Chapter 9 #2
“I yelled at him. I… I’ve just never been so angry at somebody. Because he knew. He knew everything that I had been through. He saw me going through it. When I was in high school.”
“Fuck him. Honestly. He sounds like an average, normal dude.”
He wondered if he was being too hard, too dismissive, even, but she turned to look at him, a perplexed expression on her face.
“He is. You… you’re right. I… this betrayal felt like something so weird and out of left field that I think I’ve been trying to figure out the key to it.
But there is no key. He wanted to have sex with a new person.
So he did. And at a certain point, obviously, the double life thing wasn’t going to work.
And… whether he pretended he was going to come out here to get rid of me, or he just didn’t even think because he got so caught up in it, and then when he had to make the decision, he chose himself.
I’ve been thinking of it in terms of him choosing this other woman.
But that’s not it, is it? He chose himself instead of us.
He didn’t think about another person, and that’s actually not unusual at all. It’s my whole life.”
“Yeah. Selfish assholes doing selfish asshole things. Believe me, I get it. That was my dad. A selfish asshole who did whatever the hell he wanted all the time. Who didn’t care who else he hurt.
A lot of people don’t behave that way because they’re afraid.
They’re afraid of the backlash. I guess maybe your husband figured…
If he had you and his sister move across the country… ”
“Both his parents are dead.”
“Yet. So, why keep… being selfless? I think some people really think of it that way. They’re only good because not being good has a social consequence.”
“What about you?”
“I don’t know if I’m good. I think we just proved that I’m pretty damned flawed, but I don’t do the right thing because other people are looking.
I do the right thing because I know how badly you can hurt other people when you don’t.
I’ve lived in that consequence, and I refuse to be that consequence.
Sounds to me like your husband grew up with a decent family.
Just based on the things that you’ve said. ”
“Yeah. They were wonderful. His mom was such a lovely woman, his dad was sweet, even though I didn’t get to know him very long. Cara, obviously, is the best, and she’s like the sister I never had.”
“He doesn’t know what it’s like. He doesn’t know how painful it is when somebody just decides to not do the thing that is expected of them. The thing that they’re supposed to do.”
“Yeah. But are we supposed to live our lives just doing the expected thing to keep other people happy?”
“I don’t know. I believe, with all my heart, that some people aren’t meant to be together. Maybe that’s the two of you. But, even if your marriage was going to end eventually, you can’t tell me that it needed to end this way.”
“Well, that’s too damn right.”
“He owed you more.”
She nodded slowly. “Yeah. He did.”
Silence lapsed between them. And for some reason, he found that he wanted to know more. He wanted to dig deeper into the substance of her. Of why exactly it was such a betrayal for him to do what he did, knowing about her past.
He wanted to know about that past.
“So, how was your growing up?”
“My mom left. After punching a bunch of holes in the wall in our trailer. Not all at once. Just years of it. I was eight when she left, but I remember every year she was there. She was an angry, volatile, drunk mess. And my dad wasn’t a whole lot better, but he stayed with me.
He was also childish. He tried, I think, but he liked to drink too much, and the women that he met he always met in bars, and they liked to drink just as much as he did.
I never had any stability. I didn’t have a real family.
I always felt like I had to take care of my dad.
Make sure he was all right, call in to whatever job he had, and make an excuse about him being sick when he was just hungover.
I guess you could say I’ve been working in hospitality my whole life. ”
He laughed, a short, sharp laugh, and he was relieved when she laughed too.
“Thank you,” she said. “Only the truly traumatized understand why that’s funny.
Poor Cara would probably look at me with big, wounded eyes and say that she felt bad for me.
Not that I don’t feel bad for me sometimes.
But if you can’t laugh at your horrendously traumatic childhood, what are you going to do?
Lay down and give up? Cry about it? I could, I suppose, but there’s no answer in tears.
” She let her head fall back against the seat.
“I suppose, there’s no answer anywhere. At least, not one that I found. ”
He cleared his throat, rubbed his beard, and kept his eyes on the mountains on the horizon. “I guess what you do is live in opposition to it.”
“Yes,” she said. “That’s right. That’s why it’s so important to you, isn’t it? For you to be a good person.”
“Damn straight.”
“I get that. I don’t think that I took it and turned it into that.”
“You’re an only child, right?”
“Yes. I mean, as far as I know. I assume that my mom had more kids somewhere. Maybe my dad did, but none that he knew about.”
“You’re an only child,” he said. “So, that makes sense to me.”
“Yeah?”
“I don’t mean that to sound callous or anything like that. I just mean… I never wanted to let them down. I had people immediately around me that I watched get hurt by the same things I was being hurt by, and I knew that I couldn’t do the same thing to them.” He cleared his throat. “Or to anybody.”
“Yeah. I guess I just… I just wanted to make sure that I was never dependent on someone who wasn’t functional again.
But I guess I was. More than I realized.
Because he was covert. Anything that wasn’t drunk and passed out during the middle of the day seemed functional to me.
Which is more of an indictment on my childhood than anything else.
But I thought that he was great. Maybe he wasn’t.
” She put her hand over her mouth and spoke through it, her voice muffled.
“What if he sucked the entire time, and I didn’t know because I’m used to being treated so badly?
” She moved her hand away and stared at him.
“Is that the saddest thing you’ve ever heard? ”
“No,” he said. “Not the saddest. The saddest would be if you kept waiting for him to come back to you in spite of all of that. Because that’s more like my mom.”
“Well. She had kids with him. So I can see why that was complicated for her. I’m sure she wanted her kids to know their dad.”
“Yeah, I don’t really think that was her motivation for going back to him over and over again.
It was about her. It wasn’t about us.” He felt guilty saying that.
It was the kind of thing that Walker said.
He felt real sympathy for their mother that Walker didn’t seem to have access to, but as much as he wanted to defend her, there was no pretending that wasn’t true.
“We were always going to have kids,” she said. “This is the first time that I’ve been grateful we waited. Because I would’ve hated to put them through this. I don’t think he would’ve been different just because they were kids.”
“No,” he said. “I’m no expert on that kind of thing, but I can tell you that kids don’t necessarily change a person. Or make them better. It would be good if they did. But… Not always.”
That was one reason he never intended to have any. He had two siblings, let them carry on the family name, or whatever. He didn’t have any investment in it.
“Yeah. I get that.”
“So,” he said. “Three weeks left until people start showing up.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I’ve got applications to look over. I have to start doing interviews.”
“Laney should be showing up soon,” he said.
“Yes, she sent an email to my official resort address. She and her employees. Well, I guess she’ll be doing interviews like me.”
“She has a lot of restaurant experience, though it’s my impression that she hasn’t exactly had her own before.”
“It’ll be interesting for both of us because I’ve never run a hotel this size before. But I’m feeling confident.”
“Good.”
This felt like more familiar ground. It felt normal.
And hell, that was a good thing.
They pulled onto the driveway that led to the hotel, and he couldn’t tell if he was more or less tense at the idea of being free of her presence.
“Well,” she said. “Thanks for that… For the afternoon.”
“Yeah,” he said.
She bailed out of the truck almost as soon as he stopped, and closed the door, head down as she moved quickly into the hotel.
And he drove straight back toward the cabin to erase the evidence of what they had done.