Chapter 7 Mistakes Were Made #4
What rankled even more was that he allowed himself to be called a boy. The only conclusion he could draw was that he wanted his father’s approval more than he cared to admit.
“It’s nice you have a good relationship with your dad,” Blair said.
“Don’t assume because my dad calls, we have a good relationship,” Jack said, more sharply than he’d intended.
She stopped walking, and after a beat of silence, she turned to face him. “You’re right. I shouldn’t assume. I’m sorry.”
It was an effective apology, and it caused a pang of contrition in his chest. “No, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have snapped at you.”
He tried to make his apology as good as hers had been despite the fact that the words felt like lumps of coal in his mouth.
He held her gaze, and when he almost couldn’t stand it anymore, the gentle yet somehow intense scrutiny of her green-gold regard too much to bear, she resumed walking and said, “It’s OK.
I understand having a complicated relationship with parents. ”
What did that mean? From their texts, he’d surmised that she’d grown up wealthy, but she’d never said anything about her parents.
And why was he finding himself so frequently in situations where he had to apologize to Blair?
His ruminations were punctured by a loud cawing. He turned his gaze to the sky as a black bird whooshed by.
A black bird and a turquoise pool.
He tried to see where it had gone, but it had disappeared as quickly as it had arrived. Had he imagined it? “What was that?”
“American crow,” Blair said, and though his query hadn’t been as to the particular species of bird, he appreciated learning that if he was having a delusion, it was a shared one.
“What makes it American? Is it rude and monolingual?”
She laughed. “It is rude and monolingual, but I think that’s true of all crows, not just the American ones.”
“How do you know so much about crows?”
“I used to feed them—this was back at home in Georgia. Turns out when you make friends with crows—or ravens, I’m pretty sure, or magpies—they reward you with their loyalty. They bring you shiny little trinkets and dive-bomb your enemies.”
“You are making this up.”
“I’m not. And the ‘dive-bomb your enemies’ thing, while it sounds amazing in theory, was a real pain in the behind.
We had a bunch of terraces and porches on the house I grew up in, and I used to read in the summer on this small one off the library.
No one else ever used it, so it was my witchy-crow reading nook.
But then my mother decided to plant a garden nearby.
And that…” She winced. “Displeasing my mother was not good in general, but siccing a crow army on her was very not good.” She paused.
“So, yeah, I shouldn’t have presumed anything about your relationship with your father.
I was starstruck by the idea of him. I bet that happens to you a lot.
But as I said, if it’s any consolation, I get it.
I mean, not the specifics, of course. But the concept of an overbearing parent? Yep.”
“Sometimes I feel like—”
What was he doing? She hadn’t asked him a question. There was no reason to offer any information, much less information that included an armchair psychological self-evaluation.
She looked over her shoulder. Kept his gaze for a few beats. It was that same look from before, the one that had made him apologize. It contained a kind of neutral openness. As if she wanted to hear his story but didn’t feel entitled to it. That was a rare combination.
It made him squirmy, even as it put him at ease.
He thought about her saying she was a good reader. She was a good listener, too, it turned out. That quality of interest without entitlement, that innate curiosity, was probably what made her so good at her job.
It was what made him finish the sentence he’d let trail off. “I sometimes feel like I can’t write my book with my dad around.”
Well. He hadn’t known he felt that way until the words were out of his mouth. He almost laughed, though nothing was funny.
He felt, suddenly, grounded. A hundred percent less squirmy than a moment ago. It was as if that truth had been rattling around inside him, and now that it was out, he could calm the hell down.
Blair said nothing, which he found rather amazing. Other people would have said What do you mean? Why not? Shouldn’t your literary genius of a father be a help, not a hindrance?
She merely kept walking. Didn’t even look back at him when, a good ten seconds later, she said, breezily, “Well, then it’s a good thing you’re here and not there.”
Then she and her beagle named after a fictional teenage vampire took him to a scenic overlook and showed him a view of rich people’s houses nestled in trees that looked like they were artificial trees in a natural history museum display on California instead of actual trees in the world.
He kept an eye out for the crow that might or might not have been the product of a shared delusion, but it didn’t reappear.
And then they walked back down the hill to Blair’s house and Jack went inside and brewed another irritatingly large cup of coffee and canceled his flight home.