Seventy-Five
“THANK YOU FOR being here. I should have said that already,” Taylor says. “I know I’ve been sounding like a bitch.”
“If you ever try to thank me again,” I say, “I’m getting your mother over here.” Then, taking one last shot at somehow lightening her mood, I add, “Bitch.”
She does manage to smile at that, almost as a last resort. Maybe to shut me up.
I’ve finally convinced Taylor to stay with us at the farm until her eyesight returns. We both know that as well-meaning as her mother is, having her as a caretaker, even in the short run, would be the same for Taylor as being under house arrest.
EJ is on her way over to pack things up for Taylor.
Clothes mostly.
“While I’m reluctantly accepting your invitation to stay with you and your grandmother,” she says to me, “something I’d be happy not to see is you going through my underwear drawer.”
“I can respect that,” I say.
“You want to know the only good part of this?” she says. “I don’t have to see pictures of Burt and me every time I turn around.”
She’s still not feeling sorry for herself. That’s not it and that’s not her, wasn’t her even after Burt died, from that first moment in his hospital room.
She had said the other day she was just trying to put one foot in front of another.
Only now she’s not sure she can even do that.
Out of nowhere comes a flash of anger. “I cannot fucking believe this, Silas. I really can’t.”
She’s scared, we’re both scared, nothing I say is going to change that, certainly not tonight. Nothing is going to give her a conclusive answer about when her eyesight is coming back.
We’re still in the living room, me next to her on the sofa now, when we hear EJ’s car. I start to get up and open the door for EJ, but Taylor finds my arm with her hand to stop me. I look down at her, not sure what she’s seeing.
But something.
“You need to know nothing has changed,” she says.
Still holding my arm, her grip as fierce as the look on her face.
I think: Practically everything has changed.
Then I ask her, “What hasn’t changed, Tay?”
“What I told you that day at the gun club, about anybody who would hurt somebody I love,” she whispers. “I want them fucking dead.”