Happy Endings Are All Alike. Sandra Scoppettone

Tylers always had a cocktail hour before dinner and Jaret and Chris were welcome to join in the conversation, a prerogative Jaret sometimes exercised but one Chris never did anymore. When he was home he was invariably in the room he had built for himself in the basement.

      This was one of the evenings Jaret had decided to sit with her parents, drinking the light vodka and tonic she was allowed since she turned eighteen. In the middle of their conversation, Chris, in satin soccer shorts and T-shirt, walked through the room.

      “Want to join us, Chris?” Bert asked, always hopeful.

      “Does a chicken have lips?” he answered, not bothering to look at anyone, continuing to walk toward the kitchen.

      “God, I’m sick of that expression,” Kay said. “Can’t you come up with something new?”

      He didn’t answer. They heard him head downstairs to his room.

      “I could strangle him,” Kay said.

      “Oh, Mom, he’s just at that age.”

      “The age of a moron.”

      “Remember what I was like when I was sixteen?” Jaret asked as though it were twenty years ago rather than two.

      “You bet. Articulate, bright, fun. Girls are always . . . Kay stopped herself, realizing she shouldn’t be a bigot about the male sex in front of Jaret. It wouldn’t help things. “Actually, you were a pain in the neck.”

      “Right. We didn’t get along at all then. Remember?”

      Jaret, from age fourteen to sixteen, had been at terrible odds with her mother and it had scared and hurt Kay until she remembered how she’d been with her own mother and how they’d later become friends. That she and Jaret were good friends already was a real plus; she hadn’t expected it for years.

      “What a brat I was,” Jaret went on.

      “You were never a brat,” Bert said. He was as entranced by his daughter as he was his wife. Jaret, aside from being exceptionally bright, had real beauty, and it pleased him to know that she would have her pick of men when the time came for her to marry.