Chapter 10 #3
“What? No, I don’t want to.” I looked outside the window. “We’re not near his apartment.”
“He just moved,” she answered. “He really wants to talk and make up with you, Grace.”
“There’s nothing to make up. I’m not mad or anything,” I said. “Why do we have to do this?” But she didn’t speak and then I did get mad. “We are not playing the quiet game!” I informed her.
“No, of course not. I have to tell you something, but it made JuJu upset and Patrick, too. I don’t know how you’re going to feel about it.” Her eyes moved briefly to me before returning to the icy road.
“What is it? Does everyone know except me? What?” I repeated when she still didn’t answer.
“The divorce will be final in a few weeks,” she told me, but that was something that everyone had been saying about our parents’ split for what felt like years.
“It really will be this time, because there’s nothing left for Mom to argue about.
” She sounded a little bitter, as were several of my siblings who agreed that the process had gone on for much too long.
“Ok, maybe,” I acknowledged. “So?”
“So, when they’re divorced, Dad will be getting married again,” she said. “He already found someone else.”
A few hours later, I returned to the temporary home that I was temporarily sharing with Theo.
He wasn’t back from work, of course, because he always stayed so damn late.
“Damn it,” I muttered aloud. And yeah, I was swearing and I didn’t care if Nicola didn’t like it, because it was just like Sophie had said: I was a grown-up and no one could police what came out of my mouth anymore.
“Damn it!” I yelled, and then I shrieked in fear.
“Grace! It’s me! It’s just me!” Theo shouted back. He knelt down and then started to pick me up. “Did you fall?”
“You scared me,” I explained, in case he hadn’t noticed how I had screamed my head off, tried to run, and collided with the door frame in this new house that I wasn’t yet familiar with.
“Did you hit your head?”
He was very observant and had seen how I was holding my hand over the place where a knot was going to form on my forehead. “What if I get another black eye? How will I go to my interview like that?” I asked.
“It hurts so much that you’re crying?”
“No, it’s ok.” But he kept checking to see if I was really all right.
“Theo, it’s not my head that hurts. I’m not crying because I walked into the door, not too much.
It’s because I’m afraid that I’ll get a black eye and then I’ll never get hired, not without the reasonable excuses that Sophie gave me before.
And I just met my dad’s new girlfriend.”
“What? You did?”
“They moved in together. They’re getting married,” I said, and I kept crying enough that Theo made me sit down, and since we hadn’t gotten around to procuring a lot of furniture, it was on a folding chair in the middle of the room so it looked like I was being interrogated.
“You know what we’re doing tonight? Ordering a couch,” he said.
We did have ice because the house came with appliances, but we also didn’t have any towels (paper or otherwise) so he’d used one of his IU t-shirts to make a cold pack for me.
Then he sat on the floor, so I climbed down next to him because that seemed unfair.
“You could also sit on one of the beds,” he suggested.
We had brought only a few things from the now-empty cabin, but we’d borrowed my brother-in-law Jude’s truck to take the mattresses with us.
We both got back up and when I sniffled my way into my new bedroom, Theo followed.
“I’m sorry that I scared you,” he said as he sat next to me. “Keep applying the ice.”
“What are you doing home?”
“I left work when Pinar and Regina did,” he explained. “Regina felt my forehead a few times because she was sure that I was sick, but I told her that it was my New Year’s resolution to leave at a more reasonable time.”
“Is that true?” We had spent a large part of the day on New Year’s Eve taking a hike through the property that surrounded Theo’s cabin.
By the time we’d gotten back, made dinner, and packed his remaining belongings in preparation for the move to this house, we’d both been tired.
There had been no talk of resolutions or parties since we’d been asleep by nine o’clock.
“I don’t really believe in resolutions,” he admitted to me now.
“But Regina does and she made several that we’re all supposed to stick to, like increasing our workouts and doing five minutes of mindfulness every morning.
So I came home earlier than usual and scared you to death. But why did you go see your dad today?”
I explained how it had been Sophie’s fault.
“She told me that she wanted us to hang out together, which I should have known was suspicious but I did have a nice time when I was over at her house for dinner and she trusted me to hold the twins. It was probably only because she was right there watching,” I admitted.
“But today, it was a trick. She wanted to introduce Dad’s girlfriend—I guess she’s his fiancée,” I corrected myself.
“Soph wanted me to meet her because she’s trying to support them and no one else is on their side.
Nicola and Addie think that it’s too soon for him to be with someone else.
They don’t want anything to do with the new girlfriend.
Fiancée. Juliet and Patrick are mad at him in general, and Dion never knew him but says that this is all tacky.
Brenna agrees and adds that what Dad does is none of her business.
She’s also not going to see the girlfriend. ”
“Fiancée.”
I nodded. “Sophie isn’t exactly happy about it, either.
She can’t understand why Dad has to jump into a new relationship like this.
He was always the one telling us to be careful and prudent, and now he’s marrying his assistant and she’s only a year older than Nicola.
But Soph is the one who has the best relationship with him, and she doesn’t want to lose that.
I understand because it was hard to stand out in our family.
It was important to have something that made you feel special. ”
“At Christmas, Sophie told me that you don’t miss very much,” he said. “She was right about that.”
“She thought I could be an ally and I guess that Dad keeps telling her how he’s trying to make up with me, but I’m being rude.”
“You’re not being rude,” Theo stated. I had curled up with my pillow and now he stretched over to me, half-lying himself, to adjust the ice I held against my face.
“You’re expressing your opinion about how he handled himself during his marriage, and he doesn’t like that.
He’d rather that you forget it because he’d like to forget it himself.
It’s a lot easier if he blames his faults on you. ”
“That’s exactly right! He wanted me to pretend like everything was fine but it isn’t. Now that he asked this woman to marry him, my siblings can see that, too.”
“So you’re going to tell them that he was unfaithful in his marriage to your mom?”
“No. Maybe…I don’t know,” I sighed. “She’s going to fall to pieces when she hears that he’s getting married to someone else. Maybe it won’t matter when their relationship actually began.”
He didn’t answer, and I knew that I was wrong. It mattered to me and it would also matter to my mom, a whole lot.
“The fiancée doesn’t seem like a bad person.
She kept repeating that she was excited to get to know us all better, that she’d only met a few of us briefly and only in the role of my dad’s assistant at work.
Now she wants us all to be friends. And he never said anything about how that would go.
It would go terribly,” I filled in, but Theo was already nodding because as a doctor, he was extremely perceptive.
“But does she really think that our family would want to give her a big hug? I remember when my friend Raróg tracked down the man who had been sleeping with his girlfriend. He burned that guy’s house down and maybe Sophie is right.
My friends are all jackasses and so are my boyfriends, and there’s way too much fire in my life. ”
“Fire? What fire? Why are they all jackasses?”
“She was telling me that I have bad taste in people. She was worried that I was going to mess up things with you, because you’re so you, so much Theo, and everyone else is mostly like Raróg. An idiot.”
“I’m so me,” he paraphrased. “What does that mean?”
“You have your whole life just perfect,” I explained, and his eyes widened.
“Me? Remember that you’re the one who dug me out of a rotting cabin.”
“But that wasn’t you, not really,” I reminded him. “That was external mess that you didn’t like. The real you isn’t living in a rotting cabin or eating take-out every night. I know that things are going to be so good for you, in just a little while.”
“You sound sure of that.”
“I am,” I said, and nodded.
Theo replaced the ice against my forehead. “I’m going to try to be home earlier and more often, but I don’t want to scare you again.”
“Is there suddenly less work? Or are you going to try to do less of it?”
“I’m going to be less available to my patients.
Instead of taking their calls and answering their texts and emails at all hours, I’ll put limits on our contact.
That will let me focus more while I’m there at work and when I leave the office or the hospital, I can also focus on having a life beyond my profession.
” But as he said that, his hand went automatically to his face.
“I have to, because I don’t want to live like this.
It’s not something that I can keep up for the long-term. ”
I looked at him. “I don’t know if you can stop.”
“Why not?”
“You care a whole lot,” I said. “That’s just you.”
“Well, I’m going to have to care less. I’m going to have to separate myself because I want to have more than just a successful practice. I didn’t even want to go into oncology.”
“What do you mean?”
“Originally, I was planning to do my residency in pediatrics.”
“Why did you switch?” I asked.
“Because of my grandfather,” he answered. “His wife, my grandma Penelope, had died after suffering a lot. He encouraged me to try to make a difference and he was paying for my schooling.”
“So he forced you?”
“No, he didn’t. But I knew what he wanted, and I wanted to honor him.
He believed in me and I didn’t want to let him down, and like you said, I also wanted to be important to someone,” Theo told me.
“I was pretty used to coming in second or third, or usually last to the horses and whatever needed to be done on the farm. It felt great when he said that I could make his dream come true. But now it’s not a dream—I’m living my life, and I have to make some changes. A lot of changes.”
“What else do you want to change?”
“I’m coming to some conclusions. You’ve been thinking a lot about that yourself,” he said. “Did you decide what you want, besides clean sheets?”
I sure had. I just wasn’t sure if I would ever achieve what I wanted, or if I deserved it. “I’ll have to get back to you on that,” I answered. It was as good as I could do right now.