24. Then
O ne week after the boys leave for summer training, the pastor has his stent surgery.
It’s an outpatient procedure, and he spends the rest of the week home, expecting us to wait on him hand and foot.
Once it’s over and Donna doesn’t need me around to help, I’m going to leave.
It won’t be easy. I’ll move first, and I’m hoping it will, perhaps, seem obvious to Danny that we aren’t going to work out.
He’s not moving to LA and I’m not moving to San Diego.
If it isn’t obvious, I’ll deal with that when it happens.
I call Hailey from the pharmacy while I wait for the pastor’s prescriptions. “Did you still want to go to LA?”
She yelps. “Are you serious?”
I look around me again before I reply. “Yes. I mean, we’ll need to find a place, and I don’t have a lot saved. Do you?”
“Not a penny.”
I wince. I was sort of hoping, naively, that she’d be able to pull her weight.
“What about your job this summer? And the graduation money from your grandmother?”
“I spent most of it. You know how that goes. But I’ll find a job as soon as we get to LA. You won’t have to cover me for long.”
It’s less than ideal. I have enough for perhaps three months’ rent somewhere, that’s it. “Okay,” I tell her. “Let’s look for something cheap.”
Over the next few days, Hailey and I look online in our spare time, finally settling on a group house where they’ve agreed to let us share a room for twelve hundred a month.
On the pastor’s first day back at work—we were told he’d be up and about, but he’s barely moved from his favorite chair all week—I meet Hailey at a coffee shop halfway between us to be interviewed by our prospective housemates over Skype.
They’re older, and male. I’d rather not live with men, but they seem nice enough, and Hailey tells me I’m being paranoid, so I reluctantly agree.
She squeals as she walks me out to my bike. “We’re really doing it!”
We really are. I’m sad about leaving Danny, heartbroken by the possibility we might not even be friends when this is done, but also hopeful for the first time in a long while.
I want to drink. I want to dance. I want to be kissed by someone who’s desperate to do it, not terrified.
So I bike home, dreaming more of freedom than of what I’m giving up—of being able to hang pictures on the wall or stay out all night.
I can eat potato chips for breakfast and Cap’n Crunch for dinner.
I can sleep until noon. Not that those are things I’m necessarily dying to do.
They’re just things I couldn’t possibly do, until now.
I get to the house, surprised to see the pastor is already home.
I’ll have to wait until Donna’s alone to tell her I’m leaving, because the pastor always seems to be questioning my motivations—even suggesting a new song for Sunday’s service gets a side-eye from him and a gentle, “Is there something wrong with the song that was planned, Juliet?”
I walk in to find him on the phone, and Donna sitting at the table, her hands clasped tight. “Oh, honey,” she says, rising and throwing her arms around me. “I’m so glad you’re here. Danny hurt his knee at training. He’s been wanting to talk to you.”
I never took my phone off silent after the interview. I pull it out of my back pocket—I have seven missed calls.
“The pastor’s talking to the orthopedist right now, but I think he might need surgery.”
I sink into a chair. Poor Danny. He worked out all summer, hoping this was going to be his season. I think he clung to the idea even harder, watching Luke’s star begin to rise. “I guess there’s still next year.”
Her shoulders sag. “I don’t know. Danny’s worried he might get cut, and if he does, he’ll lose his scholarship. We don’t have enough saved to cover the difference if that happens.”
“They can do that?” Danny has endured two years of practices and sitting on the sidelines, has given up weeks of his summer for training camp…all to lose his scholarship now ? It would be so fucking unfair.
She nods. “He could get financial aid, obviously, but then he’d have loans to pay back before we could start our mission. I guess we’ll just have to pray for the best.” Her hand lands atop mine. “I sure am glad you’re here though.”
For a moment, I’d forgotten about my plans entirely. Plans I’m going to have to abandon.
Leaving is one thing. Leaving now…is too selfish, even for me. I just sent twenty-four hundred dollars via PayPal an hour ago—our deposit, our first month’s rent—and I never even set foot outside the city limits.
I text Hailey to let her know I can’t do LA after all, and she asks if I’m joking. When I tell her I’m not, she replies with a simple, “Fuck you, Juliet”, and I don’t hear from her again.
Which seems…fitting.
I’ve just lost my only friend. I’m remaining in Rhodes. I’m taking the internship.
I was right to bet on Luke rather than myself. From the moment I came into the world, I’ve been hearing, in one way or another, that it would be better if I hadn’t appeared at all.
Today, at last, I agree. I’m never going anywhere.
* * *
Donna flies down to San Diego, spending money they don’t have to do it. Between what insurance won’t cover for Danny’s surgery and the cost of the trip, they’re stretched thin.
I remain behind to look after the pastor.
I can’t work much until Donna gets back, and I don’t have a driver’s license, which means I’m biking to the grocery store every day and balancing the bags on my handlebars to get them home.
I clean and make dinner, and the pastor sees our meals together as a glorious opportunity to remind me about the importance of charity and gratitude, giving back and service.
I’m not angry about it, though. I feel nothing when he talks. I feel nothing when anyone talks. As if I’m encased in ice.
Danny’s miserable, though the surgery went just fine. “I just don’t understand why it happened,” he says mournfully.
“What do you mean?” The why seems pretty fucking clear to me: he took a bad hit from the side; his knees were weak. It’s hardly uncommon in football.
“I’ve done everything I was supposed to.
” His voice grows quiet. “You know, I watch my friends doing whatever they want for years, and I just thought my time would come. I thought I’d get rewarded for all of it.
Like, maybe I’d finally get on the field this season and I’d play really well, and everything would change. ”
It seems impossibly na?ve and yet…I get it. Half the movies ever made are about someone doing the right thing or trying harder than everyone else and winning in the end. In real life, though, you do the right thing and absolutely no one notices.
“Your father would say goodness is its own reward.” My voice lacks conviction.
“I guess.”
In his begrudging reply, I hear what he hasn’t said: that it’s not enough of a reward. That there are better rewards out there, and they’re going to the people who haven’t tried as hard as he has. “You could be more sympathetic, you know,” he adds.
“Danny, I didn’t mean to be—”
“I’ve got to go. My mom just made dinner. Oh, and she wants you to call and update her on my dad.”
We hang up and I stare at the blank walls of my room. I’m so empty now that I don’t even know what I thought I might put on that imagined wall in LA, what I cared enough about.
I wonder what it would be like to have one person in the world as concerned about me as the Allens are with each other and themselves. What it would be like to have one person say, “Juliet, you don’t seem happy. Are you tired? Is there something else you want from your life?”
Except there is someone who cares that much. One person who put me above everyone else. He just couldn’t show it to the world.
Maybe I’m not empty after all. It’s just that the things I’d put on my walls and the things I’d like to sing about are ones I can’t show the world either.
* * *
Danny is young and healthy. He’s up and about within a week, so Donna returns, but life doesn’t improve much.
My internship has begun and has turned out to be its own special kind of hell.
The music teacher, Miss Johnson, is the type who’d make you hate anything she taught.
My contribution involves making copies, straightening the room, and walking the bad kids to the principal, but she still acts like it’s a burden to have me around. I just…let it happen.
The little I had to offer the world has been poured out onto the ground and gone to waste.
At home, the pastor isn’t improving. He wheezes anytime he walks up the stairs.
And increasingly, he just sits in his favorite chair and has Donna and I get what he needs.
Grady is over frequently, lurking like the shadow of death over the house, salivating at the possibility that he might be able to replace the pastor once his mentorship is over.
“Do a bit of missionary work,” the pastor advises him one night when Grady’s been too obvious about his intentions. “I could even handle the sermon on Sunday if you’d like,” he’d said.
“Let yourself season for a while. When Mrs. Allen and I go back to Nicaragua in five years, you can take my place. Marry Libby too. No one wants an unmarried pastor.”
Donna pats his hand. “Leave him alone, hon. Libby’s the same year as Danny. But I suspect there will be any number of weddings two summers from now when everyone graduates.”
She smiles at me then, and I go rigid, my hands gripping the kitchen counter. Yes, I knew this is where it was headed. It just always seemed very distant.
And two summers from now doesn’t sound distant enough.
* * *
In late October, Danny is cleared to begin training with the team again, but things don’t improve the way he’d hoped.
“That new freshman they brought in from Texas is starting,” he tells me. “Two years I’ve been there and I never started once. And the guy got arrested over the summer for some drug shit, and it wasn’t the first time. How is that fair?”