Chapter 26
EVERETT
This is by far the worst.
I messed up today. It started when I let the record label’s email get to me. I realized that their pressure went beyond having three songs ready and hinges on a successful tour. Something I am seriously doubting I can give them after the school incident.
Every coping strategy I’ve ever relied on has lost its power, and I’m out of ideas.
Summer offered to read to Quinn at bedtime again, so I came out on the patio to repent for my shortcomings. Also to call the one person who has always offered me advice when I needed it.
“Everett? Is everything all right?” His gravel tone crackles through the speaker when he answers.
I yank the phone from my ear to look at the clock. The time difference.
“Dad, hey. Everything’s fine. I’m sorry to call so… early? What time is it there?”
“Doesn’t matter. Hang on a second,” he whispers.
There’s a creak, a shuffle, a pause, and a click before he speaks again. “Sorry about that. It’s good to hear your voice.”
The revelation that we haven’t spoken since Quinn’s birthday smacks me square in the chest. That was a month ago.
“Yours too. Where are you?”
“In the bathroom.”
I chuckle. “I meant in Italy, Dad. What part of Italy?”
“Oh, right.” A clear indication that I woke him for this conversation.
They’ve texted me pictures from Naples, Rome, and Florence since they left the Amalfi Coast. The most I’ve sent back is a heart.
Communication is not my strength when life gets overwhelming.
When I moved to Nashville, my parents used to check in with me all the time.
They stopped when I got too busy to answer, waiting for me to call them first.
“Well, we made it to Milan yesterday. It’s the home of designer purse brands, apparently. I couldn’t tell you the names of any of them. Pretty incredible cathedral though.”
“Sounds awesome. How’s Mom?”
“Had to talk her off a ledge yesterday, but she’s good now.” A muffled laugh follows his attempt at a joke.
“I’m sorry I haven’t called sooner.”
I promised them a few days the last time we spoke. She has every right to feel upset over four weeks.
“Taking care of a kid is a lot,” he argues.
I appreciate the validation, but it doesn’t make me feel any less guilty.
“Speaking of… how’s Quinn?”
I pick out shapes in the clouds—a fish, a bear, a tree—to calm me. “She had an evaluation a couple weeks ago and started speech therapy.”
A hum slips from his lips. Silent patience follows. My disability may have forced me to excel at lip reading, but being a good listener is a skill I learned from him.
“Can I ask what it was like for you when you found out about my APD?”
It’s a question I never thought to pose when I was younger. There are certain things you don’t appreciate until you’re a parent too.
For ten seconds I think he turned on the bathroom fan. When the whirring stops I realize the sound came from him.
“I started therapy.”
Silence—from him—follows that sentence. Surprise follows it for me. Not at the visual of my dad lying flat on a couch talking with a professional about his feelings—he’s never been too proud to show vulnerability—but at learning it wasn’t my mom on that couch, talking to a professional.
Because it was her who suggested I attend therapy after the concert fallout. She suggested it when Eliza died too.
I wait for him to elaborate before realizing he answered my question already. In as few words as possible, but the meaning behind them is still there—he was struggling and sought help.
“Do you think I could have the number?”
“I’m texting it to you right now. His name is Charlie. I’ve been seeing him for twenty-five years. Not every therapist is right for everyone, but he’s put me back together more times than I can count.”
I would have never guessed.
“Thanks. I have a hard time trusting people with this stuff. But I think if I go to someone who already knows about me, I might have an easier time opening up.”
No matter my lack of belief in it before, I think this will help me. It’s what I need to do.
“He does Zoom calls,” my dad adds. “You can speak to him from the privacy of your own home. And he also doesn’t pry or push like I plan to about this nanny of yours who’s living with you.”
I clear my throat. “How did you—”
“Your mom and sister talk over each other when they speak on the phone.”
“Just on the phone?”
“Quit dodging the question.”
“I suppose you know her name too?”
“What was it… Sutton? Sybil? Sydney?”
“Summer, Dad. Her name is Summer.”
“Right.”
“I met her at my last concert. She lives… lived a few blocks from the house. Her best friend’s son is in Quinn’s preschool class, and she needed a job.”
“And your sister hired her first,” he comments.
“How much of this do you already know?”
His tongue clicks while he pretends to think about it. “That’s it. Are there any important details I left out?”
Those are the highlights, not the details. If it’s specifics he wants…
“She built a box fort in the backyard for Quinn before your sprinklers destroyed it.”
“Mom didn’t want to burden you with her secret garden,” he defends.
“I know.”
“What else?”
“She knows my favorite donut. Brings me flowers and pretends they’re for Quinn.
She made me join the school play and morphed it into a talent show celebrating all the kids’ differences.
She made up the nanny position in front of Caroline and pushed me to ask for help.
She’s infuriating and stubborn and beautiful and—” An endless string of adjectives flies out of my mouth.
There will never be one word to describe Summer, and there shouldn’t be.
Layered and nuanced is what drew me to her in the first place.
I’ll never make her feel like her life was destined to be one thing.
Never put her in a box. Not a nanny or a school volunteer or a cat mom or even mine.
But the reality is that I’m falling for a woman I’m relying on emotionally.
I’m afraid if I continue to, a prison is what I’ll put her in instead. I won’t be any better than Brian.
“I’m scared I need her more than she needs me,” I confess to him.
“Well… I obviously haven’t met her yet.”
I love that he uses the word yet as if it’s inevitable. I want Summer to be inevitable.
“But from how you’ve described her, she sounds like the type of girl who wouldn’t be there if she didn’t want to be. Also, the kind of girl I always imagined for you. Ev, only when we’re whole can we be there for somebody else.”
He’s right. It’s why I struggled taking care of Quinn on my own. If today taught me anything, I’ve been pretending to be okay when it’s obvious I’m not. There are things I need to work through. I let his words settle into a safe space in my heart.
“Thanks for the number, Dad.”
“Thanks for calling, Ev. Night or day,” he reminds me.
“I know.”
I’m lucky. Knowing he’ll answer is something I’ve never had to doubt.
She’s the epitome of devastating next to a golden backdrop—hair a little messy, clothes comfortable. Exactly how I pictured her at night now that she’s living here.
Summer has achieved the impossible. Made here—Harrison Boulevard and my childhood home—my new favorite place. There’s only one thing it’s missing.
“Chris Stapleton? Seriously?”
There’s a playful flicker in her eyes and a cocky swivel to her hips as she brushes by me in a T-shirt I thought she made up. Nope. The smug smirk tells me she knew how much this would affect me.
“We go way back.” Her eyes are trained on me as she runs her fingertips over the full blooms of a snowball bush at the edge of the patio.
“Bet he hasn’t experienced what Rhett Dawson did last night.”
She fights a laugh and sits down in the lounge chair next to mine. “Your mom has impeccable taste.”
I track her gaze to the limbs of a tree budding with pink blossoms.
“Her favorite book is The Secret Garden. She took her love for it quite literally. Doesn’t have any peonies though,” I comment.
“So, the woman isn’t perfect. There’s beauty in flaws.”
I don’t feel like we’re talking about flowers anymore. Especially when her attention abandons the yard to look at me.
“What other wisdom do you have to offer?” Because I seek advice now, apparently.
She gathers her hair in a fist and drapes it over one shoulder. “Peonies are usually covered in ants. It helps them fend off other bugs.” She looks away and smiles. “Henry taught me that. He has autism and is the smartest person I know.”
I wondered. That was a diagnosis my therapists considered for me before I was old enough to be tested for APD. Sometimes the two have overlapping struggles. I think it’s why I like Henry so much. We have things in common I don’t share with many people.
“I have a lot to learn from that kid,” I say.
“Keep watching Brave Wilderness with him, and you’ll catch right up.”
I scratch the back of my head as if those ants made a nest in my hair. “I’d rather burn in hell.”
She snorts.
“Did she go down okay?” I stare beyond the sliding glass door where the baby monitor is perched on the edge of the counter.
“Yeah. But she missed you. Can I ask what happened out there today?”
Shame is the first emotion I feel. Somehow it manages to bring a fresh wave of sadness with it too.
How do I describe a disability to someone who hasn’t lived it? Some things you have to experience to know.
It’s not like a cold where for two weeks—at most—you deal with the miserable consequences, then life resumes as if you never had it all. There is no break from words processing in a scrambled format. But I try for her, because the way she’s looking at me right now, she really wants to understand.
“I’ve never told anyone I have it. Not my manager, my closest friend, not even El.
I’ve always been embarrassed of it. Tried to hide it.
It doesn’t mean people are oblivious. When Blake called Quinn stupid today, it brought back all the labels kids used to slap me with.
It’s the last thing I ever wanted to give her. ”