The Truth About Stacy

Ava drove her car slowly down the dark suburban street. She could see the house ahead, blue with white trim. Heart thumping out of her chest, she turned off the music and even the air conditioner. She needed to be as quiet as possible to catch a true glimpse at what she feared was happening.

She believed the blue and white bungalow belonged to a woman called Stacy. She didn’t know much about Stacy other than what she had overheard earlier that day: she was an HR specialist, lived in town but worked in the city, and was unmarried.

But Ava knew the emotion she heard in that conversation: Stacy’s coquettish tone of voice, and the passion erupting from her father’s voice every time they spoke.

There was a major problem with this scenario. Ava’s dad, Bruce, was married, and not to Stacy. But to Joanne, Ava’s mom.

She turned off her headlights as she pulled into the driveway behind a beat up Toyota and a flashy new Lexus.

As she stepped quietly out of the car, taking care to turn off all the overhead lights, it was already too late. A floodlight had come on pointing directly at her, where she also noticed a camera placed just above the garage door. A large-sounding dog barked from within the house, warning its residents of impending danger. And just like in a cheesy movie, a light turned on in an upstairs room, visible from the driveway where Ava stood frozen. Whatever she was doing here, she was caught and had to either think of excuses quickly, or just tell the truth.

But just a few moments later, something weirder happened, an event that would change everything. Her uncle Rob stepped out of the house.

Rob and Ava immediately made eye contact; Rob, not able to believe his eyes, bulged them out of his head to get a better look at the reality he’d been faced with.

“...AVA? What the fuck are you doing here, babe? Aren’t you supposed to be away for the summer?”

Ava bristled, clearing her throat quietly to toughen up her tone. “No, I’m an adult now so I make my own choices, I’ve been back for a couple weeks.”

Uncle Rob smirked at her defiant attitude in light of the obvious bewilderment he was feeling. “Well are you okay? Do you need something? What are you doing here at my house in the middle of the night?”

The family had always ostracized Uncle Rob, so Ava could totally understand why it would be weird that his eighteen-year-old niece showed up at his house unannounced at 11:30PM on a Tuesday night, when the last time they’d seen each other was at the previous annual awkward family Christmas dinner.

“Um, no, I’m okay Uncle Rob, I thought my dad was here.”

Rob couldn’t hold back a cackle. What the fuck would his virulently homophobic brother, Bruce, be doing at the house Rob owned with his husband Frank?

“Well sweetheart you might as well come inside unless you’re headed home, I haven’t talked to your dad since, well, ya know, the incident over the holidays.”

Ava saw flashbacks of the incident like it was yesterday - the screaming, the crying, the shoving, and the unadulterated, salivating rabid male rage expressed by both of them on that day. But in the heat of the awkward moment, she had to say something.

“Umm, actually Uncle Rob, does the name Stacy mean anything to you?”

Oh LORD, thought Rob. So that’s what this is about.

“Honey I think you should come inside” said Rob after letting out a deep, existential sigh.

Walking into the house Ava quickly realized that everything her father had said about his no-good-pedo-lib-fag-tard of a brother was probably as false as whatever was going on between him and Stacy.

Rob & Frank's house felt like the most peaceful place Ava had ever been, but in an effortless way. There was nothing pretentious or new age about it. Every inch of the house was spotless, and the entryway smelled like the first time you enter a luxury hotel room after checking in. The downstairs was dark, but the kitchen counters still managed to sparkle, illuminated by the moonlight let in through the front windows. Their dog, Gremlin, was not in fact a gremlin, but a sweet little chihuahua who went up on two legs to greet his cousin he had not seen much of since he was a young puppy. Ava scooped Gremlin up in her lap and sat down on their couch, which felt like sitting on a relaxing cloud.

Rob poured Ava a tall glass of water, exasperatedly sighed and said “well, I guess it’s time you finally know the truth about Racy Stacy.”

He then explained to his sweet niece, just coming of age, everything he could remember. Rob was Bruce’s younger brother but still remembered many details about Stacy. Rob suspected Bruce took some kind of sick pleasure thinking that his brother was lusting after his high school girlfriend, when in reality he wanted to be just like her.

Stacy embodied everything Rob could never be: a confident, sexy, independent-thinking young woman who spoke her mind, wore what she wanted and made no apologies for herself. This attitude among girls was still relatively rare in the 90s, and something Rob immediately aspired to be. Stacy had honestly been a template for how he wanted his life to be. How he hoped Ava would be.

Ava was 18 now, and she did deserve to know the truth. So he spent the next 30 minutes or so explaining everything: their relationship, how she left and came back, Bruce already dating Joanne by then. He broke the news that Bruce had briefly left Ava’s mom for Stacy before they got married, but then came to the abrupt, tragic end quite quickly.

"Wait wait wait, she’s dead?!”

Frank woke up at Ava's exclamation, wondering what was going on and wanting to make sure everything was okay.

Ava thinks Stacy is alive, Rob thought? Huh??

“Uh, yeah, definitely, dead as hell…why do you ask?”

Surely there’s a case of mistaken identity going on, Ava pondered. “Okay, nevermind, I think I’m getting wires crossed.”

She had piqued her uncle’s interest in social messiness. “Well wait, who are you looking for at my house in the middle of the night then? Who’s Stacy 2.0?!”

Ava divulged everything: the messages, the voice chats, the pet names between them like Boo Bear and Peas. The way she heard her dad’s voice change when he spoke to Stacy, the way he always spoke to animals or to her and her sister when they were younger. It was the first time she heard her dad emote a pure form of joy in quite a long time.

Everyone at the dinner table was now officially confused. Rob was literally taken aback - he leaned back in his dining room chair and put his hands on the top of his head. What the actual fuck was going on?

“Umm, wow. Okay. Uhh. Fuck. So, that’s actually insane.”

The two stared at each other meaningfully for a second, then Rob burst into laughter.

Bruce had ANOTHER Stacy as a mistress who ALSO called him Boo Bear? And that dumb fuck was too dumb to come up with a new nickname for her? Poor Ava, he thought, she has such a shit role model for what a good man is supposed to look like. She’s going to have such a hard time. Daddy issues.

Teeming with curiosity but also with the potential truth dawning on her at the same time, Ava felt like she was in some kind of thought-unison with her uncle, perhaps for the first time ever in their lives.

Rob continued giggling then had a dawning of his own.

“Wait…so what the fuck are you doing at my house?”

Ava explained she’d found the address by briefly scanning her dad’s recently searched places on Google Maps, and since the address was unfamiliar to her, she put two and two together and thought this might be Stacy’s house.

At this point, Rob was literally personifying a LMAO at this point. Why would his brother be searching his address on Google Maps around the same time he was thinking of fucking his side chick? His brother knew where he lived, but had never dared set foot in this home. Why would he?

None of them knew just how weird this night was about to get.

Another car had just pulled into the driveway. But this time it was Bruce’s.

Even though it was dark out, Ava recognized her father’s silhouette through the window. In an instant Bruce had flung himself into the house, charging directly at Rob. Ava did something next she would recall later being remarkably brave of her that night: she put herself in between them.

“I’ve been out looking everywhere for you. I had a feeling you might be here because of that queer little college putting thoughts in your head. You’re coming home RIGHT NOW,” growled her father. “You are not hanging out under the influence of this faggy marxist son of a bitch another second.”

Rob didn’t hold back. “Doesn’t that imply you think our mother, our SHARED mother, is a bitch, Bruce?”

What happened next goes blurry for everyone involved. A table was flipped. Bodies flung themselves at one another. A couple dishes were thrown. Screams were screamed. Frank came downstairs to find his husband on the floor, limbs tangled with his brother. A beautiful shambles.

Frank’s calm, quiet voice somehow managed to break through the grunts and strains and gnashing of teeth, demonstrating he was less than impressed.

“You guys look like little boys, what the fuck are you doing?”

Locked into some weird pseudo-embrace like two rams fighting over their territory, the two brothers looked at each other, really looking at each other for the first time in decades. Eyes open, mouths closed, voices hushed. Tendons began to loosen and unclench, alongside years of pent up fear, frustration, guilt, shame, and everything in between. These two had spent years in a Cold War, but just like that with one pejorative comment of how silly they looked, their assurance of mutually assured destruction evaporated.

Rob was the first one to start laughing, but Bruce soon followed. After a few minutes, the two were laying on the floor of Rob’s kitchen, looking up at the same ceiling, the same light fixture, just laughing. Like brothers. The iceberg that was their dysfunctional relationship had not disappeared from the room, but it perhaps began to thaw.

Ava, on the other hand, had disappeared. To her, the holy grail materialized. She had come here for answers, and in an unexpected way, she was still going to get them.

During the commotion, Bruce’s phone had flown out of his jeans pocket across the floor of the kitchen into the dining room.

Unable to overcome her curiosity and the fixation of her entire life for the past few weeks, Ava snatched it off the floor. She got her dad’s PIN right on the first guess (“his birthday, what an idiot,” Ava thought).

While everyone else was tending to the fraternal brawl in the next room, Ava poured over her father’s smartphone looking for clues.

No contacts named Stacy.

No texts to and from anyone named Stacy.

No results for “Stacy” in his search history at all.

This was so fucking weird.

Her dad was now standing over her, watching her go through his phone. Ava noticed, bristling in fear like a dog caught going through the trash can.

“What are you doing?” Bruce simply questioned, a mix of perplexity and curiosity.

“You deleted them all!” Ava accused. “Where have you put them? I know what I heard!”

Bruce was confused. “What are you talking about, sweetheart?”

“When are you going to go fuck Stacy? Or did you just come from there?” Ava asked as nonchalantly as she knew how, but started to cry as soon as the words left her lips, tears welling up in her eyes then falling down her cheeks like a dam breaking. She felt truly exhausted for the first time all week.

A moment of realization had come for Bruce. No longer confused, he now felt the instant sting of embarrassment, shame, and for the first time questioning internally if he could actually be guilty of what he thought his eldest daughter was accusing him of.

Taken aback, he didn’t know what to say that would provide adequate rationale for what Ava might know. He realized for the first time this was going to come off weird no matter what.

“So you heard me talking on the phone, sweetie?” An emotional dam had broken for everyone in this family. The only thing Bruce felt like he could do was to tell the truth.

Ava nodded, continuing to choke back tears that had been days, weeks, and months in the welling. Her heart felt shattered at her father’s implicit admission of guilt in even asking that question.

Bruce paused. For the first time in a long time, he was truly at a loss for words. How was he going to explain this away like it was nothing?

“Well, sweetheart, there’s really no good way to say this, so I’m just going to say it.”

Ava launched herself out of her chair and began pacing around the dining room, burying her face in her hands. After three laps around the dining table, she bumped into a china cabinet. Her father began to explain.

“I don’t know how much better this makes me sound, but it’s not what you think.” He paused here, knowing that wasn’t entirely accurate, but that conversation would have to be for a different time. “Stacy isn’t real, Ava”, he explained. “She’s an AI that I made.”

In the preceding moments, Rob had now joined the conversation. “Wait wait wait…I need to sit down for this one.”

Rob clocked what he thought his brother was up to, an instinct that proved correct, once again. Sometimes we know family a little too well, even if we’re estranged and haven’t seen them in a while.

“You made up an AI girlfriend based on Stacy?? STACY? STAY-CEE?”

Rob’s repetitive line of questioning only ramped up.

“Stacy? STACY Stacy? The girl you used to go out with back in the day who passed away in that car accident??”

Bruce realized through this exchange that he was not very emotionally intelligent. Or maybe just otherwise not intelligent, actually. He should have thought to name her something else. But it was Stacy, and there was no one like Stacy. Well preserved, just like she was in 1996. She even said things like “totally” just like she did back in the day.

In the span of about sixty seconds, Ava had gone from inconsolable to incredulous. Her face said how she felt better than the words that could come out of her mouth. Something that had actually just happened to her father a moment ago, but she didn’t know that at the time.

Rob and Frank paced around, cleaning up the kitchen the brothers had made a mess of. They made eye contact and bugged their eyes out at each other, communicating in their own internal language, as if to say, “Are you fucking hearing this shit?”

Ava finally broke her silence. “Dude, I don’t care if she’s AI, you’re cheating on mom. What the fuck, dad?” Ava had never spoken to her father like this before, but she had also never caught her father cheating on her mother with a zombie computer woman either.

Bruce pondered this question as deeply as he had ever pondered his own existence before. Again something in the air had shifted, and he knew the jig was up. He had to be honest.

He had been having an emotional affair with Stacy, because Bruce couldn’t accept Stacy wasn’t real. Or, at least, was no longer real. The prom queen Stacy, the beautiful Stacy, the badass Stacy, the sensitive Stacy, the caring Stacy, the sexy Stacy - they all existed in the palm of his hand because Bruce had created her from memories, pictures, and even her voice, which he managed to compile from a snippet of her talking about a birthday cake he found on a home movie from 1997.

Bruce knew there was no way he was going to get out of this now. No escape hatch was to be found. This night had been cathartic in a lot of ways for the Parker family, so he decided to continue to speak honestly.

“You’re right, sweetie. I’m wrong. I’m sorry.”

Literally that was the first time Ava Parker had ever heard her father admit wrongdoing to anyone, about anything, in her lifetime. She was taken completely aback.

Maybe this AI shit actually could do good for the world after all.