45. Jack
Chapter 45
Jack
I ’d been hyping myself up for this conversation so much that I was actually shocked when I walked in on my parents snogging in the kitchen.
“Please you two,” I said, and they jumped apart, Mum wiping her mouth whilst Dad just strode directly out of the room. He was clearly as uncomfortable with me having witnessed it as I was. I wasn’t exactly surprised – it certainly wasn’t the first time – but I was possibly a bit sensitive to displays of affection, even from Mum and Dad.
“Jack,” Mum said, smoothing her top, “so good to see you.”
“Is it?” I asked, raising an eyebrow to her. “Seems like I may have interrupted.”
“Never,” she said, walking over to me and leaning in for a kiss on the cheek, but I dodged it.
“No thank you,” I said. “Given the circumstances.”
Mum shrugged. I leaned against the counter as she put the kettle on.
“Dad?” I called, angling my head as if that would help me see around the corner in the hallway he’d disappeared down.
“Yes, son?” he called back; he’d got all the way upstairs.
“You got a minute?”
“Just a sec.” I heard his heavy tread on the stairs, clearly exaggerated, and a moment later, he was back in the kitchen, opening the fridge for a beer as if he hadn’t just been in here.
“Alrighty then,” I said, clutching my course booklet between my hands. Now that they were both here, it was showtime.
But I couldn’t quite manage to start.
“What do you need, son?” Dad asked, cracking open a can. “I’ve got some emails to send, as you well know.”
I nodded. I did know, though I was pretty sure his little make-out session hadn’t been helping, either. “Yes, well, sorry,” I said, “but this is a tough conversation to have.”
That got his attention. And Mum’s; she immediately waved both Dad and me into the lounge. I sat down on the armchair, whilst they settled on the sofa. Though settled was a strong word; they were perched on the edge clinging onto one another as if I were telling them I was dying. Hell, for all they knew, that was what I was going to say. And I still might , I thought, depending on Dad’s reaction .
“So I’ve been thinking about my future,” I said, and I saw Dad’s eyes narrow. But I took a deep breath and pushed forward. Technically I’d already done what I was telling them about, so avoiding the conversation really wasn’t really an option.
“What’s this about?” Dad asked, using his boss voice.
“It’s about work, Dad.” I leaned forward and put the booklet I’d been clutching down on the coffee table, then spun it around so it would face them.
“What’s this?” he asked, picking it up and bringing it close to his face, as if he didn’t have better than twenty-twenty vision.
“It’s a course catalogue,” Mum said, looking up at me, confused. “For Oxford?”
I shook my head. “Oxford Brookes. It’s where the RIBA certification courses are.”
“RIBA?” Dad looked up at me. As a contractor, he didn’t just know who RIBA were. He interacted with them all the time. Hell, our building contracts were a RIBA template.
“Yeah, Dad.”
“The architecture dickheads.”
“One and the same,” I said, pressing my mouth into a line as I watched him grasp at understanding. “I want to be one of them, actually.”
Dad sighed. “Look, Jackie. I know you like this stuff. But it’s not just drawing all the time. It’s a lot of admin still. You never get away from that.”
“Do you not think I know that?” I asked. “It’s not about the admin. It’s about wanting something different.”
I saw the moment Dad went from exasperated to offended. “What, my business not good enough for you?”
“Darling,” Mum said, putting her hand on his arm, but he shook it off angrily.
“You think you’re better than me? Is this your little girlfriend’s work? Telling you you’re better than a hard day’s work?”
My hands curled into fists hearing him mention Morgan like that. “This has nothing to do with Morgan. We’re not even together anymore.”
“Like hell it’s not,” he said, standing up.
“Alan!” Mum shouted, standing up with him. “Don’t be like this.”
“I’ll be like this if I want,” Dad said, turning on Mum. I’d never seen him raise his voice to her before. “I’ve worked hard to build a business, so I’ll say what I like. You talk to your ungrateful son about this if you’ve got a problem with it.”
“I’m not ungrateful, Dad,” I said, standing as well, but he just pushed past me to the front door.
“Please don’t leave,” Mum said, but Dad was out the door before she could get it out, and she sank back onto the sofa. I stepped over to sit down with her, putting an arm around her. A few seconds later, I could hear death metal coming from the direction of his workshop.
“I’m sorry, Mum,” I said. “I’m not trying to be ungrateful. I’m just trying to do what I think is best for me. For my future.”
She turned to me and smiled sadly, putting her hands on my cheeks. “Of course you are, darling.”
“I’ve thought a lot about this,” I said. “And it really wasn’t Morgan’s idea.” Sure, Morgan had pushed me, but so had Amy. And really, that magazine had been lying open for months before either of them had found it. It wasn’t their doing. It was mine. And that made me proud.
“I’m proud of you,” Mum said, echoing my own thoughts, and I frowned.
“You are?” I asked. “But what about Dad?”
Mum dropped her hands and sighed. “Did I ever tell you that your dad didn’t want you to work for him?”
I remembered the day he’d asked me to join the business; when he’d offered me the deal I’d been holding myself to for years now. “What are you talking about? It was his idea.”
Mum shook her head. “No, dear, it wasn’t. It was mine. Your dad was afraid that if you started working for him, you’d never leave.”
I balked. “But isn’t that what the deal was designed to do?”
Mum chuckled softly. “Well, I can see why you’d think that. But no, he just wanted to know that you were taking things seriously. That if he put the time and energy into training you, you’d stick around.”
“But you just said he was afraid I’d never leave.”
“Not stick around in the business, silly boy,” Mum said. “He wanted to know you weren’t going to run off to be with that horrid girl again.”
I sighed. “Not this again,” I said. “I broke up with Aria, remember?”
“Oh, we remember,” Mum said, her eyes going wide as she patted my knee. “We remember all of it. You really scared us for a while there.”
“Scared you?”
Mum nodded. “Building that house with no idea what you were doing, never leaving the property, not talking to anyone but Chloe and Phil … honestly, thank god for them, because I thought we’d lost you.”
Maybe for the first time ever, I realised what it must have been like for them when I came home. I could understand why they would have been concerned. Why they were worried I would run off again.
“So why offer me the job then?” I asked.
“Because,” she said, “you were our son. And we wanted you to be well. And you seemed to be better here than you had in years. So we did what we needed to do to keep an eye on you. We never expected you’d still be working for your dad all these years later.” She looked out the window as if looking at Dad over in his workshop. “And I think maybe he hoped you’d come to love it like he does.”
I thought about all the times I’d come home after a day of hard work, and how my whole body would feel alive. Just like it did when I was climbing a mountain, or paddling a river.
“I think I did,” I said. “Just not the part he wanted me to.”
“And that’s okay,” Mum said. “I think he’s just disappointed. But he’ll come around. We’ve always known you’d want to do something creative. So this is no surprise really.”
Mum smiled, and I could tell that she really believed that. I wasn’t so sure; Dad had seemed really set on retiring soon. But I decided to just take her word for it, and Dad could sort himself out. It didn’t have to be my problem.
“But I’ll tell you what is a surprise,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“That you and Morgan broke up,” she said. “We really liked her, Jackie.”
“Yeah,” I said sadly. “Me too.”
“You wanna tell me what happened?”
I found that I did, actually; I did want to tell Mum what had happened. But I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to without crying. I could already feel the tears pricking at my eyes – they were probably only half from being asked about Morgan, and half from the relief of having told my parents about RIBA – and I looked up at the light coming through the window to try to stop them coming. It didn’t work, and I felt them drip down my cheeks as I blinked.
“Oh, darling,” Mum said, wiping them away, but I quickly replenished them. I looked down at my lap, where she’d taken my hands in hers.
“She’s so talented,” I said, trying my best to distil everything into something easy for Mum to understand. “She had this job opportunity in York, and I gave her an ultimatum.”
“Oh, love.”
“I know,” I said, nodding. “She said that she didn’t want to leave, but that she couldn’t be with me if I couldn’t be honest with myself and with her about what I wanted.”
Mum nodded, trying to follow along. “Which was…”
I shrugged. “Well, her, obviously. But also this.” I nodded at the booklet, which Dad had dropped on the sofa when he left. “Just … more. For myself.”
“She’s a smart woman,” Mum said, rubbing circles on my shoulder.
“She really is,” I said. “But I messed it up so badly.”
Mum shook her head. “I’m so sorry, darling.”
“I don’t know what to do,” I said, the tears coming faster now, and I bent forward to rest my forehead on her shoulder.
“I think you’re doing everything you can do,” Mum said.
“But what if it’s not enough?” I asked, sitting up again, searching her eyes for reassurance.
“For what?” she asked. “Because if you’re doing all this to get her back” – she gestured to the booklet – “it doesn’t mean anything. But I don’t think that’s true.”
“Enough to be happy,” I said. I didn’t tell her that I wasn’t completely convinced I could be happy without Morgan.
“You’ll find happiness no matter what,” Mum said. “It’s not about one thing that will make you happy, remember? It’s about how you approach life. And it seems like you’re finally starting to get that.”
* * *
I thought about Mum’s advice all through the next twenty-four hours, as I packed for the Ren Faire. It was almost verbatim what I’d said to Morgan all those months ago on the riverside on our weekend away. But then I’d been talking about adventure. Maybe what I meant then and what she meant now were the same thing.
The time had finally come. My costumes were expertly packed by Chloe, and the Defender was full of petrol. I’d been bracing myself to be around Morgan for the weekend, but I still had a few hours until I’d need to confront that. In the meantime, I was sharing a lift to the airport with my two favourite people. And if I were ever going to find happiness amidst my grief and anxiety, it was going to be with them.
I picked Phil up first, and I laughed out loud when I saw him come down the drive with a cardboard lute in his hand.
“How the hell are you gonna get that on the plane?” I asked as he actually buckled it into the back seat to keep it from moving around.
“That’s the definition of a personal item, mate,” he said.
“I really don’t think that’s true.”
I backed out of the drive, careful not to hit the other car there besides Phil’s; presumably it belonged to the nurse he had staying with Ethel whilst we were on our trip.
“How’s Ethel doing?” I asked, and Phil told me all about her physical therapy and her memory specialist appointments. He looked exhausted just talking about it.
“How are you doing?” I asked, and this time he just scoffed.
“Oh me? Better than ever,” he said. “I’m perfect.”
“You didn’t seem so perfect the last time we talked.”
“Yeah, well, that was a while ago,” he mumbled. I wracked my brain, but I realised he was right.
“Shit,” I said, “is Adam’s stag really the last time we had a proper chat?” That had been almost two months ago.
“Well, you’ve been a bit busy,” Phil said. “You’ve fit in a whole relationship cycle in that time.”
“Oh fuck off,” I said, rolling my eyes. But I knew it was just a defence mechanism.
“Sorry,” he said. “Honestly, I’ve been better. I’m just tired, you know? My whole life is medication schedules and therapy rotations. That’s why I was so glad for the costumes as a distraction. And now that they’re done…”
It sounded like Phil was dealing with the same thing I had been, when I’d been dreading all the admin Dad was chucking at me. But Ethel wasn’t a job. He couldn’t just quit. She was everything to him.
“You should talk to Amy,” I said, thinking about how she’d helped me. “She’s only working part-time at the moment, and she’s pretty good with that kind of thing.” She’d recently started working as a virtual assistant, which made me happy; if she was getting a job, maybe it meant she was planning to stick around.
Phil turned to me and grimaced. “I sort of already have,” he said. “And I’ve got a whole windowsill full of crystals at home for Ethel to show for it.”
I chuckled at how unsurprised I was. Part of me was even … relieved?
“I’m not gonna pry,” I said, “but just be nice to her, okay?”
“Ew, Jack,” Phil said, then slumped down in his seat and pulled out his phone.
I didn’t know how the weekend would go with Morgan. I really did want things to be okay there, and if I could have snapped my fingers and had her back, I would have. But for the first time since the breakup, driving from Phil’s to Chloe’s, on my way to have a new adventure with my friends, I knew that I would be okay without her. It may only come in crumbs for a while, but I’d find happiness again. And that was enough to keep me going.