would show Barbara she was truly part of the family. It would mean something permanent. It would be a gesture of belonging that could not be taken back.
Marcus had agreed.
Not for free.
A favor for a favor.
“What favor?” I said.
He hesitated.
He looked at the table.
He looked at the window.
“Marcus,” I said.
“I helped Dad save his marriage,” he said. “And he agreed to help me with my situation.”
“What situation?”
Another hesitation. Longer this time. The hesitation of someone who has been carrying a thing and is now handing it over and is not sure what happens next.
“The apartment,” he said.
I looked at him.
“What apartment?”
Here is what Marcus had not told me, which I am going to tell you in the order I understood it, because the order matters.
Marcus had not been planning to go to college in the fall.
He had been planning to move into an apartment with his girlfriend, Lily, whom he had been dating for fourteen months and whom I knew about but had not known was this serious.
The apartment required a security deposit, first month, and last month.
Marcus did not have this money.
