Chatard 6 #2
“Because I know that it’s going to be awful.” He sat up straight and stiffened his arms. “Ok, yeah. Give it to me.”
“Why don’t you have a wife or a girlfriend?”
“Phew,” he sighed, breathing out a gust of relief. “That’s easy. The answer is that I don’t want one.”
“Oh,” I said. “You’re right, that was easy.” I paused. “Why don’t you want one?”
“I’m like you,” he answered. “I enjoy being on my own and living however I choose. For example, I don’t want someone bothering me to wash my hands when I come in from the garage.”
“You always wash your hands anyway. And wouldn’t that be someone like your mother, not a girlfriend?”
“My mother never told me to wash or to do anything else. She rarely noticed what I did.” He thought. “Ok, here’s another example,” he told me. “I was dating a woman who thought we should get a practice dog.”
“What would it practice?” I asked.
“That’s exactly what I said. She meant that we would practice being parents with it,” he explained. “It was a tryout for children.”
“But you didn’t want that,” I clarified. “You don’t want a dog or a kid, either.”
“No, and she was aware of that,” he said. “She wanted to break me into the idea, like what she did when she got a new pair of tennis shoes so that she wouldn’t get blisters.”
“But some people don’t want to break in their shoes because that creases them. And you’re the same way about relationships,” I interpreted, and he was nodding.
“I like things clean and unblemished, like a new pair of shoes,” Ronan agreed. “I think about having a life like my parents, that chaos and calamity all the damn time. I don’t want it. They didn’t mind it, though.”
“I would. I don’t like chaos or calamity either, and I’m better off the way I am, too.
” If Kiya or the other women ever asked me again why I didn’t have a boyfriend, that would be my answer.
Who would want chaos and calamity? “I totally understand your feelings about children. I was basically a millstone around my dad’s neck,” I mentioned.
“Shit,” he swore again, but now he sounded incredulous. “Did your father really feel that way about you?”
“I really was,” I said. “He took me with him, but he couldn’t live the way that he wanted while I was around.
He had chosen a traveling job so that he could have a free and easy existence, then it wasn’t possible when he had to drag his daughter along.
We fought all the time.” I suddenly had a revelation. “Judas Priest. You’re right.”
“I am? I mean, of course I am, but about what?”
“I did nag him to do stuff like wash his hands and get clean,” I said. “I did it all the time.”
“You’re not a nag. And if he wasn’t washing himself after working as a welder, he was as dumb as a box of rocks.”
“But that’s what I mean about living the way he wanted. He could have gone around filthy and been happy with that, but I was there complaining to him about staining the motel sheets and making marks on the walls.” I had hated arguing with management about extra charges.
“Your dad sounds like a pig. That’s the God’s honest truth of it.”
He wasn’t wrong, but the other truth was that my dad had been happy that way. I was happy my way, too, and Ronan was happy in his. Kiya and Channing were happy together. We were all happy, damn it.
“I don’t know about Chan and your friend,” he said suddenly.
“What do you mean? She’s really nice.” I remembered her trying to help me in the bathroom. “I like her.”
“Yeah, I do, too. But he’s never been a one-woman guy,” he explained.
“Like, he cheats?”
“More like he doesn’t stay with one person,” Ronan explained. “He never wanted to, before.”
“Maybe he changed. That could happen, too,” I suggested.
“Yeah, I remember someone saying that to me. She told me I’d settle down when I met the right woman, and I think she was hoping that the right woman was herself.
I don’t believe that, though. We are who we are, as people.
” He offered an example. “You’ll never stop washing your hands after working on your car. I don’t see Chan being with one woman.”
That made me mad. “Well, Kiya definitely thinks that he’s with her, and only her! I hope he’s not playing some game.”
“He’s not a total asshole, or I wouldn’t want to hang out with the guy,” he told me. “I don’t think he’s playing a game but I don’t know what he’s doing.”
“Why don’t you ask him?”
“Like the two of us would light scented candles, open a bottle of wine, and have a heart-to-heart? I’ve never done that with any of my friends. Imagine me and Eddie, wearing fuzzy socks and curled up on my couch under a throw—”
“That’s what it’s called,” I said with satisfaction. “I was trying to remember the name of the kind of blanket you put on a couch. It’s one of the things that Mr. Gowan had me bring back to the office, along with a toothbrush.”
“Is he sleeping at Woodsmen Stadium? Why did he want you to go along to collect that crap?”
“I think it was because he needed someone to do the manual labor. He wanted to stand on my back so he could take down the drapes, since we didn’t have a ladder.”
“I didn’t notice footprints on your coat, so I guess you said no.”
“I said no,” I affirmed. “I don’t have a problem with telling people that.”
“Good for you,” Ronan said approvingly.
I didn’t have a problem saying no. As I went to bed that night in my clean, unstained sheets in my apartment with no random handprints on the walls, I thought about the important times I’d used that word.
I had told my dad no, that I wasn’t moving again.
It was how I’d stayed at the same high school for my entire senior year.
I had gotten a job that paid for some of the cost of the motel room he rented for me, and he had agreed to help out and send money to cover the rest. I had said no, I’m not interested in you, when my coworker at the student bookstore in college had asked me out a few times.
He had been a nice guy but I hadn’t liked him in that way.
At least, I really hadn’t thought so, but then his new girlfriend had started to come by during our shifts to say hello or to bring him treats.
He had lit up like a candle when he’d seen her outside the store’s window and he’d practically run to meet her, and I’d thought that I might have made a mistake.
What if I had been the one to make him light up like that?
I’d said no to a lot of things, and sometimes my refusal hadn’t made any difference.
No, that’s wrong and you’ll need to recheck my transcripts and recalculate my GPA.
I refuse to be the salutatorian. That was what I had told the principal, but then I’d been the one giving the first speech at our high school graduation and watching Warren Marc-Wolsey get the applause as valedictorian.
I’d said no to other people who had ignored me and done exactly what they’d wanted, like the word meant nothing at all.
It was only two little letters, after all.
They had been insignificant when someone with more power was saying yes.
And that was why I’d learned to go around the rules to make my life easier.
If my dad’s sheets were stained? I could figure out where housekeeping kept the clean ones and do a switch myself, so I wouldn’t have to deal with the problem of paying for them (again).
Just like the situation with Mr. Gowan and the new gym equipment, some things were better taken care of quietly.
I was a taker-carer. I was an accomplisher and an achiever, even if my job in Special Projects hadn’t allowed me to do those things. Now I was.
I rolled over onto my side and thought. I did need to be careful about what I was doing at my job because I planned to work for the Woodsmen team indefinitely—maybe until I retired.
I would be careful and I would also learn more about football.
That meant I had an activity for Sunday and it wouldn’t feel like the day was long and empty.
On Monday at work, I listened to Kiya talk about our dinner, how we had been surprised by each other’s presence and how great Channing had been. Victoria and Taylor totally supported her but I wondered about him.
“You’re from here, right?” I asked Victoria. So was he. “Did you know him before?”
No, not well. “It’s a big area,” she reminded me and it was, geographically. “We went to different high schools but I’ve seen him around.”
“There’s no gossip,” Kiya said happily, but then she looked across the table at me. “Did Ronan say something about him?”
I thought quickly about what to tell her.
“He said that he and Channing never share personal stuff. He made fun of me for thinking that they sat around and drank wine, telling secrets,” I answered.
I didn’t need to pass along his concerns about his friend settling down with one woman.
Ronan could have been wrong and also, I didn’t want to get in the middle of their relationship.
The three of them laughed and next, Victoria told us about her brother, the one who had puked into her lunch bag.
He had a girlfriend and was being an idiot about her.
“As his big sister, I have to step in and tell him to stop acting like such a douche, partying all the time and ignoring her,” she said.
She continued to tell me about the mistakes he was making as the two of us walked back to our floor.
“He’s going to lose her, but that could be an important life lesson.
” She shrugged. “That’s what my grandma told me when I complained to her about how much he’s going out and treating people badly. ”
“Life lessons kind of suck,” I mentioned and she nodded.
“Yeah…that’s your boss, right?”
I turned and watched him walking toward us, from the direction of the elevators. “I think he’s trying to move our office to one of the upper floors,” I said. I didn’t think that would work out for him, but I also would have appreciated a view.
“He’s good-looking in an older-guy way,” she mentioned.