Chapter 6
Well. He was moving her into his house. So that was happening.
Not into his room. Not into his bed.
He shouldn’t have even had that thought.
His stomach was tight as he helped her load boxes in the back of his truck, boxes she had packed quickly, because she didn’t really have any furniture and was only coming with clothes and a few items of memorabilia.
He walked back into the house and made eye contact with Mrs. C. Just looking at her made him feel as if he had missed the deadline on something. He didn’t know why the hell she still had the power to make him feel that way. He hadn’t cared about biology when he was in her classroom.
“I haven’t seen you in years,” she said, smiling at him.
“Yeah,” he said, because he wasn’t sure what to say to that. It wasn’t like he was going to hang around the high school. He wasn’t a teacher like Ellie.
“I followed a little bit of your rodeo career, Clark, believe it or not. You’ve done incredibly well for yourself.”
He still didn’t know how to take compliments like that. Not that he heard them so often. Sure, he had fans, but for the most part people in town still saw him as a product of his family, and it was unusual for anyone who had known him in high school to say something complimentary.
He didn’t know what it would take for him to feel accomplished.
He didn’t lack confidence.
Not in general. But he still felt like the bottom of the barrel in a lot of ways.
Definitely not the kind of man who ought to have Ellie moving in with him.
It was funny, because she’d been so high above him back then. He didn’t know what he’d thought she would do, but choosing an occupation so mundane as a teacher definitely wasn’t it. She seemed like an untouchable little rich girl to him.
Soft and enticing, something he wanted in spite of himself.
He was arguably now the one with more status. Rich and in some circles famous, but his childhood feelings of inferiority didn’t go away. They clung to him like ropes he couldn’t quite get free of.
It was a helluva thing, that he could be a champion and still have the feeling that he wasn’t quite good enough.
He really hated that. Good enough. What the hell did that even mean? And who was he trying to impress?
He supposed he could blame it on childhood trauma and growing up in a small town and all of that stuff.
He’d actually done some therapy in the last few years.
And thank God, because if he hadn’t, he wouldn’t be prepared for this. To be a father.
“It’s great that Marjorie has the two of you,” Mrs. C. said when Ellie came back down the stairs.
“It’s good that we have her,” he said.
“Agreed,” Ellie said.
They looked at each other and smiled, because they’d already seamlessly done what they’d agreed to do. Coparenting at its finest. Hell, they both had married parents who didn’t seem to coordinate that well with each other.
He hadn’t lived with another person … in a long time. For years he’d basically lived out of a motel, and he’d been mostly by himself.
So as they headed back toward the homestead, he was overcome by a sense of strangeness.
He was shacking up with Ellie Parks, and he’d still never even touched her, never kissed her the way he used to fantasize about doing in high school.
She still got to him. Still made him burn for things he couldn’t quite have.
They started bringing the boxes up to her bedroom. It didn’t take long.
“I really do need to call my mom,” she said, looking around the room.
“Do you?”
“Yes,” she said slowly. “I’m not … not in regular contact with her. Talking to her is always difficult and so is she, and … I feel very protective of Marjorie. I’m worried that my mom is going to say something messed up that we can’t come back from.”
“If that happens, then at least we are liberated from having to keep in touch with her.”
“I guess.”
He wanted to move closer to her, wanted to hold her face. Wanted to comfort her, but he had to ask himself if that was actually a selfless inclination. Or did he just want to put his hands on her?
He knew the answer. He just wanted to touch her. Finally.
“Why do you think she’s going to have a negative response?”
“I don’t know. Because she’s going to say something messed up about your family.”
“Don’t you kind of say messed-up stuff to me about that all the time?”
She looked as if she was ready to swallow her tongue. “Well. I guess, I have said … I’m sorry.” She shook her head.
“You don’t have to apologize,” he said. He took a deep breath. “In all honesty, you are right. Ty did lead Melanie into addiction. And if I were you, I think I would be angry about that forever.”
“There’s no room for anger. Not now. Not when we have Marjorie. We need to have as much love as possible, which means we don’t have time for all that.”
“I didn’t realize that emotions could be scheduled,” he said.
“That sounds dangerously close to being therapy adjacent.”
“Oh, it’s not really therapy adjacent. It’s straight from therapy.”
She looked surprised. “You don’t seem like the type.”
“Why? Because I’m a rural dude who works with his hands?”
“Yeah. But also because of other things I’ve observed about you that are specific to you.”
Something hot spiked in his gut. Maybe it wasn’t fair, but he found himself being irritated. Because she didn’t know him. She never had. She didn’t know how he dealt with his feelings about his family.
Hell, emotion had to go somewhere.
For Ty, it was wadded up into a tight ball, shoved into the very center of his chest, and lit on fire by the drugs flowing through his veins.
Since Clark had embraced radical sobriety, it meant dealing with things in a whole different manner.
“I’ve been to therapy,” he said. “Extensively. To deal with the trauma of growing up in my family, to get to the root of the addictive behavior that seems to run in my DNA. I don’t drink.
I don’t do drugs. So I had to work on sorting things out instead.
And I have, Ellie. Whatever you think about cowboys or poor kids or—”
“What are you saying?” She looked offended. “First of all, I’m a teacher. I have kids of every background come into my classroom, and I love each and every one of them.”
“Do you make assumptions about them based on where they’re from? How they dress?”
“No,” she said. “Well. Maybe. But it’s not about making assumptions, it’s about trying to figure out where I think they might need a lift.
But one of the things I also understand, Clark, is that kids who look like they come from the nicest house on the block might also be facing challenges.
Sometimes the suffering happening inside a house is invisible. ”
“I didn’t say you had it easy. But I don’t like that it shocks you that I cook, that I have the emotional maturity to take a look at my own issues and decide to deal with them.”
“It’s not about you. It’s about every … every relationship in my life, honestly.
Clark, my parents have never dealt with a single issue.
My father buries himself in work, hides away in his own hobbies and activities when he gets home.
My mom needs everything around her to be perfect so that she can feel perfect.
She defines herself by her house. By what her kids are doing.
My sister drowned under all that pressure.
She couldn’t cope with the emotions overflowing inside her when she was trying to succeed at ballet.
My mother drowned her spark, her talent, her personality. Everything.”
She shook her head. “And then there was my boyfriend, Jason, who had the emotional intelligence of a turnip. He played Xbox instead of ever having a conversation. He was a successful man. With a good job. And I looked around the house we shared and realized I was in a younger version of my parents’ marriage.
Not even the promise of a commitment or children or anything like that, but with a man who worked, made the money, and then completely checked out at the end of the day.
So it isn’t you. I have a hard time believing that anyone around me has done the work of analyzing their emotions.
I’m sorry if my surprise felt personal. If it’s personal to anyone, it’s me. ”
He felt as if little shards of glass had scattered from her lips and stuck themselves around his heart.
He felt like shit, because he had just accused her unfairly, based on his own assumptions about her.
Based on the way he’d felt about her in high school, and dammit, the way she still made him feel.
She made him feel he wasn’t good enough.
She made him feel like that teenage boy who wanted nothing more than to kiss those rich-girl lips, to experience something he knew full well was too good for him.
He had brought his bullshit to her door, and all the while he’d been accusing her of doing the same thing.
“Sorry,” he said. “Genuinely. That was kind of an Uno reverse.”
“What?”
“You know, the game. Uno.”
“No …”
He sighed. “Never mind. I mean that I tend to think you don’t have a very high opinion of me, but that assumption is actually me not thinking very highly of you.”
She looked away. “Yeah, but I’ve also said some really unkind things to you.
So maybe be a little bit more gracious to yourself.
I’ve never seen you do anything that wasn’t kind, Clark.
You’ve always been there for your brother.
Sometimes, I just feel so angry about everything that happened to our siblings that I’m not rational. ”
“You don’t need to be, do you?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe not.”
“You’re the only other person I know who’s been through something like this,” he said. They had spent the same number of years trying to pull their siblings back from the brink. Feeling helpless to do anything about it, battling the apathy of their parents.
They had been the rescue squad. They’d been the biggest advocates for those people they loved so much, who couldn’t quite escape the clutches of their awful addiction.
“I guess that’s true,” she said. “We had this in common the whole time, and I’ve been turning you into an enemy.
You’re not your brother. And you’re not Melanie.
That’s the problem. I’m so angry at her, Clark.
And there’s nothing I can do about that.
Because if I tell her how angry I am, I’m going to alienate her.
More than she already is. So I’ve lashed out at you, because you’re the easiest target.
I’ve held on to anger at your family, but the person who’s really responsible for Melanie’s behavior is my sister. ”
“You’re right. I get it. We can’t even be mad at them. Not openly. And that’s the hardest thing. I know it kills me. I don’t want to push my brother away. I really don’t. I also can’t enable him.”
“Yeah,” she said. “It’s an impossible situation. Thankless. Everybody has an opinion about how they would deal with the problem, but they don’t know.”
“Hell, I don’t even know from one day to the next. Sometimes I think I should stop talking to Ty. Sometimes I think that any contact is enabling. But if we hadn’t kept the line of communication open, I really don’t think we would have Marjorie now.”
“No,” she said softly, moving forward and putting her hand out.
Her fingers brushed his, and his heart went sharp.
She looked up at him, their eyes clashing, and then she removed her hand quickly, looking away.
He wondered if she felt it too. That same electric spark he felt in his fingertips when they touched.
He decided it wasn’t something he needed to know. Hell no. He had to focus on Marjorie.
She was what mattered.
And hell, if he had an ally, a partner in Ellie, that was great.
But it was never going to be more.