Jett #2
While I managed to remain faithful in my crappy marriage, Kennedy isn’t privy to just how bad things were between her mother and me.
We did everything we could to hide it from the kids until it became too much to bear.
When Kennedy left for college, we legally separated and eventually divorced, trying to ease Pierce into it since he was only ten years old at the time.
Now he’s seventeen and a senior in high school, but he still struggles at times.
Our less-than-ideal home life has taken its toll on his fragile psyche.
He suffers from depression and severe anxiety, something we’ve done our best to deal with throughout the years.
Kennedy looks up at me and narrows her eyes. “Why are you smiling?”
I reach over and squeeze her hand. “It’s nice spending time with you, kiddo. I’ve missed you. So much.”
Her face tightens. “You had eighteen years with me living in your house, but you chose not to spend any time with me then.”
I nod in agreement. She’s not wrong. “You’re right, and I regret my behavior. All I can do is tell you that I’m sorry. I can’t change the past, but we can attempt to move forward in a positive way. I want that. Very much.”
Her face softens a drop. “I’m trying, Dad. My first order of business is to rebuild a relationship with my brother because he’s the only innocent one in all this.”
“Absolutely. He idolizes you. Thank you for agreeing to come to his senior night football game. You have no idea what it means to all of us.”
“I’m doing it for him and only him, not you and certainly not Ginny.”
She’s refused to call Ginny anything other than her first name since she walked in on her and the random man. The pain Kennedy still bears is written all over her pretty face. It breaks my heart.
“I understand, and I appreciate it. Pierce is over the moon.” I point to the phone. “Back to that. The salesman said I could make the font bigger so I can read certain things without my glasses. Can you help me do that?”
She nods as she returns her attention to the phone and swipes her fingers with purpose. Suddenly, again as if by magic, the font gets bigger. Ooh, this is much easier to read.
She looks back up at me with an amused look on her face. “Do you want help with this dating app I see downloaded?”
I shake my head, feeling embarrassed. “No, no. I was…umm…just toying with it. The salesman must have done that,” I mumble.
I quickly grab for the phone, and she cracks a mischievous smile.
I know she’s fucking with me, but it’s progress, and I’ll take it.
Pierce and I walk into my house. With a few inches of height over him, I reach over and mess up the top of his already purposefully disheveled blond hair. “Great game tonight, buddy. I’m proud of you.”
He cracks a lopsided smile. “Thanks, Dad. It was dope that Kennedy came.” It’s the first time she’s ever seen him play, and he had one of his best games ever. He even gave her the game ball.
“It was certainly…dope.” I raise an unamused eyebrow.
He lets out a laugh. “Don’t ever use that word again, bruh.”
“How about you never again call me bruh, and I’ll promise never to use the word dope?” I grumble.
He chuckles. “Deal. I’m gonna change and then bolt for the lit func at Kopple’s house. Can you hit up my Venmo? I need some bank.”
I exhale a long breath as I attempt to translate what he just asked of me. I think he needs money to go to a party, but I can’t be sure. Sometimes I have no clue what comes out of his mouth. Kids these days speak a different language.
Making a bit of a show of opening the window blinds and looking at our yard, I say, “The grass doesn’t look like it was cut this week.”
He harumphs. “Bru…Dad, this is a bougie hood. Everyone else has a grass pimp. Can’t we just hire one? We’ve got mad bank.”
I look at him in question. “What is mad bank?”
He rolls his eyes in obvious annoyance. “We’re rich. Hire a lawn service.”
I cross my arms at my spoiled brat of a son.
I’ve failed him in so many ways, but this way bothers me more than the rest. “I’m rich.
We’re not rich. You don’t have a penny to your name.
Be happy I purchased a tractor for you to mow the lawn.
When I was a kid, I had to cut the grass with a small push mower that was practically a death trap waiting to happen.
It’s a miracle I didn’t lose a limb. It took every ounce of strength I had to move that thing around, and it ate up an entire day because it was the least efficient piece of machinery you could imagine.
You can sit on your ass, listen to your music, ride around the lawn, and be done in thirty minutes, yet you still can’t manage to get it done.
So no, I will not be hitting up your Venmo with mad bank until your one damn chore is done. ”
He shrugs without a care in the world and calmly says, “Fine, I’ll ask Mom. She’ll send it.” He then carelessly makes his way upstairs while I remind him to clean his room before he goes, not garnering any response.
If I had treated my father like that, my ass would have been red and sore for two weeks. Pierce would be a tougher kid if he had a belt to the ass from time to time, but that’s a big no-no these days.
Unfortunately, he’s not wrong. Ginny will send the money without giving it a second thought.
Here’s how economics work in my family. I pay all of Ginny’s expenses, including a house, alimony, child support, and her overly excessive plastic surgery.
I pay all of Pierce’s expenses regardless of said child support payments.
Neither of them considers earning any money on their own, happily holding out their palms for my hard-earned money.
That’s it. The economic flow chart of the Jeffries’s family.
They’re basically the opposite of Kennedy, who has refused to accept a dime from me since the day she left for college.
She earned a full basketball scholarship to college that also covered her living expenses.
I tried to give her money, but she wouldn’t take any.
She may hate us, but at least she’s hard-working and principled. I can’t help but respect that.
Thirty minutes later, Pierce is off to his party, and I’m sitting out back alone with a glass of good wine.
It’s my favorite part of the day. My days are full of football practices, the weight room, and watching football film to strategize for upcoming games.
But at the end of each day, I sit in my little backyard oasis and indulge in a glass or two of wine.
Expensive wine has been my form of escapism for two decades.
After I married Ginny, I started to hit the whiskey a little too hard. I drowned myself in my misery. It always made me a bit of an asshole, but I didn’t care. I needed to numb myself to having married a stranger I didn’t even like, let alone love.
When Leo became my agent, he barged into my house and poured it all down the drain, telling me it was going to ruin my career and my life.
He introduced me to the world of fine wine, and for some reason, it intrigued me.
Instead of spending my evenings drinking hard liquor to numb the pain, I buried myself in all things wine.
Not in overindulging, but in the process and learning about the subtle differences in each bottle.
I built a wine cellar and started collecting bottles.
It made me feel good to have something to think and talk about other than football.
My whole life before that, the only thing people talked to me about was football.
Everything in my universe centered around that.
I finally found something else to make me a more well-rounded person.
Something interesting and totally different from the sport I played.
I can happily talk about wine for hours.
I now have a wine cellar full of over ten thousand bottles that it’s taken me over twenty years to build.
Aside from sports memorabilia, it was the only personal property I asked for in the divorce, and Ginny barely put up a fight.
It was leverage for her. She never understood my passion or cared for it.
She’s a martini girl, usually three deep by lunchtime.
I pull my phone out of my pocket and perk up immediately when I notice a reply on the dating app.
After Kennedy’s crash course today, I set up my profile and immediately sent Fallon a message under my fake name.
It took me hours to figure out how to do it, but the message finally went through right before I left for Pierce’s game.
Everything about my account is designed to attract her. I used what I found out when we set up her account to my advantage.
Does it feel deceitful? A little. But is Lloyd Dobler as obvious a fake, pop culture name as Diane Court?
Yes. She’ll know right away that it’s not my real name, just as I would know Diane Court isn’t hers.
Say Anything was a late-eighties movie that my mother watched at least a thousand times.
Diane and Lloyd were the main characters, and the movie was a huge cult hit.
It’s one of the best-known and most quoted movies of my generation.
The big scene with him holding a boombox outside her window will forever live on in pop culture infamy.