Chapter 7 #3
He didn’t respond to the last part of my angry lecture. “It certainly would have taken me longer than the one, single day that your family needed to empty this place,” he agreed. He blew on his own noodles to cool them.
“You know, there’s such a thing as being too nice.
There’s such a thing as—sugar, these are hot.
” I took a sip of water, now from a reusable bottle that he’d been filling at work.
He couldn’t stand the idea of all the plastic waste we were creating but he still wouldn’t let me drink from the faucet.
After everything I’d learned about antimony on Thanksgiving, it made more sense and I certainly wasn’t going to drink roof runoff anymore, either.
“We can figure out my problems with niceness later. Tell me about your day,” he requested, and I gave him a longer version than I’d recounted to the ladies at the office about the lunch with my dad and why he was trying to make up with me.
As always, Theo was a quick study. “He asked you to come because he’s afraid of paying more alimony and of being the bad guy,” he summed up, and I nodded.
“Exactly.”
“Or, hear me out,” he continued, “your father really does want to make up with you because he’s sorry about the rift he created.”
“If he was actually sorry, he wouldn’t have gone to clean that woman’s gutters.
She’s lucky that I’m not Juliet. My sister could toss her out of the window and she would have already done it, if she’d known.
But my dad’s office is on the first floor and JuJu would be too worried about her baby to throw that woman very far, anyway. ”
“Your dad’s girlfriend should probably be worried about you, too,” he said. “Addie mentioned that she used to take you to martial arts classes and that you’re a real scrapper in a fight.”
“I quit martial arts. I quit everything,” I said, and took a big bite of noodles. They weren’t much cooler but I was so hungry. “I only wanted to take that class because I was afraid, but then I understood that you couldn’t fight your way out of it.”
“Out of—”
“I also understand my father’s position.
I can imagine how it must have been to be married to my mom, because she’s a lot.
A real lot,” I emphasized. “It doesn’t mean that I excuse what he’s doing, which is what I think that he wants from me.
Maybe he thought that when I kept his secret, I was showing approval or something.
But that’s not right! And Regina said that my silence was a betrayal of my mother.
I can see that, too. I felt terrible when my boyfriend Leto was sleeping with someone else, and everyone in the group knew but didn’t tell me. ”
“What group?”
“It was kind of a religious thing,” I said. “A serious thing where we had a supreme leader and were supposed to follow all his edicts without question, and I wasn’t allowed to discuss it with outsiders.”
“So, a cult?” Theo clarified, and he sounded just as worried as my sisters had been when they’d heard about it.
“I left after I found out that he was cheating, not through gutters but with visual proof. Naked proof, in my boyfriend Leto’s case,” I explained further.
“I didn’t really believe in that stuff anyway and it turned out that he had several other wives in the group, so I was really done.
But my dad had one wife, a legal one, and if he wanted to be with someone else? ”
I waited and of course, Theo knew the answer. He was smart like that. “There were also legal remedies,” he stated and I nodded.
“Exactly,” I said again. “There’s an issue with honesty, too.
I had always believed that my dad was a truthful person.
Truthful and diligent,” I added. “Diligent” had meant that he was always working.
He hadn’t been around much, unlike our friends, the Lassiters.
Many nights, I had stood in their yard in the dark to watch them through their windows as they hung out together.
I’d seen their dad play games with them, talk to them, and get mad when they did dumb stuff.
My father had just sighed and said, “She’s off in Grace-land” or he hadn’t been around to say anything at all.
“Are you going to tell your mom now?” He nudged my plate with his chopsticks. “Keep eating.”
I did. “I still don’t want to say anything,” I said after I had swallowed. “What would be the point?”
“More alimony?”
“But also a lot more unhappiness for her. Is it worth it?”
“Is money worth it?” Theo looked around. “That was the issue between my grandpa and my mother.”
“Because he left you this cabin?”
“It started years before that. She went away to college but then she dropped out, and he was furious. She had met my father and they’d decided to start a horse farm, which Grandpa thought was a terrible idea.”
“It’s hard when everyone thinks your ideas are stupid.”
“A horse farm really was a stupid idea for them,” he told me.
“They were both serious riders but neither of them had any business experience or business sense. My dad was great with the animals but he couldn’t keep track of money and he couldn’t think long-term, and neither could my mom.
They got farther and farther into debt and the more that happened, the wilder things got at home. ”
“You got wild?” I tried to picture it but failed.
“No, as they lost control, I got more serious. I tried to take on more responsibility but I didn’t know what I was doing, either.
I wasn’t a good ranch owner or a good parent, and in the end…
I don’t think that I helped much at all.
” He frowned. “You always focus on what you could have done differently, and there’s a lot I could tell you about. ”
“Did they ask your grandfather for help? You said that he was rich.” Rich, but he lived like a sad hermit.
“I think my dad reached out to him, but my grandpa and my mom were very similar in their personalities. They were both stubborn to the point of pointlessness, if that makes sense. He lived like this, isolated and alone, rather than trying to mend fences and let his daughter and grandchildren into his life. He lived like a sad hermit.”
“Exactly,” I agreed again.
“And she let her kids go hungry in order to feed her horses, mostly because she didn’t want to admit to her father that she’d been wrong. Both of them were wrong, in my opinion.”
I nodded, because they were. I had known plenty of idiots and they ranked up there with the worst of them. “Where are your parents? Still on the farm?”
“My dad was killed in an accident about…” He thought.
“Seventeen years ago, but it seems like it just happened. I remember coming home and seeing the ambulance, but there was nothing they could have done to help him. He got thrown and fractured his skull,” he explained.
“My mom passed away just after my grandfather did, before we even knew about the inheritance he had left. She took her own life.”
So he had nobody? I put down my chopsticks and took his hand. “I’m sorry.”
“It was all a long time ago,” he said. “But thank you. I’m not sure how I got into the weeds of that topic, when what I was trying to tell you was that money is not worth it. I was also going to say that it’s a bad idea to keep secrets. They can hurt the person you’re trying to protect.”
“Regina is right,” I said. “My mom will think I betrayed her.”
“Maybe.” He winced. “I don’t know her very well, but from what I’ve seen, she might not want to listen to your explanation about why you didn’t tell anyone. Were you crying before because you’re worried about making your mom upset? Because your dad is less than what you thought he was?”
For those reasons and others. “I don’t like keeping secrets,” I said. “They wear on you.”
“It sounds like you have more than one,” Theo said. He tilted his head slightly, looking at me.
Regina always bragged that he was great at reading his patients.
She told me that he was able to see more than what they were telling him, stuff about symptoms, pain, or things that embarrassed them.
I looked down at my plate of noodles and tried not to let anything at all show on my face.
“Not everything you keep to yourself is bad,” I said.
“But there are some things that you might want to hide, like your dad’s affair.
Or there might be other things that would hurt the people that you love. ”
“Grace, what—”
“I wish that I’d never left here today,” I said.
“I wish that I’d looked through the boxes that Granger and Nicola carried down from the attic, or scrubbed the cast iron pots that we brought up from the basement, or stripped the ugly wallpaper in the dining room, or tried to figure out what’s making all the new puddles in the driveway, or—”
“There’s plenty,” he said, now shaking his head. But the thought of all that work had distracted his mind from the idea of secrets, and that had been what I’d wanted.
Now I would distract my own mind and things would be ok.