In This Life
Page 35
He looked stricken. “Nash, tell me what I can do. I’m so ashamed. I’ll do anything to make this up to you.”
“Never see her again.”
He nodded eagerly. “Yes. Done. I’ll never see her again.”
I turned to leave the room but I had one more thing to say to him.
“By the way, Dad, I fucking hate you.”
While my mind had been preoccupied with the past, I’d crossed a state line and darkness had lifted. I had to add sunglasses to my face to fend off the highway glare.
My stomach was growling so I stopped at a roadside diner to grab some breakfast and a coffee. The coffee made me think of Kat and her affection for anything caffeinated.
My legs wanted to stretch for another minute before getting closed into the driver’s seat so I hung out beside the truck. I pulled out my phone and looked again at the photo Kat had sent me last night. She’d turn the lens on herself and captured the serene image of Colin asleep on one shoulder while Emma rested on the other. Kat had a small smile on her face, that wild hair of hers unbound and spilling out beyond the frame. Her beauty was more than sensual. I couldn’t think of a single other woman who could hold a candle to Kathleen Doyle.
With reluctance I pocketed the phone, wishing it wasn’t too early to call or text. I’d call her the next time I stopped, though I would have liked to hear her voice right now to chase away the brooding gloom that had been consuming my thoughts during the drive. It wasn’t just old hurt feelings that were bothering me.
“By the way, Dad, I fucking hate you.”
I was certain I’d said many other things to him after that devastating sentence. I remembered other conversations, other words that were spoken. But for some reason, ever since his funeral the last ones I’d said to him that long ago night were the ones that had remained the loudest in my head.
The day was shaping up to be a perfect specimen of summer. With Colin babbling in his high chair in the kitchen, Emma chattering to Roxie in the living room and bright sunlight streaming through the window, it seemed impossible that I’d ever been uneasy.
Then the sharp knock at the side door made me jump. I relaxed when I saw that the shadow outside the door was in the shape of my mother. Usually I tried to consume at least twelve ounces of caffeine before dealing with my mother’s inevitable censure but coffee would have to wait.
“I wasn’t expecting you, Mom,” I said with as much cheer as I could muster.
She stared at me through her dark oversized sunglasses. They added a bug-like quality to her face. “I told you last night that I needed to talk to you, Kat.”
I sighed. “All right.”
She was about to step into the house when she suddenly frowned. “What’s that?”
“It’s the kitchen door. And I’m holding it open. So please come in before the flies do.”
“No.” She touched the door right beneath the rectangular glass pane to show me something I hadn’t seen before.
When I did see it my blood froze.
“I meant that.”
It was a small miracle my fingers didn’t shake when I plucked an item off the door that had been affixed with a blue square of masking tape. It was nothing, just a piece of paper. And yet it rattled me to depths of my soul. The photo had been printed out on regular computer paper and I was confronted by my smiling eighteen-year-old self, flanked between two impossibly good looking guys. I remembered exactly when it was taken, at a party right after a winning homecoming game. My life had felt like a fairy tale at the time; small town ugly duckling goes to big city university and attracts the interest of one of the football gods. He was a king in that world, he and his brother, both players on a champion college football team. He could have had any girl he wanted and I was in awe. In the beginning anyway.
Due to my early academic successes I was only sixteen when I started college. After two years of constant study I finally lifted my head out of my books and wondered what I was missing. At the start of a brand new semester I allowed myself to be dragged to my first college party where I kept to the sidelines and sipped warm beer until something unexpected happened.
“Come out of the corner, little mouse. You’re with me now.”
He was hot and fun and exciting. I’d never even had a real boyfriend and there I was, eighteen and claimed by the twenty-one year old golden gold of college sports. He and his brother were only a year apart, equally gorgeous and talented. They were royalty. Everywhere we went other girls examined me with thinly disguised jealousy, wondering what the hell I had that they didn’t. And I enjoyed it. Worse, I thought I loved him. I thought so even when he suggested that I change the way I dress, the way I speak. I thought so even when he insisted that I spend less time on my studies and laughed when I grew distraught over my falling grades. I thought so right up until I learned he wasn’t faithful. In the year we were together he had never been faithful and when I assumed otherwise I’d just been kidding myself. What I did next might have been partly revenge. It didn’t occur to me at the time. I thought I was trying to help a friend. But later I wondered if a much uglier motivation was there beneath the surface.
“Kathleen?” My mother was standing in the kitchen now and she was wearing a rare expression of worry on her face. “Isn’t that a picture of-“
“Grandma!” Emma had been lured away from her cartoons by the sound of her grandmother’s voice and ran into the kitchen, colliding with my mother’s legs.
“Hello my sweet girl.” My mother smoothed her hair and held out a small paper bag. “Look what your grandma brought you for breakfast.”
“A chocolate cupcake!” Emma squealed as she peered into the bag.
Normally I would have been irritated but my head was still spinning. I balled up the piece of paper in my fist.
“Ems,” I said, surprised that my voice sounded so calm, “here’s a plate. You can take that in the living room and watch cartoons with Roxie.”
Emma didn’t question what strange turn of events prompted me to encourage her to eat in front of the television. She scuttled out of the room.
My mother was staring down at Colin as he kicked his legs in his high chair and played with a teething toy. “He looks more like his mother every day,” she said sadly.
“I know,” I said, sinking into the nearest chair. The picture was still crumpled up in my hand but the image was seared into my mind. It depicted a moment when everything had seemed perfect, before I learned of betrayal and inflicted it myself, before one of the two brothers at my side would fall into a downward spiral that couldn’t be stopped, before I made a careless mistake that would alter my life irrevocably and yet gave me the best thing that would ever happen to me.
Emma laughed in the next room.
And I was aware that my mother was talking, saying something that she wanted me to pay attention to, but I was having trouble concentrating on her words.
“Kathleen Margaret,” she said with some sharpness. “Do you even care about what I’m telling you?”
“Mom.” I stood up. “I’m not feeling very well. I’ll call you later, okay?”
“Are you kicking me out?” she huffed.
“No. But I’m distracted so I’m afraid I’m not a very satisfactory conversational companion right now.”
She exhaled unhappily. “When are you going to start talking like everyone else?”
“Never see her again.”
He nodded eagerly. “Yes. Done. I’ll never see her again.”
I turned to leave the room but I had one more thing to say to him.
“By the way, Dad, I fucking hate you.”
While my mind had been preoccupied with the past, I’d crossed a state line and darkness had lifted. I had to add sunglasses to my face to fend off the highway glare.
My stomach was growling so I stopped at a roadside diner to grab some breakfast and a coffee. The coffee made me think of Kat and her affection for anything caffeinated.
My legs wanted to stretch for another minute before getting closed into the driver’s seat so I hung out beside the truck. I pulled out my phone and looked again at the photo Kat had sent me last night. She’d turn the lens on herself and captured the serene image of Colin asleep on one shoulder while Emma rested on the other. Kat had a small smile on her face, that wild hair of hers unbound and spilling out beyond the frame. Her beauty was more than sensual. I couldn’t think of a single other woman who could hold a candle to Kathleen Doyle.
With reluctance I pocketed the phone, wishing it wasn’t too early to call or text. I’d call her the next time I stopped, though I would have liked to hear her voice right now to chase away the brooding gloom that had been consuming my thoughts during the drive. It wasn’t just old hurt feelings that were bothering me.
“By the way, Dad, I fucking hate you.”
I was certain I’d said many other things to him after that devastating sentence. I remembered other conversations, other words that were spoken. But for some reason, ever since his funeral the last ones I’d said to him that long ago night were the ones that had remained the loudest in my head.
The day was shaping up to be a perfect specimen of summer. With Colin babbling in his high chair in the kitchen, Emma chattering to Roxie in the living room and bright sunlight streaming through the window, it seemed impossible that I’d ever been uneasy.
Then the sharp knock at the side door made me jump. I relaxed when I saw that the shadow outside the door was in the shape of my mother. Usually I tried to consume at least twelve ounces of caffeine before dealing with my mother’s inevitable censure but coffee would have to wait.
“I wasn’t expecting you, Mom,” I said with as much cheer as I could muster.
She stared at me through her dark oversized sunglasses. They added a bug-like quality to her face. “I told you last night that I needed to talk to you, Kat.”
I sighed. “All right.”
She was about to step into the house when she suddenly frowned. “What’s that?”
“It’s the kitchen door. And I’m holding it open. So please come in before the flies do.”
“No.” She touched the door right beneath the rectangular glass pane to show me something I hadn’t seen before.
When I did see it my blood froze.
“I meant that.”
It was a small miracle my fingers didn’t shake when I plucked an item off the door that had been affixed with a blue square of masking tape. It was nothing, just a piece of paper. And yet it rattled me to depths of my soul. The photo had been printed out on regular computer paper and I was confronted by my smiling eighteen-year-old self, flanked between two impossibly good looking guys. I remembered exactly when it was taken, at a party right after a winning homecoming game. My life had felt like a fairy tale at the time; small town ugly duckling goes to big city university and attracts the interest of one of the football gods. He was a king in that world, he and his brother, both players on a champion college football team. He could have had any girl he wanted and I was in awe. In the beginning anyway.
Due to my early academic successes I was only sixteen when I started college. After two years of constant study I finally lifted my head out of my books and wondered what I was missing. At the start of a brand new semester I allowed myself to be dragged to my first college party where I kept to the sidelines and sipped warm beer until something unexpected happened.
“Come out of the corner, little mouse. You’re with me now.”
He was hot and fun and exciting. I’d never even had a real boyfriend and there I was, eighteen and claimed by the twenty-one year old golden gold of college sports. He and his brother were only a year apart, equally gorgeous and talented. They were royalty. Everywhere we went other girls examined me with thinly disguised jealousy, wondering what the hell I had that they didn’t. And I enjoyed it. Worse, I thought I loved him. I thought so even when he suggested that I change the way I dress, the way I speak. I thought so even when he insisted that I spend less time on my studies and laughed when I grew distraught over my falling grades. I thought so right up until I learned he wasn’t faithful. In the year we were together he had never been faithful and when I assumed otherwise I’d just been kidding myself. What I did next might have been partly revenge. It didn’t occur to me at the time. I thought I was trying to help a friend. But later I wondered if a much uglier motivation was there beneath the surface.
“Kathleen?” My mother was standing in the kitchen now and she was wearing a rare expression of worry on her face. “Isn’t that a picture of-“
“Grandma!” Emma had been lured away from her cartoons by the sound of her grandmother’s voice and ran into the kitchen, colliding with my mother’s legs.
“Hello my sweet girl.” My mother smoothed her hair and held out a small paper bag. “Look what your grandma brought you for breakfast.”
“A chocolate cupcake!” Emma squealed as she peered into the bag.
Normally I would have been irritated but my head was still spinning. I balled up the piece of paper in my fist.
“Ems,” I said, surprised that my voice sounded so calm, “here’s a plate. You can take that in the living room and watch cartoons with Roxie.”
Emma didn’t question what strange turn of events prompted me to encourage her to eat in front of the television. She scuttled out of the room.
My mother was staring down at Colin as he kicked his legs in his high chair and played with a teething toy. “He looks more like his mother every day,” she said sadly.
“I know,” I said, sinking into the nearest chair. The picture was still crumpled up in my hand but the image was seared into my mind. It depicted a moment when everything had seemed perfect, before I learned of betrayal and inflicted it myself, before one of the two brothers at my side would fall into a downward spiral that couldn’t be stopped, before I made a careless mistake that would alter my life irrevocably and yet gave me the best thing that would ever happen to me.
Emma laughed in the next room.
And I was aware that my mother was talking, saying something that she wanted me to pay attention to, but I was having trouble concentrating on her words.
“Kathleen Margaret,” she said with some sharpness. “Do you even care about what I’m telling you?”
“Mom.” I stood up. “I’m not feeling very well. I’ll call you later, okay?”
“Are you kicking me out?” she huffed.
“No. But I’m distracted so I’m afraid I’m not a very satisfactory conversational companion right now.”
She exhaled unhappily. “When are you going to start talking like everyone else?”
