Chapter 5 #2
"With what? With the same fear you've conducted your whole life with?" I'm shaking, but I don't stop. "I have done everything you've ever asked of me. Every hymn, every Sunday, every version of myself you've decided is acceptable. I have never once asked for anything that was only mine."
"That's not fair, Ruthie, I have given you everything—"
"You've given me a cage and called it love," I say, and the words land in the kitchen like something breaking, and I watch my father's face go pale, and some part of me wants desperately to take it back, and a larger, newer part of me does not.
That's when he finds it. The application, still in my bag on the counter where I left it that morning, meaning to mail it after church.
He picks it up — sees the letterhead, the summer art intensive, my careful, hopeful handwriting filling in every blank — and his face crumples into something I've never seen on him before.
"An art program," he says, quiet now, quieter than the shouting. "In the city. You were going to leave. You were going to just — leave, and not tell me."
"I was going to tell you. When I heard back. If I got in."
"You're not going anywhere," he says, and before I can stop him, before I can even fully understand what's happening, he tears the application in half. Then in quarters. Sets the pieces on the counter like evidence.
"You're not going anywhere," he says again. "Not to that program. Not to that man. I won't allow it."
I stare at the torn pieces of two years of quiet, secret hope, and I feel something in me that has bent and bent and bent for twenty-five years finally, quietly, refuse to bend anymore.
"You don't get to tear up my dreams to keep me small," I say, very quietly, and I have never in my life meant anything more.
Then I walk upstairs, and I lock my bedroom door for the first time since I was a teenager, and I sit on my bed in the dark with my knees pulled to my chest, and I do not cry.
I am done crying about being small.
I sit there a long while, listening to my father's footsteps pace the hallway once, twice, then stop outside my door — I can see the shadow of his feet in the gap beneath it — and for a moment I think he might knock, might say something, might reach for the version of this conversation where we find our way back to each other tonight instead of days from now.
He doesn't knock. His footsteps retreat, slow and heavy, toward his own room, and I sit alone in the dark for a long time afterward, torn paper scattered on the kitchen counter downstairs like something that died there, and somewhere out past my window, past the church, past the whole sleeping town, I know there's a man on a bike who's probably wide awake too, wondering the exact same thing I am.
Whether any of this was worth it.
I already, somewhere underneath the hurt, know the answer. I'm just not ready to say it out loud yet, not even to myself, not on a night this raw.
Two weeks earlier, before any of this, there was an afternoon I keep returning to now, lying in the dark — an ordinary Tuesday, nothing special about it at the time, that I understand now was actually the hinge the whole rest of my life turned on.
Nadia had cornered me at Petal & Thorn, waiting for Briar to finish wrapping an order, and asked, with her usual bluntness, "So when are you gonna admit it?"
"Admit what?"
"That you're gone for him. Completely, hopelessly gone. It's been obvious for weeks. Ivy owes me twenty bucks over it."
"You have a bet on this?"
"Everyone has a bet on this. I'm just the one who talks to you directly about it.
" She'd handed me a stem to trim, unbothered, like this was any other conversation.
"For what it's worth, I think you should.
Admit it. Life's too short to spend it being careful about the one thing that actually makes you feel alive. "
"You don't know that it does."
"Ruthie." She'd looked at me then, genuinely serious for once, no teasing in it.
"I've known you a month and I've watched you laugh more in that month than I think the whole town's seen out of you in a decade.
That's not nothing. That's not something you should talk yourself out of because it's inconvenient or because your daddy doesn't approve. "
I hadn't had a good answer for her then.
I don't have one now either, sitting in the dark with torn paper on the kitchen counter downstairs, except that she was right, completely right, and I wish I'd had the courage to admit it out loud before the whole thing became a crisis instead of just a quiet, private joy.
I think, too, about Mrs. Petraki, of all people — how she'd cornered me after the last committee meeting, patted my hand, and said, unprompted, "You've got color in your cheeks again, dear.
Haven't seen that since you were a girl.
" I hadn't understood what she meant at the time.
I understand it now, lying here, that whatever color had come back into my face these past weeks, my father just spent the evening trying to tear it right back out along with the application.
I get up eventually, once the house has gone fully silent, and creep to my window, careful not to let the old floorboards creak the way they do near the closet.
Church Road is empty, the streetlight at the corner throwing its usual pale circle onto asphalt, no headlight, no engine, nothing.
I don't know what I was hoping to see. I stand there a long while anyway, watching an empty road the same way I imagine he's watched a lit window more nights than he's ever admitted to me, and eventually I go back to bed, not to sleep, just to lie there and wait for morning, and whatever it's going to demand of me next.