12. Charlie
CHAPTER 12
CHARLIE
“H ere you go.” Charlie handed Olivia a glass of the red wine he had poured. “I’ve been saving this for a special occasion.”
“Oh — you don’t need to waste it on me.”
“I already opened it,” he told her. “You might as well drink it now. And besides, it’s not being wasted. I figured I’d open it when something exciting happened, and we’re there. We got the light switches replaced and two whole rooms painted. This seems like a huge moment to me.”
“Well, if you say the time is right, who am I to argue?” She took a sip of the wine. “This is really good.”
“It’s my favorite. This vineyard is out in California. Maybe I’ll take you sometime.”
“To California?”
“We might find time for that,” he said. “We have a few months together before we’re able to list the house, and after that, who knows how long it will take to sell? We might have time to take a trip out west together.”
“Well, maybe so,” Olivia agreed.
“Would you be willing to go with me?”
“Willing, yes, but I don’t know if it would be very practical.”
“Because of your family?”
“Someone has to look after Izzy. Get her to school and back, be there for her in case she needs anything…”
“I don’t understand,” Charlie admitted. “I would have thought your mother could do that sort of thing. You’re a very good sister, Olivia, but you’re not Izzy’s mother — and yet you act like you are. You act as if you feel fully responsible for her, as if everything she needs is your responsibility.”
“It is that way,” Olivia said. “In a lot of ways, I raised Izzy, and I do still feel responsible for her.”
“But why? I know you lost your father, and that had to be hard. But you still have your mother. Isn’t she involved?”
“Of course she is,” Olivia said. “Mom’s great. I don’t know what we’d do without her. But at the same time, it’s hard.”
“What do you mean?”
“Being a single parent is tough,” Olivia said. “She’s had to raise the two of us on her own, with no help. I helped as much as I could, of course, and that’s a big part of why I feel so responsible for Izzy. But there’s also the financial side of things.”
“The financial side?”
“Izzy doesn’t just need someone to pick her up from school. She talks about going to college, and we want that for her, of course — we want it to look just like she dreams it will, even if I hate the idea of her going away to California. But that’s going to be tough to afford.”
“Oh,” Charlie said. “I didn’t think about that.” He was quiet for a moment. “This is what you meant, isn’t it? About me never thinking about things that don’t affect me? I never considered how my education was going to be paid for because it wasn’t an issue for me.”
“I don’t fault you for that,” Olivia said. “It makes sense that it isn’t top of mind for you. But we have to think about it. We think about that all the time, and a hundred other monetary things as well.”
“What about you? You must have gone to college.”
Olivia raised her eyebrows. “Must I?”
“I guess I just… assumed.”
She smiled. “I’m giving you a hard time,” she said. “You’re right. I did go to college. But it wasn’t like what Izzy is talking about. I needed to be around because Mom works nights. Izzy can be on her own at night now, she’s old enough, but when I was in school she was just a little kid, and we didn’t want to leave her alone. So I lived at home and took classes at the community college. I probably would have had to do that anyway, because there was no chance of Mom sending me away, even to a state school, on the money she earns. The only reason we can even have the conversation for Izzy is because now we have my income too. But Mom still has to work two jobs to keep the family afloat.”
Charlie was beginning to understand. “That’s why you want to sell this house so badly, isn’t it?”
“It would change everything,” Olivia said quietly. “Even the twenty percent you promised me would turn our lives around. Mom would be able to quit her night job — I can’t tell you what a difference that would make. She works herself to the bone right now. She would be able to get her social life back, get a full night’s sleep… it would be everything. And Izzy could go to school anywhere she wanted. We probably wouldn’t even have to take out student loans.”
“I didn’t realize this was so important for you,” Charlie admitted. “I guess I thought you just wanted to advance your career by putting the sale of this place on your resume.”
“Well, don’t get me wrong,” Olivia said with a smile. “I want that too. It’ll definitely have a great impact on my future opportunities. But that’s not the main reason I have for doing this, and I’d want to do it even if no one could ever know I had been involved. I want to provide for my family. I want my sister to have a carefree college experience — not like my own.”
“Was your college experience bad?”
“It wasn’t bad at all. I got an education, and I didn’t have to go into debt to do it, so I can’t really complain. But every time I see a movie about campus life or hear one of my friends talk about how much fun they used to have with their roommates, I get a little sad. It’s a part of life I’ll never know, and I want Izzy to have it.”
Charlie nodded. It made a lot of sense, and he felt bad about the fact that he’d never thought of things in those terms before. Olivia had reassured him that it was understandable, but he still wished that her struggles had come into his thoughts without her needing to explain things to him. “You do a lot for your family,” he said.
“I don’t think it’s anything much,” Olivia countered. “I care about them. I don’t want my mom to have to work as hard as she does, and I want my sister to have all the best things in life. And, you know, we’ve been very lucky.”
“You have?” He wouldn’t have put her story in those terms.
“Of course,” she said. “Mom might have to work two jobs, but at least she has work. Not everyone does. We’ve never been hungry. We’ve always had a roof over our heads, new clothes when we needed them, computers for school. I was able to go to community college, and now I have a good job that pays for everything I need, and I have enough left over to help my mom and Izzy out. Anything on top of that is just gravy, right? It’s just that I want my sister to have some of the gravy.”
Charlie was humbled by her response. “I’ve never known someone so grateful for what they have,” he admitted. “It’s so different from the way my siblings are. They all have more than enough money to never work another day in their lives, and yet all they can think about is how upset it makes them that I got this house and they didn’t. They don’t need the money that would come from selling it, they just think it’s unfair that they won’t be getting it. I can’t imagine hearing any of them talk about how lucky they’ve been — and yet, they have so much more than your family does.”
“I think maybe it takes having struggled to really appreciate the things you have,” Olivia said. “I don’t know if I would appreciate it the way I do if I didn’t see how hard my mother works for it all. But I’m more than ready for her to be able to stop working so hard. She’s not young anymore. She deserves a rest.”
“It’s great that you want to give her that. I really admire that about you,” Charlie said. “I hadn’t realized that’s what you were doing all this for.”
“Does it change things?”
“It doesn’t change anything except the way I see the situation,” he said. “I just… I think of you differently now that I know this.”
“You really thought I was an opportunist before, didn’t you? That I was just grabbing at whatever I could in order to advance my career.”
“You make that sound so much worse than it is, though. I didn’t think any the less of you for it,” he told her earnestly. “I admired you for making the most of an opportunity, really. It’s the kind of thing I would have done, and I thought it was a good move for you. But now… well, that’s all still true, but also, I think you’re incredibly caring toward your family. I’m glad I know you.”
“That’s a really kind thing to say,” Olivia said softly.
“Yeah, well, I can be nice on occasion.”
She smiled. “You’re usually nice.”
“Not just a rich playboy?”
“Not only that, no.”
“Cheers.” He held up his wine glass, and she clinked hers against it.
They sat in silence for a few moments, sipping occasionally, neither one of them speaking. The silence was nice, Charlie thought. Usually, such a thing would have made him feel uncomfortable, and he would have felt the need to speak in order to fill it. But he didn’t feel like that now, with Olivia. He thought he could have sat quietly with her all day.
She was the one to finally break the silence. “Charlie?”
“Yeah?”
“When this is all over, when we’ve ended the marriage, do you think that you and I will still talk sometimes?”
He looked at her, trying to read the expression on her face. Her eyes were wide, and she seemed earnest and hopeful.
“I’d like to,” he said.
“I’d like that too.”
“This might be a fake marriage, but I think it’s a real friendship,” he told her. “Which is… surprising. I didn’t expect that. But I feel like I can talk to you — more openly than I can with just about anybody else, if you want to know the truth.”
“I feel the same way,” she said. “I don’t know when I’ve ever confided in anyone about my worries for my family’s future. I always assume people won’t want to hear about that. That they’ll find it annoying or think that I complain too much.”
“I don’t think that.”
“I can tell you don’t,” she said. “And it means more than I can tell you to have someone I can talk to without feeling like a burden. I just never would have guessed that that person would be you.”
“Because I’m a rich playboy.”
The solemnity broke, and Olivia laughed. “You’re really never going to let that go, are you?”
“I wasn’t planning on it,” he grinned. “You have to admit, it’s a funny story. You going off about how terrible the guy who owned this house must be, not realizing that he was standing right next to you.”
“Well, I was wrong, anyway,” she said. “You’re nothing like what I pictured you to be. Nothing like what I was imagining that day. Or rather… you are like that, I guess, but there’s so much more to you. I thought you would be vapid and shallow, but you certainly aren’t either of those things.”
“You might be the first person who’s ever thought that,” Charlie admitted.
“Well, if that’s true, then everyone else you’ve ever known has been wrong. Because I know what I see when I look at you. You might have a silver spoon in your mouth, but I believe you’ve got a heart of gold.”
She chuckled as she said it, and Charlie knew that she was mostly teasing, but her words warmed his heart anyway. It was so rare that anyone paid him such a wholehearted compliment, and he didn’t quite know how to respond.
He settled for taking another sip of his wine instead, and the two of them returned to the companionable silence that they had been sitting in so comfortably — but now it felt full of tension and words that had gone unsaid.