Chapter 11 #2
“No, because she was sitting next to me in the bed watching videos with the volume up. She also asked me a few times if I was awake. I was,” he informed me. “I wanted to talk to you about what you asked me earlier. What you asked about my parents believing something bad about you.”
“I don’t care if they don’t like me,” I assured him, but oddly, I found that I did. I had wanted them to be impressed with the clean apartment and I had wanted them to believe that their son had a good support system, which I hoped that I was.
“It’s not about you,” he said. “In the car back from the airport, my mom wanted to talk about my last doctor visit.”
“You don’t have to tell them your medical information.”
“I know that.” He patted the cushion next to himself and I sat down there.
This couch might have been small, but it was certainly comfortable.
“If I don’t mention that I’ve been to the doctor, they worry that I’m not going enough.
If I tell them that I have, then they want to know what she said.
If I refuse to disclose that, then they imagine the worst. If it’s actually good news, they start getting their hopes up that maybe, somehow, I’m being cured.
A miracle,” he explained. “If it’s bad news… ”
They would have been more upset than I had been. “That’s a no-win situation, then.”
“It’s worse because this is a genetic problem,” Shane told me. “If I had been injured or it sprang out of nowhere, it could have been an act of God. They feel like they should have foreseen this. No pun intended.”
“But you said that your mom had no idea it ran in her family.”
“I’m not sure if you’ve noticed that logic and reason don’t mean much when it comes to relatives,” he pointed out. “Like you and your sister.”
“I saw her tonight.”
“Morgan? Where?”
“She came to the restaurant and I was her server. She asked to be seated in my section.” She had looked great in new clothes, things that fit her better than mine ever had.
I was taller but also rounder—fewer angles.
She had put on weight, which was a good thing for her, and she had done something to her hair to recreate the pretty, curly waves that I remembered admiring when we’d been kids.
“How did she know you worked there?”
I explained how Max’s girlfriend Avonlea had been keeping in touch.
“Not a lot, just sometimes. She asked where I was working and it’s not like it’s a secret.
” It was a little embarrassing, since I was the only sibling who had struggled to get a college degree, although apparently I hadn’t needed one.
“Were you glad to see her?” he asked.
Oddly, I had been. “We haven’t talked in weeks,” I answered.
“Not since she and Mom embarked on their solo careers. But she let it slip that things aren’t going too great.
They got an offer on the house but that fell apart after an inspection and then they had to drop the price.
My dad is apparently back in the picture, to some extent. He’s been calling to ask for money.”
“Good golly, I hope they’re not giving him any.”
“Morgan isn’t but she thinks that Mom is.
They’re barely scraping by, so there’s not much to give.
Apparently, life without the support of your family is harder than they imagined, once you run through the slush fund that you’d been hiding from everyone else.
” I heard the gloating note in my voice but hoped that he hadn’t caught it.
“I had other tables so I didn’t get a ton of information. ”
“Maybe you could see her again,” Shane suggested.
No, because I was still mad at her, if he hadn’t noticed.
“Maybe,” I said. I’d tried to sound noncommittal but was aware that I might as well have said “no, no way in hell” because I had firmly shaken my head as I’d spoken the word.
“What can I do to make things easier over the next few days with your parents? Do you want me to stay out of the way?” If his answer to that question was “yes,” there was the problem of where I would go…
“No, this is your house, too,” he answered immediately. Phew. “If anything, I think that you should spend more time with them. Then they’ll see.”
“See what?” I wondered.
“They’ll see that they should like you,” he said. He looked over at me and smiled.
I smiled back, although my best move had been the BLTs and they had already vetoed those. “You know, I can’t imagine you playing football,” I told him.
“Really? Why?”
“I always think of those guys as super mean and competitive,” I explained. “You’re not like that at all.”
“I was the one who fought you over the last bowl of strawberry sorbet. I won,” he reminded me.
Yes, it was true, but I hadn’t really been trying. That stuff wasn’t creamy like real ice cream and it hadn’t even been very sweet, more like red ice chips. I nodded, though. “And you did threaten Corbin at my graduation.”
“I wasn’t threatening him,” he disagreed. “I was letting him know his options.”
I remembered what Shane had said: move on or I’ll make you sorry. “I guess so.”
“Think of the guy making the messes on the tables at Walter’s, the ketchup criminal. He acted like a dumb little kid, not some killer competitor. You said he folded like an origami crane when you confronted him about making a mess.”
That was also true. I nodded and he nodded back at me.
“He goes up against defenders who are a half a foot taller and outweigh him by a hundred pounds. When you’re out on the field, it’s different.
In college, I played against one of my former high school teammates from Arkansas.
Great guy and a good friend,” he said. “I knew that he would have taken me out in a heartbeat, though, so I stayed the heck out of his way.”
“Do you ever talk to him now?”
“McCoy? No. No, we haven’t spoken in a few years,” he answered.
“Why? If he was a good friend and great guy, you should text him. Maybe he’d want to visit, too. I was thinking that we could buy a nice air mattress.” There was enough space if we didn’t get any new chairs, and the floor was definitely clean enough for someone to sleep on it.
“Maybe.”
That “maybe” had also sounded like a definite “no.” “Why not?” I wondered. “Is it because of your vision? Do you think they would care?”
“They wouldn’t be mean about it.”
“Would they act unsupportive? Standoffish? Emotional? What are you afraid of?” I asked him.
“You know, Molly, there’s a heck of a lot—” He stopped. “I’m not afraid of them acting any particular way. I just don’t want to deal with it.” He stood up. “My parents want to meet up good and early. I hope you’ll come out with us tomorrow. Will you?”
“Yes, absolutely.” I was used to being around people who didn’t like me—I had spent all those years with my family, after all. A few hours with his wouldn’t be so bad.
But I was nervous the next morning, anyway. “No one is going to look behind the refrigerator,” Shane told me. He had helped me move it away from the wall and I was a little sorry that we had, because it was truly disgusting back there.
“We better get going,” I said. “We don’t want to be late.”
“If we leave now, we’ll be twenty minutes early,” he countered, but he did acquiesce.
When we walked outside, he called my name and tossed over the keys, so I ended up behind the wheel of his truck.
Due to the fact that I went a lot faster than he ever drove, we were more like twenty-five minutes early.
They were, too, though, and his parents came out of the motel after only a moment.
Per the discussion the three of them had the day before, we drove out into the countryside to see the blooming orchards, trees full of perfect cherry blossoms.
I hadn’t ever done much sightseeing around my own town and it was fun to look at things from the tourist perspective.
His parents, Nedra and Johnny, were acting slightly warmer and more accepting than they had the day before, too, so that made it easier.
In fact, Nedra even talked to me, asking questions from the passenger seat where Shane had insisted that she ride.
“Have you always lived in this area?” she wondered. “It’s lovely.”
“I’ve been here my whole life except for one week when we took a school trip to Washington, DC,” I answered.
I had looked forward to that trip for months, dreaming about my taste of freedom and how fun it was going to be to get away from the restaurant and my family.
But it hadn’t been quite as great as I had anticipated. It would have been better with friends.
“Molly is like you, Mom. She never lived anywhere but our hometown in Arkansas,” he explained to me.
“I would live other places, though,” I added. “I wouldn’t mind moving somewhere else.”
“Where we are is equally beautiful,” she told me, and I answered that I would love to visit someday.
“We’re always hoping that Shane will come home, eventually,” she said next.
She glanced into the back seat, where he was shoehorned behind me.
I looked into the rearview mirror to see his reaction to her words and watched him give up absolutely nothing.
He was looking out of the window and acted as if he hadn’t even heard.
“I love these old barns,” he mentioned blandly.
“Your grandfather’s property has the barn that you could fix up,” his father said. “I would help you, son. We could do that together.”
“My dad and I used to like to build things,” Shane told me. “A chicken coop, garden beds.”
“We used to build ramps, too. Shane and I got involved in a group that helped out people with disabilities who needed better access to their homes,” Johnny said. “It was a great thing to lend a hand. Everybody needs that sometimes.”
I glanced in the mirror again. I had said just about the same thing to Shane and he hadn’t put himself in the basket of people who needed things. But his dad was correct.
“I need a hand,” I announced without thinking.
“What’s the matter?” his mom asked. She sounded concerned.