Chapter 12
I looked around the table. It was a folding one that I’d dug out of the still-packed garage at my former family home, but I had scrubbed it within an inch of its life so all the spiders and dirt were gone.
The chairs we occupied were new because Shane and I had decided we needed more places to sit, but we had gone cheap and they weren’t the most comfortable.
My guests were already squirming slightly.
I cleared my throat. “Thank you for your attendance. I’ve called you together today so that we can discuss our shared goals of financial independence and security, as well as—”
“Damn, Molly,” my sister interrupted. “Why are you taking like that? Did you go to law school when we weren’t looking?”
I turned on her angrily. “Funny you should mention school! No one noticed that I—”
“Let’s get this going. I can only give you about twenty minutes,” Max broke in.
“Really? What’s so important that you have to run off to?” I demanded, switching topics again.
He mumbled something that my mom caught, and her eyes lit up. “Really, hun? I’m so happy!” she told him.
“What? What did he say?” Morgan asked and Mom turned to her, smiling.
“He and Avonlea are going to meet with a wedding planner!”
That took the wind out of my sails, totally and completely.
“Really?” I managed to gasp. Morgan and my mom were asking him all kinds of questions and he gradually warmed up, relinquishing more information until he was fully sharing all the details about the fall wedding his fiancée was planning and where they would honeymoon.
“You’ll need a passport,” I stated, and they seemed to notice me again.
“I think you mean to say ‘congratulations,’” Morgan pointed out and she was correct. I said it.
After a while, I did manage to move the discussion back to the actual reason that I’d asked them to come over to my house. Pared down from the fancy terminology, it was basically this: what were we going to do about money?
Clearly, Max was all set. But he did still have a stake in the situation, which I brought up. “You may not know that Avonlea and I went for coffee a while ago,” I told the table. Then I looked at him, specifically. “She said that you’re interested in taking over the restaurant. Is that true?”
“You met her? What’s she like?” Morgan asked me. I shushed her.
My brother talked for a while, using some fancy terminology of his own. It reminded me a lot of when we’d sat through the pitches for his various businesses, with a lot of beating around the bush but little substance.
Finally, I broke in. “Max, are you saying ‘yes?’ Yes, you want to try to run Walter’s?”
He looked at the battered surface of the card table, silent for a while. “I don’t know if I can do it,” he finally answered me. “You don’t think so.”
“I don’t have a lot of faith,” I admitted. “You haven’t shown any interest in it before. You have shown a lot of stick-to-itivness, either.”
“Molly, that’s not fair…” my mom murmured.
“I never got the chance,” Max snapped. “When I was at the restaurant, you and dad were always telling me that I was doing everything wrong. You acted like a real bitch.”
In response, I didn’t stomp away to write an angry poem, like thirteen-year-old Molly would have done (at the time, I was sure that my work would eventually be considered as masterpieces).
Instead, I defended myself. “Dad acted like that with everyone! And I told you how to do things right so I wouldn’t have to go back and fix them myself!
” I said furiously. This discussion was going off the rails.
Shane and I had talked about it last night and one of the points he had made to me (the main point) was that I needed to stay on-topic and rein in my temper.
It was too late, because now Molly and Max were arguing. Oddly enough, she seemed to be defending me.
“You would swan into Walter’s and work for a total of five seconds before you said that had to go text someone for ‘business,’ but I know you were only playing Toad Crusher on your phone,” she told him.
“Molly did everything and she had to constantly deal with Dad, too. Do you think he was nicer to her than he was to you? He mostly ignores you and me but he hates her! You’re a failure and I’m a waste of space, so we don’t count, but Molly was the workhorse who showed up and got punished for it. ”
“Your father doesn’t hate any of you!” our mother objected.
Then we went off on that tangent for a while and it took even longer for me to yank us back on track.
By that time, Max’s deadline for when he’d have to leave had slid right past. We hadn’t even established if he would actually try to take over Walter’s, and if so, how we would wrest the business away from Dad.
That guy had somehow gotten himself to the East Coast, according to the legal notices that my mom still got in the mailbox at our former family home.
There must have been casinos in that area, places where he hadn’t yet worn out his welcome.
By the time they all got up to go, we had established nothing except that Mom believed that Dad truly loved us (despite never being able to demonstrate that emotion).
She had also admitted that their divorce wasn’t moving along at all.
Neither was the sale of the house, and neither was the balance in her bank account.
As fast as she and my sister were making money, they were spending it on utilities, food, and other essentials.
Financially, it didn’t appear that things were quite the bed of roses that she and Morgan had expected.
But my sister seemed content. She’d been chatty and upbeat throughout our failed discussion, smiling and even laughing. As Mom followed Max out of the door, Morgan hung back. She stopped on the pathway to the drive and turned around to talk again.
“How’s everything?” she asked me.
I briefly considered lying and saying that I had never been happier in my whole life—but actually, that wasn’t a lie.
I didn’t wake up singing, with birds tweeting cheerful tunes outside my window, and my hair already looking great.
But I did wake up without a pit of worry in my stomach (or if I had one, it was only a small pit).
I also woke with the awareness that I had someone on my side.
That was new to me and it was the most comforting thing I’d ever felt.
“I’m pretty good,” I told her. “I’m better off than before.”
She nodded and I noticed that she wasn’t smiling anymore. In fact, she looked extremely serious. “I was really surprised when you moved out of the house like you did. I was shocked.”
“Why? Why would I have stayed?” I asked. “You were talking about leaving, too.”
“Mom and I were looking for a place big enough for all of us!” she scolded. “You could have explained that you and Shane were seeing each other, instead of keeping it a secret. You definitely could have told us that you were moving in with him.”
“We’re not seeing each other and I live here as his roommate, not his girlfriend or partner or whatever. That’s it.”
“Oh.” She pondered that for a moment. “Then why did you sneak off?”
“I didn’t. I decided that I needed to move on, just like everyone else was. You and mom were so excited to start fresh, and I wanted the same thing. So, after my graduation—”
“What?” She walked back to me and repeated herself. “What? Your graduation? What do you mean?”
“It’s the ceremony that occurs when you complete the required coursework for a degree,” I explained.
I put my nose in the air, like Max’s girlfriend had done when she’d told me how rich she was.
“I graduated. They had speakers and handed out diplomas. The same thing happened at the end of high school and I went to yours, but you didn’t go to mine back then, either. ”
“I was really depressed,” she said quietly. “I was for a long time.”
I felt a familiar rage rise up in me at those words. “Right. So you hibernated and let life pass by without you, while other people supported you. But now, you’re feeling great and you went and bought new clothes and got a haircut with the money that Mom had hidden away from the rest of us.”
“That’s not fair!”
“No, it wasn’t fair that I went to that stupid restaurant every day while you stayed in bed!” I retorted.
“Do you think that I wanted to be that way? And no one made you go in so often!”
“What would have happened if I didn’t?” I asked her. By this point, we were both pretty loud.
“The same thing that happened when dad took off! Walter’s Café would have gone under even faster and we would all been a lot happier!”
The next-door neighbor, very next-door since I lived in a duplex, peeked out at that point. “Is everything all right, ladies?” he wondered.
He was a good guy and his side was quiet besides when his cats fought. “I’m sorry we were so loud,” I told him. “This is my sister and she’s leaving now.”
Morgan apologized too and then she did leave, without another word to me.
Not that I wanted one! I had other things to do, anyway.
Later today, I would pick up Shane when he came in from Indianapolis, and we were going from the airport over to meet some of the other lower-level Woodsmen coaches for dinner and drinks.
I was looking forward to that, having never done anything like it before, except when my sister and I had gone out together in my futile attempt to attract a football player.
That night had been a failure, since she had ended up drunk and had lost one of my shoes from the pair that she had been wearing (we’d probably left it in the parking lot as I’d shoved her into my car, since they hadn’t fit on her dumb little feet).