Chapter 16 #2
It seemed like I brooded for hours and when I finally fell asleep, it wasn’t peaceful. I had a strange dream about a terrible hailstorm that rattled my window and woke up Morgan, too.
“Molly! Wach auf!” My sister was in my room, shaking me by the arm. Then she slapped me.
“Ow! What the hell are you doing?” I yelped, sitting up and rubbing my cheek. A faint light came through my window, like the world outside was starting to awaken, too.
“I didn’t do it hard! Your boyfriend is here.”
“What?”
She grabbed my arm again and yanked, but she still wasn’t strong enough to pull me around.
We tussled a little, like when we were kids, until I pushed her aside and went to the window…
and she was right. There was Shane, who was not my boyfriend but was, in fact, standing on the front lawn.
He had his binoculars and as I stared down, he waved at me.
“He was throwing shit against the glass. You must sleep like the dead,” Morgan grumped. “Go down and see him. Wait!” She grabbed a pack of gum off my desk, the minty kind with guarana that Corbin had given me. He and I had hung out a few times lately. “You have terrible breath. Chew on this.”
“Don’t stick your nose in my face!” I responded. But I did take a stick and put the rest in my pocket.
“Go, before he wakes up Mom and Dad.”
That probably wouldn’t have happened, since they were on the other side of the house and our father’s snoring would have drowned out a fighter jet taking off. But I hurried anyway, because now that I was fully awake, I was very curious about why Shane was in our front yard.
My first question to him was logistical. “How did you get here?” I wondered. He was totally alone. Our street, never exactly bustling, was silent except for some birds calling.
“I got a car. It left a while ago because I’ve had a hard time waking you up. Hi.”
“Hi,” I answered. “Why are you here in the middle of the night?”
“It’s getting on four,” he answered. “Our flight got delayed because of a storm in the East, and we just landed. I came over instead of going home.”
“Why?” I asked again. I pointed to his hand. “What is that?”
“It’s a muffin. I brought it from Virginia,” he explained.
“Do they make special ones there?”
“Uh, no. Yesterday when we arrived at the stadium, they had put out a basket of baked stuff in the coaches’ box for us to snack on. It’s from that basket,” he told me.
“Ok, yes.” I paused. “Wait, no, that still doesn’t make sense. You saved a muffin from yesterday, like, in your pocket? And you’re bringing it to me in the middle of the night?”
“It’s almost morning,” Shane reiterated. “I had it wrapped in a napkin and it was in my backpack.”
We stared at each other.
“I saw all those baked goods and I thought about you. Remember how you made me the blueberry muffins without any blueberries? And then they all fell on the ground?” He was smiling, as if that had been so fun. “I couldn’t eat any of them.”
“Yes,” I agreed. I remembered it less fondly, since I had stayed up for most of the night making those damn muffins only to realize that of course we didn’t have any fruit, and then he’d hit my arm by mistake since it had been dark and he wasn’t able to see me well.
I didn’t realize it then but I thought about it now, so I stepped closer and more into view. “Are you paying me back somehow?”
“No. I saw them and I thought about you,” he said again. “I’ve been thinking about you a lot since you moved out. We haven’t seen each other in a while.”
No, we hadn’t. “You’ve been really busy,” I said. That was what I’d been telling myself: he’s not avoiding you, he’s just so busy!
“I’ve been avoiding you.”
Oh. Well, that was great. I nodded.
“I thought that it would be better if I didn’t see you because I knew what I would say,” he continued. “I would have asked you to please come home, because I miss you so much.”
“Oh. Well, that’s great!”
“No, it’s not. I don’t want you to have to take me on as a project.
I’m furious about all this, Molly.” He stepped even closer and took my hands.
“I’m trying to get over it. I’m trying to accept it gracefully.
Losing my vision isn’t the worst thing in the world,” he continued.
“I know that there’s a lot of stuff even more terrible. ”
“But it’s still awful. We don’t need to rank life’s tragedies.”
He nodded. “I’m standing here, shaking my fists at the sky because there’s nothing I can do about it. I’m seething with anger because I can’t be the person I planned to be, and I can’t have the person I want.”
“I think you’re talking about me? I think so,” I hazarded. “If I’m right about that, then you’re wrong, because you absolutely can have me. You already do!”
“I can never give you what you deserve. I’ll always be something else you have to take care of,” Shane said. “You won’t be able to have the life you want if—”
“You have no idea,” I said. “You don’t know what I want because I don’t know what I want! Except one thing I’m sure about is you. I don’t plan to take care of you, not any more than you take care of me. I’m not going to check on you at night like I used to do for my sister.”
“Did you do that? Were you that worried about me?”
I turned and looked at the upstairs window. “Morgan, stop eavesdropping and go away!”
“You’re in our front yard. I don’t know how you expect privacy,” she informed me. But at least she closed the window.
“We should talk about this later, and not on your lawn,” he said.
“I’ll drive you home,” I told him.
“That’s exactly what—”
I turned and ran inside to get my purse and keys but he continued with the same thought when we got into my car.
“This is exactly what I was talking about. You have to drive me around,” he said.
“You’re going to do things for me, too.” I wished I’d stopped to put on a bra. We lived on a dirt road and it was bumpy.
“You can do everything yourself,” he countered. “You ran the restaurant.”
“Not very well. It folded, remember?”
“You applied to college and got yourself through that.”
“Barely, and—so what? Lots of people go to college and lots of people work. You’re making me sound like some kind of hero when all I’ve really done is mess up!
” I explained how, in great detail. He already knew about my poor treatment of my sister but I elaborated on that, and I also told him about how I’d helped to inflate my brother’s ego with my adulation and how that had led to a crash-out that Max was just recovering from now, more than ten years later.
I reiterated that I’d never noticed some of the problems with the business (my mom’s mistakes with the finances) and never acted on others (the fact that the building was rotting away).
“Morgan said I propped them up. I did, but that was it. I propped but I didn’t resolve or fix anything. She also said that I should have let them all fail and I agree with that. Maybe they would have gotten better years ago, if I hadn’t been so busy being a crutch,” I told him.
“I think you’re way, way too hard on yourself,” he said.
“Maybe I am. But I’m saying that I’m not getting back into the solution business.”
“There’s no solution to what’s happening with me.”
“There are solutions but you don’t want to see them!
I’m not making a bad joke,” I immediately added.
“You need to think about another way that you can continue to be involved in football, or you can come up with a different job that you’re interested in, one that doesn’t depend so much on your vision.
You should plan ahead about learning braille or if you would want to work with a service dog.
You can do all those things yourself because it’s not like anything has diminished your thinking.
I was so insulted when you said that the other coaches were treating you that way.
It’s ridiculous and I wouldn’t want to work like that. ”
“We’ve talked about it, actually. The more time I’ve spent with them all, the more they understood and I’ve told them directly that they need to treat me as their equal.
But it’s hard for me to deal with and understand a disability.
It makes sense that other people also have a problem with it,” Shane answered.
“You’re more generous with them than you are with yourself. I’m not sure what we’re even arguing about,” I said. “Am I trying to convince you to want me? Are you trying to convince yourself that you don’t?”
“I don’t know either. I was stuck on giving you that muffin.
” He paused. “I understand now that it was a little strange to bring it home from Virginia, but it gives you a good idea of how I’ve been doing lately.
I’ve been so busy with work that I didn’t think I’d have time to miss you, but I did.
I thought about you constantly. That’s why I ended up in your yard. ”
We were pulling up to the duplex by that point, which felt exactly like coming home. “I missed you, too,” I said. “I think that moving out was the best thing I could have done. It gave us both a few weeks to think and figure out what we want.”
“Even if what we want isn’t the best thing?”
“How do you know what the best thing is? Don’t be a Vollidiot or even a half-idiot.” I sighed, tired of arguing. “I want to go back to sleep.”
“In the interest of not being any kind of idiot, I’d like to invite you inside. We could talk about this more or maybe you’d just like to curl up in my bed again. You used to fall asleep there and I loved that. Do you want to come in?”
I did. “I won’t read to you, so don’t worry.”