“I will say I don’t mind you as much as some other customers,” I joke.
“But you’d rather talk to no one. I know you more than you remember, Bow.” The old man flashes me a grin as I set a cape over his shoulders.
He doesn’t have to tell me what we’re doing, I’ve been straight buzzing Coach’s head since I took over the business.
“How’s the team looking for next season?” I ask, genuinely curious.
From time to time, my brothers and I will catch a game in town. We all played for Hankins, and I still do fundraisers with the team, as does Keaton.
“Eh, they’re just okay, to be honest. Lots of heart, but no real superstars. My seniors who graduated last year were the big swingers, and the team will be hurting without them. But it’s okay, heart is better than talent.”
I nod. “Yes, it is.”
The razor drowns out conversation for a little, and I focus all of my attention on shaping Coach’s cut. My work might not be rocket science, but I’m good at it and it takes my mind away from my shitty reality at the moment.
Reaching for my comb to see if everything is even, Coach catches my eyes in the mirror.
“You know, Bowen, I’m an old man, now.”
My grin is sly. “Are you trying to tell me something I don’t know?”
“Shut it, boy.” His voice is gruff but his eyes sparkle with laughter. “What I’m saying is, soon, it will be time for me to retire.”
“I didn’t realize you were thinking about it. Honestly, I thought you’d die in that dugout.”
Coach Hankins chuckles. “Many people do, too. But nah. Marjorie is bugging me, says we need to spend some of our retirement together. And my bones are old, my heart is tired. I love coaching, but I just don’t have the energy anymore. I have to find someone to fill my shoes.”
I dust his neck off, unsuspecting when he hits me with his next choice of words.
“And looking in this mirror right now, I think you might be the best man for the job.”
I nearly drop the razor I’m about to trim the last uneven bit of his hairline with. “Wh … what?”
Coach laughs, a booming, jubilant sound coming from deep in his throat. “Don’t swallow your tongue now, boy. And don’t act so surprised. I’m in here a week early … I think you’re losing track of time.”
Now that he says it … I realize he’s right. “You came in here to ask me to … what exactly?”
“To become the coach of the Fawn Hill High School varsity baseball team.” He smirks.
The idea gets my heart thumping, and my mouth going dry. Coach removes his own cape, standing from the chair to check his new do out in the mirror.
“Great job, kid.” He fishes in his wallet, gives me the usual fifteen dollars for the cut, and the fifteen-dollar tip.
I’ve told him a hundred times to stop tipping the same amount that I charge for the cut, that no one tips a hundred percent. He just smiles and whistles as he walks out, usually.
But this time, he turns to me. “I’ll let you think about it. But I’d like to hang up my cleats sooner rather than later. Let me know, Bowen.”
And then he leaves.
Jesus. That big decision just turned into a fucking enormous decision.
35
Lily
It takes me an entire day to pull myself out of bed.
That may not seem like much, but for me, it’s monumental. Never in my life have I missed a day of work due to personal issues. I don’t call out. I don’t shuck responsibilities, or leave my friends hanging, or silence calls from my mother.
But ever since Bowen revealed the secret that made my world implode, all the pieces of my life have fallen by the wayside. When I left his house, I came straight home, crawled into bed, and haven’t been out of it since.
I never understood how depression or bone-deep sadness can affect a person so brutally. You hear those stories or watch the recounting of someone who went through it and think: There is no way I’d ever be so sad that my body would simply shut down.
But it happens. It’s like the body and mind’s own way of doing damage control. Simply shutting off, not rebooting, not allowing you to explore a conscious state because if you do … the pain you’ll experience is too great to handle.
I thought sleep would evade me that I’d be crying into my pillow for hours on end. But the minute I pulled the comforter over me, the world went dark. Sleep consumed me, I’d wake for a hazy second and then be pulled back under.
When I finally surface long enough to check my cell on my nightstand, I realize I’ve been out for almost twenty-four hours. It’s five p.m. the next day, and I have approximately seventy missed calls from Bowen, more texts, and thirty unread emails from work. Thank God I’d had the forethought to email my part-time employee to cover me before I went into my sleep coma.
That word choice is ironic, considering I’d been unconscious at the time Bowen was threatened to leave me … and actually listened.
I couldn’t believe it. Even as the truth rattles around in my brain now, the one thing I’d desperately wanted to know in the last ten years, I still don’t believe it.
Our fathers. The actual men who had helped to create us … wanted to keep us apart.
My father, the one who’d told me he loved me and wanted to see me succeed since the day I’d been born, had threatened and taken away the love of my life. He’d promised to expose the dirtiest, most vulgar part of our accident … the reason why I wasn’t wearing a seatbelt. A father, not to mention a stranger, should never hold that kind of information over their child’s head. But mine did. Without me even knowing it.
I’m reeling and dizzy when I try to stand to head to the bathroom to empty my bulging bladder.
My eyes hurt as I turn on the lights in my house, the glow stinging my eyes. Every cell throbs with pain and exhaustion; I feel like I’ve simultaneously pulled an all-nighter and am coming off the worst hangover of my life.
There are so many things I want to do. My hands clench into fists as anger I’ve never experienced washes over my muscles. I want to break something, to hear the crunch of my knuckles against a hard surface.
I want to scream until my lungs are hoarse. I want to shed every tear behind my eyes. I want to demand answers from Bowen, ask why he followed their stupid rules, ask him why I wasn’t enough to risk it all for.
But the thing I want to do most? I want to confront my goddamn father.
All I can manage to pull on are the closest sweatpants and shirt, my hair hanging limply around my face. I’m half-mad with delirium as I drive over to my parents, the route completely memorized as if it’s on the back of my hand.
Most likely, I look like a disheveled vagabond when I stumble into their kitchen. It’s dinnertime, and they’re seated at the table, my father at the head and my mother sitting dutifully at his side.
“Why did you do it?” My finger points wildly in my father’s direction, my voice unhinged.
If I was in the right frame of mind, I might have thought I needed to stew on this. To wait to confront him until I was presentable, until he couldn’t refute me with his sly, underhanded tactics.
But I was raw, an open, beating vein that was gushing blood without any sign of stopping.
“Lily?” Mom rises from her chair, so much confusion in her eyes.
“You threatened him! Bowen. You told him to stay away from me.” I can feel my eyes bulging out of their sockets.
My father, very calmly, wipes his mouth with his napkin. “Why, Lily, what a pleasant surprise.”
There is nothing left of the father I knew. This man is evil … power, greed, and control have gone to his brain and corrupted it.
“Don’t do this. Don’t lie. Give me the truth!” I scream, my brain unraveling. “You watched me fall apart for months. You’ve looked on as I’ve gone loveless and childless for years. Because Bowen is the only man I’ll ever love, and yet you kept us separated for what? Because your ego co
uldn’t handle a man who wasn’t just like you being with your daughter? Because you deemed him too unworthy of me? Because he didn’t fit into your perfect political family picture?”
This is it. I’ve finally snapped. Broken out of the chains my parents have placed on me from a young age. I’m no longer obedient, or speak only when spoken to, or put their needs and that of my father’s career above my own. This betrayal, this absolute abuse of love and dedication … it has destroyed us. Even further than my relationship with Bowen.
“Lily, what in the world?” My mom looks bewildered, shifting her eyes back and forth from my father and me.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” He has the audacity to sit there and deny this.
I feel like ripping my hair out, strand by strand. “You are my father. How could you do something like this?”
“If you’ve had some sort of fight with your … friend, I don’t see what that has to do with me. Other than I told you it would end badly.”
My God, I might punch him. I’ve never felt this kind of anger toward a human.
“My friend? Bowen is the love of my life and a hell of a lot more of a man than you’ll ever be. He was truly trying to protect me, from both your threats and from seeing what a horrible monster you are!”
I turn to my mother. “Bowen told me the reason he left. Why he’s stayed away for ten years. It’s because our fathers made a pact to keep us apart, and if either of us tried to get back together with the other, they’d expose secrets about us or try to tear us down. What would your husband have done to destroy me? His own daughter? He was going to let slip to everyone in town that the reason I was ejected from the car and ended up in a coma was because I was giving my boyfriend a hand job. There you go, the ugly truth. He is a monster, Mom, and I think you’ve seen it, too.”
My mother’s mouth falls open, the room going dead silent for a minute. The ticking hands on the clock over the kitchen sink are the only sounds for a full sixty seconds, and I know she’s gone into shock.
I haven’t though. For the first time in years, I have precise clarity.
“I am done. Done. I am no longer under your thumb, nor will I listen to your instructions or demands. Your life having a dutiful daughter, it is over.”
Pride, relief, sorrow, and anger mix like a lethal cocktail in my veins as I march for the front door. There is no more left to say, no more left to listen to. My father is not going to own up to this, nor will my mother give him the earful he deserves tonight.
The only thing left to do is go home and lick my wounds. Pick up the pieces of my life, throw the rotting ones away, and start anew with what little I have leftover.
36
Bowen
I have never gone to my mother for advice or emotional support.
When I say never, I mean never.
First off, I’m a male. And I know that might be sexist, but unless we’re really hard up about something, we most likely are not going to blab to our mama’s about which girl broke our heart or what asshole friend stole our position on a sports team.
Now take that theory, multiply it by a hundred, and you get me.
Someone like Fletcher, he always indulged our mother in her need to gossip. She had no girls, and so someone had to fill it, and the most vulnerable of all of us was happy to do it. Keaton as well, as the oldest, went to her for a lot. Forrest, he was as lone wolf as they came, even in a family of five.
But me? I bottled everything up. I didn’t rely on her for parental direction, and I think it had always caused a rift between us.
Except now I had a major dilemma weighing on me. More than one if I’m being honest. My head is so fucked up, I can barely see straight. And I need help.
I’m surprised when I end up on Mom’s doorstep, but when she opens the door and greets me with a hug and a smile, I know instinctively that she’ll make everything all right.
“Bowen!” she says as we end our quick hug. “What’re you doing here? Who is at the shop?”
Mom might be more surprised than I am.
“I closed early for the day. Because … because I need to talk.” Those words sound strange coming out of my mouth.
And I’ve officially stunned my mother. “Oh … okay. Of course, of course, uh, come in, dear.”
She’s flustered but excited, I think. It’s taken almost thirty years for her middle son to come to her like this, so she’s probably just as nervous as I am.
I tell her as much as we sit down in her living room. “I don’t really know how to do this, truthfully.”
Mom smiles, and I’m instantly calmed. “Well, start from the beginning, and I’ll listen without interrupting.”
That sounded fair enough. I lean down, my elbows on my knees, deciding where to start.
“I’ve been interviewing for positions in the baseball industry. Well, not interviewing for positions … it’s just one position. As a hitting coach for a minor league team in St. Louis. It would mean leaving Fawn Hill. Which is both terrifying, and something that could give me a fresh start. And then, just now, Coach Hankins walked into the barbershop and offered me the head coaching job at the high school, as he wants to retire. I don’t even know if I’d be a good coach, and he’s offering me the top spot. My own team, young minds I’d shape all on my own.”
I stop for a second, gauging Mom’s expression. She’s listening intently, and when I don’t continue, she motions for me to keep talking.
Her wrist rolls as her hand waves. “But? These are all good things, Bowen. Tell me the big thing that determines it all. The one thing that makes your choice for you.”
And now I hang my head. “Lily.”
“Ah, I knew that was in there,” Mom says quietly. “You love her.”
I nod. “Always have. But … we’re through now.”
“You’re what?” Now my mother’s voice gets a little screechy. “Why?”
This is the part I’ve been dreading, the part I never wanted to get to. I knew the minute I spilled my darkest secret to Lily that I’d also have to take it to my mother. Because I know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that she never had any idea about the pact Dad made with Senator Grantham. When I tell her this, it will forever change the way she sees my father, and he’s not here to explain or defend himself. Speaking ill of the dead is usually not a wise thing, but my mother needs to know the whole truth.
“Because I kept the ultimate secret from her. The one that has separated us since the accident.” I take a deep breath, my stomach dropping as if I’m going over a cliff. “Dad made a promise with Senator Grantham, after our car crash. To keep us apart. To make sure that Lily and I, if we ever got back together … that we’d both be destroyed. They made a pact of mutually assured destruction, to expose our deepest secrets and ruin both of our futures.”
My mother’s eyes glaze over with tears, and she redirects her gaze out the big bay window in her living room. Her reaction is immediate, and my mother would never dare question me on this. She knows how little I’ve come to her, which is basically never. If I’m admitting something this detrimental to her, it’s not something I misheard or misunderstood because I was a teenager. My mother knows I’m telling the truth.
I hear her sniffle and see her shoulders shake. A lump of emotion forms in my throat, and I try to swallow it down. I’ve always been the one who needs her the least … and to come to her with this? It’s so unlike the relationship we have.
Growing up, I was always the independent one. Yes, most people would say that’s Forrest now, but I don’t mean the loner. I mean independent. Forrest and Fletcher were the babies, and twins at that, they needed her full attention for most of my childhood. Keaton was the oldest, and therefore her golden boy. He was the first, the one who made her a mom.
Don’t feel sorry for me, I don’t care about being the middle child. My mother and I just have a different relationship than my brothers do with her. But I still love her and keeping this secret for this long was no
t fair to her.
Mom shakes her head, turning back to look into my eyes. “Your father was a wonderful man. And at the same time, he made some terrible decisions. If that man wasn’t already in heaven …”
I look away, both ashamed that I never told her, and ashamed that I’m telling her something damaging after he’s gone. My conflicting emotions about my dad, ever since the day he told me about the pact he’d made with Lily’s father, have haunted me immensely after his death.
On one hand, he loved his family and would do anything to protect us. On the other, he took away the only thing I had left to live for after the accident. He altered the trajectory of my life forever.
Her small, warm hands grab my large ones, and the difference is stark. “Bowen, look at me.”
I do, because I’d never disobey her. This woman is the strongest person I’ve ever known.
“Your father was wrong. And God rest his soul … but he was wrong to do that to you. To make decisions like that, to give in to that horrible man’s threats. His protective instinct was misguided, and he wronged you. He took away the one person you loved most, even more than your brothers or me. I watched as you sat next to her bed day in and day out. Even while your world was imploding, you always stood by her side. You’re an amazing man, you were then and you are now. Do not let the mistakes of your father ruin the future you still have left.”
And now I break down. Because finally, one of my parents sees my pain. My mother is acknowledging me, just as I am, and she’s given me the outlet to lose it. Tears stream from my eyes, all the unspeakable words trapped inside my chest and my head flow out as silent sobs wrack my shoulders.
Forgiven: The Nash Brothers, Book Two Page 17