Chapter 15 #2
“I understand,” my brother had said, after I’d talked to him about why I’d kept our father’s affair a secret.
“I’ll keep being mad at Dad instead. Somehow, I was blaming you but it’s his fault, not yours, for creating the whole situation.
” Then Patrick had sighed. “But he’s been making an effort.
It’s not easy to watch him acting like the perfect grandfather but my daughter needs more people in her life to love her, not fewer.
” He’d sighed again, because it wasn’t like any of this had an easy solution.
Even with my lists, I didn’t always know what to do.
I was trying my best and I advised Patrick to do the same.
He’d had to hang up because he was going over to help our mother with her résumé, which no one had seen for at least thirty years.
She was job hunting, something she’d promised to do before but hadn’t followed through on.
Now it seemed more serious. Brenna had already chosen the perfect interview outfit from which Mom was not allowed to deviate at all.
It definitely included shoes and underwear, which I knew because I’d asked.
The farewell dinner tonight was long and got boozy, even with Regina monitoring.
Pinar had enough that she opted to order a car to get herself home, and Regina called her husband.
I was ok but when Theo suggested riding together, I immediately agreed.
After all, we were going to the same place: the cabin.
“Thank goodness you brought these bibs,” he said as we watched both Regina and Pinar drive away. He wiped his eyes on a blue one with the cutest duck appliqué. “It’s hard to think about them leaving. Here,” he said, and offered me a dry bib that he had in his pocket, yellow with white stripes.
“Thanks.” I was also glad that he put his arm around me as we walked to the truck. “You and Regina can visit her together,” I suggested. “You should take more trips.”
“On that note, I did make a reservation at a hotel up north over Memorial Day. Would you want to come? It will be cold in the lake but I thought you might enjoy just being there, like how you used to go with Nicola.”
I stopped and turned to him, so he put both arms around me. “Yes, I want to go up north with you. I want to go anywhere.”
“Good.” He pulled me so close that I couldn’t breathe for a second. “I have a few things to talk about tonight besides a little vacation.”
But while we were on the road, he mainly discussed our situation for the night.
“I brought two air mattresses and several sleeping bags, as well as a pile of blankets. I have lanterns, full water bottles…” He continued with the list of preparations he’d made, glancing back into the truck bed every now and then to check that it was still there.
By the time we made it up to the cabin, it was dusk and it took a minute to unload everything, especially when we both had to be very careful to avoid any standing or running water.
Even in the low light, though, his house looked amazing.
The new metal roof was on and the new, intact windows made it look much more like a home and a lot less like the place my friend Zeno had lived, which was actually just a hole in the ground.
We both stopped for a moment to appreciate the beauty before we walked up the new stairs that led to the front door.
“Be careful,” Theo said after he opened it, and took my hand to guide me around a neat pile of what looked like flooring.
The batteries in the lantern he carried were failing and the light flickered.
And despite the new roof with the clean insulation under it and the new windows with the unbroken panes, there was still no heat because the HVAC wasn’t running, and despite the warmth of the day, the air had started to feel chilly.
But he had wanted to stay here anyway, a night back in his cabin before he actually moved in for good, and I had immediately said yes when he’d invited me to come.
I’d slept in worse places—in fact, the cabin before all this work had been a worse place.
But it was really coming along quickly and Keon was an amazing and thorough contractor.
Theo shook his lantern and got it to glow a little brighter to cut through the shadows, and we followed its light into his former bedroom.
The secret room, the one that had held all the bins with the stuff from his mother, was now turning into a larger closet.
There would be two of those, which would be nice for him because although he didn’t have much stuff now, it was entirely possible that he would someday turn into a major shopper.
Brenna could help with that, if he was interested in upgrading his wardrobe.
The rest of the space, like the rest of the house, was mostly unfinished but it was already improved since we knew that the roof wouldn’t fall down on our heads and that there were no rodents, and hardly any Dermatophagoides farinae and their problems in the air.
I’d always loved his bedroom anyway, even with those issues.
“I slept in here once,” I noted as we started to fill the air mattresses.
“I liked your old bed.” And now we would be sleeping on this one together.
I wondered if he would want to put pillows between us, but I didn’t think so.
I hoped that I wouldn’t have those dreams and kick him.
He straightened up. “I still have the frame, don’t I?”
“It’s in the…I think that building was some kind of cow shed, but I’m not all that familiar with farm stuff,” I admitted. “That’s where I had my family put all the furniture, the pieces that we could clean off.”
“You were very organized with everything,” he said. “Every time I came home, there was more done. It felt like a miracle.”
“You probably hear that a lot yourself in your line of work, but I’ve never had anyone tell me that I was creating miracles before,” I said. I helped spread a blanket over the mattresses and tested the softness. “Before I lie down, I need to go out to the port-a-potty.”
He decided to accompany me and I was glad due to the increasing darkness and the possibility of getting stuck somewhere, and he got the temporary sink running with water that was heavy metal-free so I could wash my hands.
Afterwards, we took a little tour of the back, too, staying close together again for safety.
He stopped at the barn, the one that might hold his horses.
“I came back up here last weekend, when you were at your dad’s house,” he mentioned. “I read my mother’s letters again.”
“Did your opinion of them change?”
“In a way,” Theo answered. “As I went through everything, I was thinking about you and your parents. You manage to look past a lot of their bad behavior.”
“They’ve also looked past mine,” I said.
“My dad was furious when I lost his car, for example, but he still had me over for dinner last Sunday and he grilled some delicious burgers. My mom was angry about the people that I allowed to live in the attic, but she did let me stay with her myself when I needed a place to go.” That had lasted until Patrick and then Dion had needed the room instead.
“They look past things just like you do,” I continued.
“You forgave me for running out of your house in the middle of the night and then ignoring you for a few weeks. I haven’t really forgiven myself for that, but you didn’t even get very mad at me.
I wished that you had, though. I would have rather looked at your angry face than seen how much I’d hurt your feelings. ”
“I understood why you did—watch it.” He stopped.
“That looks slippery.” I retreated from the wet patch of weeds that could someday turn into nice grass to go barefoot on, and he put his arm around me as we started our walk back to the house.
“You left because you thought that I was just like your dad.”
“I did?”
Theo nodded, which I could see due to the bobbing light that he carried in front of us. “I work all the time, just like he did. I miss things, like when you made dinner. I also ran off on the same night that you did.”
“You went to go check on my brother-in-law. I pushed you out the door and told you to go. I left that night because my mom had said some things that she now claims weren’t true, but I was afraid that they were and that they still are.
They may be, and I think so, although I don’t want them to be, because it’s about something that didn’t ever matter to me at all but now matters a lot, because I met you. ”
“Do you mean when she said that you would never have a secure, loving relationship like your sisters do? Dion shared the whole story,” he explained. “He was very angry on your behalf and he argued with your mom about it.”
“It wasn’t nice to hear at the time. She doesn’t know very much about me but she is aware that I’ve never had anything like that.”
“You’ve never had a relationship? Brenna told me that you almost married some old guy.”
“That wasn’t for love, though. That was more about some issues he was having and my former contacts with the Mafia. It was going to be a scratch-his-back type of situation.”
“Literally?”
“Yes, because he had eczema, but I was also straightening things out with the Don for him. I had never loved someone like my sisters love their husbands or like Dion loves Carrington. She better love him back.” She looked strong due to a lot of expensive personal training and group exercise classes, but if she didn’t treat him right?
Well, now she had six of his sisters to deal with.