Chapter 8 #3
“Everything has been brewing for a while, since we found out about the loans and the gambling. Right now, he’s probably sitting at a casino and enjoying himself, and here we are. Stuck.”
“But he’s not at a casino around here. He got banned from all of them for bad behavior,” my brother explained to Shane. “Molly already called them and double-checked.”
“We’re going to lose this house,” I stated. “It’s probably for the best, because it has two mortgages on it already and we won’t be able to keep up with the payments. What about Mom?” I asked Max. “Where will we take her to live?”
“Uh, just so you know, I’m here to get my stuff.”
“What?” I asked him.
“I’m moving in with Avonlea,” he explained. “Let me know when you figure out the shit with the restaurant. I guess we should sell it, something like that.”
“Great. Yes, great,” I told him. “Go live with your girlfriend. Have fun.”
He didn’t seem to care about my sarcasm and disappeared upstairs. The coward.
“He’s deserting us,” I announced. Max was just like Dad.
“Might be easier. When people don’t help, they sometimes get in the way,” Shane said.
Maybe, but at least he would have been another body, another person to distract Mom. She had been frozen in her bed since the text. I’d tried to give her water and food, like she was in prison, but she hadn’t spoken or moved.
“Do you want to be the cook?” he asked. He moved, shifting his weight.
“Does your arm hurt? Are you supposed to take pain medication? Don’t worry about me and the restaurant.”
“You don’t worry about me and my arm while you’ve got all this crud going on,” he directed.
I nodded and blew my nose.
“Want me to get the T-shirt?”
No, I didn’t want him to leave, not right now. Not another person. “I’m ok,” I croaked.
At this opportune moment, my sister appeared. “Why are you crying?” she asked me in horror. She turned on Shane. “Did you hurt her?”
“Of course not!” I immediately defended him.
“You never cry. Never!” she said, because she hadn’t seen me do it.
“This is a bad situation,” he told her. “Anybody might cry about it.”
“Molly…” She looked at me and her chin started to wobble.
“Can you go check on Mom? Try to get her to eat,” I directed. People felt better when they were doing something productive.
Shane and I got productive, too. We started making plans, real ones, for the future.
First of all, though, he said that we should get something to eat, too.
It was his usual MO and it sounded wonderful because I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had anything besides a pickle and a handful of cereal.
That hadn’t seemed to make any difference in the way my jeans fit, though.
I drove so he could rest his arm and we talked on the way. “Your mother needs to get to the bank and take charge of whatever is in their account,” he said. “You also have to figure out who actually owns everything. Then she can get divorced and find a job.”
“Ok, I can make that happen,” I said. “And, as far as a cook—”
“I don’t think you should be worrying about the restaurant right now. Let it sit,” he suggested.
There was the possibility of the ceiling falling in so I couldn’t totally neglect it, but I decided that I could temporarily ignore it.
“Ok,” I repeated. “I do need to get the money situation squared away. If we have to force a sale of the house, at least we could get rid of that debt. My mom, sister, and I can move in somewhere cheap, like a studio.” That sounded terrible.
“Or, the three of you could split up and do your own thing,” Shane told me.
Before all this had happened, it had been my dream to live apart from them. “My sister has never paid bills, bought groceries, or probably changed her sheets,” I noted.
“Is she better, mentally? Can she do those things now?”
I thought about Morgan and how she’d been acting over the past few months, as winter wound down and spring started to awaken. “I think she is better,” I answered. “Just in time for our mom to go to pieces.”
Over food, which tasted delicious despite being healthy, I avoided discussing my disaster of a home life and he tried to avoid discussing his injury. I wasn’t really able to let that go, though.
“How did you fall?” I asked.
“I didn’t see a curb. Want to try this?” He offered me a bite of salmon.
“No, thanks.” Pink fish was a bridge too far for someone raised on meat cooked until it was a blackened puck. “Was it safe for you to be walking around in the middle of the night?”
“It wasn’t the middle of the night,” he said, but then hesitated. “I guess you could say that it wasn’t safe, since I ended up with this.” He looked down at the sling. “I probably won’t be able to do that anymore. I’ll add it to the list of things that are over.”
Now he sounded angry, which I understood. How would it have felt if my life was being constrained and controlled by outside forces, over which I had no control? I would have been furious and rightly so! “What if you had a cane? Or a dog, a guide dog?” I suggested.
“I’m not blind!”
Having grown up with my father, I wasn’t bothered by hollering. Shane wasn’t close to yelling but he was obviously upset, because his voice had dropped deep and it quivered, too. I must have looked surprised.
“I’m sorry,” he said immediately. He paused to draw in a long breath. “I’m sorry I raised my voice like that.”
I attempted to soothe things down. “It wasn’t even loud,” I answered. “I’m sorry I brought up those ideas. It’s none of my business, except I don’t want you to get hurt. I don’t want this to happen again.” I looked at the sling.
“No, me neither. I don’t want to go around falling on my face.” He touched his chin. Had he also hit himself there? I did see slight red mark…
“I won’t walk around at night,” he promised.
That wasn’t a great solution, though! He had to go out sometimes—was he going to turn into a reverse vampire and only emerge with the sun?
I was sure that his job would entail him doing things after dark and so did life, in general.
Wouldn’t he want to go out to dinner and have fun with his friends?
But that made me think of something odd: I had never heard about those people.
“How did your other friends react to this when you told them?” I asked.
“About breaking my arm?”
“No, I mean to the diagnosis about your vision.”
He looked down at his sling again. “Why would I have told them? It’s nobody’s business but mine.”
“But when you didn’t keep playing football, they must have questioned you,” I pointed out. “Like, one day you were in the locker room and the next, you were gone. They must have wondered what was going on.”
“I sat on the bench for the last game of the season in my senior year,” he said. “They didn’t have to know the reason why. Then I did the next semester at home, distance learning. I was done with it.”
“And if you run into them now? Or when you text or call? Don’t they ask what’s happening with you?”
“It’s nobody’s business,” he repeated.
I decided that statement included me, too, so I shut my mouth and ate my vegetable lasagna. I had my own fish to fry, but not literally because I didn’t like fish, including salmon.
We finished the meal in silence, and with nothing resolved except that I was glad he was with me. I was very, very glad.