Chapter 13 #4
“I was responsible for my mother until she died right before we came here. I couldn’t figure out how to have a sex life and do that. I didn’t like going out and talking to people because everybody looked at me like I was sad, and I was. I am. Everyone in town knew it.”
He nodded slowly. “I do understand that. I could only ever be that kid who lost his whole family. I had to leave Texas so that I could shake that off. I just never told anybody else.”
“I was thinking about this the other day. For me, it’s kind of easy. Because if people ask about my parents I can just say they’re both gone, and the more time passes the more normal of a thing that’s going to be. Eventually, it’ll just be expected. It won’t signpost all this difficult stuff.”
“Yeah, but I can always just say I don’t have siblings. It just feels like a lie. But if you say that you do have a brother, people want to know if you’re close, what he does, where he is.”
She nodded. “Yeah. I get that. I bet erasing him completely doesn’t feel right.”
“Not all the time. But sometimes, I figure he understands because he knows I don’t want to talk about how he died.”
“That’s the hard part,” she said. “I feel the same way. You get into this conversation, and you just end up talking about the grieving part. With my mom, there were a lot of years of that. But she was great when I was younger. She was just different later. It felt like a loss because I missed the person that she used to be, but she was still with me. Just changing all the time. I want to learn to try and appreciate something from those years too. Something of her. Because it was time that I had. I have an easier time pulling up good memories of my dad, because he was there one day and then gone the next. And he was always ever himself. I think I miss who he was in a sharper, more detailed way, because who my mom was feels a little bit… Lost. Like the memories got taken for me too.”
“What was your mom’s favorite TV show?”
She smiled. “She liked Matlock.”
“The old one or the new one?”
“Both. She liked both a lot. She’s the one who taught me to knit when I was little.
She loved to go to yarn stores. Loved to look at all the different colors, feel all the different textures.
She loved to bake. She used to make the best cinnamon rolls.
Then I learned how to do it. And now I have a bakery.
All because my mom loved to bake cinnamon rolls.
She made me who I am. The easy things and the hard things. ”
She took a deep breath. “I feel like I’m just learning how to be a person.
Not a caregiver, not a grieving daughter, because I’ve been both of those things for so long, and I don’t really know who I am apart from it.
That’s why I wanted to move across the country so badly.
When Aiden cheated on Marlowe, I thought…
This is it, the whole move is going to crumble.
I really was upset about what happened to her, and I really did think it was the best thing for her to come out here, and look, it was.
It really was. But I wanted it for me. I thought the only way I was ever going to be able to start over and find a new life was by getting out of Vermont.
Changing my surroundings. As much as I possibly could.
Then I got here, and I wasn’t magically brave. I wasn’t magically a different person.”
She looked down at the quilt on his bed and began to pick at a thread. “But then I saw you. I… I felt like if I was going to do something reckless, if I was going to do something brave, it was going to be you.”
He grunted and pushed away from the wall. “Then what was all this talk about Walker?”
“Well, it was part of the carefully constructed series of barriers that I was putting up to keep myself from kissing you. I figured that Walker or Jackson would be… An easier entry point.”
“Explain.”
“I knew you were going to be a whole thing. I figured somebody like Walker, who is a poster child for casual sex, was maybe a better choice for someone looking to lose their virginity without getting into a relationship, and without getting into… deep water. I had the sense that you were…”
“Fucked up beyond all reason?”
“Well, I wasn’t going to put it that way but…yes,” she said.
“And you were right.”
“I was. But my big mistake was thinking that I could keep myself from getting too deep. Because I already was.” She looked away from him because she didn’t know how he was going to react to that news.
“I don’t think that was a good idea.”