“When did your grandparents pass?”
“About a year after they went into the home. Grandma died first, and Grandpa went about a week later, because he couldn’t be without her. He told me as much. I was visiting him and he told me he wanted to go be with Beth. He was lucid to the very end. I held his hand and told him to go be with Grandma, that I’d be fine. He asked if I was sure, and I said yeah. I told him I loved him, and he closed his eyes like he was going to sleep. Got this big smile on his face, and just stopped breathing.” He’s silent a long, long time. “Damnedest thing I ever saw. Just…gone, by his own choice, naturally. He just…let go.”
“That really beautiful, actually.”
“They were together sixty-four years.” He sighs. “If anything could make me believe in love, it was them.”
I think of what we just experienced together, and I wonder if that applies to me at all. But the moment that thought enters my head, I mentally and emotionally recoil. No! Don’t wonder that. I don’t want that responsibility, that burden. I don’t believe in love any more than he does, so why would I want to factor into him believing it?
I don’t.
Simple.
Franco stands up, crosses to the pile of discarded wood pieces, squats and sorts through the pile until he finds something he finds suitable in some way, and returns with it to the workbench. Curious, I watch while he twists the piece of wood this way and that—it’s a block about six inches by four inches by three inches, a pale, soft-looking wood. He selects a different knife than the one he’d been using; this knife is thicker, longer, with a differently shaped blade. Slowly, carefully, he begins shaving off slices of wood at a particular spot, each movement of the knife made at a precise angle and for a specific purpose.
He glances at me as he carves. “So. I showed you mine, now you show me yours.”
“I was afraid you’d say that.”
Chapter 11
Franco quirks an eyebrow at me. “You had to know I would ask. You can’t think I’d tell you my deepest, most painful memory and not expect the same in return from you, can you?”
I laugh. “No, I knew you’d ask.” I take a moment to watch his slow, sure movements of the knife, gathering the courage to tell my own pain. “Mine is pretty similar to yours, actually. It’s all rooted in childhood, you know? I’ve actually got an Irish background myself, obviously, with a name like Donovan. We weren’t Catholic at all, though. I mean, we were by background, but none of my family was practicing in any meaningful way beyond Christmas Mass, Easter Mass, things like that. My dad was—is, to this day—a piece of shit. Human garbage, and I don’t say that lightly. There is, legitimately, no human being on the planet I despise more than my father.”
Franco’s eyebrows shoot up. “Damn. He must really suck, then.”
I blow out a breath. “Yeah, that’s the understatement of the millennium.” I pause, thinking, and then continue. “I don’t feel much better about my mom, but for totally different reasons.”
I rarely talk about or even think about this, so it’s difficult to get the words out, and I pause frequently in the telling.
“They met at a bar, hooked up a few times, dated on and off for a few months, and then my mom came up pregnant. She wheedled enough money out of him for an abortion, but couldn’t seem to keep clear of Dad for whatever stupid fucking reason. Went right back to him. Ended up pregnant again, with me, this time. Why she didn’t abort me, too, I’m not sure. Maybe he wouldn’t pony up the money again, or couldn’t, or she didn’t find out in time. I don’t know.”
Franco frowns at me. “It couldn’t have been, oh I don’t know…maternal instincts to want to keep you?”
I laugh at that, and not kindly. “Oh no. Nope. Definitely wasn’t that. Mom never wanted to be a mom, and she told me as much in so many words when I was…eighteen? Nineteen? She didn’t come out and say she didn’t want me, per se, just that she’d never wanted kids. I’m pretty sure as soon as she was able to afford it, after I was born, she went and got her tubes tied so there’d be no risk of getting saddled with any more damn kids.” I shrug. “So there’s that element—I was a burden to her, and even more so to my father. They were never married, and still aren’t, but they’ve been circling each other for forty-some years, getting into blow-out fights, breaking up, getting back together—it’s happened too many times in my life to even begin to count. I’d stopped keeping track by the time I was in fifth grade. The cycle was this: Dad couldn’t keep his dick in his pants, but he’s a lazy good-for-nothing son of a bitch who can’t keep a job, can’t do his own laundry, can’t pay his own bills, can’t cook his own food, so he needs my mom. And she, in turn, is lonely and sad and hardwired for codependency. She needs to be needed—just not by me; I’ve never counted in the cycle. So Daddy Dearest would go out drinking, pick up bar tail, get caught cheating because he’s the least tactful or circumspect human ever to walk this earth, and my mom would lose her shit, break up with him, kick him out, swearing up one side of the trailer and down the other that it was the last damn time.”
Franco has the block into a recognizable shape at this point—a bird, it looks like, something wheeling on a wingtip, a raptor with a sharp beak and extended talons. All this in a matter of minutes, with a few economical strokes of his knife; now that he has the major shape outlined, he switches to a smaller, sharper knife for more detailed work.
“Well, about two weeks later she’d be horny and lonely and maudlin and had herself convinced he’d learned his lesson, and that he’d be sick of McDonald’s and Mad Dog and dirty clothes, and he’d come crawling back and turn on the charm. And ohhhh yes, good ol’ Pop could be a charming motherfucker when he wanted to be; even I wasn’t immune to it as a kid. He’d lie and manipulate and promise and charm and wheedle his way back home and into her bed, and things would sort of stabilize for, like, a week or even a month here and there.” I sigh, fiddling with the rabbit he’d carved. “Then the whole thing would start over again. He’d stray, and she’d find a condom wrapper in his laundry or lipstick on him somewhere or she’d get a call from one of her many gossip hound friends telling her he’d been seen stepping out with so-and-so. He never really tried to hide it, I don’t think. I mean, Dad’s a lot of shit, but he’s not stupid. He just didn’t care enough to bother hiding it. I don’t know. And Mom is just…weak. Needy, and without enough self-esteem to kick his ass to the curb for good.”
“That sounds about as chaotic as my own childhood.”
“Oh yeah. And the fights they’d get in? Oh man. Cops were at our door regularly. I was on a first-name basis with a few of them by high school because they got called to our trailer so often. I’d have to sit outside with one of them while the other went in to talk to Mom and Dad, and sometimes they’d take me for ice cream or to Seven-Eleven for a Slurpee. I honestly wished more often than I care to admit that one of those officers would just take me to their home, or at least just leave me on the street and not make me go back home. I was so sick of Mom and Dad’s bullshit that being homeless sounded more appealing most days.”
Franco’s eyes are sympathetic. “I know the feeling, trust me.”
I wave a hand, hating how even now it hurts to talk about this old crap. “I know better, now. I was lucky to have a roof over my head, food in my belly, and that they never hit me, and that Dad never did anything gross to me, or let his friends do anything. I mean, I knew plenty of kids, just in my trailer park, who went through all that and worse, so I knew even then that I was better off than a lot of them. But it still just sucked, you know?”
“It’s tempting to compare yourself both ways, isn’t it?” Franco says, pausing to look at me. “To people who have it worse, and to people who have it better. But you can’t. You can only really understand what you’re going through yourself.”
“So true, that,” I say. “So, yeah. That was my childhood, and it really messed up my view of love and marriage. Like, if that’s love, I want zero fucking p
art of it. And, honestly, I had nothing better to even compare it to. My grandparents weren’t in the picture and never have been, for reasons I’m not certain about. Family dysfunction, I guess—the kind of shit all of them never got over, so they just don’t see each other. I’ve seen them for Christmas a few times, and I’d get the occasional birthday card, but that’s about it.”
“And then?”
I laugh. “You just want to get to the really juicy stuff, huh?”
He shrugs, grinning at me. “Yep, basically.”
“And then…I was so eager to escape Mom and Dad’s cycle of horse crap that I found ways to stay at school. Which for me ended up being sports. I played volleyball, basketball, tennis, soccer, did track…anything and everything, as long as it meant I could stay at school and practice, or work out. By junior year I was one of our school’s top stars in track and field, volleyball, and soccer. I was literally always either at practice or in the gym. I had it so I only had to go home to sleep, and only then for as little amount of time as I could manage and still function, which is a habit I’ve never been able to break, even to this day. I got almost a full-ride between volleyball and track scholarships, and the summer after I graduated I moved to an apartment on campus and never went back.”
“Was that with Imogen?” Franco asks.
I shake my head. “No, actually. We’ve never lived together. We were best friends all through school, and we ended up going to the same college just by virtue of accident or fate or whatever, but we never lived together.”
“Oh. I guess I just assumed you had.”
“Nah, we almost did, but we decided against it. I think we both knew we’d kill each other. We’re too different in the way we live, so our friendship was better off with a little space built into it.”
Franco laughs, flipping his knife between his fingers. “Oh man, I can’t even begin to tell you how tough it was, that year and a half Ryder, James, Jesse, and me all lived together in that three-bedroom, two-bathroom bungalow. Jesse and I shared a room for the first two months, until we convinced James to let us update his basement into a workable living space for one of us. So then Jesse moved down there and I stayed in the bedroom, while Ryder stayed in the garage, which left one bedroom for James, one for the girls, and one for me, with Ryder in the garage and Jesse in the basement.”
“The garage?” I ask.
“Yeah. One of the first things James did when he bought the place twelve or fifteen years ago was to turn the garage into an extra room, so that’s where Ryder stayed from the start. The garage is James’s official Dad Bod Contracting office, now.” He pauses, examines his carving, twisting it this way and that to look for flaws, spots one, and sets to work fixing it. “Jesse and I almost killed each other on a daily basis while we shared a room, though. We nearly came to blows a few times. James never knew, though, and still doesn’t. I know he knows it was tough for us at times, especially early on, but he never knew how hard it was for two grown-ass men, used to independence, to share a single tiny bedroom.”
“It’s amazing that you guys did that for him.”
He shrugs. “Not really. He’s our best friend. Our brother. We’d do anything for him, and he’d do anything for us—and we have, in every possible way over the years.” He eyes me. “You can’t tell me you and Imogen aren’t the same way. In fact, I know you are—I’ve seen it.”
I nod. “Well, yeah, but you guys quit jobs, broke leases, moved, and shared a house. Those are not small sacrifices.”
He waves a hand at me. “Enough about that. Get to the good stuff.” He eyes me with humor. “And by that I mean the really horrible shit that probably scarred you as bad Maria did me.”
In a patently ridiculous attempt to leaven my own mood, I make the wooden rabbit hop around the workbench, singing “Little Bunny Foo-Foo”, tapping the carving on the bench at every repetition of “boppin’ ’em on the head.” It makes Franco laugh, which makes me laugh, but I can’t put off telling Franco the unvarnished truth any longer.
“Okay, so I met Jared my sophomore year at State. He was an all-state quarterback in high school, and ended up all-state in college, too. I met him on the track—we were both doing wind-sprints early one morning. He was the real-deal golden boy, you know? All-American good ol’ boy from the Illinois countryside. Drove his grandfather’s restored pickup, lettered in three sports in high school, prom king, valedictorian—the star quarterback who led his team to state championships three years in a row, because he was the starting varsity QB by sophomore year in the most competitive high school football program in the state. Tall, built, perfect blond hair and pretty blue eyes and a dazzling white smile.”
Franco rolls his eyes. “Sounds like a douche.”
I laugh. “Well, he was, and still is probably, but I didn’t know that then.”
“Well, of course not. With those kinds of qualifications, who would ever think that of him?”
“And to be fair, he was really good at covering his douchey-ness.”
“They always are.”
“They?” I ask, eyeing him curiously.
“The biggest douches on campus. I didn’t go to college in the traditional sense—I went to trade school via an apprenticeship, so my personal experience was different than most, but I spent a lot of time at Urbana-Champaign with James and Renée, so I got to be pretty familiar with how places like that work.”
“Right. Well, he was the king of the campus at State, like he’d been the king of the campus in high school—it was a continuation of high school for him, I think, just on a larger scale. More attention, more fanfare, more glory.” I pause, gathering my thoughts and memories. “So, you have to be aware that I was…pretty much the opposite of him. A nobody. I mean, sure I set a few records for volleyball and track, but who really cares about that? I was the tough girl from the trailer park. Back then, I didn’t really dress the way I do now; I lived in athletic gear—track pants, hoodies, gym shorts, cross-trainers, nothing tight or revealing. And by the time I met Jared, I had a pretty interesting reputation already.”
He lifts an eyebrow. “Meaning what?”
“Meaning I’d been assaulted on campus late one night my freshman year—only, I kicked the shit out of the guy so bad he had to be hospitalized. And then another guy tried to pick me up in the cafeteria one day, and I publicly roasted him, as the kids on the internet like to say. I mean, I was brutal. Shit like that happened a lot to me, and I developed a reputation as a hard-ass ice queen. I had no patience for guys, beyond…you know. Getting into their dorms and back out when I was done with minimal drama.”
“And then you met Jared.”
“Exactly. So he’s this golden boy, and I’m the girl who beats guys up and roasts them in the cafeteria so bad they all but run away crying. I’ve mellowed a lot since college, if you’ll believe it.” I laugh, and Franco laughs with me. “It was an unlikely pairing at best. But I could go to the gym, or the track, and keep up with him—and not just keep up, but challenge him. Obviously I lifted less in terms of weight, but he had a hard time matching me in terms of raw intensity. He liked that. He wasn’t…it didn’t faze his sense of manhood, I guess—and it does a lot of guys—but I’m never willing to back down or put out less than my full effort.”
“Nor should you.” He eyes me. “You’re a beast, for real. And that’s sexy as fuck, to me.”
“Thanks for that.” I can’t help a smile, but I’ve got more to tell. “Anyway. Jared wasn’t threatened by me, and that made me feel like I could be…I don’t know—a girl. Stupid, but I don’t know how else to put it. I’d had to be tough all the time—my trailer park growing up was a rough place, and my apartment wasn’t great either, so I was always this tough, strong, take-no-shit chick. Still am, actually. But Jared let me feel like a girl. Still not exactly what I’m trying to say, but I don’t know how to put it.”
“He made you feel safe and feminine.” He’s not looking at me as he says this, but somehow his full a
ttention is still on me, and fiercely intense.
I catch my breath. “Yeah. Exactly.” I breathe again, after a moment of pushing all kinds of emotions away. “So…somehow, we ended up together. Girls hated me, after that. I mean, real hate. Death threats, evil eyes, nasty notes, real high school shit from these dumbass girls who were supposed to be grown women. All because I dared date the Jared Ellis. Me—the ice bitch. He didn’t seem to care about any of that, and neither did I.”
“So far so good, right?”
I laugh. “Yeah, so far so good.” I sigh, humor fading quickly. “I started embracing some of my femininity with him—he encouraged me to wear girlier clothes, and I tried it, for him. I hated it, but I did it. And I got attention for it—girls making fun of me and being more jealous than ever, and guys trying to hit on me before they realized I was Jared’s girlfriend. I had a love-hate thing with that attention. I liked feeling and looking more feminine, and I liked the attention, but I also hated it at the same time. I dove headfirst into my relationship with Jared. Just blind, headfirst, all-in. I lived at his dorm as much as I did my own apartment, and took the role of girlfriend as seriously as I took studying and working out. I was happy. I loved him. He loved me. He was the antithesis of everything my dad was—Jared was proof that decent men existed because, until him, I’d been sure a good-looking and decent man was as much a myth as unicorns and one hundred percent effective birth control.”
“Funny that you put those two things together,” Franco remarks, finally finishing carving the eagle and beginning to sand it.
“Yeah, well, the little girl in me always wanted to believe in unicorns, and the woman of loose morals in me always wanted to believe that birth control would totally protect me from disease and pregnancy.”
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