Chapter 12 #2
I fully expected that to be the dynamic for the afternoon – maybe quiet work was our version of being on good terms, even if I’d be infinitely chattier with anyone else – but she surprised me by asking me a question out of nowhere.
“Are you from the area?” she asked, without looking over at me. She just focused on what she was doing, so I did the same.
I grinned, knowing she couldn’t see me. This was the kind of question people asked after minutes, not a month. “My parents own the farm next to Jack’s family’s. We grew up together.”
“That’s really cool,” she said, and I heard a longing in her voice that I couldn’t quite place.
“What about you?” I asked, pretending I didn’t know where she grew up from my internet sleuthing.
“I’m from Southern California,” she said, “but I’ve been coming here every year since I was a kid to spend summers with Jen.”
“And you spend the rest of your time back home?” I asked.
“Mostly travelling around,” she said. “I live in a van, actually. Or, I did; I had to get rid of it before I came this year because it was on its last legs.”
I smiled, remembering the picture I’d seen of the converted camper van. “That sounds amazing,” I said. “I bet you’ve been to some really cool places.”
“Yeah, a few,” she admitted. “Yosemite is great, and I love the California coast. I keep meaning to drive up to Oregon or Washington, but it’s never quite happened.”
“Too busy?” I asked. “Friends? Girlfriend?”
I sensed Teddy’s glare before I turned my head to actually see it.
“Sorry,” I said, opting for humour, just this once. “I shouldn’t presume. Boyfriend?”
Teddy tipped her head back and barked out a laugh, and I smiled. It felt nice to earn that from her, at least, even if I couldn’t have her approval.
“No, no friends or otherwise, really,” she said, though she didn’t sound all that sad about it. “Not all of us are so lucky to have such a tight-knit group like yours.”
I smiled to myself as I turned back to the sweetcorn. My friends really were amazing – when I thought about them, it put all of the crises of vocation and identity to the back of my mind. They were everything to me.
“I’m only there for half the year,” Teddy continued, “and even then, I’ve always been biding my time until I can move here permanently.”
I paused; that was interesting, but after what Teddy had said on my first day about the job being hers, I didn’t want to pry into that, so I pivoted back to safer territory.
“Is Jen from here?” I asked. “She doesn’t sound like it.”
“No, she’s from California, too, but she married a Welsh man. She didn’t know she was gay until they’d been married for a few years. Or, if she did, she kept herself locked in the closet long enough to get permanent residency.”
I laughed. “Resourceful, I suppose.”
Teddy grimaced. “Yeah, but he was awful. I tell myself she must not have known until the end, because otherwise I can’t imagine she would have been able to stay with him.”
I turned in place and sat down in the path, my back to the bed I’d been working in. I expected Teddy to tell me off for taking a break so soon, but she didn’t. In fact, she surprised me by doing the same, facing me. She looked down at the spade in her hand as she spoke.
“When they split,” she said, “Jen couch surfed for about a year before she had enough money to buy the house here. Then she, my mom, and I spent the next decade making it what it is now.”
“That’s amazing,” I said, imagining all the work that had gone into that. “Does your mum not come anymore? Will I get to meet her?”
Teddy’s face fell, and I immediately wanted to take it back – to pick the words up out of the pea gravel between us and shove them into my big mouth.
“She died,” Teddy said, as matter-of-factly as I would have expected, but I could hear a slight croak in her voice that hadn’t been there before. “About nine years ago.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said in a quick exhale.
Teddy shook her head. “It was a long time ago.” But she also turned back to the beetroot, so I turned away, too, and got back to work, mentally kicking myself for blowing it.
“Do you have another parent?” I asked. “Are they … still around?”
Teddy laughed again, but this time it was cold.
Weak. “Situationally? Yes,” she said. “My dad still lives in the house I grew up in. Existentially? Not so much. He’s got a really bad drinking problem now.
I see him as much as I can when I’m there, but I’m mostly nomadic, so we’re not really close anymore. ”
There was a twinge of guilt in her words that I only recognised because of my own semi-estrangement from my parents.
“I’m sorry,” I said again, and I meant it. “Were he and your mum together?”
“Yeah, they were,” she said. “They were always super independent – he worked as a raft guide and climbing instructor in Yosemite during the summers while we were here – but they loved each other. Deeply.”
“So, he took it hard,” I said, filling in the gaps. “When she died.”
Teddy didn’t brush me off, but she didn’t elaborate, either. She just kept working, and I did, too. When I’d finished with the sweetcorn, she pointed me towards some courgettes and explained what to do with them whilst she moved on to some tomato seedlings going in further down in the same bed.
“What about you?” she asked eventually. “You close with your family?”
“Not really,” I admitted, feeling my shoulders tense as I twisted a pot off a seedling and pressed it into a hole I’d dug.
“Even though you live so close?”
There was no judgment in her voice, but it was hard not to place it there myself. Here was Teddy, whose mum was gone, and whose dad was a shell of a person, and I had two perfectly healthy parents just a few miles down the road from me. Yet, I was avoiding them.
“We don’t get on very well,” I said. “I’m sorry. I know that’s shitty.”
I heard the scratch of Teddy’s spade stop, and I felt the air move behind me. I turned around to see her sitting back on her heels, looking at me over her shoulder.
“Don’t do that,” she said, her voice sharp. “You don’t have to have a relationship with your parents just because mine aren’t around.”
“I know,” I said softly, but I felt chastised. “Sorry again.”
She sighed. “No, it’s fine, really,” she said.
“People do that all the time; they find out my mom is gone, and they feel like they have to couch every complaint about their own parents with some sort of statement of gratitude. I dated one girl a couple of years ago who would always say, ‘God, my mom pisses me off so badly, though I guess I’m lucky to have her.’”
I laughed, trying not to think about the fact that I’d already social media stalked her enough to know who she was talking about. Why did thinking of that picture – of them together – make me feel tense now?
“Anyway,” Teddy said, “tell me why your parents suck.”
I thought about how to articulate it to her. I’d never really had to explain this to anyone; it hadn’t come up with Lauren or anyone else I’d dated, and Jack and Phil and their families already knew, because they’d been there for it. So I’d never found the words to sum things up.
“I guess my mum is just really unhappy,” I said, picking at a loose piece of plastic on the rim of a discarded pot. “I think she wanted more from her life, and she’s kind of put that on me. So every time I didn’t care about school or didn’t do what she wanted me to, I’d hear about it.”
“Sounds … overbearing?”
I huffed a laugh. “Yeah, you could say that.”
“And your dad?” Teddy asked, and she must have heard the sudden breath I sucked in, because she turned around again. “Sorry, you don’t have to answer that.”
I shook my head. “It’s fine.” And it was – as frustrating as Teddy had been, I could tell she wouldn’t hold this against me. Despite only having known her for a few weeks, really, and despite most of that time being antagonistic at best, she felt like a safe space. At least for this stuff.
“He’s just too impartial. We get along fine, but every time Mum would tell me I was wasting my life, when I’d run to my room in tears, he wasn’t there.
He never said the kinds of things she did, but he never said anything to contradict it, either.
He never stood up for me, or even let on that he disagreed. He was just…”
“Complicit,” Teddy said, and I nodded.
“Yeah. Exactly.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “You deserve better than that.”
I bit back the emotion that rose up in my throat.
Since I’d never told anyone outright about all this, no one had ever had the chance to unequivocally take my side.
Not that it meant much, since Teddy didn’t know them, but still.
Hearing her acknowledge how much it sucked?
Hearing her assert, however much of a platitude it might be, that I deserved better? It mattered, for some reason.
“Thanks,” I whispered, then focused my attention back on the courgette plant in my hand.
We worked next to each other in silence for a long time after that, and neither of us rushed to fill it.
It was easy; companionable, even. I didn’t move to frame the shot or document the moment, either, my phone staying in my pocket.
I could appreciate the fact that, for the first time, I wasn’t toe-to-toe with Teddy.
We were back-to-back now, working together instead of against one another, and I liked it a lot better that way.